This week on theamericanconservative.com, Daniel Larison evaluated the vice presidential debate, Bill Kauffman made the case for voting third party, and Daniel McCarthy questioned Romney’s big foreign policy speech. Glenn Arbery profiled a small farmer, and Ted Galen Carpenter remembered the long history of hawks roosting on Capitol Hill.

Scott McConnell wished for a bit of daylight between Romney and Israel and dissected the Andrew Sullivan meltdown, while Alan Jacobs and Rod Dreher parsed a new Pew report on the religiously unaffiliated. Scott Galupo assessed the polling on Romney’s last best shot, Larison took the WSJ’s editorial page to task for calling for intervention in Syria, and Jacobs pointed out the flaws in civic literacy surveys.

Noah Millman and Dreher reflected on repetitive versus spontaneous prayer, Dreher considered French racism, and Larison doubted Paul Ryan’s foreign policy fluency. Pat Buchanan made the case for a deal with Iran and warned against intervention in Syria. Kelley Vlahos reported on marijuana legalization‘s tipping point.

Rod Dreher contemplated Paris, American culinary habits, and the virtues of travel. He also noted the gradual death of Catholicism in Austria and a posthumous pedophile scandal in the United Kingdom. Jacobs reflected on twentysomething life, and Samuel Goldman questioned David P. Goldman’s optimism about the restorative potential of a Romney presidency.

Philip Giraldi highlighted the corruption in the uppermost echelons of the military, and Timothy Stanley reviewed David Johnson’s John Randolph of Roanoke.

Larison questioned the importance of vice-presidential debates, justified America’s neutrality on the Falkland Islands dispute, and analyzed neoconservative misunderstandings of the Georgian election.