I spent all of last week in Frankfurt at the one-hundreth anniversary of the German Society for Sociology, giving the opening lecture on Monday and participating in a seminar on Friday. A great honor to be sure, but on accepting the invitation I had not fully visualized the dubious thrill of spending an entire week […]

I’ve just come back from a trip through the Republic of Georgia, giving a series of lectures at universities there and meeting with people in various policy institutes and government offices.  For me, a trip through Georgia is a trip down memory lane.  I first visited Georgia twenty years ago when it was still part […]

With the Israeli government’s latest (and in my view, misguided) decision to start construction on housing in East Jerusalem, the struggle over the future of the peace process has grown more intense.  Meanwhile, as Middle East diplomacy heats up, J Street–an organization primarily representing American Jews who disagree with the hardline policies of the current Israeli […]

On August 26 Raimon Panikkar died at age 91, in a village near Barcelona, the city in which he was raised. There have been obituaries in both the religious and the secular press. I read a fairly extensive one in The National Catholic Reporter of October 1.Panikkar was a key figure in the development of­­ […]

When the idiotic Kyoto Protocol was put before the US Senate, 95 senators voted against this confused and destructive initiative on the grounds that, as designed, the measure would simply ship American jobs to China and other countries without reducing greenhouse gasses.For years, green activists have mourned and bemoaned the shortsightedness of the US.  How […]

The Supreme Court this week heard a case which raises the issue of possible limits to the freedom of speech in the sharpest possible way. I had not been aware of this case until I first read about it last week in the October 1 issue of The Washington Post (a newspaper I don’t normally […]

When the Supreme Court decided Citizens United v. FEC last fall, holding that corporations have a First Amendment right to spend money in candidate elections, analysts were divided over how much the case was going to affect U.S. elections. Writing in the July/August issue of The American Interest (as part of its extensive coverage of […]

The world is full of boycotts.  Animal rights activists are boycotting everything from mink coats to veal and foie gras.  The Palestinians and their allies are boycotting goods made in Israeli settlements on the West Bank and in the Golan Heights.  Workers’ rights activists are boycotting clothes made in sweatshops.  Human rights activists are boycotting […]

Lost in the chatter about the potential GOP tsunami in the midterm elections is one simple fact:  if American politics still operated on the rules of the twentieth century, the Democrats would own this political cycle.The issues that concern voters most in this cycle (unemployment, insider power, Wall Street greed) are, or used to be, […]

Wellesley is one of the wealthiest suburbs in the Greater Boston area, exhibiting a mixture of upper-class lifestyles and progressive politics typical of such communities. It is best known as the location of Wellesley College, which for years has been a beacon of radical feminism and other ideological orthodoxies. On September 22 The Boston Globe […]