Christopher Caldwell

Profile: Full name: Christopher Caldwell Area of interest: Politics, Culture and International Affairs Journals/Organisation: Financial Times Email: Christopher.Caldwell@ft.com | editor@weeklystandard.com Personal website: Website: http://www.ft.com/comment/columnists/christopher-caldwell | http://www.weeklystandard.com/author/christopher-caldwell Blog: Representation: Networks:

Biography: About: Education: Harvard College: English Literature Career: Current position/role: Financial Times: Commentator Weekly Standard (US): Senior editor New York Times magazine and Slate: contributing writer Other roles/Main role: Other activities: Author Disclosures: Viewpoints/Insight: Regularly writes about what he sees as the increasing Islamification of Europe US Holocaust Memorial Museum: Voices on antisemitism - 1st February 2007 Broadcast media: Video: Controversy/Critcism: Considers that Muslim immigration has served to increase antisemitism in Europe Awards/Honours: Scoops: Other: Father-in-law is journalist Robert Novak

Books & Debate: Left hooks, right crosses: a decade of political writing OCLC49903168 , (with Christopher Hitchens), 2002 Latest work: Reflections on the revolution in Europe: immigration, Islam and the West OCLC495597742, paperback edition published May 2010 Speaking/Appearances: Current debate: The illusion of Cuba’s caudillo - When Ernest Hemingway survived a plane crash in Uganda in 1954, he was able to read his own obituaries. A similar diversion may await Fidel Castro - Christopher Caldwell, Financial Times, 23rd February 2008 US must end its implacable opposition to Cuba - Sir, Christopher Caldwell (“The illusion of Cuba’s caudillo”, February 23/24) should not just listen to Harvard professors... - Ian Taylor MP, 1st March 2008

Financial Times: Column name: Remit/Info: Politics, Culture and International Affairs Section: Comment Role: Commentator Pen-name: Email: Christopher.Caldwell@ft.com Website: FT.Com / Christopher Caldwell Commissioning Editor: Day published: Saturday Regularity: Weekly Column format: Average length: 1000 words

Articles: 2012 One man stands between California and a bleak future - A bias towards stimulus and away from austerity has proved disastrous for California - 19th May No sense of history without a good biography - Lyndon B. Johnson’s life story illustrates the value and popularity of a genre - 12th May An election free of logic or substance - French candidates are struggling to find a focus - 5th May Venture capitalists are no longer the true conservatives - Republicans are now the party of the traditionalist, pious lower middle class - 28th April The decline and fall of America’s literary ecosystem - You can measure the waning of cultural resources through the Pulitzers - 21st April Who needs the Shard when you have Shakespeare? - London has made more architectural mistakes than most cities over the past half-century - 14th April Obama’s grasp of social Darwinism is yet to evolve - Skimming the history books for lessons in invective is not constructive - 7th April Groupthink is no match for solo genius - Scientists have cast doubt on the collective intelligence trend - 31st March There is no place for bounty hunters in America’s sport - Scandal over money for violence hits the game - 24th March The UK’s Budget box deserves reverence - Compared with other western countries, Britain’s system makes it a paragon of budgetary virtue - 17th March Cyber-hackers are the most sinister of troublemakers - Are hackers cyberterrorists or cyber-activists? - 10th March Mister 75 Per Cent opts for the risky, theatrical gesture - The sound of these punitive plans to tax the rich is always pleasing - 3rd March The new battle for the old soul of the Republican party - Romney represents the party as it was in the 1950s - 25th February The French are right to resist Global English - Universalisation is for better and for worse - 18th February Charles Dickens: our overrated mutual friend - The outsider and self-promoter was no one’s stereotype of an Englishman - 11th February Privacy is not only about soldiers at the door - If the state exercises expanded powers almost for free, fairness is violated - 4th February Class warfare need not be taxing - The pragmatic case for socking it to the rich is weak - 27th January Inadvertent lesson from a nautical scoundrel - Costa Concordia raises ideas about codes of honour - 21st January Pull the plug on TV’s push to dodge decency standards - Deregulating will only mean more boobs, bums and bullets - 14th January Beware bards bidding to take charge of court - N’Dour’s experience follows the philanthropic model of western ‘activism’ - 7th January

Articles: 2011 Go forth, open the mind and just walk - Mothers who praise the benefits of a good brisk walk are right - 31st December We wish you a merry Christmas. . . and a luxury new car - Materialism, once thought a threat to seasonal Christian aspects, is now more a threat to social and family life - 24th December The folly of private space travel - Allowing gazillionaires to experience zero gravity may seem harmless - 17th December An inconvenient truth: the power of moral suasion - What politicians blame the rating agencies for is saying things that governments wish they could conceal - 10th December Not a reward; rather an exercise of power - There are two ways to get people to do something: coercion and persuasion - 3rd December Why climategate is a catastrophe for science - Emails hit support for the fight, but in US they probably killed it - 26th November The protests failed but capitalism is still in the dock - As long as it has no ideology, tent cities are the entire message of Occupy Wall Street - 19th November Raw and silly, but the Pirates may yet draft a new order - Germany’s Pirate party knows that information is power, just as money is power - 12th November New rules for the succession are a right royal mistake - Change makes monarchy look more ridiculous - 5th November Americans, put that in your pipe and smoke it - Christopher Caldwell describes how Herman Cain, who polls show as frontrunner for the Republican nomination, is making waves in Washington - 29th October Piracy is just a part of a capitalist system - Illegal file downloads have aided the move to a bookless, cinema-less world - 24th October Décroissance: how the French counter capitalism - Christopher Caldwell on a coalition of activists who say economic growth has done enough damage to our planet and must be reversed - 15th October France’s battle to understand banks and banlieues - French voters see the world differently to their political leaders - 8th October Putin and his timely lessons for western democrats - Even many of those who dislike Putin believe he saved the country from servility - 1st October The president just does not get the American centre - Barack Obama is a typical American – the more he says, the less you know him - 24th September Coofs, xylocarps and the noble glory of crosswords - At what point does looking for hints in reference books and online become ‘cheating’ - 18th September French lessons in taking on fizzy drinks brigade - Having resisted a US-style tax protest, France will get a US-style tax - 10th September Leaders of today: do crises demand craziness? - If mentally healthy leaders crumble in crises, we are in trouble - 3rd September America’s morals appeal more than French will admit - France retains the sexual morality of village and hierarchy, but it is an anachronism - 27th August Why Buffett is wrong about soaking the rich - Berkshire Hathaway chief executive believes tax on the rich should go up - 20th August The death knell for the era of the British bobby - The urban riots have revealed the British policing system as untenable - 13th August The temptation and greatness of skyscraper ambition - Feats of engineering are often more symbolic than practical - 6th August Say no to online lotteries - Why selling lottery tickets online is not a good idea - 23rd July Why Amazon’s tax-free landscape needs bulldozing - The tax exemption, not technology, is what distinguishes the company from its rivals - 16th July America’s budget talks are entering their ‘Greek’ phase - The deficit may have reached dimensions at which politicians stop trying - 9th July Unionism will not be the force to fix western economies - The world view of the put-upon taxpayer has won out over that of the fellow toiler - 2nd July Smoking ads are more about class than compassion - These ads tell the truth on tobacco only in the sense that pornography does about sex - 25th June Lessons from Kosovo for Nato in Libya - Fear of losing is incentive to escalate conflict - 11th June Lessons for the future from China’s bathrooms - The big selling point of the US is its taste and sensibility - 4th June Surpluses not sacrifice still sway US politics - The establishment has not changed to reflect the new post-crash mood - 28th May Do not look for a coherent ideology in violence - Terrorists get a hearing; homicidal people running amok do not - 20th May In praise of privacy rules - Super-injunctions are a sinister instrument - 14th May Out with the intellectuals - Stubbornness, caginess and occasional sycophancy are needed to defend oneself in politics - 7th May Fuelled up for populism - A look at the effect of rising petrol prices on the US president’s popularity - 30th April Three cups of platitudes - Greg Mortenson had difficulty distinguishing his own fortunes from those of his cause, or even humanity - 23rd April It is the fate of libraries to die - The government must focus on necessities and cut frills - 16th April A bankrupt nation wakes up - America has lost the plot on confronting its debt - 9th April Nuclear power will find a third-world backyard - Countries have learnt different lessons about energy from the nuclear disaster at Fukushima - 2nd April Teach history warts and all - Children cannot build a simple narrative if teachers are running down the credibility of what they impart - 26th March A war to die for but not control - The problem for US voters is that America provides most of the soldiers - 19th March Modern muckraking does free speech a disservice - Political prank ‘stings’ threaten to narrow the scope of the sayable - 12th March A fate written in the stores - Reflections on the death of Borders books - 5th March Why America’s unions are not working any more - Budget battle in Wisconsin goes to the heart of collective bargaining - 26th February Jeopardy is just the start - If you get paid to answer questions in a structured context, it is reasonable to fear the progeny of Watson, IBM’s quiz show-winning computer - 19th February Egypt shakes a distant dictator from his dream - Hosni Mubarak’s role – that of speaking for Egypt – gradually won out over his person. And that was too bad for him - 12th February US principles clash with its interests - Anti-US forces in the Arab world have proved stronger than pro-US or neutral ones. Why should they not? - 5th February Rights and roots collide - Not knowing whom one’s parents were may gnaw more than it used to at those who were anonymously delivered - 29th January Sins of the Tiger Mothers - Amy Chua’s style of child-rearing, where one solution to substandard educational performance is punishment, is spreading anxiety across US - 22nd January Obama pitch perfect again - The president has allowed his allies to retreat from an argument they should not have got into in the first place - 15th January Let Huck Finn tell it as it was - Fury tends to be directed at books that merely mention race. These are invariably anti-racist - 8th January

Articles: 2010 To pardon Billy the Kid would be to deny history - US politicians are too often drunk on an idea of themselves as Lone Men of Integrity - 28th December Why Italy still has Berlusconi - No opposition has presented an ideological alternative that voters prefer - 18th December Obama’s budget anarchism - The president is trying to respond to outraged voters without undoing his Democratic agenda - 11th December Rome protects its views on love - The Catholic idea of sex has its idiosyncracies, and condoms bring these to the fore - 27th November For the benefit of Mr Jobs - That The Beatles have put their songs on iTunes is dispiriting - 20th November Bush’s weak tea for the right - The former president misunderstood US conservatives - 13th November A limited Tea Party triumph - These elections are a clear victory for the Tea Party, but also reveal the movement’s limitations - 3rd November Why America doesn’t do kings - Americans prefer a president who looks right in a dunce cap to a man who looks right in a crown - 30th October Mandelbrot tips off the markets - His gripe was that all algorithms tended to underestimate the risks of investing - 23rd October Government by search engine - Google’s projects are less eccentric and more hard-headed than they appear - 16th October Tough luck on the train tracks - Our politics is too often a discussion between politicians and planners – not with the public - 9th October Iceland’s tribal prosecution - Central banking sometimes requires political leaders to mislead - 2nd October Politics takes a comic turn - The idea that humour calms down political conflict is a misconception - 25th September Born-again anti-Catholicism - Britain’s reception of Benedict XVI is the most hostile he has received - 18th September Obama’s faint recovery hopes - The president flaw is that he is not the person he said he was - 11th September Mistweeted and misunderstood - The disturbing implications of a Twitter hoax - 4th September Roma reveal a rootless Europe - French immigration policy shows an unwillingness to assert national interest - 28th August Google versus the pixelators - Germans are right to be worried about Google’s Streetview - 21st August Anti-capitalism made beautiful - This film is a ravishing indictment of the frenzy of modern life - 14th August A mosque that wrecks bridges - Building a mega-mosque at Ground Zero is a bad idea - 7th August Why Turkey sits outside the tent - EU members have good reason to be cautious about Turkish accession - 31st July Lord Black profits from a grey law - ‘Honest-services fraud’ could apply even to an employee who calls in sick to go to a baseball game - 24th July Billionaires bearing gifts - Bill Gates and Warren Buffett may have misjudged the public mood - 17th July Listen to the Walmart moms - While less ideological than Tea Partiers, Walmart moms are more important electorally - 10th July Merkel gains from a close call - The possibility of a viable leftwing coalition looks more remote than it did a month ago - 3rd July An incoherent resignation - McChrystal’s comments come when the president is seen as weak - 26th June Too high on oil to hear Obama - President warns of bad results if the US does not moderate its consumption - 19th June BP feels the ire of a Machiavelli - Disasters such as that in the Gulf can be addressed without witch-hunts - 12th June Israel had no other choice - When participants in a conflict blur the line between civilians and combatants, good options disappear - 5th June Grown wild in Tivoli Gardens - Jamaica’s gangs have mastered globalisation more quickly than its government - 29th May Profligacy and the primaries -Americans must decide whether they are going to reject Obama’s government or pay for it - 22nd May This oil outrage will run dry - Deepwater makes the transition to alternative fuels less, not more, likely - 8th May Arizona moves the boundaries - Immigration policy has taken a populist turn - 1st May Freedom to discriminate - The difference between powerful elites and endangered minorities - 24th April The kids are not alright - Americans are trying to legislate their way out of the ‘liberation’ they imposed in the 1960s - 10th April Germany flexes its muscles - No longer mainly economic ballast, Berlin now speaks for Europe - 3rd April Healthcare repeal is no lost cause - The law rests on the kind of actuarial sleight of hand that repels voters - 31st March Explaining sex and the City - Erotic capital provides a new framework for thinking about gender issues - 27th March Blood flows in Bangkok - When democracy fails the way is open to more visceral appeals - 20th March Games prey on your mind - Video games are increasingly sophisticated, subtle and dangerous - 13th March Flinty truths for California - Jerry Brown, a former governor of Califormia, wants his old job back - 6th March Is Google now a monopoly? - Brussels faces the task of searching the company’s practices - 27th February Too much brain on Capitol Hill - The politics of Capitol Hill is not, to use Evan Bayh’s word, “brain-dead”. If only it were. Representative bodies should not be brainy places. Democracy means keeping government simple enough so that ordinary citizens can continue to run it - 20th February Why fat is not a First Lady’s issue - American’s are unlikely to put fitness first - 13th February One step back for mankind - America must not give up on lunar exploration - 6th February Inequality in a meritocracy - The problem is that the UK's new report on equality takes 'inequality' as a synonym for 'prejudice and discrimination', which it often is not - 30th January The ill-health of democracy - Republicans are wrong to assume their own economic mismanagement has been forgotten - 23rd January Don’t bank on voters forgetting - Years from now, as the public comes to realise that it will spend a generation paying for the bail-outs, rage against bankers may be more intense, not less - 16th January Killing freedom and cartoonists - Political violence is aimed at promoting a cause – in this case, Islam. But if a country cannot stop the violence directly, the public will demand it is stopped indirectly - 9th January Time really is speeding up - The Beatles’ release of ‘Love Me Do’ in 1962 is now closer to the first world war than it is to us - 2nd January

Articles: 2009 Efficiency is no test for Trident - Nuclear weapons are not meant to counter terrorism. They are meant to counter nuclear weapons. If Britain is to be something other than a province of Europe, it must have its own nuclear deterrent - 19th December Climate change, the great leveller - The concept of victims and perpetrators breaks down when it comes to global warming. Economies collude in pollution. Global warming is not a bilateral problem, it is a global problem - 12th Decermber Berlin’s pious Sabbath decree - The driving force behind misgivings about Sunday shopping is worry over globalisation, and the sort of capitalism that has landed us in such a mess over the past year or two - 5th December A climate of suspicion - On the eve of the Copenhagen summit, the 3,000 e-mails stolen from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia and published last week are a blow to global-warming activists - 28th November France and the culture wars - For novelist NDiaye’s defenders, it is not enough that politician Eric Raoult be wrong – he must be Hitler - 21st November Enemies need not be insane - In Major Hasan’s case, bureaucrats were scared to speak their minds - 14th November Doubt in the Age of Obama - Democrats must wrap themselves in the mantle of Obama’s programme. But what is that? - 7th November The return of rulings on faith - on France v the Church of Scientology - 31st October The state and journalism - The authors of a recent report call upon the government to support journalism, but in that case the taxpayer ought to have a say in what he pays for - 24th October The travesty of the commons - The winner of this year’s Nobel economics prize may have succeeded in countering the influence of one of the most bizarre – and influential – social science papers of our time - 17th October Girls (and mice) on film - Just as pornography used to pass itself off as medical advice, animal violence will pass itself off as art - 10th October Polanski and the maiden - It has grown harder to feel sympathy for Polanski since the intervention of his Hollywood friends – imagine other industries trying such special pleading - 3rd October Obama’s age of atonement - The president’s UN speech distanced him from Bush but more global co-operation will not sit well with the American people - 26th September French suicides complicate corporate life - Blaming company culture for workers’ deaths is simplistic but entirely natural – and hard to combat - 19th September Google writes its own rules - If $125m is all it costs to facilitate a hugely beneficial cyber-library, then who needs Google? - 12th September The west plays Gaddafi’s game - Politicians are not being outsmarted, they are caving in - 5th September The opposite of education - Stanley Kaplan, the self-taught educator who died at 90 this week, can lay a claim to having reshaped American society - 29th August Beware blind faith in bigness - We have lost the sense that big institutions can be a problem - 22nd August Guilt cannot be nameless - Anonymity for defendants is hard to justify - 15th August To the court of King Kim - Bill Clinton’s trip to North Korea was not a humanitarian effort, as he claims, but a diplomatic one that blurred the lines of state power - 8th August Some trifles do concern the law - How seriously the property rights of employers should be enforced against employees is a fuzzy area - 1st July California’s fiscal charade - The state’s problems are those of ‘direct democracy’: the state’s laws are shaped by plebiscites to a degree unmatched outside Venezuela - 25th July An unsentimental education - Obama is right to focus on community colleges - 18th July Mixing morals and money - To judge from his encyclical Caritas in Veritate, published this week, Pope Benedict XVI agrees with those who say that something has gone wrong with the way the world does business - 11th July A test of legal logic for US civil rights - Enforcement is now more pragmatic, less principled, and more corrosive to social ideas of fairness - 4th July Germany has misread Islam - Who has the problem with liberty? - 27th June The catch in the copyright - Unfortunately for J.D. Salinger, you cannot copyright departure, introspection and nostalgia - 20th June Addicts have made a choice - There are costs and benefits in an addiction – the problem is they are difficult to value. Where they become easily calculable, recovery rates are excellent - 13th June The politics of self-abasement - Obama’s Middle East trip gave an inkling of what diplomacy is like when someone else has the upper hand - 6th June MPs’ expenses: a view from the US - The outrage is excessive - 30th May Guantánamo’s Gordian knot - If Americans want to reinstate rights, they will probably have to trade some security. That is the bargain - 23rd May Sarkozy’s war on virtual piracy - In regulating the internet, France has been generally courageous and usually correct. The new Hadopi law should help in the fight against illegal downloading - 16th May A new hunger for headlines - Hunger striking, which was considered rare and radical when Bobby Sands did it 28 years ago, has gone mainstream - 9th May Extinction has a weird appeal - There is a new fascination for life after people - 2nd May No honour among pirates - The desire to deck today’s Indian Ocean pirates out with an ethical system is strong in some quarters. But guff about their ‘code of conduct’ will be short-lived - 25th April Isolation will not free Cuba - If Barack Obama is defending the embargo with his new approach, he is defending it in a way that makes manifest its obsolescence and illogic - 18th April On edge and under scrutiny - British police are a mirror of the society they control – and they believe they are dealing with a heavily armed and undeferential public - 11th April Morality half remembered - The hypocrisy of those who would hang Jacqui Smith out to dry is fully a match for her own - 4th April Words that fail the test of time - It is easy to emerge from a sampling of the volumes of the monumental Dictionary of American Regional English underwhelmed by its subject - 28th March Not populism but opposition - The case for huge executive salaries in the financial sector has crumbled with the finance system - 21st March Bernie Madoff’s life of make-believe - A key to his infamy lies in the words ‘split-strike conversion strategy’. That is the explanation he gave for his spectacularly consistent returns - 14th March Protection by another name - If lax labour standards or minimal welfare states constitute unfair trade practices, then so do subsidies of other kinds - 7th March Highway to hell revisited - The 1956 Highway Act exacerbated the very problems President Obama has been most eager to solve - 28th February Reaching for the Starbucks - The chain will have to serve a different function in the bust economy than in the boom. Maybe espresso bars will thrive as purveyors of ‘cheap luxury’, the way cinemas did in the 1930s - 21st February Not malevolent but mediocre - No individual was capable of predicting the crisis. But the bankers were paid as if they were - 14th February The right to jam your phone - how technology can corrode order - 7th February Is the stimulus Obama’s Iraq? - About a third of the bill – the welfare and social service parts – will be exceedingly hard to end - 31st January Official rhyme without reason - Evidence mounts that official poetry has no natural place in American life - 24th January Galleries, who needs them? - The Prado has posted 14 paintings on GoogleEarth. The experiment reopens the question of what makes art museums worth visiting - 17th January The limits of Senate power - If it admits Burris, the Democratic majority will be doing the right thing, but for reasons of expedience - 10th January Huntington’s misunderstood doctrine - Western policy towards Islam did considerably more to produce Vladimir Putin than it did to produce Osama bin Laden - 3rd January (Samuel P. Huntington, political scientist)

Articles: 2008 No smoke without ire - The attention paid to Barack Obama’s relationship to cigarettes is evidence of a pathology – and not on the part of the president-elect - 27th December 2008 Time for some morality trades - The public is unsure whether the global finance system seized up because it was mismanaged or because it was, in a moral sense, wrong - 20th December 2008 Politics and poor English - Harvard’s plans to restructure its literature course reveal a confusion about what a college English department is supposed to do - 13th December 2008 Leaks are good for governance - No government ever ought to be leak-proof. The vast majority of stuff that leaks ought to leak - 6th December 2008 The problem with Hillary - Mrs Clinton’s probable nomination as US secretary of state is a worry. She shows a willingness to interfere in the internal workings of sovereign countries, which would require force. It is questionable whether the tools of force she extols are still effective - 29th November 2008 The ‘right’ to work until 70 - The same French government policy that a 48-year-old views as a right, a 68-year-old may view as an imposition - 22nd November 2008 Righteous Peeping Toms - tabloids and the basic right to privacy - 15th November 2008 Obama: radical moderate -The new president did not stand up for progressive values or talk about gun control and abortion the way Democrats used to - 8th November 2008 The hedonists’ reckoning - We should worry less about the bigness of our problems than about the smallness of our character - 1st November 2008 W and history’s true character - Oliver Stone’s film fails to capture the reality of the US president and his dime-a-dozen personality - 24th October 2008 French culture’s existential angst - France is coming to see that it is not so much a protector of minority cultures as a minority culture itself - 18th October 2008 The excesses of pragmatism - Sometimes people are forced to choose which they want more – democracy or prosperity. We are picking the latter - 11th October 2008 A disturbing darn debate - It is astonishing what an unsteerable ship an American presidential campaign is - 4th October 2008 Reality dawns in real estate - Thanks in large part to tax laws, US homeowners saw their houses become investment engines – rickety ones - 27th September 2008 There’s no free lunch and no free economy - Having discovered there is no such thing as a free lunch, Americans now suspect there is no such thing as a free economy - 20th September 2008 France only wants to know - By midweek, Edvige, the new police database, had few supporters anywhere in French politics - 13 September 2008 The evolution of creationism - The battle over Darwin’s theory is a class conflict disguised as a religious or moral conflict - 6th September 2008 Human error is struck out - Whether or not video replay raises the quality of refereeing, it renders US football less gladiatorial and more litigative - 30th August 2008 Caught in the human traffic - Traffic, by the science journalist Tom Vanderbilt, has become the big succès d’estime of the US summer publishing season - 23rd August 2008 Myths of the Obamacans - It is neither on foreign policy nor on economics but on religious values that Barack Obama has made his big pitch to party-switchers - 16th August 2008 The folly of a trans-fat tax - In any health-conscious country, consumer knowledge about trans fats will create a stampede away from them - 9th August 2008 The price of saying sorry - If slavery has warped US society as the bill claims, Americans of all races are owed an apology - 2nd August 2008 Parallel visions of Sarkozy - The president’s peccadilloes are overshadowing his real achievements in modernising reform-resistant France - 26th July 2008 Hear the one about Obama? - Comedy has never been more important to American politics, perhaps as a consequence, it has never been less funny - 19th July 2008 Communion as discord - The battles within the Anglican Church’s are a symptom of the newfound might of African Christianity - 12th July 2008 Philanthropy goes to the dogs - Generosity often means relinquishing power. It does not mean assigning armies of the less wealthy to tasks of one’s own devising - 5th July 2008 The ideology of teen pregnancy - Every year at Gloucester High School in Massachusetts, three or four girls get pregnant. But not this year. This year 17 did - 28th June 2008 Italy is right to curb it's politicised judges - Enduring Silvio Berlusconi’s behaviour last week was like “sitting through a film you’ve seen before”, said Senator Anna Finocchiaro, the parliamentary head of Italy’s Democratic party. Not two months after starting his third stint as prime minister, Mr Berlusconi is in a familiar controversy - 21st June 2008 Web gossip is forever - There is, it turns out, something worse than being dragged through a messy divorce in court – being dragged through a messy divorce in cyberspace - 14th June 2008 Spying and the abuse of data - Setting up cameras and monitoring employees’ toilet breaks, as the supermarket chain Lidl did; keeping a “black money” fund for kickbacks to officials in developing countries, as Siemens allegedly did; diverting money to pay for call girls for refractory board members, as Volkswagen did ... German executives have not been at their best lately - 7th June 2008 Military makes its sacred claim - You can measure the continuing power shift in Washington by looking at the costly package of veterans’ benefits sponsored by James Webb, the Virginia senator elected on an anti-Iraq war platform in 2006 - 1st June 2008 Network power that works too well - At the heart of globalisation is a basic, and politically explosive, mystery; globalisation proceeds through the breaking down of boundaries, the unfolding of diversity and freedom of choice – so why is it experienced by so many people as a constriction, an oppression and a loss of freedom? - 24th May 2008 Real spies grow harder to find - New details emerged this week of how Syria managed to conceal the secret nuclear plant it was building with North Korean help, and how close to producing plutonium it was before it was destroyed by an Israeli air strike last autumn - 17th May 2008 Disasters and dictatorships - About 2,000 square miles of Burma’s Irrawaddy delta are still under water a week after the arrival of cyclone Nargis - 10th May 2008 Austria, incest: real news at last - The Austrian incest story – the one about the “devil dungeon” or the “sex-hell pit”, to use The Sun’s descriptions – is the archetypal tabloid story. It is violent, macabre, conducive to easy moral outrage and of no practical interest to anybody - 3rd May 2008 More mortal than some - Americans were shocked on Tuesday to read the results of a study by four scientists affiliated to the Initiative for Global Health at Harvard University.* Since 1983 life expectancy has declined for women in hundreds of US counties, most of them in the south, and for men in a dozen counties - 26th April 2008 Humility and Harry Potter - “We all know I’ve made enough money,” said J.K. Rowling, the author, in a courtroom in New York City this week. “That’s absolutely not why I’m here.” - 19th April 2008 The lazy, crazy middle class - Two years ago, several prominent economists gathered in Italy to debate the wide gap in annual working hours that separates the workaholic US from leisure-obsessed Europe. The conference was called: “Are Europeans Lazy? Or Americans Crazy?” - 12th April 2008 The perils of shaping choice - This week’s New York Times/CBS poll, which showed Americans more pessimistic about their country’s prospects than they have been in decades, yielded a puzzling figure. In the midst of a spreading credit crisis, barely a quarter of Americans (28 per cent) blame the banks that made bad loans and even fewer (14 per cent) blame borrowers. A big plurality (40 per cent) blame government - 5th April 2008 China will not be cowed - Boycotting the Olympic Games scheduled for Beijing next August is a solution that has long been in search of a problem - 29th March 2008 Obama breaks the secret code - Towards the end of his speech about race on Tuesday, Barack Obama made an observation that was raw enough to knock any attentive American listener out of his chair - 22nd March 2008 Birth of a ‘creedal’ nation - Lord Goldsmith, the former attorney-general, released a report called “Citizenship: Our Common Bond” this week that seeks to redefine what it means to be a British citizen - 15th March 2008 Tall tales of the would-be victim - Love and Consequences – the memoir of a half-American Indian girl adopted into a caring but star-crossed black family in gang-infested Los Angeles – was praised to the skies last week - 8th March 2008 What Obama owes to Reagan - There was a curious moment in Tuesday’s televised debate between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama - 1st March 2008 The illusion of Cuba’s caudillo - When Ernest Hemingway survived a plane crash in Uganda in 1954, he was able to read his own obituaries. A similar diversion may await Fidel Castro - Christopher Caldwell, Financial Times, 23rd February 2008 A-listers at the barricades - When several Hollywood studios reached an agreement with the Writers Guild of America last weekend, ending a strike that had lasted 100 days, the film director, Michael Moore, called it “an historic moment for labour in this country” - 16th February 2008 Why Kerviel is so unsettling - “You lose a sense of the amounts when you’re doing this kind of job,” the rogue trader Jérôme Kerviel told Agence France-Presse this week. “Everything gets dematerialised. You can get carried away.” - 9th February 2008 Bipartisan allegiances - Something bizarre is happening in the minds of American voters. Two US presidential candidates – the Democrat Barack Obama and the Republican John McCain – are attracting supporters who oppose their stances on major issues - 2nd February 2008 In defence of the right to offend - The Netherlands has spent the past several weeks in a political crisis out of a novel by Borges. People are worried that a politician might say something he has already said. And they are divided over how to interpret a film that may not exist - 26th January 2008 Confusion over Scientology - In a four-year-old video that was much watched on the internet this week, the actor Tom Cruise mentioned various leaders he had met around the world. “They want help,” he said, “and they are depending on people who know, and who can be effective and do it, and that’s us.” - 19th January 2008 Politics of the personal - Hillary Clinton used a moment of brilliantly staged emotion to win the New Hampshire Democratic primary on Tuesday, which every opinion poll had predicted she would lose - 12th January 2008 A question of competition - A business can occasionally bring out products that are too popular for its own good. Such a product is the New England Patriots football team. Such a business is the National Football League and specifically its pay-television spin-off, the NFL Network - 5th January 2008

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