American - Journalist | May 26, 1950 -
As so many writers know, the experience of creating an imaginary world is closer to dreaming than it is to normal, grit-your-teeth work. It's preconscious rather than conscious. Ideas fall into your head, and the book writes you, rather than the other way around.
David Ignatius
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American politics, like most things, is a story of what statisticians describe as the reversion to the mean.
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Thanksgiving is America's favorite holiday because it's a time when we put aside our cares, much as the struggling Pilgrims did nearly four centuries ago, and eat a gut-busting meal without worrying about the 'out years.'
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This is a universal human dream - that brains, not brawn, will rule - and the fact that America has the world's finest institutions of higher education may be our greatest single national asset.
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Saudi Arabia is a frightened monarchy. It's beset by Sunni extremists from the Islamic State and Shiite extremists backed by Iran.
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Images sometimes capture particular periods in history. The unreachable green light, beckoning from across the bay in 'The Great Gatsby,' has become a symbol of the yearning of America in the 1920s.
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The CIA in real life, we know, is looking for new kinds of cover. It's looking for new platforms, as they like to say, and it's trying to use the revolution in communications technology, the ability to use all sorts of corporate entities in ways that are hard to detect to get our spies in the places where they need to be.
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The framers hated the tyranny of King George, but they were also afraid of the mob. That's why they put so many checks and balances into our system, to guard against the excesses of a government that might be inflamed by public passion or perverted by a dictator's whim.
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During an economic crisis, what matters is that the government keeps its foot on the accelerator.
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Middle Eastern wars rarely end with outright victory and permanent stability, so the word 'settlement' may promise too much. At best, for many years, it may simply mean stable ceasefire lines, reduced bloodshed, fewer refugees, and less terrorism.
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Chinese experts noted that the U.S. economy has rebounded from the 2008 crash more strongly than some analysts here had expected, while China's own growth is slowing after several decades of rocket-ship acceleration.
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Politicians need to rethink their reflexive invocations of the Second Amendment and the idea that the gun lobby is too powerful to challenge.
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