Google’s court case in Italy is a big deal. As everyone is saying, if Google can be held accountable for the content it syndicates on its site, that would change the way that information flows through the internet forever. It could close the whole thing down. I thought I’d take this opportunity to throw out … Read more
Last weekend, Harvard’s Model United Nations conference for college students took place for the 56th time, drawing thousands of students from all over the world to Boston Park Plaza. As an uber-important (or not) Assistant Director to the E.U. committee, I got to observe first hand how students acted as delegates from countries they didn’t … Read more
Didn’t want to let this go by without comment. From the Feb. 18 edition (“What’s Wrong With Washington?”): Washington has its faults, some of which could easily be fixed. But much of the current fuss forgets the purpose of American government; and it lets current politicians (Mr Obama in particular) off the hook. America’s political … Read more
In Saturday’s New York Times, Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN) penned a long article entitled “Why I’m Leaving the Senate,” citing “institutional inertia” and frustration with partisan politics. In that same spirit, let me offer my reasons for leaving the country. People always joke about how lousy everything is here in America. But it’s no laughing … Read more
I was taking a Sporcle quiz the other day (something I do often) on all of TIME Magazine’s Persons of the Year throughout its history. Beyond the predictable leaders like FDR, Hitler, Stalin and Churchill, giants of the World War II era, there was another leader in their midst: 1937, Chiang Kai-Shek, leader of the … Read more
Watching live. I think that the main audience here is nervous Congressional Democrats. Not in the sense that this will actually move public opinion; it won’t, nobody other than real political junkies watch this stuff. I think it’s more to give them a sense of how the midterm election debates are going to play out. … Read more
Following Kramer’s comments the other day, an interesting conversation has arisen that compares Kramer’s proposal to end pre-natal subsidies with China’s one child policy. The reason for this debate originates in the UN’s definition of genocide, as found in Article 2 of the Convention on the Preventment and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide: “In the … Read more
The New Republic has reprinted a wonderful Depression-era essay by John Dewey about the collapse of what he calls the “romanticism of business”: But it was just at this point that the new romanticism of business so cleverly came in. Human imagination had never before conceived anything so fantastic as the idea that every individual is … Read more
I remember the day when John McCain used to be that Republican that we Democrats kind of liked. Then came the 2008 presidential campaign. I can’t exactly fault McCain for steering hard to the right; he was, after all, trying to win the Republican primary and then energize the party’s base in the general election. … Read more
On February 3, Martin Kramer, visiting scholar at Harvard’s Weatherhead Center, gave a six-minute speech at the annual Herzliya Conference in Herzliya, Israel (discussed by Jeremy below). In that short amount he time, he provided a clear call for the West to curb Gaza’s exploding population by ending pro-natal subsidies for Gazans: “Aging populations reject radical … Read more