It’s November 4, 2008. I’m currently sitting in a history seminar on the Yalta Conference of 1945, discussing how the Allied leaders decided to divvy up the Balkans. It’s striking to read the statements of Stalin and Churchill, because they read like ancient history. Churchill was driven by a single animating desire: the preservation of … Read more
Lately, I’ve become more accustomed to seeing Saturday Night Live’s Tina Fey as Governor Sarah Palin than Sarah Palin as herself. And apparently I’m not alone: The New York Times’ television blog, “TV Decoder,” noted on September 16 that the Tina Fey-Amy Poehler sketch, presenting the mock joint television appearance of Sarah Palin and Hillary … Read more
When I first heard Gov. Sarah Palin say, in the vice-presidential debate, that she would not “attribute every activity of man to the changes in the climate,” I wanted to believe it was a mere verbal gaffe. I assumed she meant that she didn’t attribute every change in the climate to the activities of men. … Read more
I don’t think most Obama supporters realize that Obama is running on a platform promising unending war in the Middle East. I don’t mean Iraq; I think he’s still committed to leaving Iraq as soon as possible. He has, however, committed to winning Afghanistan, and I don’t think voters realize just how much of a … Read more
I was recently reading the Harvard Independent (a mistake, I know), and one of the writers had a piece discussing two widely-read articles over the summer trashing students from Harvard and other Ivy League universities. I skimmed through most of it, and what really struck me was a passage mentioning Harvard students’ homogenized, unfailingly reasoned … Read more
The presidential race has taken more of an interesting turn than I could have imagined with John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin as a running mate. I’m not going to talk about Sarah Palin, but as a confirmed member of the East Coast Liberal Enemy (the Harvard Political Review is pretty much ground zero), I … Read more
Fresh off of his keynote address at the Democratic National Convention, former Virginia governor Mark Warner is spending the rest of his summer engaging in a much less glamorous task: braving the Virginia humidity in search of a new job. Once considered a strong potential candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination this year, Warner … Read more
John McCain’s speech at the Republican National Convention did a handful of things poorly and a lot of things well. While the speech didn’t make Cindy McCain’s teal jacket fit properly, nor prevent the large screen behind the nominee from looking (at times) like a green screen, it did an impressive job of highlighting McCain’s … Read more
I don’t think history has in any sense “returned”; as Robert Kagan has suggested of the recent conflict in Georgia, but merely has become more difficult for us to ignore. In retrospect, it seems foolishly naive that anyone could have ever believed it had ended. Rather than represent any particular “new reality”, this invasion has … Read more
On April 29, 1972, the Barristers Union at Yale Law School held its annual Prize Trial, in which four top lawyers, two to a side, competed. Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham formed the prosecution team on a fictional case about police brutality in Kentucky. The case was presided over by Abe Fortas, who had recently … Read more