The most annoying adage of American diplomacy is surely “Only Nixon could go to China,” as it credits the 37th president with solving a problem that he did more than anyone to create during his tricky career of redbaiting, fearmongering and saber-rattling. U.S. diplomatic recognition of the People’s Republic of China should have been a […]

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Reviewed: The Age of Austerity: How Scarcity Will Remake American Politics by Thomas Byrne Edsall (Anchor Books, 272 pp., $15.95). The New Year’s Day bill that Congress finally passed to avert the “fiscal cliff” prevented a rise in income taxes for most American families, and put off drastic cuts in the federal budget for two months. […]

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Reviewed: Detroit City Is the Place to Be: The Afterlife of an American Metropolis by Mark Binelli (Metropolitan Books, 336 pp., $28.00). I have no plans to visit North Korea, but there was a time when I longed to see it out of sheer curiosity. Then I read cartoonist Guy Delisle’s graphic travel memoir Pyongyang, and […]

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The Chronicle of Higher Education published a blog post by journalist Naomi Schaefer Riley entitled “The Most Persuasive Case for Eliminating Black Studies? Just Read the Dissertations.” Schaefer Riley argued that there are “no legitimate debates about the problems that plague the black community…happening in black-studies departments” and that Black Studies has outlived its usefulness. […]

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Reviewed: Deception: The Untold Story of East-West Espionage Today by Edward Lucas (Walker & Company, 384 pp., $26.00). Communism is dead, but the threat from Russia is still very much alive—and we in the West are dangerously complacent in the face of this menace. That is the central thesis of Edward Lucas’s Deception: The Untold Story of […]

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