I ran into my friend Dorota at “The Nutcracker” a few days ago. As the orchestra began to play the familiar bars of Tchaikovsky’s overture, she sighed. “I’ve seen it every year for the past 10 years,” she confessed. “Finally I thought I could skip it this year. But then my daughter got a part …
ONCE, THE Allied history of the Second World War—the Anglo-American history of the Second World War, the Victors’ history of the Second World War—was the only one we thought mattered. In school, in movies, and in political speeches we learned of a war between Britain, France, and America on the one hand, and Nazi Germany …
Riots across Tunisia, December 2010. Demonstrations in Moscow, December 2011. Fasts and street marches in New Delhi, March 2012 — plus street movements in Slovenia; Quebec; Iraq; Azerbaijan; and Wukan, southern China, among others, throughout the past two years. What do they all have in common? The answer is corruption, or, rather, the desire to …
The anti-corruption movement: Human rights’ natural partner Read More »
A Texan friend of mine heard Karl Rove a couple of days ago talking angrily about President Obama winning by “suppressing the vote.” Not long after that, she read that Sean Hannity wants to create a “pathway to citizenship” for illegal immigrants. She wrote to me that she was compiling a list: “ways in which …
Let’s be perfectly clear: this year’s American presidential election was not a referendum on American foreign policy. Nor did it involve much discussion of the subject. During most of the campaign, the words “Iraq” and “Afghanistan” were scarcely mentioned.
The Republican party’s sound economic policies are being drowned out by the strident voices of dubious fringe figures President Barack Obama’s victory speech. Mitt Romney could not separate himself from a Republican Party whose public faces – in the media as well as in politics – seem to many Americans ever more extreme
“Is this presidential election really the most important in our lifetime?” That was the question asked, in so many words, by a concerned Brit at a discussion here a few days ago. His words were directed at the political analyst Larry Sabato, whose countenance had been beamed onto a conference-room screen like some giant electronic …
To those who met them in Japanese-occupied Manchukuo in 1935, the Swiss businessman Charles Emile Martin and his American partner, Cy Oggins, must have seemed an enigmatic pair. Oggins was a distinguished-looking man with craggy features, well-made suits, and a penchant for silver-topped walking sticks. He seemed to know a great deal about Oriental antiquities, …
Several months ago, I found myself walking down an empty Tripoli street near midnight, looking for a taxi. I wasn’t alone — I was with two colleagues, one of whom was then living in Libya. But we weren’t especially well-protected. We didn’t have a bodyguard. We certainly didn’t have a gun.
Aleppo was burning last week: On YouTube, you could watch the flames consuming the walls of the 600-year-old souk, the central landmark of one of the world’s oldest cities. If you looked further, you could also find film of what appears to be Syrian government planes strafing the city and a video made inside the …
