Most of the time I look at the Obama Administration and think, with much relief, how nice it is to have grownups back in charge. When it comes to diplomatic protocol, however, the last few days have been pretty much amateur hour. At least the Russians took State's SNAFU with a bit more humor. Sue Pl...

Although we just got the CD yesterday, I'd been listening to Neko Case's new album (currently #2 in music on Amazon) pretty much non-stop via NPR for a bit. Quick and dirty: not as consistently good as Blacklisted , but an excellent album nonetheless. Noel Murray's review pretty much nails it, but J...

Abi Southerland on the current popularity of Zombies:I mentioned this puzzle to my better half, who happens to be in the middle of a reread of World War Z. His answer? ... You can have a fascinating story about a single zombie in a world of humans or the last human in a world of zombies. You can do ...

One of the panels I attended at ISA was a roundtable on Stephen Brooks' and William Wohlforth's excellent new book, World Out of Balance: International Relations and the Challenge of American Primacy . The participants did an outstanding job of discussing the strengths and weaknesses of the piece, b...

You can't really blame the AP. It can be so hard to tell those DINOs and RINOs apart....

For some time now, NATO and Russia have engaged in on-again, off-again discussions about supplying Afghanistan via the Russian Federation. So consider this sequence of events: 1. An increasingly hard-currency strapped Kremlin offers Kyrgyzstan $2 billion in aid.2. Kyrgyz President Kurmanbek Bakiev a...

Rob Farley points our attention to the latest from Iceland:Foreign diplomats hardly believed what they heard when the Icelandic president said that his country needs “new friends� and that Russia should be invited to take use of the old U.S. airbase of Keflavik. In the lunch which took place in ...

I would be doing our readers a great disservice if I failed to point them to James' fascinating discussion of the future of the conservative movement s after 4 November 2008. A taste: Politically, on the right, nobody is dead now. Nobody is discredited. Everyone will decide for themselves. The wagon...