Books

On June 2nd the American Strategy Program hosted a conversation with Professor George Lakoff, PH.D, premier linguist and cognitive scientist, in which he discussed his new book, The Political Mind: Why You Can't Understand 21st Century American Politics with an 18th Century Mind. Steven Clemons, Director of the American Strategy Program led discussion and Q&A for the event. An MP3 audio recording can be downloaded below, while video is available at right. Dr. Lakoff of the University of California,… more

If what is shaping up to be the worst foreign policy disaster in U.S. history has an upside, it is that the current war in Iraq should definitively, permanently settle a handful of critical questions about American conduct in the world. This book provides a list of those questions and even ventures some answers in the form of key lessons from Iraq.

The idea of assembling lessons as tools for avoiding the next war is less of a stretch than it… more

For a people whom Tocqueville described as living eternally in the future, we Americans do quite a lot of remembering. Eight weeks ago, it was Martin Luther King Jr., who has been gone longer than he was alive. Now we enter the season of remembrance for a former New York senator, Robert F. Kennedy, a season made all the more poignant by the depressing news that the Liberal Lion, Ted Kennedy, is suddenly and unexpectedly a lion in winter.

R.F.K.'s busy… more

Voter turnout this primary season has been setting records. With interest so high, some analysts are predicting another blockbuster general election in November. But can American democracy survive all this heightened interest in the political process?

Half a century ago, political scientist Paul Lazarsfeld became one of the first scholars to document the link between political participation and partisanship. He discovered that partisans voted more regularly and with greater enthusiasm than those who resided in the ideological middle. Although most experts… more

In the 20th century, a global network of colluding activists, institutions, and governments sought to engineer solutions to various real and perceived social problems by, as Matthew Connelly puts it in his new book, planning "other people's families." In its most egregious expression, this movement led to the forced sterilization of millions of people around the world, including many thousands in the U.S., on the grounds that they were -- genetically or otherwise -- unfit. California alone had sterilized 7,500… more

After the Iraq war, Fareed Zakaria argued in his Newsweek column that the world's new organizing principle was pro- or anti-Americanism. But as the Iraq muddle drags on and China rises, the larger story of the post-Cold War era has come into sharp relief: We are not the center of the universe. It matters less that particular countries are pro- or anti-American than that the world is increasingly non-American. We need to get over ourselves.

Zakaria's The Post-American World is about… more

There will never be another speechwriter like Ted Sorensen, if only because there will never be a relationship like the one between Sorensen and John F. Kennedy. Staffs have mushroomed along with expectations that presidents will speak more or less incessantly, on all subjects, from Earth Days to birthdays. Burnout sets in earlier, and few writers stay with a politician for anything like the length of time Sorensen worked for Kennedy, from January 1953 to Nov. 22, 1963. Arguably, he… more

Half of the world’s population now lives in cities, a number that will climb to 75% by the middle of the century. This development marks a radical break in human history, for humanity has until recently been overwhelmingly rural, concerned first and foremost with brute survival.

In “The Communist Manifesto,” Karl Marx referred to “the idiocy of rural life” -- or so the mistranslation goes -- as an enduring problem. In fact, Marx wasn’t talking about “idiocy” at all. Rather, he… more

While one political party offers a bold, coherent, and failed vision for foreign policy, the other has proffered an inchoate and incoherent response that falls far short of a strategy. Matthew Yglesias -- a known "ringleader-of-sorts for the D.C. blogging community" -- suggests looking past both parties to offer a set of tried-and-true approaches for renewed internationalism and U.S. engagement with the world.

Dude! What a rad plan! Kicking back over drinks at Bungalow 8, the hard-to-get-into Manhattan nightclub, filmmaker Morgan Spurlock hatched the idea of a humorous documentary and book about the hunt for Osama bin Laden. Your average auteur would wake up the next morning back in his Brooklyn crib, reach for the Advil and realize that searching for the largest mass murderer in U.S. history is about as funny as a pounding hangover.

But Spurlock is not an auteur easily deterred.… more