The hoary joke in the literary world, based on 'Dreams From My Father,' was that if things had worked out differently for Barack Obama, he could have made it as a writer.

Everyone in the Chinese economic world knows that the country is not going to move out of cheap-workhouse status, toward the realm of 'real' rich-country corporate power and prosperity, unless (among other changes) it begins removing these price distortions.

Considering all the different ways in which China has interacted with the world in the last 50 years, considering all the challenges ordinary Chinese people have to put up with, it's beneficial and, and, by any rational standard, non-threatening to have national energies channeled into this kind of competition. It's touching to see so many ordinary Chinese crowds cheering for their new heroes.

No one ever really 'learns' from history, because choices never present themselves in exactly the same way, and because you can always choose similarities and differences to fit current needs.

The air that people breathe in many Chinese cities has become dangerously polluted. Their food supply is subject to constant contamination scandals. Now it appears that not merely stagnant ponds but the water people draw from deep underground is already tainted.

Racial prejudice boils down to the deeply anti-American message that some people are born to fail.

Successful societies-those which progress economically and politically and can control the terms on which they deal with the outside world-succeed because they have found ways to match individual self-interest to the collective good.