Power, not anchored to any larger principles, is a recipe for self-preservation over good governance. That’s the picture that veteran Nevada political journalist Jon Ralston paints of the late former Senate majority leader Harry Reid and his worldview, in a meticulously reported if largely solicitous book about Reid’s political life, The Game Changer. The subtitle
At age 93, the magisterial Harvey Mansfield of Harvard has given us a splendid new book, The Rise and Fall of Rational Control. The title will be perplexing to most people. “What is ‘rational control’?” they will ask. And “how can such a thing, whatever it is, ‘rise and fall’?” Professor Mansfield provides a hint
When Stefan Merrill Block is about 12 years old, his paternal grandmother, Mimi, comes to visit his family in Texas. “The boy should be in school,” the elderly Jewish woman tells his mother. “It’s a Thursday! A boy on Thursday should be in a school learning a thing. He needs the—what do they call it?
Three weeks ago, my beloved San Francisco 49ers were unceremoniously dispatched from the NFL playoffs by the Seattle Seahawks, who are vying for their second Super Bowl championship today. The result didn’t surprise many; the Niners were hobbled by injuries to many of their best players and, frankly, enjoyed more than a bit of luck
In the 1970s, after the Six-Day War had time to sink in, an impressive number of Western academics, journalists, politicians, diplomats, spooks, and especially oil executives gave Israel a centripetal eminence in the Middle East that neither its population, geography, faith, wealth, nor even military accomplishments merited. Thirteen hundred years of Islamic history over 3.8
In recent years, there has been growing concern that the United States and China might find themselves in a war over Taiwan. Such worries overlook an important fact: Washington and Beijing are already at war. But as David Shedd and Andrew Badger document in their new book, The Great Heist: China’s Epic Campaign to Steal
Diana Buttu, who teaches courses on negotiation skills and female leadership, has praised Hamas in the past Diana Buttu (Al Jazeera English/YouTube) A Harvard lecturer who writes a column for Zeteo, the anti-Israel blog of former MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan, is slated to speak at a conference in Qatar next month with a top Hamas