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The article comments on the debate surrounding the movement to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel over its treatment of Palestinians.

The author discusses free speech and boycott movements in college campuses in the U.S. which focuses on Semitism and Zionism being experienced by several students around the world and mentions the approach of the government to manage such activities.

THE present-day obscurity of Joseph Alsop, a once-feared political pundit, is instructive in many respects, but especially in regard to the fleeting nature of power and fame in Washington. At one point during the Vietnam War, President Lyndon B. Johnson was reported to have commented, when he decided to deploy another 50,000 troops, ''There, that should keep Joe Alsop quiet for a while.'' David Auburn's play ''The Columnist,'' which opens on Broadway Wednesday at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, deftly portrays a series of events -- some real, some imagined -- in the life of one of mid-century Washington's most influential and almost impossibly opinionated commentators, a man whose career would rarely recognize any demarcation between the personal and the political. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As White House aides and Congressional leaders flood the media with dueling leaks about just how far President Obama was willing to go last summer to meet the budget-cutting demands of House Speaker John A. Boehner, many liberals have reacted with shock and horror at how much of their historic achievement the president appears to have been ready to bargain away. If a Democratic president could consider cutting America's shredded safety net further when unemployment remained stiffly high and the country was undergoing an explosion of inequality, was the ''liberal moment'' of American politics finally over? Yet Maryland recently became the eighth state to join the same-sex marriage club (which includes the District of Columbia). Rush Limbaugh was force-fed a triple helping of crow for his failed attempt at ''slut shaming,'' after opening up the gender gap again. Women, young people, college graduates and mixed-race Americans, surveys indicate, are spurning conservative arguments about contraception, same-sex marriage and sexual freedom. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Interviews Mark Lilla, a professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago in Illinois, about the attitude of intellectuals toward tyranny.

Presents several books on the ethnic history of Kosovo. `The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Post-Socialist Change,' by Katherine Verdery; `Imagining the Balkans,' by Maria Tedorov; `Balkan Ghosts,' by Robert D. Kaplan.

Deals with finding reasons for optimism about authoritarian regimes. Comments from Fareed Zakaria, the managing editor of Foreign Affairs magazine; Advantages of nondemocratic entities over dictatorships or illiberal democracy; Factors most closely associated with full-fledged liberal democracies.