Writing Worth Reading
Last updated 11 pm GMT
Writing Worth Reading
"To understand Mitt Romney, you have to understand the most difficult passage of his political life: How he changed his position on abortion. Not the story he tells about it, but the real story." A painstaking, fascinating piece
Commentary on complexity of developing policy on Syria. Arming the opposition is problematic, and possibly counterproductive. Scenarios of power vacuums, sectarian warfare must be considered. Pity the poor residents of Homs
Does the Greek bailout signal an end to the European debt crisis? Or is it just another step along the road to Greek default and euro collapse? The views of Carmen Reinhart, Barry Eichengreen, Mohammed el-Erian and Simon Johnson
Hong Kong is a bastion of free-market capitalism, right? Wrong. These days it's more of an oligarchy. Four family-owned conglomerates dominate the economy. They've captured the regulators, they've got government in their pocket
Book extract. "He has created his own mythology of a child of post-siege Leningrad, a mean, hungry, impoverished place that bred mean, hungry, ferocious children." In fact, he was relatively well-off. But still mean and ferocious
With Ron Paul. "When he warns against threatening Iran, or calls the war on drugs 'a total failure,' or observes that 'rich white people don’t get the death penalty very often,' he seems like a man competing in a separate contest"
![David Petraeus, Tooryalai Wesa [Image 3 of 7] by DVIDSHUB](http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5190/5598104957_eaf922e7f8_s.jpg "David Petraeus, Tooryalai Wesa [Image 3 of 7] by DVIDSHUB")
Phase one was Rumsfeld's "liberation" through "shock and awe". Next came Petraeus's pacification with counterinsurgency. Now, US conducts war through targeted assassinations. Call it the Vickers era (Starts after five-par intro)
"Suddenly, manufacturing is back – at least on the American election trail. But don’t be fooled. The real issue isn’t how to get manufacturing back. It’s how to get good jobs and good wages back. They aren’t at all the same thing"
Brotherhood must adapt quickly to face realities of power. "Remember, for 60 years we were working underground and now we've come out into the light and are staring directly into the sun. We're all blinking and rubbing our eyes"
"By engineering rigged elections that nobody bothered or dared to protest, Putin managed to conceal his regime's deepest secret, namely that Russia, rather than being misgoverned, is governed very laxly if at all"
"It looks like something changed, tangibly, in the past 10 days. The established parties lost belief in what the EU is forcing them to do; parts of the EU lost belief in it too; and the people lost belief in the political class"
We've peaked. "Birth rates, defence spending, bond prices, welfare spending versus wealth creation; everything that historians look to in order to gauge the health of empires suggests that Europe’s fire has gone out" (Free reg/$)
Delegates at the first Zionist congress in 1897. Image from Wikimedia Commons
"There's no work. There's going to be a civil war". Paul Mason reports
"Never before in the history of our Republic have so few spent so much to influence the votes of so many"
