I’ve been puzzling about international humanitarian interventions lately, in part because my daughter Bec is in the middle of a uni assignment on the subject, but mostly because as I write this Robert Mugabe continues to terrorise and impoverish his own people in Zimbabwe while the equally odious military junta in Burma sits on its collective hands while its people starve and die of rampant but readily preventable diseases in the wake of Cyclone Nargis.   Read more »

What shape is the income distribution of Andrew Leigh’s dreams? Even he doesn’t know. "I don’t have a strong sense of what the right level of inequality is", he writes. "Indeed, I’m not even sure I have the right intellectual framework for answering the question." Read more »

If you haven’t seen or read Obama’s speech on the Reverend White, you should.  Or if you’re stretched for time, Clive Crook edits it down to the best bits - which are still pretty extensive. Read more »