The amazing thing about Trump is that he is so completely predictable. Hillary Clinton knows that if she teases him about either his wealth, his taxes, the women who are coming after him or his preposterous claims of being against the Iraq war, he cannot resist.

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.

A basic rule of life for reporters is that you should spend your time talking with and learning about people who are not sending you press releases, rather than those who are.

Environmental disaster is the gravest threat to China's continued development. That's according to me, but it is not some wacko view.

Everyone moans about the collapsing U.S. infrastructure.

Up or out" greatly magnified the careerist emphasis on holding a position rather than doing a job.

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.