One great thing about blogging is it reveals a writer’s true nature, flaws and all. (Like my flakiness; I try and ground myself but there it is; I think in Kabbala they would say I am too much in my…
Soldier, the new bio of Colin Powell by Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post, includes some incisive comments about the neoconservatives’ concern for Israel’s interests. Per the LA Times review: According to the author, the then-secretary went out of his…
A study by public-health researchers at Johns Hopkins says that estimates of deaths in Iraq since we did that nation the great service of bringing them democracy are way low, that the likelihood is 600,000 have died. Though they say…
I’m surprised that everyone covering Corey Lidle’s death has avoided the psychological question: Was depression or suicidal feeling a factor in the crash? Let’s go to the videotape: in his last appearance in the public eye, just four days before…
Further proof that anyone who said Walt and Mearsheimer were extremists had their head up their Today’s Ha’aretz reports the formation of a lobbying group to counter AIPAC’s hawkish position in the U.S. George Soros is involved. So is IPF,…
The Halftime show on Monday Night Football on ESPN is featuring something called “Jacked Up,” showing the five biggest hits of the previous weekend’s action and asking people to vote on which was the best one. The hits are blindside…
Timothy Garton Ash, in the latest New York Review of Books, makes a point that should be obvious, but unfortunately is not: that reforming Islam is not like reforming Communism. At the end of the Cold War, there were very…
The woods this fall are filled with acorns. Trails are a kind of roller derby of the nuts underfoot, and squirrels look fat and happy. At night there’s a continual clatter, as the acorns fall. A friend who lives in…
MJ Rosenberg has a fascinating column this week on a potential new axis in the Middle East: Saudi Arabia and Israel… Rosenberg calls for, egad, creative thinking on the Bush Administration’s part to seize the moment on a Palestinian state….