This morning I overheard my wife giving relationship advice to a friend on the phone: “This is the rule. In the beginning of a relationship, those first two or three golden weeks, you can confess anything. You get permission to…
Janet Malcolm is one of my idols, I’d read her shopping lists if someone would print them. Her book The Journalist and the Murderer is a cultural landmark, it changed the relationship of journalists and their sources, giving more power…
Some readers are abusing this site by leaving comments “signed” by Phil Weiss. I didn’t write these comments, I’m going to start taking them down when I get a minute; they’re misrepresentations. If you want to go after me, fine,…
Last night at Columbia’s school of international affairs, Scott Ritter, the former weapons inspector, and former Marine, opened a speech about Iran bracingly, by speaking not of Iran but about the “elephant in the room”: Israel. He said that Israel…
Senator Reid just now said a smart thing on the floor of the Senate: the way out of the Iraq mess involves talking to Syria. “Even talking to Syria.” The grieving David Grossman told Israel the same thing last week….
Today the Times at last quotes Steve Walt fairly, in an article by Steve Erlanger and David Sanger about why Israel and the U.S. are joined in a war on terror from Gaza to Baghdad, and maybe on to Tehran….
My commenters below are right: the prejudices that Sacha Baron Cohen stokes in Borat are conventional ones, and the film is a form of Red-State blackface. All the juice in his journey happens between the coasts. When he’s on the…
I caught Lieberman on Meet the Press today. The guy is an amazing politician. He’s always been a great politician, this time he outdid himself. He knows how to talk to people, he knows how to build a coalition, he…
Antony Loewenstein is saying just what I’m saying about Israel’s crisis, but in Australia. The author of the book, My Israel Question, Loewenstein writes in The Age: Israel is a nation in serious decline. Israel’s long-term future lies not with…