Greece

Danny Heitman on PBS’s ‘The Durrells on Corfu’ and the island childhood that inspired Gerald Durrell’s career.

The failed Macedonia referendum.

Christopher Caldwell on the euro and the damage it wrought.

People have been forecasting the end of the euro since the currency came into being in the late 1990s. Yet the euro has survived five sovereign bailouts—including three successive ones of Greece (the continent’s most troubled economy)—and two bank rescues aimed at Spanish and Cypriot banks. The…

Pleasure, war, and the mad torment of Lord Byron.

The daring exploits and beguiling charm of the 20th century’s greatest travel writer

Athens

Writing history, and especially the history of the ancient world, is an uncertain business, in which the truth is as elusive as in metaphysics. Modern historians of the classical world necessarily rely heavily on the works of the ancients. And the supreme historians among the ancient Greeks had to…

Athens

Athens

There is hardly a member of the European Union whose past is not more prosperous, secure, expansive, and influential than its present. During every age of European civilization, someone has held the upper hand, and lost it. Perhaps thanks to the maturity that comes of rising and falling, this…

There is hardly a member of the European Union whose past is not more prosperous, secure, expansive, and influential than its present. During every age of European civilization, someone has held the upper hand, and lost it. Perhaps thanks to the maturity that comes of rising and falling, this…

Something remarkable happened in classical Greece, but we didn't know about it until very recently. Against all historical odds, they nourished a successful class of entrepreneurs and became wealthy.

Something remarkable happened in classical Greece, but we didn’t know about it until very recently. Against all historical odds, they nourished a successful class of entrepreneurs and became wealthy.

Athens

George Papaconstantinou has been through hell. His reputation as the finance minister who cowrote and signed Greece’s first bailout agreement with the eurozone in the spring of 2010 cost him his cabinet post the following year and his parliament seat the year after that. He spent the next three…

A beautifully carved marble votive relief of Asklepios, the god of medicine, leaning on his staff welcomes us as we enter The Greeks: Agamemnon to Alexander at the National Geographic Museum. The noble procession of the god and his children confronting a group of worshippers echoes, on a small…

Few cultural experiences can match that moment when, for the first time, you approach the great Pergamon Altar in Berlin. Because it is famous, but not as famous as the Ara Pacis or the Elgin Marbles, many visitors will encounter it in complete ignorance that something so big or so imposing has…

Europe’s migrant crisis, the continent’s greatest humanitarian disaster since the aftermath of World War II, continues to worsen. The summer began with mass drownings in the Mediterranean and bickering between the European Union and the governments of its member states over who should foot the bill…

Is America, or Illinois, or Chicago the next Greece? The answers are “Yes, if .  .  . ,” “No, but .  .  . ,” and “Perhaps.” Greece joined what was then the European Economic Community even though it had no business applying for admission, and the existing members had no business allowing it entry,…

A mass outbreak of syphilis, the radical economist and member of parliament Costas Lapavitsas told an interviewer, is about the only thing the European political establishment did not threaten Greece’s voters with before the country’s early-July referendum. 

Greece ill-temperedly rattles a tin cup, desperate for another handout from the European Union but feeling far more anger than gratitude toward its would-be benefactors.

The vote in Greece is running 60 percent “No” on the terms of its creditors.  The same experts who had been predicting a close vote will now explain why it was a runaway in favor of … well, who knows.  But count on the usual confident voices to sort it all out.  

One reads of the crisis in Greece.   And the one much closer to home in Puerto Rico.  The crisis, that is, that inevitably comes after spending too much and taking on more debt than it is possible even to service, much less pay down. One thinks of how unfortunate it is for the people who will now…

The crisis in Greece remains … a crisis.  After five years, during which time everyone who was paying attention said it was a crisis.  And, of course, the crisis went unresolved. The end game may come soon but, then, who knows?  But there seems to be a consensus of sorts building around the idea…

We have been hearing, for so long now, that the end is nigh in the crisis of the Greek economy that it is hard to take another such warning seriously.  The problem of Greece, like so many others, seems to have no end, no resolution and, even, no point. Unless, that is, you are a citizen of Greece.…

In Athens in mid-January, two weeks before the election that would make 40-year-old engineer Alexis Tsipras Greece’s new prime minister, a bunch of cleaning ladies explained to me why they planned to vote for his party, the Coalition of the Radical Left (Syriza, for its Greek acronym). We met where…

Not that long ago, the world’s central bankers rushed to rescue a small nation with a colorful history and a very troubled economy.  How everything, but everything, came to depend on the survival of Greece’s economy was never quite clear but the crisis went away. 

A chart from the Republican side of the Senate Budget Committee shows that "U.S. Per Person Debt [Is] Now 35 Percent Higher than that of Greece."

September 12 was a momentous day for Europe. It saw three separate events that in a powerful way may come to remake the European Union.  First, Germany’s Constitutional Court ruled that the nation’s parliament can ratify a new, permanent rescue fund for the eurozone, called the European Stability…

The New York Times profiles the mayor of Thessaloniki, Yiannis Boutaris, the Scott Walker of Greece:

A male Greek politico attacked two female politicians on national television:

A Jerusalem Post reporter in Athens, Greece was reportedly beat up by thugs last night. 

Debtors of the world, unite—you have nothing to lose but your IOUs!

The tide sweeping from Greece across Europe and into the United States is washing away support for austerity, in some cases reinforcing opposition to it, largely from the left. President Obama is delighted at this support for his refusal to cut spending in the face of mounting deficits, and the…

The Republican Senate Budget Committee will release this new chart later today, showing that the "U.S. Spends More Per Person Than Portugal, Italy, Greece, Or Spain."

This business with Greece goes on and on, and one begins to think, automatically, of Sisyphus and his rock. Only in this case, you start pulling for the rock.

The Republican side of the Senate Budget Committee will release this chart later today, clearly showing that America's debt is greater than the combined debt of the entire Eurozone and the U.K.:

The Hill: "Dick Armey: Gingrich campaign turned into 'first-rate vendetta' against Romney"

There are good days and bad days, but even on the good days the abyss is never too far away. The eurozone’s dangerously original mix of innovation, incoherence, and unaccountability makes it difficult to identify a single event that could finally push it over the edge. But, with confidence already…

Greece and Italy may be ungovernable, but America is ungoverned. The president ducked out of the country for an Asian tour while the supercommittee tried to reach agreement on a plan to cut the deficit. But the Democrats refused to offer specific cuts in entitlement spending, despite a Republican…

Mario Monti’s appointment as prime minister of Italy has given some hope to observers of the current crisis in the eurozone. Monti, a former student of Nobel Prize winning economist James Tobin at Yale and president of the Bocconi University in Milan, has strong academic and policy credentials.…

Greece is a far away country about which we know very little, as Neville Chamberlain described Czechoslovakia right before developments there brought the world closer to World War II. France has not been a great friend in recent times of America—remember Freedom Fries?—so its travails aren’t…

Capital New York: "Bloomberg: ‘Plain and simple,’ Congress caused the mortgage crisis, not the banks"

Financial Times: "Greece approves austerity bill on first reading"

Rupert Murdoch: "The Steve Jobs Model for Education Reform"

We are all Europeans now. Doubt that—and just try to get news about the American economy on the financial news networks on any morning. No luck. Lots of talk about German chancellor Angela Merkel’s balancing act—trying to keep from being turfed out of office, while still sending Germans’…

Fred Barnes, with Juan Williams and Charles Krauthammer, last night on Fox News: 

Billion by billion by billion, showdown by argument by ultimatum, Greece’s latest bailout is being put together by those who run the eurozone. The country’s finances are so bad, and its prospects so poor, that even the new $159 billion rescue package announced on Thursday will (assuming it comes…

Flotilla organizers are always insistent that their mission to break Israel's naval blockade of Gaza is strictly humanitarian. So although the latest flotilla has been prevented from leaving Athens by Greek authorities, one might think that the organizers would at least be willing to accept…

The AP reports that the latest flotilla has been prevented from sailing to Gaza by Greek authorities:

As thousands protest in the streets, Greek lawmakers "approved a controversial package of tax hikes and spending cuts, helping clear the way for $17 billion in international emergency loans needed to stave off a possible default," the Washington Post reports.

President Barack Obama spent over a trillion dollars on projects he claimed were  “shovel-ready” and would prevent the unemployment rate from reaching 8 percent. Federal Reserve Board chairman Ben Bernanke obligingly printed $600 billion with which to buy the president’s IOUs, predicting that…

Although Greek prime minister George Papandreou survived a vote of confidence last night, meeting the conditions required by the IMF for the disbursement of another tranche of aid to its ailing economy, parliament will have to pass another austerity package later this month.

"My question is, what the hell was the Secret Service agent driving the limo doing drinking a Slurpee while on duty?"

Reading this piece on Greece's debt-ridden rail system in today's Times, I was struck by these lines: