Readers of my previous comment on Tariq Ramadan will no doubt have come away with the impression that I don’t much like Daniel Pipes. This is not an entirely accurate assessment of my opinon of him. I think Pipes is an unreconstructed bigot and xenophobic fanatic whose academic work fails to meet even [...]

William Pfaff, a writer who wrote about European-American relations and the challenges of perceived unchallenged US global leadership well before the Iraq induced and war-blogged “transatlantic rift”, may have indeed listened to Carly Simon when he wrote his not too favorable review of Zbigniew Brzezinski’s election year foreign policy summary “The Choice: Global Domination or [...]

“A sad day for trade relations between the US and Europe”. This is how John Disharoon, vice president of the trade committee at the American chamber of commerce to the EU described the decision by the European Union to begin imposing trade sanctions on US goods as of today. Of course, the arguments about [...]

The last week has seen the ‘great US ousourcing debate’ hit both new highs, and new lows. On the plus side would be the declarations of the oft maligned Greg Mankiw to the effect that the “outsourcing” of jobs is beneficial to the United States economy (even with the qualification ‘perhaps’ this has merit - [...]

Once upon a time, there was a large, intellectually hegemonic, somewhat totalising ideology rooted in a heterodox school of economics. Its advocates proposed to make massive changes to the structure of society and claimed that only such a revolutionary realignment could alleviate the contradictions and failures of the existing order and save the world [...]

It is too early to grasp the real aftermath of 9-11 in Hollywood, but some trends are more obvious than others. Couple of last year’s major Hollywood productions indicate that the major change is afoot in American film industry, closely resembling shifts in American foreign policy resulting from 9-11.
The changes are very visible for those [...]

No this is not (yet) the title of one of my new pages (although we were looking into living in sin, but unfortunately it’s already taken). No the denial I am referring to is much nearer home for most of us, since it is up there in Brussels. “European Union nations are dragging [...]

OK I’m pushing the point quite hard here, but what I want to emphasise is that a European blog in a global world has a pretty broad reach. The latest round of US employment figures are in, and they are nowhere near as pretty as everyone (including even me) was expecting. Over 400,000 people stopped [...]

When I first came to Belgium, one of the things that genuinely surprised me is how people seem to think Buffy, the Vampire Slayer is a children’s programme. Admittedly, the title doesn’t exactly say “socially relevant drama”, but I doubt that the show’s success on American TV would have been possible without the age [...]

The front page of today’s Washington Post has a none-too-flattering analysis of Gov. Howard Dean, the man most likely to challenge GW Bush for the White House in 2004. It starts:
“Former Vermont governor Howard Dean stands on the brink of a remarkable achievement in American politics, having transformed himself from rank obscurity to clear favorite [...]