Matt's got a post full of true bigthink on the multipolarity (present and future) of the word, and our position vis-a-vis the emerging powers of China and India. Read it in full. I, on the other hand, am going to zoom in a bit: In military terms, I think there's also less here than meets the eye. As India and China get richer, their militaries will grow more powerful. But it's not as if the American military is so powerful right now that we can credibly threaten to invade China or India (or the EU, for that matter). American global military supremacy simply doesn't take the form of giving the ability to just muscle anybody around. In practice, only fairly ramshackle nations like Serbia and Iraq can really be subdued by the force of our conventional arms. Nothing about Sino-Indian growth is going to change that.... The only possible change here would be if China or India were to somehow acquire the ability to deploy power in this manner. That would certainly have important results, but...

Zoe Vanderwolk has emerged out of retirement to defend Larry Summers. I'd do some quoting but her comments really deserve to be read in full, they're the best I've seen on the issue in weeks. Worth noting is that Zoe is a female statistics major at Harvard, if she wasn't around to weigh in on this, some newspaper somewhere would have to invent her. Anyway, go read .

My inbox, on any given day, contains The Nation advisory, a dispatch from The Boston Review , and a host of link requests and post pointers. And I love and honor them all. But I'm surprised that my mailbox doesn't contain the same. I know, for instance, that The Washington Monthly sends each issue to every Senator, Congressman and major media personality in the hopes that their coverage will influence the influencers and receive a more visible perch in the wider debate. So I'm surprised that The Monthly and it's competitors aren't showering bloggers in issues, especially considering that our whole game is trolling for interesting and/or provocative reporting that we can use to fuel our writings. If TNR really is serious about attracting subscribers to TNR Digital, wouldn't it make sense to let a few publicizers inside their gates so the locked articles can be teased to a wider audience? My self-interest aside (and with my list of magazine subscriptions, this shift wouldn't help me for...

• A tad aged, but Kung Fu Monkey misses Republicans. • Jeanne d'Arc preaches it. • Mark Schmitt comes out for Rosenberg, and makes the point that net-savvy isn't the sole or even primary attribute needed. Is he sure? • Henry hooks Easterbrook's Collapse review up to the Insight Machine and returns with this : It seems to me that there’s a shared attitude towards science among various right-leaning technophiles (Glenn Reynolds being a paradigmatic example). Roughly speaking, they tend to agree with science when it suggest new possibilities for human beings (the Singularity! nanotechnology! conquering the universe via spaceflight! longer lifespans!) and to strongly disagree with scientific results or prognoses that suggest fundamental limits to human beings’ can-do ability to prevail over their circumstances (global warming, ecological collapse). Most impressive! I'll see Henry's point and raise him a reversal -- liberals are no less entranced with technology's potential but portions of...

Brad Plumer explains how a Democratic bill becomes a law.

Tucker Foehl points out this interview with Naomi Klein. Her thoughts on the anti-war movement, the state of Iraq, the failure of the left, and basically everything else are worth reading in full, but this caught my eye: So what the Republican Party has done is that it has co-branded with other powerful brands — like country music, and NASCAR, and church going, and this larger proud-to-be-a-redneck identity. Policy is pretty low on the agenda, in terms of why people identify as Republicans. They identify with these packets of attributes. This means a couple of things. One, it means people are not swayed by policy debates. But more importantly, when George Bush's policies are attacked, rather than being dissuaded from being Republicans, Republicans feel attacked personally — because it's your politics. Republicanism has merged with their identity. That has happened because of the successful application of the principles of identity branding. Klein, of course, is an expert on branding,...

In an otherwise impressive synthesis/review of the current glut of books promising a European Revolution, Tony Judt hobbles his piece with a near-fatal opening: Consider a mug of American coffee. It is found everywhere. It can be made by anyone. It is cheap—and refills are free. Being largely without flavor it can be diluted to taste. What it lacks in allure it makes up in size. It is the most democratic method ever devised for introducing caffeine into human beings. Now take a cup of Italian espresso. It requires expensive equipment. Price-to-volume ratio is outrageous, suggesting indifference to the consumer and ignorance of the market. The aesthetic satisfaction accessory to the beverage far outweighs its metabolic impact. It is not a drink; it is an artifact. Consider the following lazy writer trick: Rather than reporting to find the perfect example that sums up your piece, or simply eschewing a gift-wrapped synecdoche, you spend a paragraph inventing an analogy that'll do the...