I’m not always wild about The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, but I think he has a very perceptive post about Israel’s relationship with the United States. He points out that the ultra-conservative governments that have been in power lately have been doing their best to alienate their potential American supporters, particularly young American Jews. Namely, that actions like Gaza or their ... Read More
If you’ve seen Avatar and haven’t yet read Annalee Newitz’s article “When will white people stop making movies like this?” then you’re missing out. Avatar — putatively anti-racist, seemingly simple and beautiful and extraordinarily entertaining — is in fact, she argues, mired with subtle racial biases and white ethnocentrism. She writes: These are movies about white guilt. Our main white ... Read More
Public discourse in the age of the Internet Republic.com 2.0 by Cass Sunstein Princeton University Press, September 2009, $24.95, 272 pp. Create Your Own Economy by Tyler Cowen Dutton Adult, July 2009, $25.95, 272 pp. Cass Sunstein begins Republic.com 2.0 by asking his readers to imagine a world where their control over the media they consume is total.”It is some ... Read More
How Obama will influence the genre On his posthumously released hit Changes, 2Pac rapped, “Although it seems heaven sent, we ain’t ready to see a black president.” The song addresses problems like police violence, drug use, poverty, and the epidemic of incarceration in the black community. Blasting what he sees as the offenses of a racist government, he called on ... Read More
When former Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao spoke at Harvard as a visiting fellow, I hoped she would spark debate on everything from white collar overtime regulations to pension assets. I attended her study groups and can attest to the fact that she did this and more. Ms. Chao was engaging, provocative, and thoughtful, the type of speaker who helps ... Read More
New prospects for stable democracy Four years ago, the Iraqi national elections were riddled with fraudulent voting, sectarian boycotts, and insurgent attacks. Although the accomplishment of largely free and fair elections drew praise from onlookers around the world, the elections still suffered from violence and low turnout; this seemed to indicate how difficult, even impossible, the transition to democracy would ... Read More
Rewriting the history of the Civil War
What Obama's election means for international relations
Have you seen the Santelli clip? Watch it. Now. I’ll wait. Yes, that is a CNBC reporter channeling the rage of the common volk. Raging about the “losers” getting bailed out by gubmint money. Interestingly, he neglects to mention the orders of magnitude more money getting thrown at the losers who happen to already have lots of money and political ... Read More
Barack Obama’s election to the presidency should not come as a shock. His political operation was more disciplined, more organized, and more effective than that of his opponents. The wisdom of his policy objectives compared to those of his rivals can be debated ad nauseam, but, it is not my intention to do so; I will leave all normative judgments ... Read More
I was recently reading the Harvard Independent (a mistake, I know), and one of the writers had a piece discussing two widely-read articles over the summer trashing students from Harvard and other Ivy League universities. I skimmed through most of it, and what really struck me was a passage mentioning Harvard students’ homogenized, unfailingly reasoned and moderate political positions. It ... Read More
