I just finished watching Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks’ The Pacific, an HBO miniseries following a group of marines in WWII. And it was truly epic. Melodramatic and overwrought maybe, but the war in the Pacific was no jungle romp. As The Pacific vividly shows, it was unimaginably gruesome, traumatic, and relentless. The marines battled the unyielding and suicidal Japanese on malaria-infested, ... Read More
Our three latest interviews are available here. Teaching the Teachers: Teach for America’s founder talks about education in America. Wendy Kopp is the founder and president of Teach for America, the national non-profit teaching corps. She also serves as CEO of Teach for All, an organization that works to introduce Teach for America’s methods around the world. By Meredith Baker. ... Read More
I was taking a Sporcle quiz the other day (something I do often) on all of TIME Magazine’s Persons of the Year throughout its history. Beyond the predictable leaders like FDR, Hitler, Stalin and Churchill, giants of the World War II era, there was another leader in their midst: 1937, Chiang Kai-Shek, leader of the Republic of China on and ... Read More
Last Wednesday, the Director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair, at last treated Iran’s nuclear program with some of the honesty it deserves: he admitted that it’s up to Iran whether or not it wants to build the bomb. Although on one level this forms the latest round in saga of political posturing between two sides, it is also a surprisingly frank ... Read More
Obama would do well to learn from the post-Oslo experiences of two other Presidents The Nobel Prize Committee’s recent decision to award the Nobel Peace Prize to President Obama touched off a firestorm across the world. Reactions have ranged from rancor from much from the right wing for the supposed lack of justification, to delight from the American left and ... Read More
In a plot twist which should surprise approximately no one, it seems that the August presidential election in Afghanistan was not entirely on the up-and-up. It’s not that the United States is particularly keen to create a warlord-ruled narco-”state” in perpetual war and essentially ungovernable…it’s more just that nations with no literacy, centralized power, or democratic tradition probably aren’t reasonable ... Read More
So I actually just returned to school from a summer spent working in Tokyo, and so I have been following with great interest the returns from the recent Japanese election. As you may have heard if you’ve heard anything, the bare-bones outline is this: the Liberal Democratic Party (neither liberal or democratic, truth be told), after 50 years of almost ... Read More
George Friedman’s geopolitical prophecy The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century is a book that admits it will not get everything right. The author George Friedman, founder of the private intelligence firm STRATFOR, takes up the prophet’s mantle and tells us what the 21st century might look like. His contentions seem, at first glance, fantastic: in 2050, ... Read More
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 ... Read More
Yesterday Richard Garwin spoke in the Science Center about the role of nuclear energy in the country’s energy future, and I was once again amazed at how clearly the numbers demonstrate our nation’s strong need for nuclear energy. If we want to stem global warming and continue to grow our economy at a strong pace by continuing to provide low-cost ... Read More
So apparently McCain’s strategist, Steve Schmidt, is recommending that Republicans drop their rabid opposition to gay marriage. I think the “rabid” part is right; it’s certainly not netting them any votes. Strategically, however, I think it’s wise for them to not just give in entirely; it’s hardly as though there’s a clear majority of Americans in favor of gay marriage, ... Read More
