Showing results by narrator "Kevin Stillwell" in All Categories

After a decade-plus of war, the lessons for the United States are clear: fight fewer, more traditional wars and fight them more decisively. Above all, avoid getting entangled in the politics of chaotic countries.

Discussions of the Holocaust aside, Germany and Israel are still rarely mentioned in the same breath. Yet Berlin has long been one of the most successful - and secretive - intermediaries between Jerusalem and its enemies.

With U.S. hegemony waning and no successor waiting to pick up the baton, the current international system will likely give way to a larger number of power centers acting with increasing autonomy. The post-Cold War order is unraveling, and it will be missed.

ISIS' army has attracted a stream of Western volunteers, but there is no reason to panic about their return home. Some may come back as terrorists, but the danger has been exaggerated, and the United States and the EU know how to handle such problems.

Just as the world is beginning to grasp the implications of the 3D revolution, researchers are proposing an upgrade. Their work suggests that the true promise of digital fabrication lies with a fourth dimension - in printing objects that change over time.

Since the early 1990s, a handful of oligarchs has dominated Greece’s economy and politics. So long as these elites have a vested interest in keeping things as they are, the country will never fully find its way out of crisis.

Over the last few decades, governments have increasingly sought to reclaim indigenous artifacts from museums abroad. Yet inappropriate calls for repatriation should be resisted. Encyclopedic museums do more than house artifacts; they also spread cosmopolitan ideas.

The destabilizing consequences of Washington’s hasty withdrawal from Iraq were not only foreseeable, but foreseen by U.S. military planners and commanders. To avoid a similar disaster in Afghanistan, President Obama must not make the same errors.

After 13 years of war, the loss of many thousands of lives, and the expenditure of trillions of dollars, what has the United States learned? The answer depends on not only who is asking but when.

More than 13 years after 9/11, the Afghan war is far from over, even if Washington insists that the U.S. role in it will soon come to an end. Three recent books help explain why, and what Washington needs to do next to protect the gains that have been made.

According to Ian Morris, the author of a sweeping history of conflict from prehistoric times to the present, war can sometimes produce safety. But his account runs into difficulties as it approaches the present.

A hard-boiled newsman and a sharp-witted sheriff team up to solve a murder mystery in Grand Master of crime fiction Dorothy Salisbury Davis’s suspenseful and disturbing story of death and violence in a small coal-mining town.

Sweden's Feminist Initiative party aims to put gender issues squarely at the top of Sweden's political agenda. By contrast, many U.S. feminists have turned the personal-is-political mantra of second-wave feminism on its head, taking a marked turn toward lifestyle issues, with a new focus on empowering women within the political and economic frameworks that already exist.

Set in San Francisco and North Carolina, the linked stories in Damn Love introduce us to characters struggling with love in all its complicated forms, including a young doctor getting over a breakup with the help of a patient, a newly married gay man who reconnects with his estranged mother, a trio of physicists caught in a surprising love triangle, and a soldier who takes secrets with her to the Iraqi desert.

In assembling an international coalition to combat ISIS, the United States has looked mostly to the Middle East and Europe, regions that it said face a direct threat from the militant Islamist group. But other parts of the world are just as anxious about ISIS - above all, Southeast Asia.

Europe’s political climate is more hostile to Jews now than at any time in recent memory. Rising anti-Semitism among Europe’s Muslims, especially in the wake of the war in Gaza, is one reason for this change. But to claim that the rise of Muslim anti-Semitism is the main culprit - as the German journalist Jochen Bittner did this week in The New York Times - is to overlook the role played by the European majority.

The new book A Troublesome Inheritance confirms that the basic biological facts of race and human evolution are indisputable. But at certain moments, the book ceases to be a scientific inquiry into race and becomes something far more troubling.

Released in 1974, Sweet Home Alabama has become synonymous with Southern rock. From its opening guitar riff, it is instantly recognizable, a raucous, irreverent defense of a Deep South state and its segregationist governor against the jabs of Neil Young. But the roots of Lynyrd Skynyrd's best-selling anthem go much deeper than regional pride or resentment of a fellow rocker.

Henry Spearman, the balding economics professor with a knack for solving crimes, returns in The Mystery of the Invisible Hand - a clever whodunit of campus intrigue, stolen art, and murder. Having just won the Nobel Prize, Spearman accepts an invitation to lecture at Monte Vista University. He arrives in the wake of a puzzling art heist with plans to teach a course on art and economics - only to be faced with the alleged suicide of womanizing artist-in-residence Tristan Wheeler.

In this issue: "Pitchfork Politics", by Yascha Mounk. The Tea Party and its European cousins have emerged from the enduring inability of democratic governments to satisfy their citizens’ needs. Today's populist movements won’t subside until the legitimate grievances driving them have been addressed.