Democratizing the Middle East may bring a different set of problems to a troubled region.
In fighting for their own rights, women in the Middle East are broadening the democratic space in society as a whole.
According to opinion polls, Congress is one of the least esteemed institutions in American life. While that should come as a shock, today it’s taken for granted. What can’t be taken for granted is the health of representative democracy amid this corrosive—and often unwarranted—distrust of its central institution.
Marshall McLuhan (1911–80) was an unlikely prophet of the information age. One of those who first saw the truth in the vatic pronouncements of this obscure academic was a talented young journalist named Tom Wolfe, who helped champion McLuhan’s ideas in the 1960s. Here, Wolfe reflects on the unexpected sources and continuing impact of McLuhan’s vision.
Nearly 60 years ago, Americans marched into a small, ravaged country thousands of miles distant, determined to transform it into a modern nation. They could not have imagined how successful they would be—or how long the transformation would take.
What does the future hold for America's consumer economy treadmill?
“The subject may appear an insignificant one,” Charles Darwin conceded, “but we shall see that it possesses some interest.” Earthworms were the subject, and Darwin’s lifelong fascination with them revealed as much about the unique qualities of his mind as it did about the surprising effects of the creatures’ subterranean labors.
Woodrow Wilson’s struggle withphysical affliction—which emerged long before the famous stroke that crippled the last part of his presidency—may have been admirable, but its secret nature compromised Wilson’s own values—and raises the question of how different history might have been had the American public been told the truth.