Russian With a Western Way
Andrew Carnegie needed a lifetime; the Rockefellers required several generations. And how long does it take nowadays to win respectability in Washington?
Andrew Carnegie needed a lifetime; the Rockefellers required several generations. And how long does it take nowadays to win respectability in Washington?
Why talk about Iraq? Why talk about it now? I don’t have a full explanation myself, but there it is: Suddenly, simultaneously, everyone around the world seems to be arguing about whether their country should or should not support the imminent American invasion of Iraq.
“Vous votez Chirac, eh?” It wasn’t quite a question, but rather a statement, addressed to myself and a friend as we walked through the Goutte d’Or, one of Paris’s immigrant quartiers: “You are voting for Chirac, no?”
Last weekend, following the Friday suicide of Ayat Akhras, an 18-year-old Palestinian girl who blew herself up at the entrance to a Jerusalem supermarket, the BBC broadcast a small segment of the video tape she had recorded beforehand.
Has the world changed since Sept. 11? As I’ve said, it’s difficult to give a straight answer—and if you are staring hard at the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, it’s almost impossible.
It isn’t often that I think the opinions of another magazine are worth quoting at length, but I have just read something so stunning that I think it worth making an exception.
London — On the morning after the terrorist assaults on New York and Washington, my friend Matt, a New Yorker who has lived here for a long time, woke up to discover a sympathy card slipped under his door.
Three guesses which country the United Nations now reckons to contain the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. No, not Somalia; not Rwanda; not Mozambique.
I admit that up until recently I’ve had trouble taking seriously the violent protesters and tear-gas throwers who nowadays show up whenever a meeting of one of our great globalizing, multilateral institutions takes place.
Hands up anyone who remembers the first scene in Air Force One, the film in which Harrison Ford plays the American president as action hero: The opening credits roll, parachutes open up, American paratroopers swoop down.