Boston Review

Two recent books, Hanna Rosin's The End of Men and Liza Mundy's The Richer Sex, collect the many strands of this tale of women ascendant. These authors are motivated by the same basic facts: women's attainment of college degrees has surpassed that of ...

In Land of Promise, Michael Lind argues that America's political economy has historically oscillated between two schools of thought: Hamiltonians, who believe in a strong federal government to shepherd the economy, and Jeffersonians, who believe in ...

Editor's Note: The following is a response to The Soft Side of Regime Change by Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett. A sensible, balanced discussion on Iran is difficult to come by these days. The level of hysteria within the Beltway is so high, ...

Back in the day, when bad guys used telephones, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies would listen in with wiretaps. As long as phone companies cooperated—and they had to, by law—it was a relatively straightforward process. The Internet, however, separated providers of communications services—Skype, Facebook, Gmail—from those running the underlying infrastructure. Thus, even if the FBI obtains a suspect's traffic data from their Internet service provider (ISP)—Comcast, Verizon, etc.—it may be difficult to make sense of it, especially if the suspect has been using encrypted services.

So, I will interleave rebuttals with my own recommendations, which differ slightly from Evgeny Morozov's. Although I agree with his abstract suggestion for ...

Kentaro Toyama’s insightful essay punctures the cyber-utopian hype surrounding ICT4D initiatives and resists the allure of quick technological fixes for political and social problems.

But Toyama says relatively little about how to design ICT4D projects that apply the same good sense. In the absence of a clear-cut prescription, policymakers may believe that simply by acknowledging the failures of previous technologies, they ensure that their new initiatives avoid the same fate.

Just before 4:30 one afternoon last July, calls to prayer echoed from all the mosques in Ayn al Hilweh, a Palestinian refugee camp in the city of Sidon, south of Beirut. First built in 1948 for refugees from northern Palestine, the camp has grown into a ramshackle ghetto. Concrete and cinderblock line tight alleys with cobwebs of low-hung electrical cables. On the walls are layers of faded political posters -- some for Hamas, some for Fatah, and still others for Saddam and even Hezbollah leader Seyid Hassan Nasrallah -- marking the divisions among Palestinian resistance factions.

“You have now entered Iraq,” my taxi driver joked. We had in fact just entered Sayida Zeinab, a neighborhood on the outskirts of Damascus. This shrine city, long a destination for Shia pilgrims, had become home to an estimated one million Iraqis seeking refuge in Syria. “Everybody is Iraqi,” laughed another driver after several people he had asked for directions replied in Iraqi Arabic that they did not know. Indeed, walking through the alleys of Sayida Zeinab I felt as though I were in Iraq, except it was safe.

On April 7, 2006, the third anniversary of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, I drove south with Shia pilgrims from Baghdad to the shrine city of Najaf. The day before, on the same route, a minibus like ours had taken machine-gun fire in the Sunni town of Iskandariyah. Five pilgrims were killed.

A fatal riddle of our time is why the United States, which in the end won the Cold War peacefully and emerged from it as the uncontested world hegemon, has in a few years thrown away its moral and political leadership through reckless and illegal war.