The Current Discussion: All four Oscars for best acting went to non-Americans. Is Hollywood's cultural hegemony finally breaking up? Or are we Hollywoodizing foreign talents like Javier Bardem and Marion Cotillard?

It is easy to elevate the importance of Hollywood to fictional heights and then reach a positive, but superficial, answer to both questions, and then shrug it all off by saying, Who cares? The question carries a presumption of an American monopoly over the art of cinema, although India is the top producer of films. The annual awards ceremony of the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is essentially a domestic affair and a celebration in America’s production centre of its top export.

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The Current Discussion: With the Israeli re-invasion of Gaza, it's clear that the "Annapolis Peace Process" is collapsing. Does it matter? Who's to blame?

The Annapolis Peace Process was dead at birth. It was conceived as an American project for internal politics. The cause of death is the obvious defective design of a hasty and illogical desire to decouple from the past. It might be a flashback to 1947, when Britain withdrew from the Mandate of Palestine and announced that it could not reach a solution acceptable to both Arabs and Jews. Thereafter the young U.N. General Assembly resolved to create two countries alongside each other, with Jerusalem as a specially designated city of equal access. Nevertheless, Israel declared independence and the complicated problem remains alive some sixty years later. (Didn’t we see a re-run of this show in Kosovo a mere two weeks ago?)

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The Current Discussion: New York State governor Eliot Spitzer admits he hired a prostitute. Should people care, and why?

The election process is about public trust as well as law and order. The public invests its trust in a legally defined bond with that person to carry out the duties spelled out in the law and compliance with it. The case of Mr. Spitzer and his suspected involvement in aiding the interstate sex industry, a crime under American laws, is a stark reminder of limits that test the abuse of trust. Unlike Bill Clinton, it seems that Mr. Spitzer did in fact inhale!

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The Current Discussion:The global economy is quaking. Are we heading toward a global recession? Who's to blame?

The chain reaction in progress can be best described as a “deleveraging” of American finances. It is a uniquely Anglo-American development, not a global problem, and is likely to continue for two or three years before fundamental stability and realistic valuations fall in place. Alas, recession is a rusty description, originally coined for industrial economies. It is a misnomer for today’s American finances and post-industrial economy, isolated into a unique set of presumptions: rampant consumerism, service-based revenues, presumed constants in long-term forecasts (say, price of commodities or consumer demand), and herd behavior (mislabeled as competition); all glued together with liberal amounts of debt and stitched up with hype.

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