The Second Coming of Christ: October 22nd
Daniel Walker Howe looks at the day Christ did not come.
Looking For a Few Good Muslims
Jenkins reflects on the Lancaster House conference on “Islam and Muslims in the World Today.”
Sharm e- Shekh, Again…
Shlomo Ben-Ami looks forward and backwards at the peace process.
Women’s History Month: An Interpretation of Feminism in Africa
For Women’s History Month we turn to the AASC to englighten us about Women in Africa.
Women’s History Month: Feminism and Art
There is no perfect marriage between feminism (as a political ideology) and art (as a cultural activity). Feminism promises at the same time to enrich the products of art, to expose the pretensions and vested interests in art and to break open the category of art altogether.
Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day: Flaunt v. Flout
Garner’s usage tips.
Contemplating Torture
Is torture ever ethical?
Friday Roundup
Friday Roundup
Happy Birthday Upton Sinclair!
OUP wishes Upton Sinclair a happy birhtday.
Women and literature: the dual tradition of African American fiction
The prevailing wisdom of most African Americanists, is that due to the distinctive history and acculturation of Africans in the British colonies in North America, African-American literature is most meaningfully assessed in the context of multiple geographical, oral, and literary heritages.
Ornstein Thinks the U.N. is “Feckless.”
Norman J. Ornstein, co-author of The Broken Branch, is a Resident Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. Below is an except from his recent article at the Huffington Post:
Changing the Rules in Africa
By Charlayne Hunter-Gault I’m a journalist, not a poll-taker, however, over the past month, while touring the country to talk about my book New News Out of Africa, I’ve been conducting an informal, highly un-scientific survey about how much Americans know about Africa. I know that the majority of the people I talk to are […]
African American Lives
Whoopi Goldberg
Goldberg, Whoopi (13 Nov. 1955 –), actress and comedian, was born Caryn Elaine Johnson in New York City, the second of two children of Emma Harris, a sometime teacher and nurse, and Robert Johnson, who left the family when Caryn was a toddler. Caryn attended St. Columbia School, a parochial school located several blocks from […]
Inside Putin’s Russia by Andrew Jack
Now Moscow is debating another dangerous proposal: a law that would regulate the operations of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and require them to register with the government. This proposal threatens to impede groups fighting for human rights, democracy and to foster the development of a stronger civil society in Russia. Foreign NGOs are particularly under threat.
The first rule for Russia watchers is to be suspicious of first drafts of parliamentary laws. These proposals may be unsolicited “initiatives from below” put forth by politicians eager to prove their loyalty to the Kremlin, even if the result may be embarrassing for their masters. At other times, they are clearly orchestrated “from above” to test the waters for change – often in an anti-democratic direction.
“Torture” or “coercive interrogation”?
the Bush Administration has through multiple acts of ineptitude made it one of the central topics of debate in the world today. Louise Arbour, a former Canadian judge who is now the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, told the United Nations on December 7 that “Governments are watering down the definition of torture, claiming that terrorism means established rules do not apply anymore.” The United Nations press release on her remarks further describes her as calling “on all Governments to reaffirm their commitment to the absolute prohibition of torture by condemning torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment and prohibiting it in national law.” There can be little doubt that the “government” she is most trying to speak to is our own. And, not at all coincidentally, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice is spending most of her time on her current tour of European capitals defending the United States with regard to the issue of “rendition,” the technical term for sending suspected terrorists to other countries for interrogation. The most notorious case involves a German national who was undoubtedly the victim of a mis-identification by which he “was disappeared” to Afghanistan for five months and, he alleges, tortured in a CIA camp there before being abruptly released in the Albanian countryside and told that no one would believe his bizarre story. (The use of such a peculiar verb form of “disappear” is a legacy of Chile and Argentina, where suspected terrorists “were disappeared” by the fascist governments of those two countries in the 1970s and early ‘80s.) For good reason, the German government believed him, and Secretary of State Rice has apparently conceded the American error. She has also repeatedly insisted, as has President Bush, that the United States does not tolerate torture.
“An army of liberty and freedom”
Uber-blogger Andrew Sullivan quoted David Hackett Fischer today in a post on “alleged mistreatment of detainees” by U.S. forces in Iraq. Sullivan writes in response to two stories that came out today; one, about abuses at an Iraqi ministry, the other, a story on alleged abuses by U.S. Army soldiers that has resulted in a […]