The New Republic

A reporter who visited the White House last week brought back the news that the criticism of President Obama’s immobility about the Syrian disaster has “begun to sting.” Good. Something got through. READ MORE >>

Almost as soon as the bombs exploded on Boylston Street the calls were heard to move on. READ MORE >>

There is almost nothing worth saying that is not worth saying again. Sense may be conveyed efficiently, in a single utterance of sufficient clarity; but meaning amasses and accrues, it is not stated but mined, and this requires a return to what was said, and then another return, and then another. It requires repetition. Kierkegaard remarked, premonitorily, that “one becomes weary only of what is new.” Epiphanies, our secular mysticism, are barren freaks of experience unless they are made to serve as beginnings, and raptures are succeeded by chores. READ MORE >>

“She told him that she loves me, which is an important data point.” I overheard those words a few months ago, and they stopped me in my tracks. I did not know the smitten and empirical young man who spoke them well enough to offer a correction of his way of talking about desire, but I was pleased to have stumbled upon such a blunt formulation of one of the shibboleths of the day. I refer to the messianic conception of data, or Big Data. READ MORE >>

"One could never have supposed that, after passing through so many trials, after being schooled by the skepticism of our times, we had so much left in our souls to be destroyed.” Alexander Herzen wrote those words in 1848, after he witnessed the savage crackdown on the workers’ rebellion in Paris. READ MORE >>

Is there a greater gesture of intellectual contempt than the notion that a tweet constitutes an adequate intervention in a serious discussion? READ MORE >>

In January, the government of Israel announced that it plans to build a fence along its frontier with Syria, because the Syrian army appears to have receded from the border area and jihadist forces have moved in. It is no wonder that the anarchy and the atrocity in Syria causes consternation in Israel; but this announcement left me with a heavy heart for another reason. With the erection of this northern barrier, Israel will be almost completely fenced in. READ MORE >>

The "light footprint" that is Barack Obama's doctrine in foreign policy originated as Donald Rumsfeld's doctrine in military policy. Rumsfeld was undone by the contradiction between his ends and his means: in Iraq, he sought to attain big ends with small means, disastrously insisting that after "shock and awe" a light, nimble American force advantaged by technology would suffice for assisting the Iraqis in the political transformation of their country. READ MORE >>