[Above: DATW vehicles stand ready to begin their mission outside of Chez Jay's in Santa Monica, California.] Chez Jay

[Above: Rolf does some nifty macho stuff in an expedition Land Rover.] Study a four-wheel-drive car commercial from any time in the past 20 years, and you

The Drive Around the world

In the course of researching and promoting the Drive Around the World expedition, I recently had the opportunity to attend a meeting of the Los Angeles Adventurer

If you happen to be a K-12 teacher, here's a great opportunity to bring geography home to your students. As the Drive Around the World team drives to points overseas, you and your class can follow us using the education portion of our website. A prototype of this education website is online here , and...

After my Land Rover expedition announcement earlier this week, some folks wrote in to ask if the Golden Gate Bridge shot of the team and vehicles was doctored with Photoshop. It wasn't: That was just normal San Francisco fog. The above shot, however is doctored for a clearer view of the city. It also gives...

"Vulnerable or not, the United States is too powerful compared to the rest of the world, and the nature of the "war" it is fighting is too diffuse and long-term, for Americans not to return to some degree of complacency -- although they may never again reach the height of hubris that prevailed on September...

Late last year, while attending an elephant polo tournament in Thailand (that's no joke; see here ), I had the pleasure of meeting Christian Litz, who is a layman expert on the little-known (but very real) historical power-struggle between margarine and butter in Germany. I asked him some questions on the topic, which I reprint...

"Without this cloak of respectability, America will face a growing hostility around the world. During the Cold War, many nations disliked or disagreed with America --over Vietnam, for example -- but they despised the Soviet Union. The enemy of their enemy was, in the end, their friend. But today, with no alternative ideology and no...

"Ever since the Munich agreement and Pearl Harbor, with only a brief interruption during the decade after the Tet offensive, there has been a consensus that if Americans did not draw their defense perimeter far forward and confront foreign troubles in their early stages, those troubles would come to them at home. But because the...

Cowboys and Indians, Thai-style From the grounds of Thailand's premier cowboy resort, a displaced Kansan explores the mysteries of the Far East's Wild West. By Rolf Potts S tanding in the dusty stables of Pensuk Great Western cowboy resort, the wrangler sizes me up and tells me there's a problem. "You can't ride the horses,"...

"Democrats once dreamed of societies whose political autonomy rested firmly on economic independence. The Athenians idealized what they called autarky, and tried for a while to create a way of life simple and austere enough to make the polis genuinely self-sufficient. To be free meant to be independent of any other community or polis. Not...

"It was the discovery of black gold underneath the Arabian desert that provided the old religion with the means and wherewithal to revive its culture while Britain created new sultans and emirs to safeguard their newest and most precious commodity. Throughout the 20th century, the West, to safeguard its own economic interests, supported the most...

"The problem with most discussion of globalization is that too many experts treat it as a binary outcome: Either it is great and sweeping the planet, or it is horrid and failing humanity everywhere. Neither view really works, because globalization as a historical process is simply too big and too complex for such summary judgments....

"The future is already here -- it

"Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda followers may not represent Islam, and their statements and their actions directly contradict basic Islamic principles and teachings, but they do arise from within Muslim civilization, just as Hitler and the Nazis arose from within Christian civilization, so they must be seen in their own cultural, religious, and...

"So much of the best new thinking about society, economics, politics and philosophy in the last century came from America. Unhampered by the snobbery and exclusivity of much European thought, American thinkers vaulted forward -- courageous, innovative and determined to talk in a public language. But, unfortunately, over the same period, the mass media vaulted...

"The sheer horror of September 11 also conceals an important fact: By most measures, Islamic fundamentalism is the weakest of all the threats that globalization has yet faced. Socialism, the main ideological opponent of liberalism for most of the past century, combined a searing analysis of contemporary injustices with a compelling promise of a better...

"The entire view of the world that supported the markets' faith in globalization has melted down.