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Jack Jordan, Spiked: online

When the spotlight of the Western media was last on Ukraine, optimism was in the air. ‘Our man’ was in, the oligarchs were out and a new era in Eastern European politics was being predicted by journalists and politicians alike.

The so-called Orange revolution - in which the opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko fought his way to the presidency despite electoral fraud, the state-controlled media and an attempted poisoning - was hailed as a shining example of the New Europe in action. It made for a good Hollywood narrative: the dioxin-scarred Yushchenko finding the strength through ‘people power’ to take on the dark forces of the post-Soviet world. With the colourful occasion of his inauguration ceremony and the party afterwards on Kyiv’s central square, the story was given a neat climax, and the attention of the world turned elsewhere.

Arnold Kling, Tech Central Station

Economists support the idea of health insurance. However, many of us believe that policies that pay for all health care services are not real health insurance. Insurance should protect people against catastrophic loss, but it should not insulate them from the cost of all health care. As an economist, I believe that the law of demand applies in health care. I believe that if patients are insulated from the cost of health care, then they will err on the side of obtaining unnecessary CT scans, MRI’s, and visits to specialists. They also will “err” on the side of obtaining useful preventive care.

Charles Krauthammer, Commentary

The post-cold-war era has seen a remarkable ideological experiment: over the last fifteen years, each of the three major American schools of foreign policy—realism, liberal internationalism, and neoconservatism—has taken its turn at running things. (A fourth school, isolationism, has a long pedigree, but has yet to recover from Pearl Harbor and probably never will; it remains a minor source of dissidence with no chance of becoming a governing ideology.) There is much to be learned from this unusual and unplanned experiment.

S. T. Karnick, The National Interest

In the last several decades, modernity–the period initiated by the Enlightenment–has come under increasing criticism. Most prominently, of course, the postmodernists have put together a critique of pure reason, as it were, that uses logic to question the rationality of modern, Enlightenment-based philosophy. In arguing that all reasoning is based on attempts to gain, sustain or increase power, postmodernists openly seek to obliterate the very foundation on which the modern world was built: the supremacy of reason.

Robert Cooper, The National Interest

IT IS DIFFICULT both to be good and to be powerful. This seems to be the common view among statesmen, sages, poets and thinkers. A core thesis among thinkers of the realist persuasion has been that in foreign affairs, being good may in the end be bad for the people you serve, and that moral ends may best be served by thinking in terms of power and how it should be preserved, instead of aiming to do directly what seems morally good. This lesson is repeated in the works of Machiavelli, Morgenthau, Kissinger and many others. Realism is about power, and though barren and inadequate as a description of the way international society functions, it is at least consistent. Likewise, liberal internationalism, though its proponents have sometimes mistaken aspiration for reality, is also consistent. But the attempt to combine the two, as Charles Krauthammer did in these pages (”In Defense of Democratic Realism”, Fall 2004), presents difficulties in both theory and practice.

Paul Farhi, American Journalism Review

Philip Meyer, who has studied the newspaper industry for three decades, can see the darkness at the end of the tunnel. If present readership trends continue indefinitely, says the University of North Carolina professor, the last daily newspaper reader will check out in 2044. October 2044, to be exact. “I use that as an attention-getting device,” says Meyer, whose latest book, “The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving Journalism in the Information Age,” spells out the bad news in elaborate detail. “It’s shocking, but that’s what the numbers say.”

Don Boudreaux, Cafe Hayek

Browsing through the August 15th issue of Time, I came across an insightful quotation from the brilliant Harvard University psychologist Steven Pinker. Pinker is quoted in Time’s cover story on the role of religion in schools. Pinker says, defending the theory of natural selection against the idea of “intelligent design,” that

Overcoming naive impressions to figure out how things really work is one of humanity’s highest callings.

Indeed so.

I don’t here write to enter my two-cents in the debate between Darwinians and creationists (although, for the record, I am solidly in the Darwinian camp). I write to record that Pinker’s insight applies to society no less than to biological beings.

Rachel Donadio, The New York Times

Two monuments rise like emblems from the green countryside of Wiltshire, England, not far from the secluded house of V. S. Naipaul: Stonehenge and Salisbury Cathedral. They are signposts in a landscape Naipaul has been traversing for more than half a century, one in which the impulses of culture, civilization and progress have always existed in close and uneasy proximity to the impulses of paganism, religion and disorder.

Troy Southgate, The Barnes Review

While the First Crusade is overwhelmingly portrayed as a decidedly Catholic (i.e., Western) affair, the aims and objectives of its chief participants from the West must never obscure those of the great Byzantine Empire to the East. This essay examines four main areas in which a diverse set of motives can be shown to have been at work during the tumultuous events, which left their mark on the world during the final years of the 11th century and affected the way we live today. The author seeks to interpret the rationale that led the Byzantine Emperor Alexius I, Pope Urban II, and vast numbers of crusaders to engage in a historical episode of staggering proportions.

Eric Cohen, The New Atlantis

With a subject as large and as profound as modern genetics, we face a major question from the start about how to approach it. We could take a scientific approach, examining the use of information technology in genomic research, or the latest advances in identifying certain genetic mutations, or the transfer of genetic knowledge into useful medical technologies. We could take a social scientific approach, seeking to understand the economic incentives that drive the genetic research agenda, or surveying public attitudes toward genetic testing, or documenting the use of reproductive genetic technology according to socioeconomic class. We could take a public safety approach, reviewing different genetic tests and therapies for safety and efficacy, and ensuring that sound regulatory procedures are in place to protect and inform vulnerable patients undergoing gene therapy trials. As we think about the genetic future, all of these approaches are valuable, but none of them is sufficient.