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Related: Brooks on the democratization of snobbery
Earlier: Brooks on exurban sprawl, Frank on commercializing the counterculture

From the New York Times :

MOSCOW - Oleg Tinkov sees himself as something more than Russia's "beer oligarch," as he has been called here. The 36-year-old founder of Tinkoff Private Brewery sells no ordinary proletarian suds, but premium-priced brews, as well as a sense of home-grown hip, to Russia's growing class of young professionals. (Using the two-F French spelling of his name for the beer is meant to accentuate that.) Vodka may forever be identified as Russia's national drink, but Mr. Tinkov has been capitalizing on beer's increasing popularity here. In 2003, Russians drank 53.4 liters a person, up from 36.6 in 2000, and consumption is expected to keep growing about 4 percent to 6 percent a year. There is room to catch up: last year, the British drank 99 liters a person and Czechs, 160 liters.

MILLICAN, Ore. - Deep in the high desert of Central Oregon, on a lonely terrain thick with sage brush and juniper trees where there are far more antelope, bobcats and jack rabbits than people, lies one of America's tiniest towns. With its seven residents, all members of the Murray family, Millican's population is actually booming these days. For more than 60 years it was Oregon's one-man town, a dinky outpost with one store and two wooden cabins, where two different men were, for several decades each, mayor, postmaster, hotelier and lone resident. … But now Patricia and Jay Murray, a baker and a meat-slicer repairman originally from Portland, Ore., have resettled Millican with their children and young grandchildren, a stray cat and four chickens. … The Murrays are modern-day pioneers who are trying to get back the Millican post office, the Millican ZIP code and the old Millican way of life, as they piece together the strange history of this 80-acre town through newspaper clippings and clues they found scribbled on the walls of the old jail.

• China seems well on its way to having the world's largest economy. But there's at least one problem, says the New York Times . "China is on course to age faster than any major country in history, as its median age soars from about 32 today to at least 44 in 2040." China is aging even faster than graying Europe. "Put another way," the Times says, "China will get old before it gets rich." China's one-child-per-family policy may have worked too well—it restrained the size of the nation's population but left too few youth to replenish it. Article
  Earlier: China also has too many males (second item here)
• The modestly named Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy may be less inspiring than its predecessor, the bipartisan Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, but it figures to last longer, wrote Laurence Kaplan in a recent cover story in the New Republic. Kaplan quotes scholar and realist John Mearsheimer as saying, "Realists tend not to draw sharp distinctions between 'good' and 'bad' states, because all great powers act according to the same logic, regardless of their culture, political system, or who runs the government." Kaplan says this kind of pragmatism stems from Cold War diplomat extraordinaire George Kennan, but the centrist New Republic, which supported the invasion (and now wonders "Were We Wrong?" ultimately rejects such an outlook. Article The article is mostly about politics, but the more interesting question (posed four years ago in B&C) is about philosophy: what are the virtues and vices of pragmatism?

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