Joachim has pointed me to a number of our coreligionists’ angry responses to the splendid Noah Feldman piece on marrying a gentile in the July 22 New York Times Magazine. Boy, religious Jews are pissed. One blogger calls Feldman a…
On Meet the Press yesterday, Tim Russert sharply questioned George Tenet over his passivity during the runup to the Iraq War. Disaster was looming, the executive was justifying war with lies; and yet the intelligence chief did not tell the…
I heard a report that Sen. Barack Obama’s position on Israel/Palestine is no different from the Democratic mainstream, that in fact he abandoned a more progressive view—which you might expect given his multicultural/international backstory—to get there. I asked someone who…
A few months back, the brilliant and flawed David Brooks said that blue/red was giving way to a new divide in American society that would play out in ideology and partisan politics: globalist interventionist elites on one side, populist isolationist…
Tonight’s the big debate. I haven’t been so excited since Norman Mailer and Germaine Greer and Susan Sontag squared off over feminism. As a pipsqueak, I was on the wrong side then (Mailer’s), now I’m on the right one. One…
I’m just back from visiting my mother on the Cape and it’s with sadness that I report that all the families seem to be leaving now and heading home. That regretful process used to happen in September. Kids would prolong…
I bashed The New Republic’s Martin Peretz for hinting ominously that Harvard Pres. Larry Summers’s departure would result in the loss of $100 million gifts to the school. Oops. Turns out he was right.
On Charlie Rose, that is. The outgoing Harvard President was on for an hour, rebroadcast just now. It was interesting to see him up close at last. Some observations: Summers seems a business executive by temperament. He’s too tan and…
The AP reports that Bill Clinton made $7.5 million last year in speeches. I’ve touched on Clinton’s post-presidential career before. Here is a related criticism, coming from neocon David Frum, in his book The Right Man, in the context of…