Roundup: Media's Take

Asra Q. Nomani: You Still Can't Write About Muhammad

[Ms. Nomani, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, is the author of "Standing Alone: An American Woman's Struggle for the Soul of Islam"] Starting in 2002, Spokane, Wash., journalist Sherry Jones toiled weekends on a racy historical novel about Aisha, the young wife of the prophet Muhammad. Ms. Jones learned Arabic, studied scholarly works about Aisha's life, and came to admire her protagonist as a woman of courage. When Random House bought her novel last year in a $100,0

Mark Z. Barabak: Obama, McCain Find Race Issue Isn't Easily Discarded

Race has bedeviled this country from the start, when the Founding Fathers ducked the slavery issue for fear of killing the nation in its cradle. Obviously, much has changed. For one thing, Americans are seriously weighing the prospect of elevating a black man to the White House in November. But as this past week's debate over "the race card" illustrates, there is still no subject in American politics as fraught as the color of a candidate's skin.

Sidney Blumenthal: The Strange Death of Republican America

On July 29, President George W. Bush appeared at the Lincoln Electric Company in Euclid, Ohio, where he spoke about energy and then asked the audience for questions. The opportunity for people in a small town in the Midwest to pose a question directly to the president of the United States is a rare one, possibly a once in a lifetime experience. "And now I'd like to answer some questions, if you have any," said Bush. But his request was returned with silence. Bush filled the air with an

Hillel Italie: Solzhenitsyn Changed Story of Soviet Union

[Hillel Italie is AP National Writer.] The legacy of Nobel laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn serves as a reminder that books can matter as much as life and death. Solzhenitsyn never stood before a tank in Tiananmen Square, but novels such as "Cancer Ward" and "The First Circle" landed like roadblocks before Soviet might, their power confirmed and magnified by his government's determination to stop them. "Writers are a problem, they a

George Walden: How Chairman Mao led China to humiliation

[George Walden's book China: A Wolf in the World? is published this month.] The small dramas of the Olympics are tending to overshadow the historic event they symbolise: China's emergence from Maoist autarky and austerity to a great power, active in the world. How did we get here, in three short decades? Everyone knows about the 1962 Cuba crisis, but it was another near-nuclear war seven years later that did more to change the world, as I have particular reason to rem

John Pilger: The lies of Hiroshima live on, props in the war crimes of the 20th century

[John Pilger has been a war correspondent, film-maker and author.] When I first went to Hiroshima in 1967, the shadow on the steps was still there. It was an almost perfect impression of a human being at ease: legs splayed, back bent, one hand by her side as she sat waiting for a bank to open. At a quarter past eight on the morning of August 6, 1945, she and her silhouette were burned into the granite. I stared at the shadow for an hour or more, then walked down to the river and met

Ruth Marcus: The Even-handedness in Professor Obama's Law Exams

How would candidate Obama answer professor Obama's exams? During his years teaching constitutional law at the University of Chicago, Barack Obama favored take-home tests touching on some of the scorchingly hot-button legal issues of the day: gay rights, reproductive freedom, affirmative action and racial profiling. These exams, unearthed by The New York Times' resourceful Jodi Kantor, are edgy versions of the classic law school 'issue spotter.' Can a state university's law review ex

Jon Meacham: The South Just Ain't That Different Anymore

In a self-interview entitled "Questions They Never Asked Me," Walker Percy once unleashed the frustrations of years of sitting for interviews, particularly with journalists from outside his native South. "Of all the things I'm fed up with, I think I'm fed up most with hearing about the New South," Percy wrote. Why is that? he asked himself. "I would dearly love never to hear the New South mentioned again … If there is anything more boring than the questions asked about t

James Rainey: Obama's Crime? Acting Too Presidential

America, meet Barack The Arrogant. Did you hear, this guy's already talking about redecorating the Lincoln Bedroom? Or that a few weeks back, he stood behind a podium bearing a faux presidential seal? The young upstart from Illinois has even got his minions planning a White House transition! We have reporters, columnists and TV talking heads to thank for exposing these outrageous displays. So apparently the verdict is in: Sen. Barack Obama, too confident to govern.

David Lightman: It's Not About Experience, Experts Say

Many undecided voters have a common concern when they size up Barack Obama: his inexperience. "I have nothing against Obama. I just think John McCain has more experience," said Steve Viernacki, an Ashley, Pa., restaurant owner. Experts say that such worries are overblown. "Experience matters, but its importance is terribly overstated," said historian Robert Dallek, the author of recent books about Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon.

Marcus Warren: Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Communism’s deadliest foe

[Marcus Warren is the Editor of Telegraph.co.uk and a former Moscow correspondent who covered Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s return to Russia from exile in 1994.] Alexander Solzhenitsyn did more to demolish the moral and intellectual case for Communism than any of its critics, writer or statesman, poet or legislator of the world, acknowledged or not. Of course, the tyrants and grey bureaucrats who actually tried to turn Marxism into a working polity contributed as much if no

William Harrison: The other Solzhenitsyn

[William Harrison is a writer and journalist based in Moscow.] Alexander Solzhenitsyn's anti-Sovietism was heroic and influential, but its other side became clearer upon the Union's collapse. The death of the literary colossus and anti-Soviet dissident has, quite rightly, been greeted with an outpouring of praise for his principled and brave unmasking of the horrors of the Soviet regime. His literary achievements, closely connected with his dissident activities, have al

Donald Rayfield: Solzhenitsyn's literary legacy

[Donald Rayfield is emeritus professor of Russian and Georgian at Queen Mary University, London.] Solzhenitsyn's literary career spans more than 60 years, from verse he composed and memorised in prison and the camps before Stalin's death, to the handful of short stories and novellas (A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Matriona's Yard) of the 1960s which propelled him to fame, together with Khrushchev's de-Stalinisation, and the major novels, In the First Circle and Cancer Ward (b

Michael Scammell: Russia's literary light who illuminated dark world of Soviet regime

[Michael Scammell has translated the work of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Vladimir Nabokov, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, among many others. In 1985, Scammell's biography of Solzhenitsyn won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and an English PEN Center prize.] Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who has died aged 89, was a prolific novelist and memoirist, whose life's work, in the best traditions of Russian literature, transcended the realm of pure letters. He was a moral and spiritual leader,

Juliet Eilperin and Jonathan Weisman: Race Proves to Be Unwelcome but Persistent Issue

Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama tried yesterday to step back from a divisive debate over race, with each candidate denying that he was the first to inject the issue into the campaign. Nonetheless, the candidates and campaigns battled throughout the day over the issue and over which side was engaged in "low road" politics, an indication that race is likely to remain a major point of contention in what is becoming an increasingly bitter contest. For Obama, the a

Ralph Peters: American Calcutta

ONE of the best ways to see a city's bones is to take a long jog in the hour before dawn. That's what I did in San Francisco this week. The city reminded me of Calcutta. By day, the camouflage of color and crowds makes the multitudes of homeless less apparent. At the chilly end of the night, though, they lie strewn on the sidewalks like plague victims, wrapped in filthy blankets and abandoned. New Yorkers have no idea how bad a homeless crisis can be.

David Brooks: Missing Dean Acheson

[David Brooks is a Canadian-American political and cultural commentator.] We Americans are about to enter our 19th consecutive year of Truman-envy. Ever since the Berlin Wall fell, people have looked at the way Harry Truman, George C. Marshall, Dean Acheson and others created forward-looking global institutions after World War II, and they've asked: Why can't we rally that kind of international cooperation to confront terrorism, global warming, nuclear proliferation and the rest of

Richard Byrne: The Selling of the President 1968 remains a vital cultural and historical document

[Richard Byrne is a journalist who lives in Washington, D.C. He blogs at Balkans via Bohemia.] The original dust jacket of Joe McGinniss' The Selling of the President 1968 has Richard Nixon's face emblazoned on a package of cigarettes. To value that image at a thousand words is parsimonious. It elicits a multiplicity of responses to Nixon and to his 1968 campaign: clever, slick, amoral, dangerous, familiar, branded, and addictive. (Yes, addictive. How long was Nixon in

Alan Cowell: Churchill's definition of Russia still rings true

[Alan Cowell writes for the International Herald Tribune.] Somewhere in Central Europe, at a secret hideout, the chief executive of a huge oil company struggles against the maneuvers of Russian partners to depose him. At the headquarters of NATO in Brussels, a Russian diplomat lays out a plan to sideline the alliance set up decades earlier to contain and repulse Soviet power. Within the United Nations Security Council, a Russian envoy casts a veto backed by China to thwart Western d

Robin Stummer: The Secret History of Vienna

[Robin Stummer is the editor of Cornerstone architecture magazine.] Vienna's secrets can be big. One of the largest measures half a million cubic metres, weighs several hundred thousand tonnes, and thrusts more than 55 metres into the sky. Not surprisingly, it's a pretty open secret. Everyone in the city knows about the Flaktürme - flak towers - the huge gun emplacements built during the Second World War to fend off Allied bombers. All six of these reinforced concrete c