without his persistence and dedication, India would likely not have been on the brink of freedom when World War II began.

all the faults of Gandhi’s leadership style, his sanctimony and monumental stubbornness, would also play a part in exacerbating the tragedies of World War II and partition.

his collection of anecdotes about Gandhi’s attitudes toward European fascism is extremely damning

What Lelyveld describes as Gandhi’s increasing inflexibility—owing to his allegiance “to the dictates of his ‘inner voice’”—is unquestionably one of the reasons that the eventual British departure from India was more violent and tragic than it had to be.

Gandhi’s political-spiritual program was entirely unrealistic and quickly became obsolete. “Not only did he reject birth control and recommend abstinence as a means of limiting population,” Lelyveld writes, “but he had no scheme that addressed glaring inequalities in land ownership and distribution beyond a wishful, wooly theory of ‘trusteeship’ that basically relied on the benevolence of the wealthy.” As the Indian scholar Sunil Khilnani once wrote, Gandhi] “assumed that the village could continue as a productive unit [in the absence of caste], a debatable judgment at the very least. It also led him to believe that caste could be dissolved through pressure of moral argument and example—in contrast to Nehru, for whom industrialization and the social relations it set in place were both essential practical solvents of the bonds of caste.” Gandhi’s romanticization of rural and village life will never be a solution to the problems of Indian society.

that’s just the point about making exceptions to moral imperatives that should remain exceptionless — like Lincoln’s absolute condemnation of torture, or the condemnation of sexual degradation as a weapon of war, or the judicial killing of an innocent person to keep the peace.

These things must never be done. To put such moral boundaries on the same level as legal niceties about sovereignty or the need for a warrant reveals a profoundly flawed sense of proportion.

The point is that once you are willing to cross the line of absolutely wrong, you must answer impossible questions: How many people must be endangered; how certain must we be of the danger; how sure must we be that this is the person who can lead us to the bomb and that the torture will work on him? What if the terrorist who planted the bomb is immune to torture or beyond our reach, but his young child is not? May we torture the child if that will make the terrorist talk? And how certain must we be that that will work?

what we’re experiencing right now is a top-down disaster. The policies that got us into this mess weren’t responses to public demand. They were, with few exceptions, policies championed by small groups of influential people — in many cases, the same people now lecturing the rest of us on the need to get serious. And by trying to shift the blame to the general populace,

What happened to the budget surplus the federal government had in 2000? The answer is, three main things. First, there were the Bush tax cuts, which added roughly $2 trillion to the national debt over the last decade. Second, there were the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which added an additional $1.1 trillion or so. And third was the Great Recession, which led both to a collapse in revenue and to a sharp rise in spending on unemployment insurance and other safety-net programs.

The real story of Europe’s crisis is that leaders created a single currency, the euro, without creating the institutions that were needed to cope with booms and busts within the euro zone. And the drive for a single European currency was the ultimate top-down project, an elite vision imposed on highly reluctant voters.

A truly free society is not simply one that limits the power of the central government; many times in history, central governments have defended the liberty of non-elites against the coercions of well-­organized local power brokers. In American history, freedom for African-Americans did not evolve spontaneously. It required first a bloody civil war to end slavery and then intervention by the federal government a century later to bring about the end of legal segregation.

He is necessarily a moral relativist, since he does not believe that there is a higher perspective from which one person can dictate another’s ends. Morality for him is more like a useful coordinating device than a categorical imperative. But surely the Western tradition that Hayek celebrates is as concerned with virtue as with freedom, whether from the standpoint of Christianity or that of classical republicanism. One searches in vain through this or any of his other books for a serious treatment of religion or the moral concerns that animate religious ­believers.

Hayek made the slipperiest of slippery slope arguments: the smallest move toward the expansion of government would lead to a cascade of bad consequences that would result in full-blown authoritarian socialism. If anything, however, the history of the past 50 years shows us that the slippery slope has all sorts of ledges and handholds by which we can brake our descent into serfdom and indeed climb back up.

the reaction to the end of the cold war was a classic moment in conservatism's divide. I was relieved we no longer had to fight a global war, with all the draining of resources and fraught spasms of McCarthyism and far leftism it created. Others - mainly neocons - were desperate to fight another war. They picked China first, but then Jihadism took its place. There is a conservatism of nonviolence and a conservatism of violence.

the reaction to the end of the cold war was a classic moment in conservatism's divide. I was relieved we no longer had to fight a global war, with all the draining of resources and fraught spasms of McCarthyism and far leftism it created. Others - mainly neocons - were desperate to fight another war. They picked China first, but then Jihadism took its place. There is a conservatism of nonviolence and a conservatism of violence.

the reaction to the end of the cold war was a classic moment in conservatism's divide. I was relieved we no longer had to fight a global war, with all the draining of resources and fraught spasms of McCarthyism and far leftism it created. Others - mainly neocons - were desperate to fight another war. They picked China first, but then Jihadism took its place. There is a conservatism of nonviolence and a conservatism of violence.

the fact that huge numbers of kids are passing through school systems and not learning basic literacy drives home the fact that districts also need to take checking to see if the kids are learning anything more seriously. That means tests, and since it’s good to be able to compare different schools to one another that means standardized tests. It’s a limited tool, it shouldn’t be the sole criterion on which the effectiveness of anything is measured, but it’s also an important one.

“We must recognize that security means more than defense,” they write. After ending the 20th century as the world’s most powerful country, “we failed to recognize that dominance, like fossil fuel, is not a sustainable form of energy.”

In their paper, the officers argue that the United States has to move from “containment” — the foreign policy established after World War II to limit the expansion and influence of the Soviet Union — to what they call “sustainment” or sustainability.

The first priority, they write, should be “intellectual capital and a sustainable infrastructure of education, health and social services to provide for the continuing development and growth of America’s youth.”

we have a tendency to see history as driven by deep historical forces. And sometimes it is. But sometimes it is driven by completely inexplicable individuals, who combine qualities you would think could never go together, who lead in ways that violate every rule of leadership, who are able to perpetrate enormous evils even though they themselves seem completely pathetic.

Analysts spend their lives trying to anticipate future threats and understand underlying forces. But nobody could have possibly anticipated Bin Laden’s life and the giant effect it would have.

“Oil companies basically own the whole gulf region,” Safina writes, viewing American addiction to petroleum, indifference to greenhouse gases and political genuflection to the oil lobby as more disturbing than the failure of supposedly foolproof devices to prevent the blowout.

Lax federal regulation, BP’s obsession with profit over safety, and management arrogance led, Safina writes, to a “chain disaster” in which several problems, none of which alone would have been fatal, amplified one another. In his book “Normal Accidents,” the sociologist Charles Perrow argued that when complex technology meets large corporate and government hierarchies, lack of accountability will lead inexorably to destructive failures of systems that might have been operated safely. The gulf oil spill surely was that.

As “A Sea in Flames” progresses, its author undergoes several conversions. Expecting to find evidence of terrible harm to the gulf biosphere, instead he finds only mild problems. Expecting to discover that the dispersants caused widespread marine death, instead he discovers that by breaking up crude, these chemicals speeded the oil’s natural decomposition. After Allen and Lubchenco grant him an interview, Safina switches ground and decides they are not as bad as he thought.

Officials here want this Boston suburb to become the first city in the United States to systematically track people’s happiness. Like leaders in Britain, France and a few other places, they want to move beyond the traditional measures of success — economic growth — to promote policies that produce more than just material well-being

To draw up its questions, Somerville turned to a neighbor, Daniel Gilbert, a Harvard psychology professor who wrote the 2006 best seller “Stumbling on Happiness.” Dr. Gilbert, who donated his time, is also helping the city do a more detailed telephone survey, using a randomized sample of Somerville’s 76,000 residents.

The survey that was mailed with the census asks people to rate the nuts-and-bolts aspects of their communities — the police, the schools, the availability of affordable housing — as well as the “beauty or physical setting” of Somerville, an industrial town full of triple-decker houses. The city wants to know: “Taking everything into account, how satisfied are you with Somerville as a place to live?”

What interests me is not the details of what happened, but that implicit in the lack of sympathetic hand-wringing over Mr. Mortenson’s exposure is a kind of righteous vindication.

we knew all along that nobody could be that good. How did we know? Because we’re not that good. Mr. Mortenson’s altruism is an indictment of our own sloth, and so some punishment — of him — might be in order.

that unspoken challenge innate in public acts of courage and altruism: “What are you doing?” Speaking for myself, the answer is usually a highly uncomfortable, “Nothing.”

almost 70 percent of men are overweight, compared with 52 percent of wom

The real explanation for the gender disparity is found in a chauvinist culture whose double standards demand physical perfection from women while simultaneously celebrating male corpulence. 

The film reports that as hard as kids compete to win acceptance to name-brand colleges, they come out of high school without knowing much. The University of California at Berkeley, we are told, has to provide remedial education for close to half of incoming freshmen before they can handle a college course load. The film notes that American kids score poorly in international tests. If they work so hard, how do they learn so little?

The film's answer, in part, is that President Bush's No Child Left Behind law forces schools to focus entirely on preparing their kids to pass annual tests tied to their state's education standards. The premise is that state governments have designed standards so poorly that kids must spend time learning useless material, or too much material, which they are then unable to retain.

Ms. Abeles argues that U.S. education is focused too much on giving kids "things to memorize and regurgitate," instead of developing the critical thinking skills that will be most useful in solving problems and thriving later in life.

Is preserving and reviving cursive handwriting retro sentimentality or neo-Luddism? No, it's good teaching and good neuroscience.

The close connections between hand and brain, whether in music or in writing, have strong support in research, as summarized here:

Neurologist Frank Wilson, author of The Hand: How its Use Shapes the Brain, Language and Human Culture, says, "Although the repetitive drills that accompany handwwriting lessons seem outdated, such physical instruction will help students to succeed.  He says these activities stimulate brain activity, lead to increased language fluency, and aid in the development of important knowledge."  He describes in detail the pivotal role of hand movements, in particular  the development of thinking and language capacities, and in "developing deep feelings of confidence and interest in the world-all-together, the essential prerequistes for the emergence of the capable and caring individual."

The government said China’s population was 1.34 billion, an increase of 73.9 million, or 5.8 percent, from the last tally in 2000. That was below the 1.4 billion that United Nations demographers were predicting when the head count was conducted last November, and the slowest rate of growth in nearly half a century

The average household size shrank by 10 percent, to 3.1 people, and the urban population surged by more than 45 percent, leaving urban and rural Chinese nearly equal in number, the census indicated.

“It is now a post-transitional population, with very low fertility, quite low mortality, and is being increasingly urbanized,” he said in an e-mail on Thursday. “Such a highly mobile society produces a tremendous dynamism for the Chinese economy and society, and at the same time poses great challenges for the government’s political control.”