Anne Applebaum

In the Key of Healing

In the Key of Healing

Two years ago, someone called up Arthur Bloom with an unusual request: A badly wounded soldier, a former drummer, wanted to start playing music again. Trouble was, he’d lost a leg in Iraq and couldn’t use his old drum kit. Did Bloom have any ideas?

Clinton in Charge

Clinton in Charge

“It’s time for Barack Obama to let Hillary Clinton take off her burqa.” It’s a line that brilliantly managed to belittle our female secretary of state under the guise of supporting her, to offend her and “defend” her at the same time: No wonder the insult that Tina Brown lobbed at the White House two …

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A Mad, Bad, and Brutal Baron

A Mad, Bad, and Brutal Baron

Like a contemporary reincarnation of Adela Quest, the heroine of E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, James Palmer was both attracted and repelled by his first encounter with the grotesque, grimacing, wooden gods of Inner Mongolia: “I entered the shrine of a gruesome god, his sharp teeth grinning and his head festooned with skulls. I …

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An Overlooked Force in Iran

An Overlooked Force in Iran

Women in sunglasses and headscarves, speaking through megaphones, brandishing cameras, carrying signs: When they first appeared, the photographs of the 2005 Tehran University women’s rights protests were a powerful reminder of the true potential of Iranian women. The images were uplifting; they featured women of many ages; and they went on circulating long after the …

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Where’s the Revolution?

Where’s the Revolution?

We’ve been waiting and waiting, but the widely predicted European backlash — against capitalism, against free markets, against the right — has not come. There are no demands for Marxist revolution, no calls for nationalization of industry, not even a European campaign for what the Obama administration calls “stimulus” — a policy more colloquially known …

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