A chara, - Conor McCarthy (September 20th) asks where your spokesperson for the American left is. Instead of an anti-Steyn bleating on about John Kerry, I think you need someone who can write with understanding about the roots of the upsurge in global instability.
Mark Steyn is mostly a clown but he does represent a very important US constituency. What he doesn't do is explain the context in which terrorism flourishes. Terrorism is supposed to have just come out of nowhere, or suddenly mutated out of Islam.
Tom Humphries (Sports, September 13th) refers to the effects of what he calls "no-regrets capitalism" on Detroit. We need to understand whether or not "stability", "democracy" and "freedom" are compatible with the massive and sudden global economic changes of the past 15 or 20 years.
Across the Third World, peasants are being driven into unwelcoming cities. In the US and elsewhere, economic uncertainty has led many people to become newly religious. The processes which attract people to fundamentalism are in certain respects similar in both the US and the Third World.
I'd like to read a correspondent who can explore these links without resorting to caricature. - Is mise,
CATHAL RABBITTE, Adliswil, Switzerland.