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March/April 2009
Many lament the decline in the number of foreign correspondents, writes Jack Hamilton in the Columbia Review of Journalism, but foreign coverage is entering yet a new era with a clear defining feature: many types of foreign correspondents operating at once.
Some months ago, while exploring files in the nearly empty, ink-blackened basement of the old New York Times building on West Forty-third Street in Manhattan, I came across a 1968 memorandum from Seymour Topping. The longtime foreign correspondent had just been put in charge of foreign news, and his memo outlined the changes he planned.
The emphasis on getting spot news first, Topping argued, was outmoded. This he chalked up to the "special challenge" of electronic journalism, with around-the-clock radio news and what he perceived as the glimmerings of real-time television coverage. "Foreign news dispatches on news agency printers," he noted, are "shown on TV screens at about the same time those dispatches come into the wireroom."
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Start-Up Nation addresses the trillion-dollar question: How is it that Israel—a country of 7.1 million, only sixty years old, surrounded by enemies— produces more start-up companies than large, peaceful, and stable nations like Japan, China, India, Korea, Canada, and the UK? With the insights of geopolitical experts and investors, the authors examine this nation’s adversity-driven culture to answer this question and offer prescriptions for a global economy on the rebound.
In Forces of Fortune, Vali Nasr presents a paradigm-changing revelation that will transform the understanding of the Muslim world at large. He reveals that there is a vital but unseen rising force in the Islamic world—a new business-minded middle class—that is building a vibrant new Muslim world economy and that holds the key to winning the cold war against Iran and extremists.
In Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know, Julia E. Sweig presents a remarkably accessible portrait of Cuba's unique place on the world stage over the past fifty years, including its internal politics, its often fraught relationship with the United States, and its shifting relationship with the global community.
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