Roundup: Media's Take

Gideon Rachman: Why 9/15 changed more than 9/11

[Gideon Rachman is the FT’s chief foreign affairs columnist.] America commemorates two grim anniversaries this month: 9/11 and 9/15. Almost a decade has passed since hijacked aircraft flew into the twin towers, killing nearly 3,000 people and transforming America’s relations with the world. Two years have elapsed since the collapse of Lehman Brothers triggered a global financial crisis and provoked fears of a new Great Depression. The two events took place within a few

Julia Baird: How the Recession is Redefining Failure

[Julia Baird is a deputy editor of Newsweek.] We’ve spent more than 60 years dissecting Willy Loman, the character artfully sketched by Arthur Miller in Death of a Salesman. Willy is, perhaps, America’s consummate loser, a failure to his family. But if you can bear with me for one moment, imagine he lived in current times, not amid the postwar prosperity of 1949. Sure, his career was ebbing, but Willy kept a job for 38 years, he owned his house—he had just made the last mortgage pay

James Grant: Britain's Well-Stocked Cabinet

[Grant is a constitutional law scholar at the University of Oxford.] ...Since the early 1980s, Britain's prime ministers moved the political system from its traditional Cabinet format to something more akin to the U.S. presidential system. In this regard, previous Prime Minister Gordon Brown of the just-dethroned Labor Party was perhaps the most controlling. "Gordon wants to interfere in everything," said Geoff Hoon, a Cabinet minister under Brown and his predecessor, Tony

Lawrence Wright: Age of Intolerance

[Lawrence Wright has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1992.] When a dozen cartoons satirizing the Prophet Mohammed appeared in the conservative Danish daily Jyllands-Posten, in September, 2005, there was only a muted outcry from the small Danish Muslim community, and little reaction in the rest of the Muslim world. Six months later, however, riots broke out and Danish embassies were burned; more than a hundred people died. Assassination threats were made, and continue to

Nabila Ramdani: Echoes of Vichy

[Nabila Ramdani is a Paris-born journalist and commentator.] It's the rentrée politique in Paris and Nicolas Sarkozy, son of a once-impoverished Hungarian immigrant, is glowing tycoon amber after spending the whole of August in Cap Nègre, at the vast home belonging to the family of his Italian-born wife, Carla Bruni. The president and first lady had an entire stretch of the security-scanned Riviera to themselves throughout their long holiday, providing evidence that not being wholly

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown: The two faces of modern America

[Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, a Ugandan-born British journalis, is a regular columnist for The Independent.] It ain't over. The anniversary of the 9/11 attacks has mercifully passed without a mass barbeque of flamed holy Korans planned by the florid Florida pastor Terry Jones. But he is still there, waiting to start another fire, to protect his America, patently not the America admired around the globe – refuge of the persecuted, land of opportunity for all. Jones, leader the Dove Outreach

Gerard Alexander: Conservatism Does Not Equal Racism

[Gerard Alexander is an associate professor of politics at the University of Virginia and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.] From an immigration law in Arizona to a planned mosque near Ground Zero to Glenn Beck emoting at the Lincoln Memorial on the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, the controversies roiling American politics in recent weeks and months have featured an ugly undertone, suggesting meanness, prejudice and,

Timothy Noah: The United States of Inequality

[Timothy Noah is senior writer for Slate.] Liberal politicians and activists have long argued that the federal government caused the Great Divergence. And by "federal government," they generally mean Republicans, who have controlled the White House for 20 of the past 30 years, after all. A few outliers even argue that for Republicans, creating income inequality was a conscious and deliberate policy goal. Until recently, the consensus among academics—even most

Andrew F. March: What Shari'a Actually Says

[Andrew F. March teaches Western political philosophy and Islamic law and political thought at Yale University. He is the author of Islam and Liberal Citizenship: The Search for an Overlapping Consensus.] Every American now knows something about"shari'a" -- the Islamic religious law. What most know, or think they know, about shari'a comes to be symbolized by a few violent rules -- stoning, cutting off hands or lashing. Other practices many Westerners find disturbing, like

Gideon Rachman: Sweep Economists Off Their Throne

[Gideon Rachman is a columnist for the Financial Times (UK).] ...There has been some self-examination and soul-searching within the economics profession since the onset of the financial crisis. Joseph Stiglitz, another Nobel prize-winning economist, has suggested that: “If science is defined by its ability to forecast the future, the failure of much of the economics profession to see the crisis coming should be a cause of great concern.” Yet Prof Stiglitz’s conclusion is disappointi

Nick Donovan: The War Criminal Next Door

[Nick Donovan works at the Aegis Trust, which works internationally to build up legal cases against suspected war criminals.] The film Marathon Man is one of the great paranoid thrillers of the 1970s, infamous for the scene in which the Nazi dentist played by Lawrence Olivier drills through Dustin Hoffman's teeth into his live nerve below, repeatedly asking "Is it safe?" This is the stuff of Hollywood horror films, but another scene is more plausible: Olivier -- whose char

Aaron Goldstein: Where St. Nicholas Once Stood

[Aaron Goldstein writes from Boston, Massachusetts.] With all the talk of building a mosque in the shadow of the World Trade Center, how many of you knew there was a church that once stood in the shadow of the World Trade Center? And how many of you knew this same church was destroyed on September 11, 2001? I must confess that until a few weeks ago I wasn't aware that a church was among the property that was leveled in Lower Manhattan that Tuesday morning. When the Sout

Steve Kornacki: Republicans Flunk Government Shutdown History

[Steve Kornacki is Salon's news editor.] In the same way that many of them still -- after all these years and against all available evidence -- would rather chalk up Bill Clinton's 1992 victory to the presence of Ross Perot than to their own deficiencies, there are Republicans who still refuse to accept the reality of what happened when they forced a shutdown of the federal government in 1995. That's probably the best way to understand the eagerness with which so many o

Jeffrey Goldberg: Fidel to Ahmadinejad: 'Stop Slandering the Jews'

[Jeffrey Goldberg is a national correspondent for The Atlantic. Author of the book Prisoners: A Story of Friendship and Terror, he has reported from the Middle East and Africa. He also writes the magazine's advice column.] A couple of weeks ago, while I was on vacation, my cell phone rang; it was Jorge Bolanos, the head of the Cuban Interest Section (we of course don't have diplomatic relations with Cuba) in Washington. "I have a message for you from Fidel," he said. This

Evgeny Morozov: The 20th Century Roots of 21st Century Statecraft

[Evgeny Morozov, originally from Belarus, is a Yahoo! Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University.] Hence a question that has been bugging me for months now: What exactly is so 21st century about "21st century statecraft"? Am I being unfair to the State Department in drawing such parallels and asking such questions? Well, here are the facts. Silicon Valley CEOs do join American diplomats to exotic locals like Siberia, Syria and

Jonah Goldberg: Don't Dismiss the Market Economy

[Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large at the National Review and writes a column for the LA Times.] ...In 1958, Leonard Read wrote one of the most famous essays in the history of libertarianism, "I, Pencil." It begins, "I am a lead pencil — the ordinary wooden pencil familiar to all boys and girls and adults who can read and write." It is one of the most simple objects in human civilization. And yet "not a single person on the face of this Earth knows how to ma

Michael Gerson: Will 2010 Midterms Be 1994 All Over Again?

[Michael Gerson is a columnist for the WaPo and a former speechwriter for the Bush administration.] ...For nearly two years, American politics has been a controlled ideological experiment. A popular president, granted sizable House and Senate majorities, passed the agenda nearly every Democrat wanted -- a large stimulus package and a major expansion of the federal role in health care. The economic outcome has been universally disappointing. A group of highly motivated activists has

Alexei Pushkov: Moving From 'Boris and Bill' to a Real Reset

[Alexei Pushkov is director of the Institute of Contemporary International Studies at the Diplomatic Academy of the Foreign Ministry and anchor of political program “Postscript” on TV Center.] As we enter September, a question naturally arises: What is the future of the much-famed “reset” in U.S.-Russian relations? The previous political season between the two countries ended on a low note because of the spy scandal in the United States, which started — as if by coincidence — three

James Antle: Republicans Partying Like It's 1994

[W. James Antle, III is associate editor of The American Spectator.] The polls keep getting worse for the Democrats. Last week, Gallup showed the Republicans ahead by ten points -- 51 percent to 41 percent -- on the question of who registered voters would prefer to elect to Congress. This is the biggest generic ballot lead for the GOP in sixty years of polling by this venerable organization. On most issues, voters preferred congressional Republicans to their Democratic

Nir Rosen: What America Left Behind in Iraq

[Nir Rosen is a fellow at the New York University Center on Law and Security and author of the forthcoming book Aftermath: Following the Bloodshed of America's Wars in the Muslim World. Research for this article was supported by the Nation Institute.] Hundreds of cars waiting in the heat to slowly pass through one of the dozens of checkpoints and searches they must endure every day. The constant roar of generators. The smell of fuel, of sewage, of kabobs. Automatic weapons pointed a