A collection of 215 posts
The human rights record of the Chinese Communist Party provides ample evidence of its capacity for repression and cruelty, and therefore ample opportunities for condemnation.
Bureaucratic inertia and incompetence are plentiful in China, and not just among local officials, even though apparatchiks in Beijing frequently use them as scapegoats for their own corruption.
Totalitarian regimes begin in mass movements, but it should be noted that not all mass movements are totalitarian. The American Civil Rights movement was a mass movement and undoubtedly a hugely positive force for urgently needed change.
The New Yorker story remains an albatross around my neck.
The past is raked over for imperfections as left-modernist ideologues render the most grievance-based interpretation of history imaginable.
The first time we hung out, we read together in an empty classroom.
Cook is best understood as a quintessential figure of the European Enlightenment, with all the consequences flowing from that, positive and negative.
It is by now a familiar truism that the Internet—and social media, in particular—has awarded the intolerant, the narrow-minded, and the censorious unprecedented power. To this challenge from below, publishers have, by and large, responded with dismaying timidity. Large multinational publishing firms have hastily withdrawn controversial titles and
As an institution grows and evolves, it inevitably requires reform, but that task can only be entrusted to those who have its best interests at heart.
The self-exoneration and re-incrimination of Jens Soering.
Our Man tells a tidier story than The Unwinding because it focusses on one man, and the analogy between Holbrooke and the country he served holds up remarkably well throughout the book.
The argument that avoiding meat would deny animals lives worth living faces further problems.
The more someone invests in a lie, the more painful it becomes to renounce.
The story of the ITN trip to Bosnia—and the bitter quarrel about its reporting that followed—is a cautionary tale about the destructive and deranging effects of ideological hubris.
Ever since, all of Europe—the East as well as the West—has carried the burden of Nazi guilt, as others would have us bear the guilt of North American slavery and Jim Crow.