Context is everything. As Maya Jasanoff, the Harvard historian, asks, in lyrical terms: "If a writer harbored bias, shall we never speak his name? Or when he wrote with insight, might we read him all the same?" The questions appear in her review in The New Republic, of Christopher Benfey's If: The Untold Story of … Continue reading If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you
Tag: politics
An area, call it what you will, of safety
Colleagues at Arab Digest have just published an interesting commentary on "Boundaries in the Arab world and their remarkable durability." It's not publicly available, but I do hope they'll release it as a sample for general readers. The piece, authored by Chatham House's Greg Shapland, ex of the Foreign Office, alludes to one of those … Continue reading An area, call it what you will, of safety
The Common Vote
Recent events in Columbia and Hungary have precipitated new analysis of a recurring problem - the benefits and hazards of popular referenda. I grew up in one country where referenda were gifts that just wouldn't stop giving. I later worked in several countries where similar problems resulted in the extremes of war. I now live … Continue reading The Common Vote
Missiles of Outrage and Anger
In the early pages of his memoir Known and Unknown, Donald Rumsfeld described boyhood memories of an America struggling to come to grips with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. One of those recollections was of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's reassuring voice, its "formal, almost aristocratic tone" cutting across the airwaves. "Outlining the indictment against the … Continue reading Missiles of Outrage and Anger
The Military-Evangelical Complex
Noted at Juan Cole's Informed Comment, as item 4 in a list of Top 10 Counterterrorism Scandals 2010: George W. Bush claimed that he had misspoken when he called his 'war on terror' a 'crusade.' But it turns out that the Michigan company that makes rifle sights for the US military inscribes them with Bible verses. … Continue reading The Military-Evangelical Complex
MICHAEL A. INNES 