Comment & Opinion - Columnists Archives
Black with gold lettering. It feels heftier than most passports, maybe due to the thicker paper used on the visa pages. Before it is born, it is simply black vinyl and a dozen…
How much does popular music influence society? How does it shape society’s image of itself? How does it change a society’s image of other societies? It’s been a question…
The Libyan problem isn’t a problem to be solved by policymakers. It’s a problem to be solved by financiers. Bankers stand a far better chance of helping the Libyan rebels than…
Whether I’m travelling in a developed or developing country, one of the common features of news reports is the presence of ratios, often termed the “something something rate.”…
As a third-generation graduate of the University of Chicago, nuclear power has a special place in my thinking about policy. The University of Chicago Maroons (the university’s…
On the face of it, they are similar. New Orleans, USA had been under threat of serious hurricanes for over a century. The fault lines running along the Japanese coast were…
In January, I again watched the Paris-Dakar Rally (this being the 32nd running of the event, on a route that passed through neither Paris nor Dakar), one of the top events…
From 1981 to 1989, some of the cleverest diplomats and lawyers from around Europe met in Luxembourg to devise what we now know as the Schengen agreements. These agreements, a…
Many recent histories, including Samuel P. Huntington’s, allege that cultural divisions drive policies on Civilization A that are inherently in conflict with those of…
This post was co-authored with my friend and colleague Lt. Patrick Larsen. Pat is a graduate of the United States Air Force Academy and a graduate student at the University of…