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Hannah Arendt and the Meaning of Politics
Hannah Arendt: “The meaning of politics is freedom.” (Library of Congress via the World Bank) I have worked in politics at virtually every level — local, state, federal and international — for nearly...
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History as a Presence
While living and working in Memphis, Tennessee, I moonlighted as a book reviewer for the local broadsheet, the Commercial Appeal. In retrospect I’m amazed I was able to do it, now in a time when The...
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Faith, Politics and “The West Wing”
Capitol Dome under construction, 1861 (Library of Congress) I always felt that for all its other traits “The West Wing” was in secret an extended essay on the political experience. I know who work in...
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Justice or Politics?
Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic, indicted Serbian war criminals, in the early 1990s. (Reuters) The Canadian academic and politician Michael Ignatieff has written extensively and profoundly on law,...
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The Aesthetic Dictatorship
Franz Marc, Blue Horse I Reading to my daughter “The Artist Who Painted a Blue Horse,” Eric Carle’s homage to the expressionist artist Franz Marc, reminded me again — in the unsettling arena of a...
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A Good Story
“Telling Their Story,” from Discover the Journey A friend in New York forwarded me this MediaStorm Blog post about ethical guidelines for reporting on children in crisis. It’s a valuable resource and...
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The Incompleat Public Diplomacy Reader
When it comes to public diplomacy I am aware of no condensed reading list outside those assigned to the few academic programs in this country that teach the discipline formally, and even then I don’t...
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Richard Ben Cramer and “What It Takes”
There was no shortage of praise for Richard Ben Cramer upon his death earlier this month. The author of What It Takes was widely lauded for writing probably the definitive campaign narrative, a hefty...
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Commander Salamander’s NATO Headquarters Bellylander
The new NATO Headquarters under construction in Evere, Brussels A recent post by the blogger Commander Salamander, who writes about defense matters, was brought to my attention for his skepticism about...
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The Corrections
Graphic of hand-corrected manuscript of 1984 by George Orwell, via GeorgeOrwellNovels.com. I found an error in Table 7.2 on page 124 relating to languages spoken in the United States. All of the...
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Punk Is Not Dead
Today my review essay of Masha Gessen’s latest book, Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot, appears in the Los Angeles Review of Books. The book is a testament to the courage of the...
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Some Dreamers of the Impossible Dream
The Church of St. John, Ohrid, Macedonia (via The Guardian) With nods to George Kennan, Joan Didion, and Cervantes, enjoy this excerpt from my book, The United States and the Challenge of Public...
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New Book Review: “Through a Screen Darkly”
I’m happy to post my review of Martha Bayles’ recent book on public diplomacy, Through a Screen Darkly, published this month in The Hague Journal of Diplomacy by Clingendael in The Netherlands. The...
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Joan Didion, Californian
Joan Didion seized my attention early, before I wrote for myself. Assigned “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” in high school, I read with amazement her cool, detached descriptions of things I recognized...
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Belief from the inside out
The Pulitzer Prize awarded last month to Carla Power’s If the Oceans Were Ink, an outsider’s meditation on The Holy Qur’an with the help of a learned Islamic scholar, signals a subtle but seismic shift...
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Prologue (Blogging Black Lamb and Grey Falcon)
“And the death of Elizabeth had shown me the scourge of the world after the war, Luccheni, Fascism, the rule of the dispossessed class that claims its rights and cannot conceive them save in terms of...
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Journey (Blogging Black Lamb and Grey Falcon)
“These were exactly like all Aryan Germans I had ever known; and there were sixty millions of them in the middle of Europe.” (Journey) WITH HER HUSBAND Rebecca West travels by train from Salzburg,...
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Croatia (Blogging Black Lamb and Grey Falcon)
“Politics, always politics. In the middle of the night, when there is a rap on our bedroom door, it is politics.” (Croatia/Zagreb VII) ENDING THE JOURNEY of the previous chapter, Rebecca West and her...
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Dalmatia (Blogging Black Lamb and Grey Falcon)
“But these people’s culture instructed them exactly how best they might live where they must live.” BY TRAIN REBECCA West and her husband travel from Zagreb to Sušak in Dalmatia. From there they...
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Expedition (Blogging Black Lamb and Grey Falcon)
“There was everywhere the sweet-smelling scrub, and thickets of oleander, and the grey-blue swords of aloes; and on the lower slopes were olive terraces and lines of cypresses, spurting up with a...
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