Philip Stephens on the NY Times scandal

Among modern institutions, only the US Senate and perhaps the Japanese imperial household have a more positive self-image, a stronger conviction of their own weighty contribution to human progress, than the Grey Lady of 43rd Street.

Taki on Blair and Iraq

If I sound angry, I am. Having done away with crime in British cities, having fixed the health service and the transport system, having lowered taxes and made education the best in Europe, he now has time to concentrate on making an Iraqi utopia. What utter crap. The guy had no other way to go. He was elected to fix Britain and, having failed utterly to do so, he has now decided to fix Iraq.

Tony Judt on Robert Kagan

Robert Kagan wants it both ways. At the end of his book he rather limply asks that Americans and Europeans show better mutual comprehension; but the foregoing 100 pages display not just ignorance of the recent European past and current European diversity, but an undertone of arrogant condescension, mixed with a certain amount of humbug. "The problem," he writes, is that "the United States must sometimes play by the rules of a Hobbesian world, even though in doing so it violates Europe's post-modern norms." But the norms that Washington currently violates are its own - there is nothing uniquely European, much less post-modern, about the rule of law or the desirability of peace over war.

Peter Singer on Animal Rights

Lewis Petrivlovich says that our biology turns certain boundaries into moral imperatives and then lists "children, kin, neighbours and species". If the argument works at the narrower circle of family and friends, and the wider sphere of species, it should also work for the middle class: race. If the argument doesn't show race to be a morally relevant boundary, how can it show that species is?

On who got to direct the Coen Brothers films

Joel: I'm about three years older and thirty pounds heavier and I have about three inches on Ethan in terms of reach. But then he fights real dirty. I can beat him up so I get to direct.

Ethan: It's those critical three inches in reach that make the difference.

Robert Dworkin on Affirmative Action

Colourblindness that has no basis in moral principle and helps only to perpetuate social stratification is worse than pointless.

Julian Barnes on Dreyfus

Charles Peguy said the Dreyfus Case confirmed the rule that the victim usually isn't up to the mystique of his own affair. "We were willing to die for Dreyfus," he commented, "but Dreyfus wasn't."