China v. India:

Gurcharan Das entitles his op-ed piece in today's New York Times "The Next World Order," but the interesting part of it is the comparison between how the two nations function. China's economy is tightly controlled by the state, while India's economy works, according to Das, in spite of the government.

Das describes a Chinese friend and business associate befuddled by the Indian attitudes about the recent terrorist attack in Mumbai. The Indian people were angrier at their own government than they were at the terrorists. For Indians, terrorism seems an unfortunate but "futile sideshow."

Notable essays online:

Michael Lewis's "The End," in Porfolio.

Christopher Caldwell's "The Unwisdom of Crowds," in The Weekly Standard.

"Professor X's" "In the Basement of the Ivory Tower," in The Atlantic.

John B. Judis's "American Adam," in The New Republic.

The last of these is about America's and American's ability to re-invent themselves. In the essay, Judis compares Barak Obama with Ronald Reagan, something that has become popular to do among pundits. Judis describes Obama's ability to draw massive, admiring crowds, but this was never something that Reagan was able to do. True, "The Great Communicator" won two elections by huge margins, but even at his most well known speech, the Berlin Wall speech, his crowd was relatively small, perhaps only one-third the size that JFK spoke to, and Reagan's crowd was specially screened and appeared as a carefully orchastrated event by the German government.

In terms of popularity at the beginning of an administration, LBJ seems a more appropriate person to compare Obama with. But in terms of re-invention, maybe Reagan works. He certainly re-invented himself. Obama, on the other hand, hasn't so much re-invented himself as he seems to be a rebirth of an ideal that may never have existed.