Welcome! This is an unapologetic, agenda-free zone. Just commentaries on current events that’ll move you to think, laugh, rage, and even cry.
I have infuriated more than a few people in friendly debates by dismissing Niall Ferguson as being to academia what Donald Trump is to business. Ferguson is a professor of History at Harvard who seems to prefer playing a political pundit on TV. But the following should give you a sense of why I think… Read more.
Jacob Zuma, the constitutionally gaffe-prone president of South Africa, had his long-suffering people scratching their heads again last week. This time because it seems he saw nothing undemocratic, or even improper, in granting permission to one of his patrons, the Gupta family, to use a South African military base as their private airport. Evidently, the… Read more.
Twitter and other social media have turned public consciousness into a sieve through which gigabytes of information pass, but nary a byte is retained. Therefore, it would not surprise me if only few people can recall that Tim Tebow was as much a media darling this time last year as Jason Collins is today. Tebow… Read more.
It has become de rigueur for celebrities from around the world to make pilgrimages to South Africa just for self-indulgent photo ops with Nelson Mandela. Nobody has lamented this trend more than I: He’s treated more as a tourist attraction these days (like the Statue of Liberty or, perhaps more to the point, a Carnival… Read more.
Ex-Baltimore Ravens and gay rights activist Brendon Ayanbadejo has been stoking media interest in recent weeks with his efforts to have four closeted NFL players come out at the same time. Well, one NBA player, Jason Collins, just stole their thunder by becoming the first male professional athlete (in one of the four major sports) to… Read more.
A French lawyer called me a legal “ignare” for asserting that the paparazzi and tabloid responsible for the topless photos of Kate Middleton, which went viral last year, should be prosecuted. I don’t speak French, but I knew what he meant. And he was not the only one who questioned my legal judgment. For the… Read more.
Wilfred S. Coakley Jr. was a remarkable man with extraordinary accomplishments in boxing, finance, insurance, writing, and law. Yet, he regarded them all as, well, ordinary. “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” Former US President Teddy Roosevelt popularized this proverb. Coakley personified it. But he was a skilled boxer and the first Bahamian president of the… Read more.
I have argued for years that it is in Serbia’s enlightened national interest to give up all sovereign claim to any part of Kosovo; not least because Serbs had (and still have) neither the political influence nor the military power to enforce such a claim. The international political and military forces aligned against the Serbs are such… Read more.
Much is made in the international media of the way North Korea ignites military tensions with Groundhog Day-like precision. It does this, of course, by threatening to nuke not just wary neighbors like South Korea and Japan, but even the United States. By contrast, relatively little is made of the way Japan ignites similar tensions… Read more.
