• The Journal's Russia Scandal, Matt Taibbi and Mark Ames
.......Just before Christmas in 1997, as a tumultuous stock-market crisis ravaged emerging markets in 
.......every corner of the globe, readers of the Wall Street Journal were treated to some good news: Russia 
.......was going to emerge from the mess unscathed. While conceding that "few debt markets outside 
.......Southeast Asia were hit harder by recent financial turmoil than Russia's," the Journal's Moscow 
.......bureau chief, Steve Liesman, added quickly that "many analysts believe an equally strong rebound 
.......may be in the offing." 
.......©1999 The Nation Company, L.P. All rights reserved. 

• Kosovo Waits, Mariana Katzarova 
.......If Macedonia with its 20 to 40 percent Albanian population is involved in an eventual conflict, Greece 
.......and Bulgaria might get into the fray as well, either supporting Macedonia or seeking to occupy its 
.......territory. It is not likely that Turkey would stay out if Muslim interests are endangered--as it showed 
.......by gathering the foreign ministers from the Organization of the Islamic Conference, in June 1992 in 
.......Istanbul, to take up the question of aid to Muslims in Bosnia and Herzegovina. 
.......©1999 The Nation Company, L.P. All rights reserved. 

• How We Ended The Cod War, John Tirman
.......As the apparent winner, the West has tended to regard its triumph as a vindication of cold war 
.......policies or, more modestly, as a case of Soviet "exhaustion." Neither of those views is satisfying 
.......because each discounts the role played by the peace and antinuclear movements. Evidence is 
.......mounting that their influence on events was more important than most historical accounts 
.......admit--perhaps even decisive. 
.......©1999 The Nation Company, L.P. All rights reserved. 

• A Conversation with Daniel Dennett
.......Turing shows that if a computer can add, subtract, multiply, and divide, and if it can tell the difference 
.......between zero and one, it can do anything. You can take that set of mindless abilities and build them 
.......up into structures of indefinite discriminative power, indefinite discerning power, indefinite reflective 
.......power. You can make a whole mind; you can solve Hume's problem; you can get ideas to think for 
.......themselves on this slender base. That's the idea of an algorithm.
.......Copyright © 1998 by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights reserved. 

• Ataturk's Children, John Tirman
.......As Jonathan Randal deftly puts it, "Only a state as slavishly faithful to the ossified letter of its 
.......founding dogma could have backed itself into a corner as totally as Turkey did in this final decade of 
.......the twentieth century." Randal makes a compelling case: Kemalism, sclerotic and corrupt but 
.......clinging to the rigid mindset of Turkish nationalism, could not allow the pluralism that makes Western 
.......democracies so adaptive. The obdurate military dashed hopes for economic growth and democracy, 
.......and turned perhaps a third of the electorate toward traditionalist reactionaries like Refah.

• The Next Left , Scott Stossel
.......A conversation with Richard Rorty - Richard Rorty, one of the most famous living philosophers in the 
.......United States, would seem an unlikely person to be exhorting the American Left to "kick  .......
.......the philosophy habit." And yet in his new book, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in 
.......Twentieth-Century America, that is exactly what Rorty does. Arguing that political liberalism in this 
.......country has been derailed by the abstract theoretical dithering of what he calls the Cultural Left -- 
.......Who cares what Lacan says about repression? 
.......Copyright © 1998 by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights reserved.