I just got of the phone with Josep Maria Sole Sabaté, my friend and a leading Catalan historian and public intellectual. He was nothing short of breathless as he described the helicopters flying overhead stated flatly that he was in the the midst of a coup...
Working in what I presume they see as the interest of factual accuracy, NPR has published an annotated version of Trump's inaugural speech. In theory, this is probably a good idea. My problem with it lies in the network’s clearly selective use of this practice. They...
Imagine going to your doctor and being told that, based on an initial examination, you may very well have a serious and fast-moving form of cancer, and then being a handed a referral to see a heart specialist first thing the next morning. I think you’d agree that a...
The great danger of faking your ability to do something in the public square is that someone with an actual desire to the job you are pretending to do might come along and show you up. This is what has just happened to the US in Syria with the entrance of Russia into...
Kosovo is falling apart at the seams, with it thousands of its citizens seeking desperately to escape life there by any means possible. Haven’t heard about that one? Perhaps that’s because the U.S. is almost wholly responsible for creating an independent...
Last Saturday, Angela Merkel went to Kiev to pledge increased financial and political support for the coup-installed regime's war against separatist forces in the eastern and largely Russian-speaking part of Ukraine. Seldom in recent history – and that is saying a lot...
As has been widely reported, the American Studies Association, the umbrella organization of academics devoted to the study of US literature, history and culture, recently voted to join the movement to boycott Israeli academic institutions. In the days since that...
In an article in Sunday’s New York Times co-signed by Isabel Kershner and Ethan Bronner, the readers of the “Paper of Record” were informed that “Israelis are turning inward and discovering that an issue they had neglected — the place of the ultra-Orthodox Jews — has...
Imagine for a moment that you were preparing for a fact-finding trip to a foreign country and that you had to choose between background reports produced by two competing informants. The first is by a person who has visited the place on a number of occasions in...
On more than a few occasions in the last decade, I have been the recipient of lectures—almost always by people with no discernible hands-on experience with foreign cultures in general, nor the Arab world in particular—about just how different and unlike us "those Arab...
