Somebody said: if you're an intelligent Islamic militant and you had a choice: to take over either Afghanistan or Pakistan, what would you do? You would take over Pakistan, obviously.

Ghaith Abdul Ahad photo

Mark Blyth is in the pub tonight, played by Sean Connery, as usual, and demonstrating again how far a man can go in political economy just by talking fast and infallibly with a strong Scots' accent.

The Democrats in Washington have taken up again their modern mission: cleaning...

Mark Blyth, of Austerity fame and the Watson Institute, has a Scot's vernacular gift for clarifying economics. Is the situation explosive? "You've got 300 million Americans and 500 million handguns. And 72 percent of Americans that live paycheck to paycheck. Do the math!"

We're talking in particular...

Dennis Lehane so rules the neighborhood of Noir ("Nwaaah," as we say in Boston) that he gets street credit for work he didn't write, like "The Departed" and "The Town." But does the author of "Mystic River," "Gone Baby Gone" and the new Moonlight...

It is well known that the term 'Pakistan', an acronym, was originally thought up in England by a group of Muslim intellectuals. P for the Punjabis, A for the Afghans, K for the Kashmiris, S for Sind and the 'tan', they say, for Baluchistan... So it was a word born...

If there is a problem with Barack Obama's thinking, his "intellectual biographer" James Kloppenberg is saying on the morning after Obama's mid-term "humbling," it's not what he thinks, deep in the Democratic mainstream. Neither is Obama over-thinking his confoundingly broad assignment. Rather it may be the way he thinks,...

Noam Chomsky, after all these years, retains the power to shock -- in the bright title of his new collection, Hopes and Prospects, and with what sounds like good news in this conversation.

It's Professor Chomsky's cheerful conviction, drawing on his own trials in the Vietnam War resistance, that...

There's more religion than politics in the 2010 Tea Party, Jill Lepore is saying. There's less of 1776 about it than of 1976 -- that dyspeptic post-Vietnam, post-Watergate bicentennial moment remembered for Gerald Ford and school busing fights in Boston elsewhere. 1976 marks a time when we discovered that...

Andrew Bacevich is the soldier turned writer who's still unlearning and puncturing the Washington Rules of national security. The rules have turned into doctrines, he's telling us, of global war forever. He is talking about the scales that have fallen from the eyes of a slow learner, as...

Listen to the conversation here:

In the slick commercial media of New Delhi, Tehelka is the strong-minded reformist alternative. It could remind...

BANGALORE -- Brinda Adige, a self-starting social activist, in yellow sari, is our guide to the slum side of Bangalore and the virtual canyon between the public squalor and private affluence that are both hallmarks of the New India.

We're in Lakshman Rau...

"... And our nation, though it has no drinking water, electricity, sewage system, public transportation, sense of hygiene, discipline, courtesy or punctuality, does have entrepreneurs. Thousands and thousands of them. Especially in the field of technology. And these entrepreneurs -- we entrepreneurs -- have...