For eight years, Ed Rendell was governor of Pennsylvania. The eight years before that, he was mayor of Philadelphia. In all that time, he never got the national attention he’s received in his last two weeks as governor, since unburdening himself about what he called “the wussification of America.”He was upset that the NFL postponed the Dec. 26 game between his beloved Philadelphia Eagles and the v

The ugly American ― the stereotypically brutish, ethnocentric, bumbling traveler abroad ― is dead. He’s gone the way of global U.S. hegemony, the strong dollar and mid-20th century American naivete.Thirty years ago, the streets of major European capitals were awash with wide-eyed, culturally entitled, middle-class American tourists who were members of the first generation to take advantage of fore

By its nature, an intelligence service is antithetical to the transparency and accountability that are hallmarks of a democracy. When the Central Intelligence Agency was created in 1947, diplomat Dean Acheson wrote, “I had the gravest forebodings about this organization and warned the president that as set up neither he, the National Security Council, nor anyone else would be in a position to know

All too often, we look at our bodies as a white-elephant offering rather than as a treasured gift. We’d happily pass to someone else our varicose veins, oversize nose, frizzy hair, extra-wide feet. We’d swap in a minute our pokey metabolism, our allergies, our bellies that hurt when we eat dairy products.Yet whatever we might think, the body is, indeed, a gift. Hair and skin, blood and bones, croo