Can six-party stakeholders return the next volley? On Feb. 13, 2007, six-party talks with North Korea reached a breakthrough. In exchange for economic and energy aid, the regime would begin dismantling its nuclear reactor at Yongbyon in a key step towards denuclearization. But a major setback occurred in December 2008, when the D.P.R.K. suddenly halted the process and refused to [...]
Can Michael Steele lead blacks to the Republicans? The recent election of Michael Steele, the first African-American chairman of the Republican National Committee, may be taken to symbolize the necessary modernization of the Grand Old Party, or merely cynical tokenism at its worst. Steele’s victory ended a racially charged contest in which one candidate, Katon Dawson, was discovered to have [...]
Emptying pockets, shifting concerns Dwight D. Eisenhower once said, “The future of this republic is in the hands of the American voter.” John McCain and Barack Obama would most certainly agree. This November, American citizens cast their votes to decide the course that the nation is to take over the next four years. In a contest that was dominated by [...]
Science education improves gradually over time From our vantage point in the ivory tower, it can be tempting to assume that only a handful of school districts still fail to teach children about the lynchpin of modern biology, the theory of evolution. Yet, despite several adverse court rulings and eighty years of progress since the famed Scopes “monkey trial” marked [...]
I could not shake my feeling of profound sadness when I learned on Monday that David Halberstam had lost his life in a traffic accident. Older generations remember Halberstam as the bold and energetic foreign-affairs correspondent for the New York Times. His reporting from Vietnam would earn him, at age thirty, the Pulitzer Prize. But as he grew older, he [...]
