South Carolina is my native state and Walmart is my favorite store, but color me puzzled by the news that a couple in Anderson, South Carolina found that  the face of Jesus had mysteriously appeared on their receipt from the local Walmart.Retail competition must be tougher than I thought; I wonder what they give you […]

My grandparents lived in Florence, South Carolina.  We had our claim to literary glory; Henry Timrod, often (and especially in Florence) called the “poet laureate of the Confederacy,” had lived there. And of course there’s the crater from the time the Air Force dropped an atom bomb on the town.But even in Florence SC they’ll […]

The recent Pew Global Attitudes Project survey found that almost no one in the Muslim Middle East has anything nice to say about Jews.Researchers found that the percentage expressing “favorable views” about Jews was uniformly low: Egypt, 2 percent; Jordan, 2 percent; Pakistan, 2 percent; Lebanon, 3 percent; Palestine, 4 percent; Turkey, 4 percent.Repeat until […]

Bill Keller, the editor of the New York Times,  thinks too many people are writing books and we need to cut back.  I’ve long thought the same thing; if fewer books were published and the books that were published were better, the world would be a more productive and more learned place.  Flannery O’Connor agreed; […]

Today brings to a close The American Interest‘s daily updates on Civil War events from 150 years ago.  We’ve taken the story one day at a time from Lincoln’s election through the Battle of Bull Run, providing news summaries of the news as it would have been known to readers of the leading American newspapers […]

The limitations of Bolivarian socialism, it seems, are at least as visible from South America as they are from glamorous Queens: the WSJ reports that recent appointments by leftist Peruvian president-elect Humala are market friendly economists.Like former Brazilian president Lula, Humala is a long time Latin leftie whose rhetoric can be anti-Yanqui and anti-capitalism.  But […]

Over a million people demonstrated across Syria after Friday prayers yesterday. Importantly, significant numbers of people turned out on the streets in Aleppo and Damascus. The smart money has always said that the Syrian revolution will ultimately turn on what happens in Syria’s two biggest cities — and that Damascus matters more than Aleppo.  The […]

One of the least surprising poll results in modern history comes from Gallup:   Americans’ top source of financial concern is, brace yourself,  “lack of money,” afflicting 17% of those polled.There are a few people around whose main financial problem is that they keep running out of sacks to store all their money in, but […]

Russia appears to be moving toward a geopolitical strategy in Asia that complements American goals, if this recent piece by top Russian foreign policy expert Sergei Karaganov, one of Russia’s top foreign policy intellectuals is any guide.  Karaganov argues that China will inevitably be an important source of capital and economic growth as Russia tries […]

The great waves of civil rights legislation and urban policy since the 1960s had successes and some failures.  The great success has been the establishment of a much larger and better educated Black middle class.  Forget the high profile achievements of the few — two of the last three Secretaries of State, the current President […]