Speaking of books you've got to read, we're barely a month away from the release of the best foreign-policy volume of 2008, Heads In The Sand by Matthew Yglesias. No commentator has been as prescient for as long about the structural and political barriers to an intellectual rebirth of liberal internationalism among the foreign-policy establishment. No commentator has been as eloquent for as long at identifying the failures of Democratic foreign-policy thinking. No commentator has been as ruthless for as long at eviscerating the abject failure of conservative foreign-policy thinking.

It's important that liberalism enter the age of Obama. Clearly, something fundamental is changing on the American left. A clear symptom of this is the rise of Yglesias and (to borrow a phrase from Schlesinger) the destruction of the old order. It's true that the author is my roommate and my friend, but Heads In The Sand introduces the new liberalism to its new Neibuhr: its herald, its intellectual backbone, its wit, its ideological mailed fist.