In his State of the Union address, President Obama lauded two fruits that fell from the tree of government support for the basic research of “cutting-edge scientists and inventors”: the Internet and GPS. Though he didn't mention it, that wasn't just any old...
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently took a four-day tour of the Middle East, at each stop telling various allies and enemies, in classic American fashion, what they must do. And yet as she spoke, events in Lebanon, Iraq, Algeria, and even Egypt seemed to spin...
“Slowly a humped shape rose out of the pit, and the ghost of a beam of light seemed to flicker out from it. Forthwith flashes of actual flame, a bright glare leaping from one to another, sprang from the scattered group of men. It was as if some invisible jet impinged...
As a boy in the 1950s, I can remember my father, a World War II vet, becoming livid while insisting that our family not shop at a local grocery store. Its owners, he swore, had been “war profiteers” and he would never forgive them. He practically spat the phrase out....
India, a rising power, almost had one (but the Tajiks said no). China, which last year became the world's second largest economy as well as the planet's leading energy consumer, and is expanding abroad like mad (largely via trade and the power of the purse), still has...
Moments of imperial and economic decline – according to a recent poll, 65 percent of Americans now believe this country to be “in a state of decline” – can also be periods of cultishness, even of madness incarnate. Such a mood now seems to be spreading through the...
