The Washington Post Column

“What a difference thirty years can make,” writes Colin L. Powell, the U.S. secretary of state, at the start of an article he published this week in Izvestia, a Russian newspaper. Indeed.

As of last weekend, Conrad Black, the famous media mogul, is no longer a media mogul at all: He has sold his newspapers, including the Daily Telegraph of London, the Chicago Sun-Times and the Jerusalem Post.

“Dear Ms. Applebaum, The most desolate, lonely place that I can think of is not Mars, but the inside of your brain.” Anyone who has ever written an article and had it printed in a public place will know how much e-mail has changed the way that readers communicate with authors.

The first color pictures from the NASA space probe expedition to Mars have now been published. They look like — well, they look like pictures of a lifeless, distant planet. They show blank, empty landscapes. They show craters and boulders. They show red sand.

Wherever he goes, Hassan Mneimneh is deluged with suggestions. Knowledgeable professors tell him about Rwandan war crimes tribunals and Cambodian archival practices. Friendly Germans lecture him on the technical operations of the commission that controls the files of the Stasi, the East German secret police.

It has an army, a stock market and a national bank. It has a seat on the U.N. Security Council, ambassadors in most world capitals and Olympic ice skaters. It has a flag, and quite a few satellites. So why can’t we treat Russia like a grown-up nation?

Anyone who has ever invited guests of opposing political persuasions over to dinner will know how quickly it can all go wrong. Having imagined they’d exchange their interesting views about something vaguely neutral — European politics, say, or Russian literature — I’ve watched my normally civilized friends spend the evening shouting at one another about

Last week I spent the better part of two days trying to understand the Medicare bill. I called up the bill’s advocates. I called up the bill’s critics. At one point, I read the advocates’ declarations over the telephone to one of the critics.

Last week, in the middle of the day, traffic ground to a halt on Interstate 10, the highway that runs south from Phoenix. Rival gangs of “coyotes,” the criminals who smuggle illegal immigrants over the Mexican border, had started shooting at one another through the open windows of their trucks. The trucks were packed with