I am nearing the end of a week’s rest and recuperation at an undisclosed location in the Cayman Islands, but Pakistan’s Summer from Hell is still going strong.Things were tough enough during my stay.  On my way in from the airport in Karachi, traffic was unusually light.  Roving gangs of armed thugs were roaming through […]

Over the last few years there was published a flurry of books marketed and discussed under the heading of “The New Atheism”.  The best-known authors are Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens.  While differing in emphasis and style, their books have in common an aggressive, indeed vituperative hostility to religion in all its forms (though […]

On July 13 the lower house of the French parliament banned all forms of headgear that hide the face, with the rationale that such garments are “contrary to the values of the French Republic”. One politician put it more poetically:  “The Republic has an open face”.  It was probably not an accident that this law […]

We have in The American Interest an ongoing project called “Nation-Building in America” and infrastructure renewal is a subject I have been trying to get covered now for some time, so far to no avail. The reason for my difficulties is my standard of adequacy: I don’t want an essay just telling my readers how […]

On July 28 the regional legislature of Catalonia passed a law banning bullfights. The official rationale was that bullfights involve cruelty to animals. This is undoubtedly true (though I, for one, am not sure that killing in an abattoir is necessarily less cruel). It is widely assumed that there is a more relevant political rationale—to […]

Sometime in the last 24 hours, Via Meadia passed an important milestone: the blog has had more than one million hits.When I started to blog last fall, I had no idea whether these essays would find an audience.  I’ve been more than gratified by the response, and thanks to all the visitors, regular and occasional, […]

The prevailing view of the cultural aspect of globalization is that of a massive process of Westernization. It is producing a synthetic international culture. On the popular level it is sometimes called “McWorld” (a term felicitously coined by Benjamin Barber), sometimes “airport culture”. Here the world dances to American music, eats American fast food, affirms […]

It’s been one disaster after another this week in Pakistan.  The WikiLeaks documents opened raw wounds in Pakistan’s agonizing relationship with the United States.  A plane crash on the outskirts of the capital of Islamabad killed 152 people.  UK Prime Minister David Cameron ostentatiously attacked Pakistan for exporting terror and ‘looking both ways’ in the […]

I’m not much good at timing.  I was visiting Jordan on a lecture tour when the Israelis assassinated Hamas founder Sheikh Yassin.  Amman closed down and much of my program had to be canceled; Americans weren’t welcome on campuses where student groups were mourning the sheikh and vowing revenge.  I was in Indonesia when the […]

On June 22, 2010, a crowd of some 35,000 Evangelical Christians gathered in a football stadium in Manaus, the Brazilian city located in the heart of the Amazonian rainforest. They met about two hours after Brazil beat Ivory Coast at the World Cup.  But the purpose of the rally was only partly to celebrate this […]