In Washington not long ago, I heard him say disdainfully that the Palestinians could not be expected to rule themselves until their average annual income was ten thousand dollars a level reached in Israel forty years after statehood.

NEWYORKER: The Party Faithful

Stand in the center of the rotunda and gaze up to the heavens through the eight-meter-high oculus at the center of the five-ton concrete dome --a stunning feat of ancient engineering, still intact after two thousand years.

CNN: 24 hours in Rome: Pizzas, piazzas and 'la dolce vita'

After 30 years of chopping onions and dismantling a thousand chickens, my desire to understand what determines the alimentary equivalent of animal magnetism has yet to be fully answered.

WSJ: The Rules of Recipe Attraction

After the overthrow of the Taliban, a form of this mistake was made again by the George W. Bush administration, which had an ideological disdain for nation building and was distracted by the Iraq War, so that in the first years after the fall of the Taliban, only a few thousand U.S. soldiers were stationed in Afghanistan.

CNN: Abandon Afghanistan? A dumb idea

After providing two years of consulting services, Taylor billed the company a hundred thousand dollars (which works out to something like two and a half million dollars today), and then he was fired.

NEWYORKER: Not So Fast

Mackinder, who was born in 1861 and died just after the Second World War, looked at the past thousand years in Europe and proposed a surprisingly simple geographic explanation for everything that had happened.

NEWYORKER: Faces, Places, Spaces