It’s been a dramatic week in the long-running nuclear talks between Iran and the six major powers (the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany). With Secretary of State John Kerry and other foreign ministers flocking to Geneva, there is a possibility that at least a partial and temporary agreement between Iran […]

Unde malum et quare? Where does evil come from and why does it exist? That has always been one of the big questions; over at Bloomberg News, former White House macher and Samantha Power super-spouse Cass Sunstein says he’s solved at least one part of the riddle: he’s figured out the from whence and why […]

This week marks the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Sandy’s landfall in the Northeast, and many lives are still disrupted by the consequences of the storm. Below are our thoughts from last year, when the storm first hit.While the lights went out across Manhattan and the city that calls itself the capital of the world was […]

The modern Fordist paradises of the industrial world have seen their birthrates crater to the point that mass immigration is the only thing that can keep their economies staffed. This is riskier than it looks. The industrialized West is undertaking a historic experiment in real time: by allowing and even encouraging mass immigration from countries […]

A grand historical drama in the Middle East is moving towards a moment of decision, and the fate of President Obama’s foreign policy and much else besides is hanging by a thread. As two storms shake the foundations of the region’s political order (the Shi’a-Sunni war and the crisis of legitimacy across the region opened […]

[With this essay, I’m returning to a series that I began late last spring on the five most important problems facing the American people today. Readers who want to go back and look at the first essays in this series can look here, here, and here. The first problem treated in the series was the […]

Last May I launched a series of blog posts on “the Big Five,” the five domestic problems that Americans have to address if the next few decades are going to go well. I planned to go on and write about them all, but after writing a couple of essays about the job crisis and another […]

I just spent two weeks traveling across Europe, visiting France, Italy, Germany, and Romania. Everywhere I went, people wanted to talk about Washington’s dispiriting budget shenanigans, the European implications of the “pivot to Asia” and the mess in the Middle East. But while the Europeans are more or less united on the subject of America’s […]

Earlier this week, the staff posted a notice on the blog that my mother’s life was nearing its end. She breathed her last around 11 PM on September 16; since then the family has been caught up in the grief and the business of a heavy loss. We held her funeral on Friday and committed […]

Americans awoke to the possibility this morning that the US has found a ‘solution’ to the Syria situation. The Times is reporting that the US and Russia have reached an agreement to remove or destroy Syria’s chemical weapons by mid-2014 (the official state department framework document on this agreement is here).If this deal goes through, […]