Nikki Haley is poised to join Bobby Jindal as conservative Indian Americans running Deep South states. Tunku Varadarajan on how they’re exploding racial attitudes—and why the Dems don’t get it...

In spite of their rousing Silicon Valley credentials, Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina are emphatic outsiders—which makes their primary races the ones to watch Tuesday. Tunku Varadarajan rates their chances come November...

President Obama doesn’t own the BP spill; it owns him. Tunku Varadarajan on the politics of catastrophe...

By propagating a message that government can solve all ills, he made it easy to blame him. But it's BP's mess—and courts should decide the damages, says Tunku Varadarajan...

In his provocative new book, The Flight of the Intellectuals, Paul Berman criticizes liberals for refusing to stand against Islamic extremism and defend Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Tunku Varadarajan speaks to him about why ideas still matter...

In her new book, Nomad, Hirsi Ali tells of escaping to America and says the Muslim world needs a revolution in how it treats women and modernity. Tunku Varadarajan salutes her necessary and powerful words...

Voters’ judgment on Tuesday is likely to be cruel, says Tunku Varadarajan. But angry Republicans’ mutiny against wussy incumbents on primary day will help them beat the Democrats come November...

No one on Wall Street has been as prescient about the economic crisis as Nouriel Roubini. He talks with Tunku Varadarajan about his new book, Crisis Economics, why Goldman Sachs is wrong, and the future of England...

Now that Britain’s political wrangling has been sorted out, the country shouldn’t expect romance—just a solution to its fiscal mess. Tunku Varadarajan offers 10 post-election insights, from Brown’s dark cloud to the Liberal Democrats’ new status...

Gordon Brown's a dour loser and Nick Clegg's anti-U.S., so Americans should root for David Cameron: at least he's younger than Obama. Tunku Varadarajan's rough guide to the U.K. elections...

Last night on Charlie Rose, the Goldman CEO said everything people needed to hear about his firm's role in the financial meltdown—and he just may have kick-started the healing process between his firm and the American public...

Crass, grandstanding senators squared off against smug and evasive bankers. Tunku Varadarajan on how Goldman Sachs’ sorry performance on Capitol Hill proves Wall Street is on another planet...

The state's harsh new immigration law sanctions government intrusion that far exceeds any part of Obamacare—and yet some broader good may come of it....

The president invited ideas on financial reform in Thursday's speech. But his rush to shove through a bill shows his true colors. Tunku Varadarajan on why bad reform is worse than no reform at all...

The SEC’s complaint raises more than just legal questions about Goldman Sachs, says Tunku Varadarajan. And the moral case against the bank is open and shut—which means we all have a stake in overhauling Wall Street...

A new poll has forced The New York Times and liberal elites to admit Tea Partiers aren’t nuts—but rather passionate, educated, serious, and relatively prosperous.

It's time to end the sleazy whispering campaign against Karzai—and empower Hillary Clinton, America's best hope to salvage relations with Afghanistan.

John Paul Stevens’ retirement robs the Supreme Court of a courtly presence who believed in the limits of his power. Tunku Varadarajan on why Stevens was not as liberal as we think he was. Plus, Thomas Goldstein looks at the top six contenders for Stevens’ seat.

The president's new nuclear weapons policy is just the latest (should we call it “Jimmy-Cartesian”?) indication that he is determined to hasten the country’s decline, writes Tunku Varadarajan.

Prosecuting His Holiness for his complicity in the Catholic Church’s sex scandals is a terrible idea, writes Tunku Varadarajan. Pope Benedict can solve the church’s problems himself.

Fresh from her campaign stop to buck up John McCain, Sarah Palin is still enraging the left, and unreasonably enchanting the right. Tunku Varadarajan on why both sides get her wrong.

As the Supreme Court considers the explosive "Jason Smith question"—whether combat soldiers can sue the Ministry of Defense for breach of their human rights—one wonders what the case portends for future relations between Britain's Court and its governments. . . .

As the president prepares to meet with the Dalai Lama, controversial Tibetan activist Tenzin Tsundue talks about why Obama must stay strong with China, Google’s shameful history of censorship, and his time in a prison camp. . . .

As religious violence deepens in his home country, Nobel laureate and Nigerian political activist Wole Soyinka shares his unbridled thoughts on Islamic terrorism and why England is a “cesspit” with The Daily Beast’s Tunku Varadarajan. . . .

Instead of giving ground after a shock defeat in Massachusetts, Obama showed style and candor in his State of the Union speech—even if hectoring the Supreme Court justices was unseemly. . . .

What do the White House crashers have in common with Balloon Boy? . . .

Here is an attempt—at much shorter length—to prick a very contemporary kind of cant, that which has swollen the debate on climate change to ungovernable proportions. . . .

It was elegant, but would it kill him to endorse winning. . . .

On Tuesday evening, the world’s most consequential turbaned man, Manmohan Singh, will glide through White House security and take his place at a dinner table beside Barack and Michelle Obama. . . .

As the enormity of the actions of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan sinks in, we must ask whether we are confronting a new phenomenon of violent rage, one we might dub--disconcertingly--"Going Muslim." . . .

John Julius Norwich is an earnest and somewhat stiff-backed editor...

It all began on a Sunday evening...

What should one make of the tale of Stephen Farrell--the seemingly reckless New York Times reporter who was rescued by British soldiers on Sept. 9 after spending four days as a captive of the Taliban?...

Here are five thoughts--four whimsical, one relatively serious--on the beer summit at the White House, hosted by President Obama for Professor Gates of Harvard and Sergeant Crowley of the Cambridge Police, with Vice-President Biden in attendance...

On July 23, Henry Louis Gates—regarded at Harvard as America’s most eminent African-American academic—was cuffed and locked up for disorderly conduct by a Cambridge policeman named James Crowley.

Amid all the ululation for Michael Jackson, arguably the most squalid icon in the history of American civilization, let's not forget to pay heed--and tribute--to Farrah Fawcett...

As Pakistan fights for its survival against the barbarian Taliban--who would turn that fragile quasi-democracy into an Islamist state so extreme as to obliterate all girls' schools from the face of the land--its people find themselves possessed of a weapon with which to vanquish the forces of darkness...

Since 9/11, I've watched scores of grainy video films showing Islamist extremists doing what they do best--meting out barbaric punishment to adulterers, thieves and Jewish journalists, and murdering innocent people in Mumbai, Lahore and other places...

When I first picked up "The Hindus" -- a tome seemingly rich with scholarship and, at 780 hardbound pages, as hefty as the legendary demon Kumbhakarna -- I was struck most of all by the author's name on its cover: Wendy Doniger...

Remember the phrase "community organizer," plucked from his CV by Barack Obama and invoked as a pre-election boast?...

In an interview with The New York Times, published on March 8, President Obama appeared to suggest that his administration might be willing to talk to people in Afghanistan whom the newspaper characterized as the "more moderate elements of the Taliban."...

The city of Lahore was once the seat of an enviable Muslim civilization...

President Obama should rebuke Attorney General Holder...

In the hierarchy of life forms on this, our earth, the British tabloid journalist lies somewhere between the hagfish and the dung beetle...

Carlos Slim, by some accounts the world's richest man, has pumped 3,497,100,000 Mexican pesos ($250 million) worth of liquidity into the varicose veins of the Grey Lady...

By what immaculate design, what unearthly force of circumstance or plot, did it come to pass that an American pilot would land an Airbus on the Hudson just days before Barack Obama's inauguration as the first black president of the United States?...

Over the last week, many Americans (and Indians) have asked me why India does not "do a Gaza" on Pakistan, referring, of course, to an emulation of Israel's punitive use of force against Hamas-run Palestine, a territory from which rockets rain down on Israeli soil with reliable frequency (if not reliable destructiveness ... but that is not for want of Hamas intent)...

I have never met Caroline Kennedy, and given the trajectory of my life and career, I'm unlikely ever to do so...

We all know the narrative...

The terrorist assault on Mumbai has only just ended, and India has entered a period of urgent self-examination, bitter soul-searching--and increasingly acrid recrimination...

In his Facebook manifestation, hastily arranged in response to Barack Obama's resounding success with the Little Cyber-Platoons, John McCain was not merely unconvincing, he was plain silly--an old geezer out of his depth in an utterly alien milieu...

After watching Slumdog Millionaire, Danny Boyle's new movie about a young man's unlikely rise out of gut-churning poverty in India, I asked myself whether America had got itself, in Barack Obama, a "slumdog president."...

An unmanned spacecraft from India — that most worldly and yet otherworldly of nations — is on its way to the moon...

If Barack Obama becomes president, he will not only be the most powerful black man in the history of mankind; his presence in the White House will also mean that for the first time in that same history, a black man will be the most powerful person on earth...

"Barack" and "Obama": Never before in American politics have words quite so outlandish come quite so close to the White House (although a spirited case can be made for "Gamaliel" and "Milhous.")...

Starting today, the United Nations' headquarters in New York turns into a caravanserai for the world's presidents, prime ministers and panjandrums...

I knew Paul Theroux could turn a phrase, but I hadn't realized that he could turn heads, too...

When a friend of mine -- let's call him Manhattan Man -- told me that he was going to Yankee Stadium for a game, I couldn't help but think that an outing such as his would drive some English friends of mine to suicide...

Coke, G.E., and McDonald's will get global exposure from the Beijing Olympics...

IN the blink of an eye, India has gone from faith, prudence and chastity to ... Brittany, Courtney and Tiffani...

Just when the American public, in an inversion of the old saw about economists, was thinking that the Bush administration professes to know the "value" of everything but the "cost" of nothing, along come Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes - two economists - to restore aphoristic order...

At what point on the continuum from marginality to assimilation to celebrity does an ethnic or racial icon become an American icon?

On finishing this earnest and entertaining book (yes, it’s possible to be both), my first reaction was to slap the author – metaphorically – on the back for refusing to deploy the word “Chindia” in his text...

Two academics – one at Britain’s Warwick university, the other at America’s Dartmouth College – have surveyed 2m men and women in 80 countries and come up with the finding that human happiness, plotted on a graph from infancy to dotage, is U-shaped...

Cricket these days is never far from tumult, some of it the result of on-field shenanigans, some the by-product of more tectonic events that occur beyond the boundary...

My son came of age this Christmas - or, put another way, emerged from the Jurassic park that was once his mind - and this has made me rather sad...

Yesterday I received an e-mail from a dear friend of mine, an Old Etonian in Edinburgh with free time on his hands. “Hello Monkey Boy,” it began, charmingly, “Tell me - does this recent spat between Australia and India mean that I am no longer allowed to address you as 'monkey'?”

An e-mail plopped into my BlackBerry, one recent mid-afternoon, with the word ''Pubs'' in the subject line...

The millions of people of Indian origin living in North America and Europe face a conundrum this holiday season: what to take, or send home, to relatives in India?

When Governor Eliot Spitzer of New York offered, in late September, an “administrative policy change” that would have enabled illegal aliens to apply for state drivers’ licences, he set off a furious revving of political engines that has still not quietened down...

There is much less guile in the pages of Monty Panesar’s writing than one would find in a single over bowled by him in a cricket match...

Over the years, in the insular world of New York journalism, Charles Gasparino has developed a reputation for being a difficult man to work with – and in saying that, I pay him a compliment...

The Presidential Medal of Freedom - America's highest civilian honour - has gone to historians, astronauts, spies, jazz musicians, matinee idols, philosophers, soldiers, activists, novelists, boxers, televangelists, architects, businessmen, politicians (a depressing number), painters and even newspaper editors...

One doesn't interview a man like Milton Friedman -- the Nobel laureate in economics in 1976 and among the five or six most consequential thinkers of the 20th century -- without doing some assiduous homework…

When I telephone him at our agreed mid-morning hour, L. Paul Bremer III—or “Jerry,” as he’s known more informally—seems just a little stressed. . . .

Yesterday, I got an email from a prominent conservative academic; it was, I think, a touch harsh on the object of its attention. . . .

David Frum, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, no longer works for the American Enterprise Institute, a free-market think tank in Washington. . . .

So the Democrats have a health-care win in the House—a win that could prove mighty Pyrrhic. . . .

Sitting for an interview with the network the White House loathes, the president was evasive when asked whether he supported a “deem and pass” vote on health care, but he and Fox News’ Bret Baier were civil, even in disagreement, Tunku Varadarajan says. . . .

The social-networking giant has opened its first-ever office in Asia—in the country where being all up in one another's business is practically a birthright. . . .

Long a target of liberal enmity for his role in the Clinton-Lewinsky probe, the former independent counsel is now taking on a cause the left can applaud. . . .

The Oscar-winning war drama provides a timely reminder: America’s army is fighting so that Iraqis might live free. . . .

The critics will escalate their grumbling ahead of Sunday’s vote, and there will be more violence. . . .

Six and a half hours, two meals, a tub of ice cream, a gallon of coffee and 20 sheets of scribbled notes after the televised “bipartisan health-care summit” began, I still ask myself the question that popped into my head within minutes of the summit’s start: What on earth was President Obama thinking when he decided to convene this weird little powwow? . . .

The indignant call for "bipartisanship" today is from people who want to pass health-care legislation over the equally indignant objections of many, many, many Americans. . . .

From Jane Hamsher and Ezra Klein to Kos and Krugman, Tunku Varadarajan counts down the most influential left-wing journalists in the country. . . .

From Instapundit and Laura Ingraham to O’Reilly and Beck, Tunku Varadarajan counts down the most influential right-wing media figures in the country. . . .

The biggest problem with 2009’s megabonuses is economic, not moral. Tunku Varadarajan on how Wall Street made money soaking savers and taxpayers, rather than adding value. . . .

The new policy requiring stepped-up security for some countries is a start. . . .

The New York Post, feisty Boswell of the Big Apple, chronicles a delicious battle in Brooklyn between Hasidic Jews and hipsters. . . .

It was elegant, but would it kill him to endorse winning? . . .

GUESTS: Co-host Tunku Varadarajan, DailyBeast.com; David Drucker, Roll Call; Matt Murray, Roll Call; Eric Dash, The New York Times; Laurence Norman, FT

Co-host Bob Zimmerman, author; Tunku Varadarajan, DailyBeast.com; Scott Horowitz, astronaut; John Bolton, AEI...

GUESTS: Co-hosts Gordon Chang, Forbes.com and Jeff Bliss, BlissIndex.com; Tunku Varadarajan, DailyBeast.com; Mary Kissel, AWSJ...

Varadarjan discusses his Daily Beast article "The Irrefutable Moral Case Against Goldman..."

Tunku Varadarajan discusses his column in The Daily Beast, “The Irrefutable Moral Case Against Goldman..."

Nouriel Roubini is always dressed in black-and-white...

Today, with great gusto, we relaunch the Opinions channel of Forbes.com...

There's something very English about the way William Hague's eyes light up when he spies crab cakes on the menu at a Midtown Manhattan bistro...

"He's really a . . . the Wall Street Journal's editorial page wouldn't describe him as such . . . but he's really a corporate Democrat. His record in the Senate is not one of challenging corporate power."...

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino praised Pakistan for setting a definite date to hold parliamentary elections...