Melissa Thomas (SAIS): What Do the Worldwide Governance Indicators Measure? Andrew Rose (UC-Berkeley): Well-Being in the Small and in the Large. That empty-nest feeling: The World Bank, founded to fight poverty, is searching for the right role in places that need its help less and less. A new issue of the IMF's Finance and Development is out, on the March of the Cities, including essays on The Urban Revolution; Urban Poverty; Governance; and what is the biggest challenge in managing large cities? World-Wide Slum Growth: An excerpt from Planet of Slums by Mike Davis. Condom Nations: Where is sex safer: sub-Saharan Africa or Scandinavia? According to the world’s largest sex survey, whether you have unprotected sex isn’t a matter of being male or female, gay or straight. When it comes to risky bedroom behavior, what matters most may be where you live. An article on condoms and their place in history.
From Eurozine, does a civil-war mentality exist in Hungary? A roundtable interview. An essay on Vaclav Havel as an authentic humanist and cultural hero for our times (and part 2 and part 3). Czechs with few mates: The heirs of Vaclav Havel deserve more respect in Europe for supporting democrats abroad. French told to try smiling for once: The grumpy Gallic image is getting a makeover as the nation starts to lose tourists. A review of Testimony: France in the Twenty-first Century by Nicolas Sarkozy. Personal trivia, it seems, tells us quite a lot about France's leader: A review of L'Aube le soir ou la nuit by Yasmina Reza. Time to call it a day for Belgium: Sometimes it is right for a country to recognise that its job is done. Switzerland is known as a haven of peace and neutrality. But today it is home to a new extremism that has alarmed the UN. Proposals for laws that target the country's immigrants have been condemned as unjust and racist. Has Switzerland become Europe's heart of darkness?
From Commentary, Max Boot on How Not to Get Out of Iraq. Immanuel Wallerstein on the Vietnam analogy. Robert Kaplan on how the Vietnam analogy looms ever larger in the debate over Iraq, but the U.S. military has memories of that conflict that the public doesn't. The Former-Insurgent Counterinsurgency: In a Sunni stronghold just south of Baghdad, the U.S. military has been persuading militants to switch sides. But it’s not at all clear that the enemy’s new enemy is really a friend; and the American military has a new strategy for fighting Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia — American soldiers are now working with Sunni counterinsurgents. David Petraeus describes the Iraq War as a war of figurative inches. Before Congress, he's likely to emphasize these smaller achievement instead of the bigger picture — which is unquestionably bleak. Hubris v. Humility: What Dostoevsky can tell us about Iraq. Waiting for the general (and a miracle): America agonises over the pitfalls of staying in Iraq—and of leaving.
