Singapore is a small city state in a region of emerging superpowers, its presidency is a mostly powerless post, and the winning candidate represents the party that has ruled Singapore without interruption since independence.Yet Tony Tan’s election as President of Singapore is news.In a four way race, Tan received 35 percent of the votes cast.  […]

In this part of the city, Hurricane Irene has been a bit of a bust — so far.  It has been raining hard and the winds are beginning to pick up but, thankfully, the hurricane has felt more like a conventional northeaster than some kind of über storm from the tropics.We shall see; the next […]

Although Assad’s control of Damascus is clearly under stress, the Syrian government continues to hold the line against efforts by protesters to overwhelm regime forces in the capital.  With pro-Assad crowds demonstrating that some remain supportive of the regime, and the security forces holding firm, the Assad dictatorship’s regime remains resilient and strong.On the international […]

The technocratic imagination believes in a division of labor.  Scientists determine the facts through objective research.  Administrators and experts, who understand the science, then develop rational policy based on it.  End of story.Not in the real world, where both science and policy struggle to give meaningful answers to even the smallest of problems.  Circumcision, for […]

The inadequacy of the political and economic leadership in the advanced world is truly staggering.  Japan is observing twenty years of failure to repair the damage of its bubble economy by failing to cope with the aftermath of the spring tsunami.  The European Union is still struggling to respond to the Greek financial meltdown as […]

The rapid pace of technological advances has become something of a cliche in recent years. Sometimes, it helps to look at one of the few exceptions to appreciate just how sweeping these changes are. The Atlantic profiles the TI-83 — graphing calculator of choice for high schoolers everywhere — which has scarcely changed at all […]

The lines in the supermarkets are long in the glamorous borough of Queens; many of my neighbors in Jackson Heights come from tropical countries where hurricanes are a familiar threat.  As the news from Irene changes hour by hour, we now appear to be in for an extremely annoying event rather than a mass disaster.  […]

There are two serious errors on the Martin Luther King, Jr memorial. Not one, two.  In separate articles the Washington Post gets into the controversy: An error has been etched in marble on the grand Martin Luther King Jr. memorial that was to be dedicated Sunday…“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends […]

Violent rumblings along the Kurdish fault line are giving Turkey’s Prime Minister Erdogan nothing but a headache and a bundle of bad options. The tenuous truce between Turkey and Iraqi Kurds – a vital one for Iraq’s stability – has been jeopardized this past month by two lethal attacks on Turkish policemen and soldiers. As […]

Meet Tammie Pearls, recent graduate of the Johns Hopkins-Nanjing Center in China, linguist, traveler, blogger, and a former contestant on China’s most popular dating game show. The Wall Street Journal  has a piece on her experience in China: On the first day, the show’s chain-smoking director laid down the law. He told us not to […]