New Statesman (U.K.)

[Interview with Evgeny Morozov] Your book, The Net Delusion, is a critique of cyber-utopianism. But you used to be a true believer in that creed, didn't you? ...

... Even the deluge of tweeting and blogging was not what it seemed. Much of it came from outside Iran and, anyway, the regime continued to unleash the goons. Too much was at stake to be distracted by western-centred wishful thinking. It was all, writes Evgeny Morozov, "a wild fantasy". ...

"Many Israelis have been worn down by fruitless talks and promises. "There's such total indifference," says Daniel Levy of the New America Foundation, a Washington think tank. "Support for a two-state solution doesn't mean anyone is willing to do anything about it." ...

... but this will only, in the words of Steven Hill of the New America Foundation, "push fuel efficiency by 2020 to a level that European and Japanese cars ...

"Over the past 30 years, American politics has become more money-centred at exactly the same time that American society has grown more unequal," the political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson have written. The resources and organisational heft of the well-off and hyper-conservative have exploded. But the organisational resources of middle-income Americans . . . have atrophied.

Groceries were always the best illustration of the merits of free markets. How ridiculous it would be if we decided collectively - by annual ballot, say, or by entrusting the decision to some Whitehall bureaucrat - which fruits and vegetables the shops should stock and in what quantities. A system whereby competing retailers offer individual consumers a daily choice is obviously better. Yet we are close to driving the free market out of the grocery sector...

Like an aristocrat in reduced circumstances, Francis Fukuyama carries around a title that is a source of both prestige and ridicule. The title belongs to his most notorious work, The End of History (1992). To be fair, the thesis that it describes is considerably wiser and more interesting than the title suggests, and Gramscian rather than Leninist in the style of its liberal capitalist teleology.

How did 13 former British colonies on the Atlantic seaboard become a continental superpower with global reach? The Dominion of War purports to answer this question. In their introduction, Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton promise an alternative to self-congratulatory, jingoistic accounts of US history: "Ours begins with the proposition that war itself has been an engine of change in North America for the past five centuries and indeed has largely defined that history's meaning."

With the pomposity of an elder statesman who quotes himself as an authority, Niall Ferguson observes in his latest book:

Writing in the dying days of the Clinton administration, I Concluded -- somewhat heatedly -- that "the greatest disappointment facing the world in the 21st century [is] that the leaders of the one state with the economic resources to make the world a better place lack the guts to do it". Little did I imagine that within nine months, a new president, confronted by the calamity of 11 September, would embark on a policy so similar to the one I had advocated.

It is not hard to understand how most of us form the impression that overpopulation is one of the world's most pressing problems. Turn on your television and you see asylum- seekers slipping across border fences, or throngs of youths throwing stones somewhere in the Middle East. We hear of child soldiers in Africa, the disappearing rainforests of Brazil and melting polar ice caps -- all caused by a human population that has nearly doubled in the past 40 years.