The pause button

As far as the bulk of the American — and for that matter, world — press is concerned, the Iraq War ended sometime in early 2008. Casualty rates suffered by American troops had dropped significantly, and this happy circumstance was generally credited to the “surge” of up to 40,000 additional troops deployed to Iraq starting [...]

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Banner image: Matt Schlian

A detail from Matt Schlian’s “Omnivore”. Schlian is a paper engineer and teacher; he creates kinetic sculptures (yes, out of paper) for both artistic and scientific purposes, and he has worked with biologists and engineers in visualizing and understanding such phenomena as cell division and such challenges as solar cell development. He also draws. My [...]

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An Orphan Annie Interview

Perhaps my happiest experience as a freelance writer was publishing in Lingua Franca, the late, much-lamented magazine that covered intellectual life with genuine journalistic moxie. Most journalists are baffled by ideas and alienated from the academy. The usual approach to writing about contemporary scholarship tends to be a mixture of sensationalism and scorn (for an [...]

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George Steiner’s Phony Learning

George Steiner’s new book. As a literary critic and essayist George Steiner is distinguished by his erudition, which is not just impressive but even intimidating. A quick glance through his books reveals that he’s a writer confident enough to sit in judgement of a vast range of cultural figures ranging from the poets of antiquity to [...]

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The Case for Immigration Amnesty

    Joseph Carens is one of the world’s most interesting political theorists. I first became aware of him when I took a class in which we were assigned to read his famous essay , “Aliens and Citizens: The Case For Open Borders,” in which Carens makes the provocative argument that immigration controls should be [...]

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Posner on the Corruption of Conservatism

“By the fall of 2008, the face of the Republican Party had become Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber. Conservative intellectuals had no party.” So writes conservative U.S. justice Richard Posner on the blog he shares with economist Gary Becker.

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Burma’s Mute Despair

The Literary Review of Canada gave me room to do a substantial review of Guy Delisle’s Burma Chronicles. Click the link in the middle of the last sentence to read the review, the opening of which is excerpted below:   Many travellers record their experiences with a camera. Guy Delisle relies on an older method [...]

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Could China become another Japan?

        Below is an interesting article by Dan Slater of Finance Asia in response to Japan’s Open Future (the book I have written with Tomas Casas i Klett and Jean-Pierre Lehmann, as introduced in an earlier post). I am reprinting Dan’s article here with his kind permission; it has been picked up on a [...]

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Listen to Reason

FDR with an Orphan Annie look-alike.   I’ve been writing the introductions for a series series of volumes reprinting Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie, a comic strip which in the 1930s pioneered a form of right-wing populism which later (in the era of Nixon, Reagan and Bush) became politically pervasive in the United States. Brian Doherty of [...]

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A detail from William Degouve de Nuncques‘s “The Mysterious Forest” (1900). De Nuncques (1867-1935) was a French-born Belgian painter who became strongly influenced by Symbolism after being introduced to the circle of Symbolist poets by his new wife, Juliette Massin (the sister-in-law of lyric poet Emile Verhaeren). For a time, he was associated with the [...]

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