The New Republic

Olivier Roy has a different view of radical Islam from many of the experts you find writing in the American press. Roy, now 63, first went to Central Asia as a 19-year-old high school dropout, but eventually become a leading expert on Islamic politics. He has been a consultant to the French Foreign Ministry and United Nations and is currently a professor at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. READ MORE >>

Clive James—the Australian-born critic, poet, and TV personality—is beloved in Britain, where he has lived for five decades, for reasons that are difficult to translate to an American context. READ MORE >>

Barack Obama's pre-presidential manifesto, The Audacity of Hope, has only one extended riff on gun control—not a homily on behalf of the cause or even a meditation on the deep divisions opened by the debate, but a story of crummy luck. READ MORE >>

In December, Marc Rotenberg received a call from a woman seeking advice on how to become an advocate for e-mail privacy. The call in itself was not surprising—Rotenberg is, after all, the executive director of a public interest group called the Electronic Privacy Information Center—but the identity of the caller was. It was Jill Kelley, the Tampa socialite whose complaint to the FBI that she was receiving stalking e-mails from a woman named Paula Broadwell led to the year's biggest sex scandal. READ MORE >>