To many readers, Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” is the most intimidating of literary monuments. It is there, like a vast, unexplored continent, and all sorts of daunting rumors circulate about life in the interior. But once you cross the border, you discover that the world of “War and Peace” is more familiar and at the same time more surprising than the rumors suggested.

Tolstoy’s Transparent Sounds

On Oct. 26, the State Department e-mailed 250 diplomats and told them that they might be ordered, whether they like it or not, to fill about 50 positions in Iraq next year. It was no secret the US was considering compulsory Iraq service for its diplomatic corps, but the e-mails sparked outrage nevertheless.

Why Diplomats Won't Go to Iraq

What science can, and can't, tell us about the insanity defense

'You Can't See Why on an fMRI'

We are sliding towards an irreversible obsession with totally visual communication. Text is struggling to keep up. Only dense, layered, information-rich text cuts it in the online world, preferably broken up with images and other information, which might explain why the blog form, in particular the visual blog, is currently so successful.

things magazine

What can you say in six sentences?

Six Sentences

Clay Christensen stresses that managers are voracious consumers of theory. In other words, they value ways to think about their world, and mental tools that will let them make decisions and predictions with a level of confidence higher than they get from experience and intuition alone.

But the intersection of ties and Enterprise 2.0 technologies goes much farther than this. In fact, ties provide a great base for understanding the benefits provided by many E2.0 technologies, and for understanding when each one should be deployed. Thinking in terms of ties, in other words, let managers select from among the grabbag of available technologies and also anticipate the benefits they’ll get after successful deployment.

The benefit of blogs becomes much more clear when they’re seen as tools to convert potential ties, strong or weak, into actual ones.

I’m hearing from a lot of people that late 2007 is much like late 1997.

Andrew McAfee: How to Hit the Enterprise 2.0 Bullseye

Lapham's Quarterly, alongside a companion radio show and weekly blog, extends his abiding interest of recent years: the theme of history's revenge upon those who ignore it. "Everything I've written," he told Kurt Andersen in 2005, "is a chronicle of the twilight of the American idea." Using historical texts to plumb our political, cultural, and economic moment, Lapham is now aiming to add a new chapter to his career-long act as ruling class scold.

Lapham: My purpose is to foster and encourage and delight in the acquaintance with history. I'm not being polemic; I'm trying to open it out. I want to say: Behold dear reader, what a wonderful archive and treasure one can find in the history of our long journey across the frontiers of four millennia.

I went around my circle and asked, what should I be reading, where should I be looking?

Q&A with Lewis Lapham

Chandler is so much a part of the furniture that we tend to forget how great he is.

"I used to like this town. A long time ago. There were trees along Wilshire Boulevard. Beverly Hills was a country town. Westwood was bare hills and lots offering at eleven hundred dollars and no takers. Hollywood was a bunch of frame houses on the inter-urban line," Raymond Chandler wrote, in the voice of his detective hero, Philip Marlowe, in 1949. "Los Angeles was just a big dry sunny place with ugly homes and no style, but good-hearted and peaceful. It had the climate they yap about now. People used to sleep out on porches. Little groups who thought they were intellectual used to call it the Athens of America."

This is a review of The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved.

On Raymond Chandler and his obsession with another man's wife

For anyone marinated in the history of Pakistan yesterday's decision by the military to impose a State of Emergency will hardly come as a surprise. Martial Law in this country has become an antibiotic: in order to obtain the same results one has to keep doubling the doses. What has taken place is a coup within a coup.

... the US Embassy green lighted the coup because they regarded the Chief Justice (Iftikhar Hussein Chaudhry) as a nuisance and 'a Taliban sympathiser'.

Tariq Ali: Pakistan Sinks Deeper into Night

At 35% urbanization, Pakistan is the most urbanized country in South Asia. 50% urbanization is predicted in the next ten years. The Powers That Be and our city fathers have yet to see urban planning as anything other than a commercialization and moneymaking racket. We need to understand the invisible global networks to which we belong and the invisible global forces to which we are liable. Only then will we have an opportunity to face the challenges of the future. Lucky for us, Saskia Sassen is speaking at the National College of Arts in Lahore this Tuesday morning.

Urbanism, globalisation and Saskia Sassen