A comment by “RickZ” about the failed Iran hostage rescue attempt in the waning days of the Carter administration prompted this reply from me, referring to a post I wrote several years ago on the anniversary of Operation Eagle Claw … Continue reading →
This describes a pretty ghastly, though thankfully rare, way that a some descendents of Holocaust survivors are paying tribute to their aging relatives: having the elderly survivors’ camp numbers tattooed on their own arms. The 10 tattooed descendants interviewed for … Continue reading →
I’d heard a lot about the Florida vote in the 2000 presidential election. Hanging chads, Pat Buchanan, virtual tie, recounts, Supreme Court, lingering rage. But I’d never encountered this factoid before: How campaigns try to sway polling results: “In a … Continue reading →
Remember back to when the fatwa on Salman Rushdie seemed a strange and unfathomable aberration? Never such innocence again.
Continue reading →Barry Rubin has written a piece describing Obama as a new kind of leftist: Barack Obama is not a communist, a fascist, a Muslim, a Marxist, a Progressive (in the pre-1920s meaning of that word), or even a socialist. Obama … Continue reading →
Let’s talk about something other than the embassy riots for a change. The other day a Rasmussen poll asked the question “Who do you trust more on job creation?” The results were 47 Obama to 45 Romney Sounds crazy, but … Continue reading →
Eleven years. That’s a formidable passage of time. New buildings are rising on the site of 9/11. The memorial fountains are in place, a somber and yet paradoxically beautiful tribute. The museum was stalled by a dispute, but maybe soon … Continue reading →
I’ve just finished my latest book group assignment, Waiting For Snow in Havana, a memoir by Carlos Eire about his childhood in pre-Castro Cuba, the Castro takeover, and the circumstances under which he was able to leave Cuba for the … Continue reading →
From Martin Amis’s book Koba the Dread: …[T]orture, among its other applications, was part of Stalin’s war against the truth. He tortured, not to force you to reveal a fact, but to force you to collude in a fiction. And … Continue reading →
From political science professor Jacqueline Stevens (via Volokh): It’s an open secret in my discipline: in terms of accurate political predictions (the field’s benchmark for what counts as science), my colleagues have failed spectacularly and wasted colossal amounts of time … Continue reading →
…is today. The French rallying cry “
Continue reading →…on the eve of the sort-of millennium makes for some fascinating reading in retrospect. I call it the “sort-of” millennium because it took place in late December of 1999, whereas the real millennium would have begun with the year 2001. … Continue reading →