1/8 Sept– Kristina vanden Heuvel quotes Mikhail Gorbachev’s Washington Post op-ed on the Georgian crisis, claiming that “if we had heeded his vision of a truly post-Cold War world, we might not today be confronting such dangerous geoploitical gamesmanship.”  Vanden Heuvel points out that in Kosovo, the West supported the KLA’s demands for independence on grounds that treated the right of self-determination as all-important, the sovereignty of the nation-state as unimportant.  In Georgia, we oppose the Abkhazians and South Ossetians in their demands for independence on grounds that treat the sovereignty of the nation-state as all-important, the right of self-determination as unimportant.  Unless we can practice foreign policy in such a way as to show equal respect to these twin principles, vanden Heuvel argues, there will be no hope for world peace.

Stuart Klawans recommends Trouble the Water, a documentary about the destruction of African-American New Orleans during and after Hurricane Katrina made by African-American New Orleanians in New Orleans during and after Hurricane Katrina. 

15 Sept– Stephen F. Cohen on the lives of people released from Stalin’s gulag; David Schiff on the opera Peter Grimes; a poem by Mahmoud Darwish.

22 Sept– The first of four consecutive issues to feature the name “Palin” on the cover.  Robert Grossman’s comic strip sets “The Legend of Flyboy McPlane” to music.  Margot Canaday reviews William Eskridge’s history of sodomy laws in America.

29 Sept– The cover is a spoof of the New Yorker’s now famous Oval Office cartoon.  After the jump, images. 

D. D. Guttenplan on a couple of books about the history and meaning of comic books; Paula Findlen on Giordano Bruno’s life, his philosophy, and the power of his story as a rallying point for anticlerical sentiment.

6 Oct– I’d always thought of the idea that the Hanoi regime had withheld American POWs at the end of the war as a sick delusion.  Sydney Schanberg gives reasons to think otherwise.  Apparently there is a great deal of evidence to the effect that such a thing did happen, and Crazy John McCain has behaved rather unpleasantly in his role as one of the chief figures in the official effort to hush that evidence up.  

13 Oct– Several contributors argue against the idea of bailing out major Wall Street firms, calling instead for an effort to rebuild the American economy from the bottom up. 

The New Yorker, 21 July 2008:

The original

 The Nation‘s take:

kind of interesting

Another, perhaps funnier, take:

A lovely couple