Greedy or Ignorant

“The Dog and His Bone” is one of Aesop’s many instructive fables. It’s about a dog carrying a bone in his mouth. As he was crossing a footbridge over a stream and happened to glance into the water, he saw his own reflection. Thinking it was...

Susan Sontag: Not So Judicious

Writer Susan Sontag, one of America’s most “celebrated” intellectuals, died a few days after Christmas of leukemia. She was 71. “In my view,” she once explained, “the only intelligence worth defending is critical, dialectical,...

America The Stingy

“It is beyond me . . . why are we so stingy, really,” said U.N. Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Jan Egeland, after the tsunami in southern Asia. ” . . . Christmastime should remind many Western countries at least, [of] how rich we...

A Wave of Criticism

The catastrophic tsunami wave that has devastated so much of southern Asia has even killed more than a hundred people on the east coast of Africa, more than 4,000 miles away. Two questions: First, what country has done the most to help the victims of this natural...