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Deng Xiaoping was a dictator, right? After all, he was the Communist Party boss of China from 1978 to 1992. He was not elected. He ruled through fear. He approved the massacre of protesters at Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989.

But he also led China in the direction of a market economy that raised the standard of living and the degree of personal freedoms for more people in a shorter period of time than perhaps ever before in recorded economic history. For that achievement, one could arguably rate Deng as one of the greatest men of the 20th century, on par with Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt.

So is it fair to put Deng in the same category as Saddam Hussein, or even Hosni Mubarak, the leader of Egypt

In the first case, I refer to the fact that we are not some ideal Bayesian-updating computer, but in fact rely primarily on a ton of mental shortcuts that are usually useful but can and do often lead us systematically awry.

In the second case, I refer to the fact that deliberation and making choices consume energy, just as surely as physical exercise does.

Part of the reason Putin had replaced Boris Yeltsin in 2000 was Yeltsin's performance during the Kosovo war.

Putin also replaced Yeltsin because of the disastrous state of the Russian economy.

Under Yeltsin, however, Russia had become even poorer and was now held in contempt in international affairs.

when we’ve reached the point of marketing salt crystals as non-GMO, it may be time to take a deep breath, relax, and re-evaluate fears of genetic engineering.

Within the environmental movement, there are signs that genetically modified foods are beginning to receive a more balanced appraisal.

As the 41st Republican in an institution that requires 60 out of 100 votes to pass legislation, he’s had the power to stop, or at least massively slow down, everything from health care to financial reform. But Brown actually looms much larger than even this calculus would suggest. In his concerns, priorities, and, maybe most important, his confusion about the economy, Brown has come to represent the average voter in 2010. If Democrats are going to be successful this November, they’ll have to figure out a way to seize the territory that Brown currently holds.

A recent Globe poll illustrates the point nicely, crowning Brown the most popular politician in his overwhelmingly Democratic state. According to the poll, Brown’s favorable/unfavorable split is 55-18, versus 52-37 for Kerry and 54-41 for Barack Obama. Brown accomplishes this feat on the strength of his appeal to independents (55-11) and a surprisingly robust showing among Democrats (41-32). Given that Democratic candidates are highly unlikely to win many Republican votes this fall, they’ll have to limit their defections among Democrats and carry independents in order to hold Congress. Judged against Brown’s performance in Massachusetts, they are currently failing at this task.

The tower's air circulation system is equipped with sensors to detect what are known as volatile organic compounds (VOCs), and a rapidly evaporating substance like Purell is full of them.

That drooping feeling you get midway through a meeting in a crowded conference room may not be caused by boredom, but by too little oxygen circulating in an overpopulated space.

Do celebrity tenants and a shiny LEED label really mean as much as they seem, or will an exercise in enormity like the BOA building wind up being more of a feel-good project than a do-good one?

The Afghan War is the longest war in U.S. history. It began in 1980 and continues to rage. It began under Democrats but has been fought under both Republican and Democratic administrations, making it truly a bipartisan war. The conflict is an odd obsession of U.S. foreign policy, one that never goes away and never seems to end. As the resignation of Gen. Stanley McChrystal reminds us, the Afghan War is now in its fourth phase.

Of course, none of those media are dead, and neither is blogging. Instead, what's happened is that they've been succeeded by new forms that share some of their characteristics, and these new forms have peeled away all the stories that suit them best.

When all we had was the stage, every performance was a play. When we got films, a great lot of these stories moved to the screen, where they'd always belonged (they'd been squeezed onto a stage because there was no alternative). When TV came along, those stories that were better suited to the small screen were peeled away from the cinema and relocated to the telly. When YouTube came along, it liberated all those stories that wanted to be 3-8 minutes long, not a 22-minute sitcom or a 48-minute drama. And so on.

For me, the great attraction of all this is that preparing material for public consumption forces me to clarify it in my own mind. I don't really know it until I write it. Thus the more media I have at my disposal, the more ways there are for me to work out my own ideas.

"The creation, selection, promotion, and proliferation of numbers are … the stuff of politics," the editors write in their introduction. No debate lasts very long without a reference to data, and as the numbers boil their way into the argument, you must challenge them or be burned blind by them. The essays presented in Sex, Drugs, and Body Counts—about human trafficking, the Bosnian death count, the Darfur genocide, armed conflict, drugs, terrorism, and more—counsel exactly that sort of skepticism.

Often, the editors write, even the most rigorous-seeming statistics conceal squishy measurements. Inflated numbers are designed to create the sense that something must be done now. Depressed counts are intended to convince the recipients that the problem is too small to worry about. Whether it's body counts in Iraq or kilos of Colombian drugs, the creators and disseminators of the numbers usually have greater interest in their size than their veracity.

the drug bureaucracy spends extra billions to produce bigger numbers because the public associates "more" with "better."

Researchers performed six experiments that involved subjects trying out new tasks—including drawing an image from looking at its reflection in a mirror, and learning to type on a new kind of keyboard. The participants were asked how long it would take them to learn the task. They tended to be overconfident and thought they’d do better on the first try than they actually did.

But while Jennings and his crew were traveling with a North Kosanese unit, to visit the site of an alleged atrocity by U.S. and South Kosanese troops, they unexpectedly crossed the trail of a small group of American and South Kosanese soldiers. With Jennings in their midst the Northern soldiers set up an ambush that would let them gun down the Americans and Southerners. What would Jennings do? Would he tell his cameramen to "Roll tape!" as the North Kosanese opened fire? What would go through his mind as he watched the North Kosanese prepare to fire? Jennings sat silent for about fifteen seconds. "Well, I guess I wouldn't," he finally said. "I am going to tell you now what I am feeling, rather than the hypothesis I drew for myself. If I were with a North Kosanese unit that came upon Americans, I think that I personally would do what I could to warn the Americans." Even if it meant losing the story? Ogletree asked. Even though it would almost certainly mean losing my life, Jennings replied. "But I do not think that I could bring myself to participate in that act. That's purely personal, and other reporters might have a different reaction."

Jennings was made to feel embarrassed about his natural, decent human impulse. Wallace seemed unembarrassed about feeling no connection to the soldiers in his country's army or considering their deaths before his eyes "simply a story."

Meet the Press, moderated by Tim Russert, is probably the meatiest of these programs. High-powered guests discuss serious topics with Russert, who worked for years in politics, and with veteran reporters. Yet the pressure to keep things lively means that squabbling replaces dialogue.

A Google search for the phrase “America’s decline” turns up 42,500 hits. Comparisons to Rome and other once-powerful empires abound, as in Cullen Murphy’s popular 2007 book Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America. From the Tea Party right comes the constant, screeching cry that President Obama and the Democrats are “destroying America.” The National Intelligence Council itself, a few years ago, predicted the “erosion” of American power relative to China and India. Clearly, the most popular classical figure in America today is that high-strung Trojan lady, Cassandra.

Twenty-two years ago, in a refreshingly clear-sighted article for Foreign Affairs, Harvard’s Samuel P. Huntington noted that the theme of “America’s decline” had in fact been a constant in American culture and politics since at least the late 1950s.

What is particularly fascinating about these older predictions is that so many of their themes remain constant. What did our past Cassandras see as the causes of America’s decline? On the one hand, internal weaknesses—spiraling budget and trade deficits, the poor performance of our primary and secondary educational systems; political paralysis—coupled with an arrogant tendency toward “imperial overstretch.” And on the other hand, the rise of tougher, better-disciplined rivals elsewhere: the Soviet Union through the mid-'80s; Japan until the early '90s; China today.

China may be developing another organization to assist in reforming its state-owned enterprises (SOEs), according to media reports. China has long sought to improve the performance of its SOEs, and already has two such organizations tasked with conducting reforms. The emergence of this new group, called the Guoxin Asset Management Corp., underscores the importance Beijing places on salvaging its SOEs, legacies of the Maoist era that still hold influence in the country.

The advantage of this strategy is that it attempts to salvage productive sectors from a larger morass of inefficiency, state dependency and corruption. The disadvantage is that the consolidation process results in behemoth SOEs that are not well integrated or able to function as a whole, but that have a greater concentration of political power — mainly due to their $3.3 trillion worth of sales in 2009, and their role as major employers — and are able to preserve aspects of the state sector from private competition, demand continued public funds for support, and serve as vehicles for government officials’ pet projects, in turn squeezing private sector development.

As research libraries and archives are discovering, “born-digital” materials — those initially created in electronic form — are much more complicated and costly to preserve than anticipated.

archivists are finding themselves trying to fend off digital extinction at the same time that they are puzzling through questions about what to save, how to save it and how to make that material accessible.

Leslie Morris, a curator at the Houghton Library, said, “We don’t really have any methodology as of yet” to process born-digital material. “We just store the disks in our climate-controlled stacks, and we’re hoping for some kind of universal Harvard guidelines,” she added.

What Rand seems to have in mind (although she's none too clear about it) is the ideal of knowledge as a complete "logical" structure (logical in this sense meaning: integrated without contradiction). In this, Rand is mirroring Aristotle's ideal of knowledge as (in the words of Karl Popper) "an encyclopaedia containing the intuitive definitions of all essences, that is to say, their names together with their defining formulae."

there is a great deal of evidence that formal definitions are of little importance to understanding the meaning of words. Most words are learned unconsciously, without the aid of formal definitions or dictionaries.

she is not distinguishing whether those definitions are consciously formalized or are merely implicit and tacit. Yet if this is so, Rand needs to explain (1) how she knows this to be true; and (2) provide compelling evidence for her view.