A predominantly African-American audience filled the chamber on a late June morning as the Senate Judiciary Committee convened for a hearing on a bill that would restore parts of the 1964 Voting Rights Act (VRA). What was arguably the most effective civil-rights legislation ever enacted had been gutted by the U.S. Supreme Court exactly […]

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  Iassume we can defeat Hussein without great cost to our side,” the late columnist Molly Ivins wrote in 2003. “The problem is what happens after we win. The country is 20 percent Kurd, 20 percent Sunni and 60 percent Shiite. Can you say, ‘Horrible three-way civil war?’” Ivins never considered herself an authority on […]

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  In June, Harvard professor and activist Lawrence Lessig launched the MaydayPAC to support candidates who will champion campaign-finance reform. By July 4, it hit its target of $5 million from 50,000 small donors, which will be matched by Silicon Valley donors. MaydayPAC continues to solicit individual donations online. The excerpt below, from MaydayPAC’s website, […]

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  Narcissists don’t happen to be particularly nice people. They preen. They grab. And they never ever really feel our pain. Extremely self-centered people, some fascinating new business school research shows, also don’t make for particularly effective corporate CEOs. This new research—conducted by business school analysts at the University of Southern California and the University of Arizona—examines […]

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  Southwest Asia has been with me for a long time. For over a decade, I was a small part of a fairly well-orchestrated U.S. strategy to maintain the balance of power in the Persian Gulf. When the Shah of Iran fell in 1979, we knew that the papier-mache kingdom of Saudi Arabia could not […]

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