The current financial and economic crisis has once again placed the dangers of capitalism at the forefront of our collective consciousness. The left, which until relatively recently had seemed adrift across much of the Western world, lacking in coherent and …
Turkey is unique among contemporary Muslim societies. Modern Turkey emerged as a nation-state after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the abolition of the Caliphate in 1924 and has been a republic since 1923. Discarding the theological trappings of …
In the fall of 2008, a little more than a year after the Bank for International Settlements (a Switzerland-based organization that fosters cooperation between central banks) warned that “years of loose monetary policy have fuelled a giant credit bubble, leaving …
“Know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em, know when to walk away, know when to run,” the gambler says in a popular song. But in the aftermath of imperialism and war, walking away is not so simple. …
When he was named acting president of Russia on December 31, 1999, Vladimir Putin inherited a country still reeling from the Soviet Union’s breakup: economic woes caused by the rapid privatization of state assets and the August 1998 financial crisis, …
The publication in the October 6, 2008, New Yorker of a selection of the more than fifty thousand Norman Mailer letters that have been archived reminds us of what a vacuum he left when he died in November 2007 at …
In the wake of the Tet offensive, on March 31, 1968, President Lyndon Johnson announced a partial halt to the bombing of North Vietnam, initiated peace talks with Hanoi, and declared he would not run for a second term. In …
On Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age
On the politics and novels of J.M. Coetzee
The U.S. Supreme Court reacted slowly to the constitutional questions raised by post–September 11, 2001, anti-terror strategies. Many questions of constitutional law are still unanswered. There have been no rulings on the “special treatment” of detainees in the fight against …
At 1:27 a.m. on the morning of August 4, 2005, Herbert Manes stabbed Robert Monroe—known as “Shorty”—to death on the 1400 block of West Oakland Street in North Philadelphia. No newspaper reported the incident. Arrested and charged with homicide, Manes …
In March 1962, in the eighth year of the Algerian War, the French government signed off on the Evian Accords, which established a ceasefire as well as a process that led to the July 5 proclamation in Algiers of independence—one …
How can one know whether China will or will not democratize? In general, as Karl Popper showed in The Poverty of Historicism, political futures in even the middle distance are unknowable because of the inherently uncertain and contingent dynamics of …
Last year, during the battle for the Democratic Party nomination, the rivals tried to keep both race and gender out of the campaign. After the conventions, with the entrance of Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin into the mix, the …
Any close analogy between “getting out” of Korea and American withdrawal from Vietnam, French withdrawal from Algeria, or British withdrawal from India necessarily fails, because in the sense implied by those cases, the United States has not gotten out of …
