If you’re confronting an endless string of unread e-mails after a long weekend or summer vacation, try thinking of responding as a game. A status game.
Back in February, music historian Ted Gioia wrote an essay on the state of American culture. He argued that many creative people want to create art (work that puts demands on people), but all the commercial pressures push them to create entertainment (which gives audiences what they want). As a result, for the past many years, entertainment (superhero movies) has been swallowing up art (literary novels and serious dramas).
A year into Israel’s fight against Hamas, it has become clear that the military “centre of gravity” – the most important element of the conflict – is not the missiles or manpower of the terrorist group. Rather, it is the 650-plus kilometres of tunnels carved out under the Gaza Strip. From those tunnels, Hamas and its sponsor, Iran, were able to train, equip, organise and