The New Republic

As Wendy Seltzer, a Fellow with Yale Law School's Information Society Project, told me via e-mail, restricting lawful speech potentially “sets a bad example for authoritarian regimes, even as we try to convince them to stop Internet censorship of ...

Let us stipulate some ugly facts up front. Iraq remains a weak state. The political institutions are—charitably—immature. The business climate is not overly attractive and corruption is endemic. Were it not for oil, there would be no real economy. There is a serious terrorism problem. Relationships with all the neighboring states are problematic. Sectarian divides remain tense, with some key fault lines unresolved. The country’s armed forces remain incapable of defending its international borders.

Dwight Macdonald, the greatest American hatchet man, applied his merciless craft also to himself. When he collected his essays, he added footnotes, appendices, and other forms of addenda taking issue with his own writings.

Back in June, Daily Beast columnist Peter Beinart celebrated Mitt Romney's apparent decision (apparently now reversed) to shirk the state, arguing “the Iowa caucuses bear only a faint resemblance to democracy.” And beyond Romney's initial strategy of ...

Occupy Wall Street is a carnival. Both detractors and supporters say so. The most amusing part of the show is watching the rush to join it. When Deepak Chopra and Suze Orman endorse the cause, you have to wonder about its revolutionary bona fides. Democrats have also flung themselves in the direction of Zuccotti Park—but in their pursuit of the movement they may damage themselves and hinder the protests’ potential to do tangible good.

Mark Schmitt shrewdly suggested that liberals had long been fantasizing about a Tea Party of the left. But I also think serious journalists had been waiting for some bellow of outrage over the way that Wall Street plutocrats had been laughing all the ...

“We really need to get out of this mentality in this country that people look at public schools as if they are a jobs program,” Jason Delisle, the director of the New America Foundation's Federal Education Budget Project, told me. ...

The most well-known of the genre are Fareed Zakaria's The Post-American World, Parag Khanna's The Second World, and, from a more academic perspective, Charles Kupchan's The End of the American Era.The Obama administration has appropriated some of the ...

In his deficit-reduction proposal, unveiled in his Rose Garden speech on Monday, President Obama once again found himself adopting the other party’s frame, embracing budget austerity instead of the fiscal stimulus that the economy needs. He still talks about finding bipartisan consensus and describes his ideas as common-sense solutions that every well-intentioned person should support, even though Republicans have shown they’ll block anything with his name on it.

I have covered the story of violent jihadism for the past 18 years, and, more than anything else, it has been a slow process of discovery. Looking back, it seems clear to me that, at any given moment in the story, there was always so much we didn’t know.