From the Graduate Journal of Social Science, a special issue on translation and the social sciences. Is Afghanistan "medieval"? Afghans shouldn't be insulted when Westerners say the country reminds them of the Middle Ages. An interview with Paul Johnson: "After 70 you begin to mellow". From FT, a look at how gambling moved into the mainstream. An interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali why Christians should try to convert Muslims. Robert Brockway on the U.S. Army’s Weed Weapon: A paranoid but true conspiracy. A mindful beauty: Joel Cohen on what poetry and applied mathematics have in common. Protecting fashion with copyright would only stifle the natural order of copying, remixing and referencing that produces enduring style. Dan Ariely on how to commit the perfect crime. Julian Baggini on how there is no one either good or bad, but circumstances make them so. These books by artists — mostly painters — read like diaries; they reveal the successes and failures, highs and lows, of working in the late 1960s up through the '80s. Cartoonist Scott Adams's personal road to riches: Put your money on the companies that you hate the most. More surprises from this pope: An interview with Ramiro Pellitero, author of The Theme of a Pontificate: The Great "Yes" of God. Dominant theory says that desertification is caused by overgrazing; Operation Hope has upended this idea, restoring degraded African grasslands into lush, green pasture. Government bad, corporations good: Casey Mulligan's “economic” analysis is so perverse it barely passes the snicker test. A review of The Uses of Pessimism and the Danger of False Hope by Roger Scruton (and more). From Dissent, young writers who belong to the next generation to govern America speak about themselves in the first person.
