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Winner-Take-All Politics is an important book that comes at a crucial moment in the political history of the United States.
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At the height of the Vietnam War, contractors represented just 14 percent of the American presence on the ground. Without contractors, we would need a draft to wage these two wars
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The development and advancement of technology has influenced reform and revolution throughout history, but arguably never more so than during the last three decades in the Middle East.
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Dostoevsky was in favor of military intervention in the Balkans, Tolstoy opposed to it. The arguments they put forward are surprisingly relevant to our own current wars.
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James Madison stood between 5'3" and 5'4" tall and weighed barely more than one hundred pounds. He was the most diminutive of the American presidents.
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When Peter Orszag left his post as White House budget director last summer, it made perfect sense, on several levels, that he ended up in an office next to Bob Rubin.
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I’m not retired! I was fired. In fact, I’ll die with my boots on. I’m still writing and I’ll continue to write and ask hard questions. I will never bow out of journalism.
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As the race for the Republican nomination warms up, it is too early to tell who would head the party's ticket next Fall. But there is more to understanding politics than predicting the horse races
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We have, for instance, contemporaneous reports that Reagan apparently was a pathological liar. He bragged of liberating concentration camps in Germany although he spent all of World War II in Hollywood.
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After my parents got back from a weeklong vacation in Florida, funded in part by the pensions they receive as retired Wisconsin public educators, they went to Madison and, after enjoying lunch at the hip, local-food-oriented The Weary Traveler, took to Capital Square to protest Governor Scott Walker’s budget bill.
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Valery Yarynich glances nervously over his shoulder. Clad in a brown leather jacket, the 72-year-old former Soviet colonel is hunkered in the back of the dimly lit Iron Gate restaurant in Washington, DC.
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Silvio Berlusconi should be in the Guinness Book of World Records. He is the only prime minister in modern history to win that office a scant four months after forming a brand new political party as the vehicle for his political ambitions.
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The boredom of Little Rock nights can be difficult to escape, so when Rod Bryan, a record-store owner and musician of local renown, announced last July that he'd be spinning records at a watering hole called the Oyster Bar, people took notice.
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The term “social contract” has a deep history in political theory. Today it generally refers to the implicit bargain that exists in any stable society over social rights and duties, and the division of economic benefits and costs.
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Organizations like the American Enterprise Institute, the Center for a New American Security, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and the Center for American Progress - to name but a few - are not politically neutral institutions.
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During the Eisenhower years, military outlays served as a seemingly inexhaustible engine of economic well-being. Keeping the Soviets at bay required the design and acquisition of a vast array of guns and missiles, bombers and warships, tanks and fighter planes. Ensuring that U.S. forces stayed in fighting trim entailed the construction of bases, barracks, depots, and training facilities. Research labs received funding. Businesses large and small won contracts.
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When I travel to a foreign capital, I will ask the U.S. Embassy there for a background briefing, but I know not to expect much from it. I've found it far more useful to set up meetings with the Europeans -- Germans, French, or Swiss, especially. Those are the diplomats who will give you the real dirt: juicy details about corruption and political infighting and what nefarious schemes the Russians or Chinese (or Americans) are up to in the country. The difference is so striking that I long ago concluded that the Americans -- the product of a Foreign Service selection process that encourages dutiful ladder-climbers rather than creative thinkers and then sends them out to be walled up in overprotected embassy compounds far from town -- were just not as sharp as their wilier continental counterparts. (I exaggerate here slightly -- I also have met very savvy American diplomats, including all of you who are reading this article right now.)
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It is rather striking, at first sight, to note how much the Dutch politician Geert Wilders and the Chinese Nobel Prize winner Liu Xiaobo have in common. Both threaten the political and ideological status quo of their countries; both have been legally prosecuted by their nation states for their public pronouncements; both speak in the name of democracy; both have received significant ideological and economic support from abroad; both have had their personal lives severely disrupted as a result of their public statements; and both are seen widely as martyrs for free speech. These similarities mark them out as men who at this moment have caught the pulse of the planetary transformations taking place in the practice of liberal democracy as a form of politics, social mobilisation and ambition.
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Among Liberal Democrat activists and some on the Labour left, Clegg is often accused of compromising his principles and selling out for the sake of power. The charge is absurd, for the Con-Lib programme is in many respects a straightforward application of Clegg’s brand of liberalism. Very little compromise was necessary. The Liberal Democrat leader has few reasons to feel uncomfortable with a government that is implementing much of the programme he urged on his own party. Just as much as Blair and Cameron, Clegg aims to replace British social democracy with a version of Thatcher’s market-based settlement.
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In a conversation with the AV club, Bob Woodward discusses his latest book examing Obama’s role as Commander in Chief.
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by Patrick Bray
When we read literature from the 19th century, we usually try to be vigilant in order not to project our contemporary ideas and obsessions onto the past for fear they might obscure the radical difference of another era. But what happens when we look at our own century from a necessarily imaginary 19th-century viewpoint? How do we recognize fragments of discourse that persist in contemporary texts, ripped from their original contexts, but not quite consciously assimilated as a cultural reference? 
by John Gaffney
One year ago, on the day of François Hollande’s inauguration as the seventh President of the French Fifth Republic, May 15th, 2012, it poured with rain all day long. Inexplicably, no one offered him a raincoat or the protection of an umbrella. He spent the day’s ceremony drenched to the bone, his glasses steamed up, his sopping wet suit and shirt flattened against him. It was a sign. It has been raining ever since.
by Jesse Miksic
BioShock Infinite pits the player against his Shadow Self as well, a twisted version of the Byronic Booker DeWitt. According to the backstory, Booker has severely punished himself for his sins against the Native Americans at Wounded Knee, sinking into alcoholism and gambling debt for a large part of his subsequent adulthood. Zachary Hale Comstock is Booker’s inverse in a number of ways: instead of resigning himself to sin, Comstock has righteously renounced it; instead of struggling with his prejudices, Comstock has embraced them and integrated them into his ideology. 
by Daniel Tutt
While “we” in the west pride ourselves on a model of multicultural tolerance that is inclusive and broad, western philosophers since Descartes and Rousseau, who are in part the chief developers of liberal universalism, should also be read as developing a universalism that is exclusive, perhaps violently so towards others. The preconditions for participating in the universal liberal state require an uprooting of the individual from their ethnic, cultural or religious contexts.
by X
The chance entrance to the city before it disappeared. Thoughts hanging like bodies from ropes. The image seems to have been taken from inside a moving car, but this is staged. The windshield wipers are props. The highway is front-projection.
by Joel Gn
While we give in to our nostalgic impulse and reminisce on how the more primitive blog afforded us anonymity in the face of the masses, we are at present, still compelled to confer the stamp of authenticity upon every single utterance made online. Many would eagerly ‘follow’ or pay attention to Twitter messages posted personally by a celebrity, but disregard anything from an impersonator, thereby illustrating that it is not the message, but the identity of the person that comes under greater scrutiny.
by Oliver Farry
I went to Albania to try and get back with an ex-girlfriend, though that is only half the story. The trip had been planned in advance; Anna, a Swedish girl I had been seeing for about eighteen months, gave me as a birthday present a plane ticket to Tirana to accompany her on a visit to her parents — her father was then working there for the EU. That was six weeks before we were due to go but the day after the birthday the relationship came to what seemed to me to be an abrupt end.
by Elias Tezapsidis
The Knife definitely employs the shock-value of an incestuous theme to further strengthen their mission in creating powerful work. The music duo is comprised of Swedish siblings Olof Dreijer and Karin Dreijer Andersson. They produce and release their music through their own label, Rabid Records, and therefore are in complete creative control of their artistic product. Stripped of the marketing techniques that are applied on other musicians by their studios and their abstract line of managerial handlers, the Dreijers are able to ameliorate their presence on a dual level. 
by John O’Malley
Most people have heard of the Council of Trent, and probably most of what they have heard is negative. It was a church council convoked to condemn the Reformation. It initiated a repressive epoch in Catholic countries and opposed everything good in the burgeoning “modern world.” It launched the dreaded Counter-Reformation. Beyond such clichés, few can venture. Like most clichés, these are badly misleading.
by Mark Twain
I came across these jingling rhymes in a newspaper, a little while ago, and read them a couple of times. They took instant and entire possession of me. All through breakfast they went waltzing through my brain; and when, at last, I rolled up my napkin, I could not tell whether I had eaten anything or not. I had carefully laid out my day’s work the day before—thrilling tragedy in the novel which I am writing. I went to my den to begin my deed of blood. I took up my pen, but all I could get it to say was, “Punch in the presence of the passenjare.”Most Popular
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