A rich and capacious second novel spreads across Ireland, India and America, but turns into a fable when it doesn’t quite come together

The wave of protests in American cities has been variously panned as leaderless, rudderless, purposeless... but perhaps America is rediscovering the messy nature of democracy

America has taken upon itself this last decade to reshape the world in its own disfigured image. Will it spend the next decade recoiling from the result?

Even ten years after 9/11, American popular culture continues to mimic the hollow piety of the political establishment. Granted the honourable exceptions

News of the World finally fell victim to its own perverted overreach, but there’s nothing to give hope that it won’t soon produce a clone

More than the sobering effect an ill-advised codename might have had on giddy Americans celebrating the Osama killing, it was a reminder of the country’s own historical injustices

At their heart, WikiLeaks and its future spawns represent an alternative architecture for democracy, putting power in the hands of many rather than a few

Indians are popping up on American television screens in new and still typecast ways, typically for the laughs they get. Watch awhile, though, and you know this is mostly about America coming to terms with emerging realities

What Obama has done to America is visible in what its comedians are saying. Take, for example, two avowedly apolitical rallies recently held in the US capital