June 1, 2010

Has Obama averted a new Cold War with Russia? Stephen Cohen weighs in.

At a recent talk at the Carnegie Council, Stephen Cohen, author of Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War, discussed some of the key features of his book as well as assessing Obama’s policy toward...

May 28, 2010

David Foster Wallace’s "Fate, Time, and Language."

One of our most-talked-about forthcoming books during the just-closed BEA and online has been David Foster Wallace’s never-before-published Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will. The book includes Wallace’s undergraduate thesis along with essays exploring the work’s philosophical...

May 27, 2010

Victor Cha on the crisis in the Korean peninsula

“It was a clearly premeditated act. And it is the most serious act of aggression by the North against the South, military-to-military, since the end of the Korean War. I mean they’ve done terrorist acts that have killed more people,...

May 26, 2010

Kenneth Posner on how to stop the next banking crisis

In an op-ed written for Fortune, Kenneth Posner, author of the recently published Stalking the Black Swan: Research and Decision Making in a World of Extreme Volatility, provides a solution for stopping the next banking crisis. In light of the...

May 25, 2010

Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef in the New Yorker and on Al Jazeera

Steve Coll’s fascinating article in this week’s New Yorker War by Other Means (subscription required) examines the current role of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the debates about whether or not the United States should negotiate with them. One of...

May 24, 2010

Is is too big to fail? Andrew Lakoff on our energy production system

In a piece for the Huffington Post, Andrew Lakoff, editor of the just published Disaster and the Politics of Intervention, examines what if anything can be learned from the debate over financial reform as attention turns to the regulatory reforms...

May 21, 2010

Interview with Douglas Walrath on Displacing the Divine: The Minister in the Mirror of American Fiction

The following is an interview with Douglas Alan Walrath, author of Displacing the Divine: The Minister in the Mirror of American Fiction Question:  Most books stem from an author’s experience as well as from his or her professional interests.  Is...

May 20, 2010

How to make peace with Iran — Arshin Adib-Moghaddam

Earlier this week Arshin Adib-Moghaddam, author of Iran in World Politics: The Question of the Islamic Republic and the forthcoming A Metahistory of the Clash of Civilisations: Us and Them Beyond Orientalism, wrote an op-ed in Open Democracy calling for...

May 19, 2010

Keri Walsh to Discuss Sylvia Beach's Letters at Bluestockings

The great NYC bookstore Bluestockings will be hosting an event tonight at 7 pm with Keri Walsh the editor of The Letters of Sylvia Beach. Walsh’s appearance to talk about the legendary Parisian bookstore owner and publisher of James Joyce,...

May 18, 2010

Kenneth Posner: Smaller "Black Swans" Are Around Us

TheStreet has been featuring Kenneth Posner’s new book Stalking the Black Swan: Research and Decision Making in a World of Extreme Volatility and his explanation of how “black swans” can be detected. The concept of a “Black Swan,” was popularized...

May 17, 2010

Guobin Yang on China's School Killings

The recent and horrific attacks on young children in rural schools in China have left the Chinese government and a slew of experts searching for answers. The spate of attacks was recently a topic on the New York Times’ Web...

May 14, 2010

America's Mayor: John V. Lindsay and the Reinvention of New York — The Exhibit

“Whatever your take on the Lindsay years, this show will both challenge and expand it,” writes Edward Rothstein in his largely positive review in the New York Times of the exhibit “America’s Mayor: John V. Lindsay and the Reinvention of...