• The Daily Telegraph
• Le Figaro
• The New York Post
• L’Orient-Le Jour
• L'Osservatore Romano
• The Irish Times
• Conservative Home
• The Jewish Chronicle

• FAZ / Eng.
• NZZ / Eng.
• Magyar Nemzet
• ABC.es
• The Catholic Herald
• Il Foglio
• London Playbook
• Financial Times

France

Mitteleuropa

Knickerbockers

Argentina

The Levant

Africa

Cape of Good Hope

Netherlands

Scandinavia

Québec

India

Muscovy

Germany

Helen Andrews reminds us what America is losing when adolescents are denied this early schooling in competence and responsibility.

■ Edward Luttwak has been one of the most insightful critics of the Agency’s failings: the perpetual deficit in language skills, front-line regional knowledge, and overall institutional seriousness.

He argues the greatest threat to the CIA isn’t the current inhabitant of the White House but Langley’s own comfort with incompetence.

■ The older established small-town America – coastal and mid-Atlantic mostly – offers an incarnation of the conservative idyll: church spires, clapboard houses, civic pride, and other gems worthy of admiration and emulation.

Yet while tradition is revered by conservatives living amidst strip malls and subdivisions, it is liberals who preserve and maintain the old houses and town greens of New England. Aaron Renn looks into the contradictions of this dichotomy.

■ We have – you may have noticed – a lot of time for General de Gaulle. The most famous of his American stalwarts was the dancer, singer, actress – and spy – Josephine Baker. Behind the glamour of the music halls, archives reveal that Baker undertook serious work for the Free French secret services – not just against the Germans, but also against the crafty Middle-Eastern machinations of Great Britain.

■ Amongst political Gaullism’s enduring legacies is Pierre Messmer’s reaction to the Arab oil embargo. The Gaullist PM was determined France would never be caught again with its pants down in terms of energy and crafted a bold plan: forty nuclear reactors around the country, all built within a decade.

Alex Chalmers delves into the planning, procurement, and politics of this feat of engineering and of statecraft.

■ The English-speaking world fails to devote enough bandwidth to Brazilian history and culture.

Ryan Musto explores Washington’s plea for Brasilia to send troops to Vietnam and the outbreak of caution in influential milieux that spared Brazil a costly entanglement.

■ After Mormonism, the teachings of Mary Baker Eddy must rank amongst the strangest religions to have emerged from American soil.

Elijah Granet explains how Christian Science achieved the realms of inoffensive boredom and assimilated, at least in part, to a cultural Protestant mainstream while maintaining a disproportionate prominence.

Search