In a time of transition for journalism all around the world, it's reassuring to know that some of the old ways endure.

The worst kind of management seeks a single optimum, a one-scale index of efficiency, like the mindless scales of 1 to 10 for grading a woman's beauty or one to four stars for a movie's appeal.

The Hawk and the Dove is a wonderful idea for a book, wonderfully carried out. Nicholas Thompson has used illuminating new material to present each of his protagonists in a convincing, respectful, but unsparing way. Even more valuable, he has used the interactions and tensions between Paul Nitze and George Kennan to bring much of American 20th century foreign policy to life, with human richness ever present but with the big issues clear in all their complexity.

Everyone moans about the collapsing U.S. infrastructure.

For a decade or more after the Vietnam war, the people who had guided the U.S. to disaster decently shrank from the public stage.

Societies are healthiest when their radius of trust is broad and when people feel they can influence their own fate.

I am explicitly not opening the giant can of worms that is the ongoing current discussion of patent, copyright, and trademark reform.