One of my favorite lines in literature is from Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises:

“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.

“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”

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Again, on vacation, so no extended thoughts, just seedlings of different things:

Historians drawing interesting, though only moderately so, connections between our age and different...

One way to think about the modern world--say, the world that was "sketched out" in the 19th century and then "filled in" in the 20th--was that it saw, fundamentally, the rise of the middle class. ...

It's weird to see stories like these, suggesting that al-Qaeda may be having a hard time staying afloat.  This piece by the Brookings Institution's Daniel Byman is a nice backgrounder to the...

For a long time, evangelical numbers in Latin America have been growing.  As this article points out, "the share of the population in Bolivia who are Protestant has increased from 7.6% in 1985 to an...