Social democracy now lies in ruins, its ragbag of policies rejected by electorates. Its heyday was the trente glorieuses, 1945–75, but, as Marc Levinson recounts in An Extraordinary Time, the splendid outcomes during these years cannot be attributed primarily to good economic policy choices. Read Here – The Times Literary Supplement
If, in these conditions, we are still drawn to the story of Marx’s life, it’s for reasons other than his authority. Amid trying and precarious circumstances, he combined philosophical penetration, literary and journalistic gifts, and revolutionary commitment to a singular degree. And yet the enormous dimensions of his undertaking meant that he could achieve hardly […]
There is little doubt that the Middle East towards which President Trump must now shape his policy is vastly different and more complex than the region Obama faced in 2009. Yet, at the end of the day, says Michael Singh, Managing Director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, “the real story in the […]
President Donald Trump’s critics have consistently underestimated his political communication skills, perhaps because he is so different from predecessors such as Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. Both FDR and Reagan, after all, were known as “great communicators.” Read Here – Project Syndicate
Politicians routinely bemoan the loss of good blue-collar jobs. Work like that is correctly seen as a pillar of civil middle-class society. And it may yet be again. What if the next big blue-collar job category is already here—and it’s programming? Read Here – Wired
Political correctness about Islam isn’t confined to America. It also exists in Europe. Last week Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel thus learned a sad lesson in Ankara: those who seek to distinguish between Islam and Islamism face accusations that they are condemning a whole religion and are thus being “Islamophobic.” Read Here – The National Interest
Donald Trump has vowed to put “America first,” but who comes second, and third, and 193rd? Barack Obama may have been more willing than his predecessors to “question why America’s enemies are its enemies, or why some of its friends are its friends,” as Jeffrey Goldberg once wrote in The Atlantic, but Trump has thrown […]
In a new report titled “The World in 2050,” consulting firm PwC projects that India’s GDP would exceed US GDP in purchasing power parity terms by 2040 (purchasing power parity accounts for the different prices levels across countries). This would make India the largest economy in the world after China. Read Here – Quartz
The Obama administration seemed to operate under the premise that signing the nuclear deal with Iran would bring it in from its international isolation and serve as an incentive for it to become a more responsible member of the international community. Read Here – Arab News
Spouses of politicians rarely take center stage on Iran’s political scene and, for the most part, remain entirely out of the public eye. Few Iranians know very much about their presidents’ wives, including their names. Effat Marashi, however, is an exception. Read Here – AlMonitor
looking beyond borders 