As bestselling reporter Sebastian Junger’s account of his year spent with US forces in Afghanistan joins other first-rate books about contemporary conflicts, novelist Geoff Dyer argues that recent reportage trumps fiction in its characterization, observation and narrative drive. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
The ethics of risk is not as straightforward as the rhetoric of “paramount importance” suggests. People talk of the “precautionary principle” or “erring on the side of caution” but governments are always trading safety for convenience or other gains. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
But when the acute pain passes you will be left with the chronic problem of who and what you are. The suffering individual has psychoanalysis to turn to. In economics, the analogous route is Marxism, which like psychoanalysis has a dubious reputation—and an explanatory power and long-term perspective that its rivals can’t touch. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Social science may suggest that kids drain their parents’ happiness, but there’s evidence that good parenting is less work and more fun than people think. Bryan Caplan makes the case for having more children. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
The oil was everywhere, long black sheets of it, 15 inches thick in some places. Even if you stepped in what looked like a clean patch of sand, it quickly and gooily puddled around your feet. And Wes Tunnell, as he surveyed the mess, had only one bleak thought: “Oh, my God, this is horrible! It’s all gonna die!” <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Certain topics never fail to generate a flood of impassioned reactions online: immigration, President Obama, federal taxes, “birthers,” and race. This story about Obama’s Kenyan aunt, who had been exposed as an illegal immigrant living in public housing in Boston and who was now seeking asylum, manages to pull strands from all five of those contentious subjects. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
David Dunning, a Cornell professor of social psychology, was perusing the 1996 World Almanac. In a section called Offbeat News Stories he found a tantalizingly brief account of a series of bank robberies committed in Pittsburgh the previous year. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
In the wake of the National Association of Scholars’ on summer reading for college freshmen—the report found many of the assigned books trivial and politically one-sided—we asked Leon Botstein, president of Bard College, to explain his institution’s unusually rigorous approach to summer reading. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
His workshop was in Swamimalai, near Tanjore, from where the Chola dynasty once ruled the southern half of the subcontinent. There he and his two elder brothers plied their trade, making gods and goddesses in exactly the same manner as their ancestors: “The gods created man,” he explained, “but here we are so blessed that we—simple men as we are—help create the gods.” <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
When I was twenty years old, and a college student, I defaced a portrait of Chairman Mao. For this act, and without a trial, I was declared a political prisoner and sent to a forced labor prison on Taihu Lake, where I served in a labor reform brigade in a stone quarry for seven years: five years in the labor prison and two years as an ex-prisoner laborer. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
I never quite got the Sammy thing. Back in the 1970s, “Mr. Sammy Davis, Jr.!” would pop up on television shows singing cheesy songs and making lame jokes about being black, Jewish, and one-eyed. TV Guide always trumpeted these appearances; the implication was that the experience would be a special privilege. I could never tell why. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
In the 1990s, Paul Romer revolutionized economics. In the aughts, he became rich as a software entrepreneur. Now he’s trying to help the poorest countries grow rich—by convincing them to establish foreign-run “charter cities” within their borders. Romer’s idea is unconventional, even neo-colonial—the best analogy is Britain’s historic lease of Hong Kong. And against all odds, he just might make it happen. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
In her provocative new book, The Beauty Bias: The Injustice of Appearance in Law and Life, Stanford law professor Deborah Rhode argues that workers deserve legal protection against appearance-based discrimination unless their looks are directly relevant to their job performance. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Intellectual critics of the Tea Party movement most often attack it for its lack of ideas, especially new ideas. But the point they are making reveals as much about them as it does about the Tea Party. Behind the criticism lies the implicit assumption that comes quite naturally to American intellectuals: Namely, that a political movement ought be motivated by ideas and that a new political movement should provide new ideas. But the Tea Party movement is not about ideas. It is all about attitude. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
In a blissfully funny, vintage Monty Python sketch, there is a soccer game between Germany and Greece in which the players are leading philosophers. The always formidable Germany, captained by “Nobby” Hegel, boasts the world-class attackers Nietzsche, Heidegger and Wittgenstein, while the wily Greeks, captained by Socrates, field a dream team with Plato in goal, Aristotle on defense and—a surprise inclusion—the mathematician Archimedes. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.” Those lines by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, written while she was being courted by Robert Browning, and among the most famous in all of poetry, open one of 44 of her love poems that are collectively known as Sonnets From the Portuguese. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
A series of apparent suicides has shaken the management of Foxconn, an electronics manufacturer that builds parts and assembles products for many Silicon Valley firms. Hundreds of thousands of people live and work at a Foxconn factory complex in southern China, in what critics say are sweat-shop conditions. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
How do Americans spend their leisure time? The answer might surprise you. The most common voluntary activity is not eating, drinking alcohol, or taking drugs. It is not socializing with friends, participating in sports, or relaxing with the family. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Although not utterly destitute like parts of south or east London, its shabby High Street reflects a now-diminished British dream of class mobility. It also stands as a potential warning to the U.S., where working-class, blue-collar white Americans have been among the biggest losers in the country’s deep, persistent recession. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
By conventional standards, the Assassins should have been no match for the superior conventional military power of any of their many enemies. But near the end of the 11th century, the charismatic and ruthless Hasan-i Sabbah forged this small, persecuted sect into one of the most lethally effective terrorist groups the world has ever known.
“GAZA Flotilla Drives Israel Into a Sea of Stupidity” declared the Israeli daily Haaretz on Monday, as though announcing the discovery of some hitherto unknown body of water. Citizens of other nations have long since resigned themselves, of course, to sailing those crowded waters, but for Israelis — and, indeed, for Jews everywhere — this felt like headline news. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Despite its blockade, Israel insists Gazans are not starving and there is no humanitarian crisis. The enclave’s poverty is not as bad as the worst parts of Africa but a people struggle to cope amid the rubble left by cross-border strikes. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
From hero of the left to neocon turncoat, and still battling on: Christopher Hitchens talks to Decca Aitkenhead about old arguments and his new memoir. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
To what extent is climate change actually occuring? Late last year, climate researchers were accused of exaggerating study results. SPIEGEL ONLINE has since analyzed the hacked “Climategate” e-mails and provided insights into one of the most unprecedented spats in recent scientific history. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
No matter how much you know about the Barnes Foundation—no matter how often you’ve been told that it houses the most important collection of Impressionist, Postimpressionist, and early Modern art in the world—nothing, especially its deceptively small scale, prepares you for the experience inside the museum. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Like attacking the Catholic Church during its heyday of killing heretics and infidels, criticizing Islamism today is not for those who jump at the sound of bubble wrap cracking. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
The conviction at the Old Bailey in London of a 10-year-old boy and an 11-year-old boy for attempted rape is bad enough. That the children were convicted despite the fact that the eight-year-old defendant admitted in court that she had made up the story of her ordeal is even worse. But what was worst of all was the very public exploitation of these three children for the purposes of working out adult fantasies. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Jiang, a 70-year-old farmer, can’t remember a time when flesh-eating ulcers didn’t cover his legs. “They never go away,” he tells me. “They just get drier. Sometimes they hurt less.” He doesn’t know for sure how he got them, but his father told him that the wounds first appeared in July 1942, soon after the Japanese army passed through his village. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Can one believe in evolution and God? Some people of faith and some scientists agree: “No.” They are wrong. The theory of evolution says that organisms are related by descent from common ancestors. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Muslims have been landing on the shores of Britain and France for decades. And, as these populations arrived and settled in the Republic, Paris pursued a policy it believed would eventually lead immigrants to full cultural integration into French society. Meanwhile, London, facing a similar influx of foreigners, attempted to create a full-fledged multicultural polity. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
