The governments of the Arab Gulf states have been skeptical of the Arab Spring. For many political observers this skepticism stemmed from the fact that most of these states enjoyed strong personal and political relations with the presidents of Egypt, Yemen and Syria.

It’s hard to escape Sarah Palin. On Facebook and Twitter, cable news and reality television, she is a constant object of dispute, the target or instigator of some distressingly large proportion of the political discourse. If she runs for president—well, brace yourself! But there is one place where a kind of collective resolve has been able to push her aside, make her a less suffocating presence than almost everywhere else: Alaska.

Last year, Karl Zéro, the madcap newsman/comedian who has been a fixture on French television for a decade, asked the sixty-one-year-old celebrity philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy why people hated him so.

Christopher Caldwell is the author of Reflections on the Revolution in Europe (Doubleday, 2009).

Once-roguish writer Will Self has come a long way from his days of bragging about snorting smack in the toilet of Tony Blair’s jet. His latest dispatch, Walking to Hollywood, sees the Brit-lit luminary blending a real-life non-narcotic obsession, urban psychogeography (the notion of walking as a subversive act), with his usual sesquipedalian flights of comedic fiction. But where his serrated satirical voice in 2009’s story collection Liver (mostly about habits that led to the detriment of the titular organ) sliced through page after page with deadly precision, Walking to Hollywood’s simplistic

In the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, an extraordinary photo came to light. Taken in 1971, it’s a holiday snapshot showing the Saudi bin Laden family on vacation in Sweden. There they are, twenty-two of them, with a healthy complement of brothers and sisters ranging from toddlers to tweens to twenty-somethings, posing in front of a big pink car, grinning and laughing, resplendent in crazy-patterned bell-bottoms and loud shirts. How could this family, looking so characteristic of its ’70s heyday—so Westernized, so likable, so much like us—have spawned the most virulent

Midway through Keith Richards’s largely genial Life, he uncorks a sudden barrage of invective against the film director Donald Cammell: “He was the most destructive little turd I’ve ever met. Also a Svengali, utterly predatory, a very successful manipulator of women. . . . Putting people down was almost an addiction for him.” Only the narcs and his frenemy Mick Jagger (mocked for his now infamous “tiny todger”) come in for comparable slagging off. Why Richards should harbor such animus against this relatively obscure figure will puzzle anyone unfamiliar with the seedier precincts of late-1960s