Now that Uruguay's striker Luis Suarez was caught on video again last night, this time sinking his teeth into Italy's defense player Giorgio Chiellini, he could face a lengthy ban from playing soccer if convicted. But Suarez's bite poses larger questions: Is football (my American friends will forgive me for not calling it soccer) a continuation of war with other means? Is it a clash of cultures? And are there national traits that each team expresses in its soccer style?
Non-US authors often go unnoticed in the United States. But Thomas Piketty, the French economist who wrote "Capital in the 21st Century" ("Le Capital au XXIe siècle") has become an economic superstar overnight, and his book an Amazon bestseller. His basic claim, that inequality in the United States has become so excessive that it endangers the superpower's economic foundation and vitality, not to speak of the American Dream, has hit like a bomb and rocked the US establishment; virtually unprecedented for an economist, and for a French author at that, ever since Alexis de Tocqueville wrote about America in the 19th century. But is Piketty right?
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