Roundup: Media's Take

Robert Scheer: From Jefferson to Assange

[Robert Scheer is editor in chief of Truthdig.] All you need to know about Julian Assange’s value as a crusading journalist is that The New York Times and most of the world’s other leading newspapers have led daily with important news stories based on his WikiLeaks releases. All you need to know about the collapse of traditional support for the constitutional protection of a free press is that Dianne Feinstein, the centrist Democrat who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, has

Jonah Goldberg: Save the North Koreans!

[Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.] If North Koreans were pandas, would we have let them suffer so? In October 1993, Edward N. Luttwak wrote a brilliant essay for Commentary magazine asking a similar question:"If the Bosnian Muslims had been bottlenose dolphins, would the world have allowed Croats and Serbs to slaughter them by the tens of thousands? If Sarajevo had been an

Daniel W. Drezner: Why WikiLeaks Is Bad for Scholars

[Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. His next book, Theories of International Politics and Zombies, will be published by Princeton University Press in February.] Let me share one of my recurring nightmares with you. I'm delivering a paper on why the United States pursued a particular strategy during an international negotiation. Suddenly a former policy principal, groaning with gravitas, emerges

Michael Lind: Nobody Represents the American People

[Michael Lind is Policy Director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation and is the author of "The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution."] The disconnect between the actions of the government and public opinion is the central fact of American politics today. It doesn’t seem to matter whether liberal Democrats or conservative Republicans are in power. Only minor, marginal reforms ever take place. The basic outline

Raul A. Reyes: U.S. Latinos Have No Single Leader, and That's a Good Thing

[Raul A. Reyes is an attorney and columnist in New York City.] César Chávez loomed large in my childhood home. Like virtually all Mexican-American households in the late 1960s and early 1970s, my entire family observed his boycotts in support of the United Farm Workers. Even as a kid, I knew Mr. Chávez was "one of us," and he was fighting for justice. This made up for the fact that I went years without eating grapes. Since then, the nation's Latino leadership

James Traub: What is a Liberal Pragmatist to Make of the War in Afghanistan

[James Traub is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine] Today, with the twelve-month review of Obama’s strategy scheduled for the coming weeks, the war in Afghanistan is his—and it doesn’t feel very good. What it feels like, increasingly, is Vietnam, especially to people who formed their views of American military power, and indeed of America itself, in opposition to the Vietnam War. Obama has poured in 50,000 more troops, at a cost of about $100 billion a year. Half

Todd Gitlin: Everything Is Data, but Data Isn’t Everything

[Todd Gitlin’s latest book (with Liel Leibovitz), The Chosen Peoples: America, Israel, and the Ordeals of Divine Election has just been published by Simon & Schuster.] This bumper-sticker headline, borrowed from the sociologist Pauline Bart, speaks beautifully to the latest Wikileaks outpour and the question of what it does and doesn’t mean. The media theorist Lev Manovich has said that the definitive informational metaphor of our epoch is the database. The databas

Richard Lourie: Ivan the Terrible vs. Peter the Great

[Richard Lourie is the author of “The Autobiography of Joseph Stalin” and “Sakharov: A Biography.”] Billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov recently gave an interview in Snob, the magazine he owns. He notes that when lecturing he always asks the audience to name the most effective manager of all Russian leaders in the last 500 years. Invariably, the answer is Ivan the Terrible or Peter the Great. But Peter and Ivan are more than effective managers; they represent enduring currents in Russian

Kathleen Kennedy Townsend: Sarah Palin is Wrong About John F. Kennedy, Religion and Politics

[Kathleen Kennedy Townsend is a former lieutenant governor of Maryland and the author of "Failing America's Faithful: How Today's Churches Are Mixing God With Politics and Losing Their Way."] Sarah Palin has found a new opponent to debate: John F. Kennedy. In her new book, "America by Heart," Palin objects to my uncle's famous 1960 speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, in which he challenged the ministers - and the country - to judg

Chris Danello: What Truman Can Teach Obama About the Deficit

[Writer for The Annual Report of the USA, and managing editor of The Harvard Political Review, Chris Danello highlights lessons learned from the Truman presidency on grappling with federal debt.] When the Midwestern Democrat took office, the federal budget deficit was high and rising. The steep costs of dealing with an extraordinary economic calamity, as well the cost of overseas wars, had drained the treasury and pushed the national debt to unprecedented heights. Compounding the Pr

Jonathan Schell: And Now: Anti-Semitism

[Jonathan Schell is the Doris Shaffer Fellow at The Nation Institute and teaches a course on the nuclear dilemma at Yale. He is the author of The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger.] When Fox News commentator Glenn Beck recently accused investor and philanthropist George Soros, who is of Jewish and Hungarian origin, of running a "shadow government" whose aim is to destroy the American political system, he was drawing on a rich tradition of anti-Semitic attacks

Harvey J. Kaye: Palin Seeks FDR's Endorsement

[Harvey J. Kaye is Professor of Social Change and Development at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay and the author of Thomas Paine and the Promise of America (Hill & Wang). He is currently writing a new book, The Four Freedoms and the Promise of America] Sarah Palin is running for President of the United States. In her new book, America By Heart: Reflections on Family, Faith, and Flag, she essentially declares her candidacy—not so much by what she says as by what she does not

David Freed: Ranking Heroism

[David Freed is a screenwriter. His son is a California National Guard infantry lieutenant.] Much has been made, and rightfully so, of President Obama's Medal of Honor presentation last month to Army Staff Sgt. Salvatore Giunta, the first living recipient of the nation's highest military decoration since the Vietnam War. But the award also raises questions. One is why so few Medals of Honor have been awarded to those who have fought in Afghanistan and Iraq, compared with the numbers

Brian Powell: Marriage and the Court of Public Opinion

[Brian Powell, a sociologist at Indiana University, is the coauthor of "Counted Out: Same-Sex Relations and Americans' Definitions of Family." More about the research and book can be found here.] In 1948, the idea of interracial marriage in the United States was almost unimaginable. The few polls on this topic at the time showed that Americans were nearly unanimous in their disapproval of it. There is little evidence that Californians felt any different. Yet t

R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr.: Liberalism: An Autopsy

[Mr. Tyrrell, a syndicated columnist, is editor in chief of The American Spectator. His current book is "After The Hangover: The Conservatives' Road to Recovery," published by Thomas Nelson.] In the tumultuous history of postwar American liberalism, there has been a slow but steady decline of which liberals have been steadfastly oblivious. The heirs of the New Deal are down to around 20% of the electorate, according to recent Gallup polls. Conservatives account for 42% of

Matt Bai: Of Debts and Doubts

[Matt Bai is a reporter for the NYT.] ...[G]enerations of Americans have sacrificed plenty for the nation’s cause, and there’s no reason to think we’ve lost the capacity. What makes this case for sacrifice [now] so much harder to embrace, perhaps, is that it goes to our national psyche, threatening our self-image as a land with limitless potential. While past generations have readily sacrificed for national greatness, debt reduction — at least in the gloomy way its advocates argue f

Pearl Duncan: Architect Frank Gehry Enhances NY's Iconic Skyline

[Pearl Duncan covered Newport-Bermuda Yacht Races, Miami-Montego Bay Yacht Races, Caribbean Ocean Racing Circuit (CORC) Races and others, for Sailing, Sail, and Yacht Racing/Cruising Magazines. Now she writes about historic New York and New Yorkers.] Few experiences are more delightful than speaking with an architect who knows how a city should be built. Some say a city should have the light airy breath of a well-planned park, not the stuffiness of a randomly grown thick forest.

Brian Landers: Corporations are Only Human - At Least in Law

[Brian Landers is the author of "Empires Apart", www.empiresapart.com, a history of American and Russian imperialism, 2009, and has been a Board memeber of private and public sector organizations including Penguin Books, Waterstone's, the Financial Ombudsman Service and the Prison Serrvice.] The US Supreme Court has ruled that corporations can spend whatever they like on influencing elections. It could happen here too as courts ins

Denis MacShane: The Browder Family and Russia's Leaders

[MacShane is a British M.P. and a former minister for Europe.] Had you asked Stalin about Earl Browder, he would have snorted in derision. Ask Putin about Bill Browder, and the reaction will be the same. The Browder family’s tortured relationship with Russian leaders is worthy of a Ken Follett novel. Earl Browder was the leader of the Communist Party USA in the 1930s and during World War II. A Stalin worshiper, he wielded immense influence in the trade-union movement, w

Andrew Sullivan: Bill Donohue's World AIDS Day

[Andrew Sullivan is a columnist for The Atlantic.] I got to see the extraordinary and powerful exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery, Hide/Seek, over a week ago. It's impressive, subtle and involving.... For me, the portraits from the era of AIDS, of mass death in the teeth of great hostility, fear and discrimination, struck home most powerfully. That is when I came of age as a homosexual man, and it is what necessarily soldered my heart to those of my brothers and s