There are plenty of people in East-Central Europe who would prefer the idealized American or the West European approach to the history of the last 100 years. They'd like to face forward and move on.

Salman Rushdie's memoir Joseph Anton rebels against the reduction of The Satanic Verses to an insult to Islam. I agree. But modern liberal democracies, freedom of thought and expression are impossible without the right to offend.

Hierarchies were the assumed order of organizational life, until people such as Warren Bennis made an unusual discovery more than a half-century ago: Democracy matters.

Hear from two of the world's most prominent North Korean dissidents and one of the world's most prominent North Korea experts.

Is there an alternative to ideological illusion and the rhetoric of evil? Yes, there is. We must remember our common human vulnerabilities and bring them into a collective conversation within which our existential anxiety can be held and better borne.

Sajjad Ghaderzah, 22, the son of Sakineh Ashtiani, an Iranian woman the regime has sentenced to death by stoning, has been "severely tortured" and rem...

I have always imagined that a totalitarian state would resemble Stalin's Soviet Union, but it has dawned on me lately that the most effective totalitarian regime would be one that no one (on the inside anyway) would recognize as such.