More than 80 years ago, the British historian Lytton Strachey (1880-1932) made a name for himself by writing short biographies that debunked their subjects, but did so with elegance and wit. He combined the style of a minor Evelyn Waugh with the slant of a demolition expert like Robert Caro, whose s

Often people ask, Why do you pray? In all honesty, at one time I prayed because I was a Jesuit. In other words, my answer was, I’m supposed to pray. Prayer was an obligation and, to be frank, a burden. At times I have prayed in order to placate Godto get God off my back, as it were. Many times

For the first time in the nation’s various wars on drugs, the scientific, political and spiritual stars are aligned for a revolution to balance and strengthen all four legs of this country’s effort to tackle substance abuse and addiction: research, prevention, treatment and law enforceme

Niall Ferguson is one of the leading mdash and almost certainly the most controversial mdash historian in contemporary Britain He last shocked his compatriots with The Pity of War which argued that Britain was as much to blame as Germany for World War I that the war could have been avoided and th

Historians and political scientists endlessly debate the sources of change in human societies What is more important in epochal transformation ideas or institutions personalities or power structures material or intellectual motives In the field of Russian studies the end of the cold war and i

During the cold war, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists became famous for its Doomsday Clock. The position of the hands on the clock showed how close the world was, in the judgment of the publication’s board of directors, to the midnight of mass nuclear annihilation. Every time the directors mo

A conference in Washington, D.C., with hunger as its theme? Some might assume that such a conference would be about hunger in the developing world. At this particular gathering on the first three days of April, however, the focus was on the often-hidden but widespread levels of hunger that pose a se

Soaring energy prices rapidly turned last winter into a season of severe discontent. In the Northeast the price of residential heating oil rose by more than 50 percent since the previous winter. In the Midwest homeowners paid at least 60 percent more for natural gas. In California households braced