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Gilles Kepel, openDemocracy

On 5 August, four weeks after the bombings of London’s transport network that killed 52 innocent passengers and injured 700 more, Tony Blair announced a series of anti-terror measures that signified a radical departure from the traditional British approach towards its Muslim community. If implemented, their combined impact would be to end the policy of “Londonistan” – the contract whereby political asylum was given to radical Islamist ideologists in return for keeping Britain safe from violence.

Charles Murray, COMMENTARY

When the late Richard Herrnstein and I published The Bell Curve eleven years ago, the furor over its discussion of ethnic differences in IQ was so intense that most people who have not read the book still think it was about race. Since then, I have deliberately not published anything about group differences in IQ, mostly to give the real topic of The Bell Curve—the role of intelligence in reshaping America’s class structure—a chance to surface.

Michael Ignatieff, The New York Times Magazine/John F. Kennedy School of Government. Harvard University

I.
As Thomas Jefferson lay dying at his hilltop estate, Monticello, in late June 1826, he wrote a letter telling the citizens of the city of Washington that he was too ill to join them for the 50th-anniversary celebrations of the Declaration of Independence. Wanting his letter to inspire the gathering, he told them that one day the experiment he and the founders started would spread to the whole world. ”To some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,” he wrote, the American form of republican self-government would become every nation’s birthright. Democracy’s worldwide triumph was assured, he went on to say, because ”the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion” would soon convince all men that they were born not to be ruled but to rule themselves in freedom.

Farah Nayeri, Bloomberg

Karl Marx was a closet capitalist.

So writes French author Jacques Attali in “Karl Marx ou l’esprit du monde” (Fayard, 504 pages, 23 euros.)

Attali argues that the theoretician widely blamed for the rise and fall of the Soviet Union was actually a free-marketeer who favored capitalism as a stepping stone to his communist ideal and predicted globalization as we know it today.

By Alan A. Stone, Psychiatric Times

In his acclaimed biography of Justice Benjamin Cardozo, Harvard Law Professor Andrew Kaufman devotes part of a chapter to a lurid murder case in which Cardozo, then serving on New York’s highest court, wrote an opinion interpreting the classic M’Naghten formulation of the insanity defense (Kaufman, 1998; People v Schmidt, 216 N.Y. 324). The case decided in 1915 is a classic cautionary tale for forensic psychiatrists and, with the wisdom of hindsight, one might even suggest that it is also a cautionary tale for the great justice.

Leland de la Durantaye , Boston Globe

Stated somewhat differently, the most brilliant American novel of the 20th century, now a round and ripe 50 years old, tells us that the artist cannot live in the world as he lives in the world of words–and that this is a lesson worthy of expressing in the world of words.

IN THE SPRING OF 1940, on the last crossing of a French ocean liner that would be sunk by German U-boats on its return voyage, Vladimir Nabokov, his wife, and his young son arrived in New York. The family’s first, precarious years in America brought many changes, but one element remained constant. Every summer, Nabokov and his wife would drive cross country to the Rocky Mountains, which offered the country’s best butterfly hunting.

Claus Christian Malzahn, SPIEGEL ONLINE

Hurricane Katrina has cost the lives of hundreds and devastated the US Gulf Coast. But instead of aid donations and sympathy, the Americans have heard little more than a haughty “I told you so” from Germany. It’s another low point for trans-Atlantic relations — and set off by a German minister. How pathetic.

For the record: German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder offered his condolences to US President George W. Bush for the Hurricane Katrina disaster that has hit the Gulf Coast. Both he and his fellow Germans, Schröder wrote, feel “great sympathy for the fate of those people affected by the hurricane.”