Olivier Roy, New Statesman

What the convulsions in Egypt and Tunisia show is that people in those countries have drawn the lessons of their own history. We have not finished with Islam, that is for sure, nor is liberal democracy the 'end of history', but we must at least learn to think of Islam in relation to an 'Arabic-Muslim' culture that today is no longer closed in on itself - if it ever was.

Niall Ferguson, Newsweek

Last week, while other commentators ran around Cairo's Tahrir Square, hyperventilating about what they saw as an Arab 1989, I flew to Tel Aviv for the annual Herzliya security conference. The consensus among the assembled experts on the Middle East? A colossal failure of American foreign policy. This failure was not the result of bad luck. It was the predictable consequence of the Obama administration's lack of any kind of coherent grand strategy, a deficit about which more than a few veterans of US foreign policy making have long worried.

Peter Singer, Project Syndicate

We should aim for our children to be good people, and to live ethical lives that manifest concern for others as well as for themselves. This approach to child-rearing is not unrelated to happiness: there is abundant evidence that those who are generous and kind are more content with their lives than those who are not. But it is also an important goal in its own right.