James Traub

A man who had won the Nobel Peace Prize, widely counted one of the greatest UN Secretary Generals, was nearly hounded from office by scandal. Indeed, both Kofi Annan and the institution he incarnates were so deeply shaken after the Bush Administration went to war in Iraq in the face of UN opposition that critics, and even some friends, began asking whether this sixty-year-old experiment in global policing has outlived its usefulness. Journalist Traub...

"The defining moment of Hubert Humphrey's life occurred on the evening of August 29, 1968, as he rose to accept the nomination as Democratic candidate for president at the International Amphitheater in Chicago. As Humphrey recited what he hoped would be healing verses from St. Francis--"where there is hate, let me sow love"--a contingent of National Guardsman began firing tear gas at thousands of demonstrators outside. "The whole world is watching,"...

"In the vertiginous era of Trump and Marine le Pen, liberalism's status is challenged. There is a widespread fear that liberal values, long taken for granted, are now in danger -- not only from authoritarian countries abroad, but also from a loss of faith inside the liberal world. What happened? Why did liberalism lose the majority support it once enjoyed? And what is so precious about liberalism in the first place? In What Was Liberalism?, award-winning...