Juan Cole

Andrew Kaczynski points out at Buzzfeed that in a 2010 interview, Mitt Romney compared his Massachusetts universal health insurance plan to that of President Obama, listing positive similarities and negative differences. He cited as a good similarity the individual mandate, in which everyone is willy-nilly made part of the pool, reducing costs, which also allows […]

Offshore account: Something that a gentleman creates, puts in his wife’s name, and carefully hides when he goes into politics because good breeding forbids him to utter obscenities in public. Frerrorist: (on the model of ‘frenemy’ or friend/enemy): Person with whom you are friends, who belongs to an organization that deploys violence against the civilians […]

Courtesy Jamiol’s World

Young Americans followed the events of 2011 in the Arab world with great interest and remarkable sympathy, such that a real difference now shows up in polls between younger and older Americans with regard to their views of the region. As the heady days of expelling tyrants gave way to the hard task of transition […]

This summer is what global warming looks like: Increased average temperatures, forest fires, extreme weather episodes. Climate change is gradual and a matter of averages. Different parts of the globe will be affected differently. We could have a cold wet summer along the way. But on average, the summer of 2012 is what climate change […]

The news out of Syria is bad and worse. The regime is being accused of widespread torture, and it is having to fight the rebels on the doorstep of the capital. Human Rights Watch has mapped out the torture centers used by the Syrian government and identified the various techniques used on dissidents by the […]