Along with David Brooks, Jeffrey Goldberg, and Jad Abumrad, Kurt Anderson belongs to my select fraternity of idealized, intellectual American man-crush. So I was kinda, well, crushed when I read his cover story for this year’s Time Person of the Year. Like the rest of mainstream media’s coverage of social change in 2011, Anderson had [...]

Last Sunday Jorge Castañeda wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times Sunday Review warning Americans what happens when a country doesn’t have a middle class. Yesterday he extended his argument in an hour-long interview with Tom Ashbrook. Castañeda argues that economic inequality in general — and the lack of a strong middle class [...]

A few months ago I wrote a geopolitical analysis of the newly launched Open Government Partnership (OGP), a multilateral network of reformers from governments and advocates from civil society organizations that are trying to expand the concept and implementation of “open government.” The reaction to this blog post was funny; at least it was funny [...]

My problem is the following: I get to a point where I have 7 or 8 drafts of ambitious yet incomplete blog posts that, if my to-do list is to be believed, will ‘soon’ be published. But my to-do list is not to be believed, not ever. And so these drafts sit and collect their [...]