I've been to a lot of panel discussions. I know what they're like. When one hears the phrase panel discussion, one likes to think it's a discussion that goes somewhere—like Plato's Symposium. This is not always the case. Panels frequently fail to adhere to the template of dialectical inquiry. Attending a panel discussion is often about schmoozing, bringing your business card, double-dipping cauliflower, drinking as much beer as possible, and recognizing at least a few people in the crowd. I have no problem with that part.

The new Jewish magazines came all at once in the first years of this decade. September 11 formed their background more than it informed their contents; further back and more explicit was the breakdown of the peae talks at Camp David in the summer of 2000 and the start of the Second Intifada that September.

A certain period of confidence for American Jews began in 1967 with the Six-Day War, as people watched on television the reuniting of Jerusalem and thousands of Israelis streaming for the first time to the Western Wall. (Those television-watchers ignored the acquisition of the West Bank and Gaza.) The period of confidence ended in three stages: July 2000, when Arafat and Barak could not reach a settlement at Camp David; September 2000, when Sharon walked atop the Temple Mount; and September 2001, when Islamic terrorists attacked the United States. The proximity of the Intifada to the terrorist attacks made something clear, finally, to younger American Jews. Israel was not a metaphysical abstraction. It was a country with a particular politics (which happened to be a bad politics). It was not the only place where Jews lived, and it was not the only place where Jews could die. The attacks meant that the Holocaust was suddenly toppled from its status as the national trauma par excellence. Almost immediately the production of Holocaust literature ceased. It was as if American Jewry had been called into history once again, not as a successful group looking backward to a historical catastrophe and sideways to a troubled distant country, but as contemporary actual living Jews. And what was our response? A restructuring of secular young Jewish life around religion was no longer an option for an urban and suburban middle class one or even two generations removed from orthodoxy. So we got the rise of JDate, the triumph of Birthright, and a group of lavishly funded Jewish magazines. Read More

In late September, while speculation regarding the financial crisis dominated news outlets worldwide, the German media found itself distracted by a comparatively local story: the untimely death of Berlin Zoo employee Thomas Dörflein.

Dörflein was a man so beloved in his home city that he could hardly leave his apartment without being swarmed by groupies, but the real celebrity was his animal charge, Knut, a polar bear cub born in the Berlin Zoo in December 2006. Rejected at birth by his mother, Tosca, Knut lost his twin brother four days later to infection. Under Dörflein's care, the 810-gram whelp nonetheless became Berlin's first Eisbär to survive infancy in over thirty years. He enjoyed a prolonged period of international stardom—complete with action figures, product endorsements, theme songs, remixes, magazine covers, TV segments, and feature films—before maturing from plush toy to ferocious carnivore. Knutmania, as the press dubbed it, centered around the "Knut and Tom Show," a one-hour, twice-daily attraction during which Dörflein frolicked with his ursine protégé beneath the fusillade of appreciative cameras. The pair drew paparazzi and admirers from all over the world. Read More

On the bed of the Moldau, the stones are churning.
The days of our rulers are ending fast.
                             —"The Song of the Moldau"

This is a Christmas card from Midtown Manhattan. It wasn't easy to get here from Brooklyn today. The F train wasn't running. "Police action on Church Street," the subway man in the red vest explained. At Prime Burger on 51st Street it was hard to get the attention of the old imperious waiters. They elbowed through the crowd, men of the Pullman Porters Union called back into service when they should have been collecting pensions at home. The crowd was thick, the toilet in the men's room had overflowed. Maybe this was the last Christmas before a new Depression, but Prime Burger bustled and a throng moved outside. Read More

Americans own 244 million motor vehicles—more than any other country by a wide margin. Yet we have only 203 million licensed drivers. Even if we all do our part and start driving continuously, we'd still need to leave 41 million cars parked. Cars pollute, contribute to global warming, kill more than 40,000 Americans a year, and injure some three million more in the process—and yet with Detroit begging for bailouts, and environmental and financial crisis upon us, history teaches us one undeniable fact: America needs more cars—now. Read More

Dear Senator Clinton,

I know that it is still weeks before your confirmation hearings, but I write you in the hope that you might redress a grievance that I have with Condoleezza Rice.

Last April I sent the State Department a check for $75 along with an application to renew my passport. Now, I don't know whether it was in conjunction with the national security overhaul that began in September of 2001, or whether it was a red-meat concession to a demographic bloc on which the Republican Party depends for votes, but when I received my renewal last May, I realized that sometime between 1998 and 2008 the State Department had redesigned the familiar U.S. passport. It is my hope that your department can swiftly revert to the old, Madeleine Albright-era design, and can issue me a fresh passport before I have to show this appalling Condoleezza Rice-era edition to any foreigners.

Read More

The talk at my Thanksgiving table—as no doubt at every Indian-American household—was all Bombay. We watched CNN through eating, with its hysterical headline blazing, "Mumbai: City Under Siege." Years of suicide bombings had suddenly given way to a wholly unexpected takeover of the major hotels, more typical of James Bond-villainy than latter-day jihadism. They differed in their attire as well: News reports insisted on pointing out that the attackers and hostage-takers wore jeans and t-shirts. Read More

When Mario Jursich and Andres Hoyos founded the literary-cultural magazine El Malpensante in 1996, Colombia's president, Ernesto Samper, had recently emerged unscathed from a series of trials revealing financial ties between his campaign and one of Colombia's most infamous and powerful drug cartels, the Cartel de Cali. The armed conflict between military, guerrilla, and paramilitary groups was reaching new violent heights and infiltrating nearly every level of urban and rural life. The country was enshrouded in an atmosphere of chaos and fear, so thorough and penetrating that a sinister new mantra soon emerged: todos los colombianos somos secuestrables—all Colombians are kidnappable. All of us: not just the wealthy and the powerful. (The world secuestrable, cumbersome in English, is succinct and correct in Spanish, and was ubiquitous at the time). This national state of fear left little space for intellectual pursuits. El Espectador, the country's oldest newspaper, had recently cancelled its Sunday magazine, which until that point had served as a lonely bastion for Colombian literary writing. Print media, television, and radio, when they weren't dedicated to covering massacres and unpunished political corruption, provided solace in distraction—beauty queens, telenovelas, soccer. Read More

The night of the Iowa caucus, I wanted to quit my job and pack a bag for Chicago or New Hampshire or wherever the action was. I didn't go to either of those places, and I put off my political wanderlust for an embarrassingly long nine and a half months, but I did end up where the action was. Though I now live in Connecticut, I grew up—and my parents still live—on what unexpectedly turned into a fault-line for the 2008 campaign: the Indiana-Ohio border.

Of the myriad people, things, and ideas that have come under assault during the last eight years we should not forget about privacy, which took a consistently harsh beating at the hands of the Bush administration. Remember finding out that back in 2002—in secret, ironically enough—the President authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on communication originating within the United States. With cooperation from giants of the industry, the NSA monitored the phone calls of hundreds and probably thousands of citizens, without ever having had to show due cause for doing so.