Walter Russell Mead
Chen Affair Exposes the Limits of U.S. Influence in China For the second time in two weeks, Chen Guangcheng phoned into a congressional hearing. The Washington Post recounts that while Chen said his immediate family ... NYC Set on Chasing Last Remaining Industry out of Town Even after the financial crisis, Wall Street is still the dominant economic force in New York, accounting for 20 percent of the state’s tax revenue ... Syrian Opposition: Up A Creek, With Guns, But No Paddle The Arab League tried to gather the various councils and organizations claiming to represent the “Syrian opposition” in Cairo this week. Only a few people ... The News That Isn’t News, Exhibit #426 Via Meadia has steered clear of the various ephemera dominating news coverage of the campaign season (such as the current hubbub over Ann Romney’s alleged Hitlerian ... Desperate States Take Money from Distressed Homeowners The budget crises that have been wreaking havoc on state finances for years now may have just reached a new low: Many states are now ... Persecution Watch: The Iranian War Against the Bahai Being a religious minority in the Middle East is an extremely tough assignment. Whether it’s the Copts in Egypt, other kinds of Christians in Iran ...
Also Find Us On
The Middle East and Beyond Fecklessness in Syria Adam Garfinkle The Annan mission in Syria may not be doing any good, but at least it's giving Obama an excuse to do nothing.
 
Religion and Other Curiosities "Most of the time I am alone with my ritual" Peter Berger Forming habits is a basic requirement if human beings are going to live in a society (which in turn is a requirement for surviving as a species). Ritual is, as it were, a solemnized habit. Ritual behavior typically occurs in the face of danger. Ergo, religion is dangerous business.
 
Middle East Lebanon on the Brink Adam Garfinkle In my most recent post on Syria, I wrote that one “likely result” of a salafi Sunni political surge in Syria would be “a new [Lebanese] civil war, with a beginning epicenter most like in and around Tripoli.” I didn’t realize how soon this would become apparent.
 
Obituary Maurice Sendak, R.I.P. Jamie Malanowski Like so many revolutionaries, it is difficult to see the influence of Maurice Sendak in the world that he remade in his image, only because that influence has become so pervasive.
What We're Reading

With routinely more deaths than births per year, Japan is now a “net mortality society.”

Did you get rejected by Stanford? Are you a liberal arts major, or what the techies would call a “fuzzy”? Then you might have what it takes to master CS221: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence. Then again, you might not, but it costs nothing to try.

Andy Revkin of the New York Times‘s Dot Earth blog is O.K. with the processed beef scrap filler known as “pink slime”, and he thinks you should be O.K. with it too.

“Physics at the Fringe”, says Freeman Dyson, is what happens when imagination loses touch with observation.
Get online for only
Ahead of the Curve
Editors' Choices from Previous Issues
July/August 2011 A Conversation with Fernando Henrique Cardoso Walter Russell Mead Former President Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil will be receiving the Kluge Prize for the study of humanity from the Library of Congress. Walter Russell Mead interviews the former president.
 
July/August 2011 Ending Al-Qaeda Carl Ciovacco, Howard Gambrill Clark & James Van De Velde The Washington Post reported yesterday that Al Qaeda's online forums have gone dark for an extended period of time. Though the United States is not taking responsibility, could it be our doing? And if it's not, why is it not? Click through, for we covered this ground a year or so ago.
Featured Reviews
Books, Film, Music & Other Cultural Artifacts
Books Nice Things About Detroit John G. Rodwan, Jr. Decades of decline have left Detroit in ruins, but it remains fertile ground for storytelling. Writers who capture the city’s grit and eccentricity speak to its peculiar appeal, and even spark hope for its renewal.
Books All That Money Can Be Damir Marusic For centuries, Philip Coggan writes, the world financial system has pitted debtors against creditors, with large shifts in indebtedness driving the rise and fall of world powers. While his broad history, Paper Promises, vindicates Tea Party fears, it shows that the United States is hobbled not just by massive debt, but by the misunderstanding of monetary economics that brought it about.
Books Our Polarizing Culture A Conversation with Charles Murray Charles Murray’s Coming Apart depicts the segregation of America into two mutually unintelligible cultures. Far from the received idea that the working class is more values-conscious, it is now the elite who benefit from virtues like industriousness and strong marriages. Will they heed Murray’s call to look beyond their rarified social bubbles and preach what they practice?
Retroview Our Hero? Ian Campbell Victorian-era historian and critic Thomas Carlyle worried about many of the social trends that concern Americans today: overweening ideologies, the dehumanizing effects of technology, the collapse of traditional faith, and the dearth of heroic leadership. His insights prove prescient for our own complex era.
Books The Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted James Kirchick As the Arab Spring erupted last year, technophiles waxed triumphant about the transformative power of the internet and social networking to free oppressed peoples around the world. Evgeny Morozov’s The Net Delusion debunks their misplaced enthusiasm and shows how these technologies can even be a boon for authoritarian regimes.