History Readings

in recent years Finnish students have been turning in some of the highest test scores in the world.

The survey compares 15-year-olds in different countries in reading, math, and science. Finland has ranked at or near the top in all three competencies on every survey since 2000, neck and neck with superachievers such as South Korea and Singapore.

Compared with the stereotype of the East Asian model -- long hours of exhaustive cramming and rote memorization -- Finland's success is especially intriguing because Finnish schools assign less homework and engage children in more creative play

“If you take a fresh strawberry after processing, it’s nothing. It tastes like nothing,” said Wright, as a way of explaining why the food industry is so reliant on the $12 billion global flavoring industry.

When I asked Dave Adams, the food scientist who founded Savoury Systems, why actual meat is such an inferior source for the chicken flavor that, strangely enough, goes into chicken, he gave me the same answer Wright did. Modern chicken, he grumbled, has no flavor. “They grow them so fast, they don’t have time to develop flavor,” he said. And chicken — even tasteless, scrap stuff — is more expensive than soy.

The flavoring game wasn’t always so sophisticated. When it began in Europe in the 19th century, companies imported spices and procured plants such as lemongrass, which yielded citronella oil, ideal for concentrating into lemon flavor. These essential oils went mostly into fragrances, medicines and candies. As the field of chemistry progressed in the latter half of the century, European scientists, particularly Germans, figured out how to synthesize flavors and fragrances from chemicals instead of having to wrench them from natural materials.

deep cuts in oil use and emissions of greenhouse gases from cars and light trucks are possible in the United States by 2050, but only with a mix of diverse and intensified research and policies far stronger than those pursued so far by the Obama administration.

by the year 2050, the U.S. may be able to reduce petroleum consumption and greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent for light-duty vehicles -- cars and small trucks -- via a combination of more efficient vehicles; the use of alternative fuels like biofuels, electricity, and hydrogen; and strong government policies to overcome high costs and influence consumer choices.

"In addition, alternative fuels to petroleum must be readily available, cost-effective and produced with low emissions of greenhouse gases.  Such a transition will be costly and require several decades.

Within the confines of Catholicism, Jesuits are generally seen as left-leaning and have burnished a reputation as questioning intellectuals who are open to debate. They are famous for the intensive education they undergo (it can take a decade to become a Jesuit), their required month-long silent retreats and their theology of “finding God in all things.” That idea has attracted progressives but turned off some conservatives who think it sounds relativist.

Strict adherence to doctrine is not typically a focus of Jesuits, and Jesuit institutions are magnets for Catholics who disagree openly with church orthodoxy on issues such as celibacy or female priests. But neither do Jesuits tend to rally publicly against church teaching.

Politically speaking, Francis is an atypical Jesuit. As a cardinal in Argentina, he led a public fight against same-sex marriage — reportedly after failing to broker a deal supporting civil unions — and has said that gay adoption is a form of discrimination against children. There are no data on whether the typical Jesuit disagrees with the new pope (and official church teaching) on matters such as gay marriage. But questioning a Jesuit on hot-button sexual topics usually elicits a nonjudgmental response.

Consider the most likely scenario for how human sexual behavior will develop over the next hundred years or so in the absence of cataclysm. Here’s what I see if we continue on our current path:

Like every other aspect of human life, our sexuality will become increasingly mediated by technology. The technology of pornography will become ever more sophisticated—even if the subject matter of porn itself will remain as primal as ever.

As the technology improves, society continues to grow ever more fragmented, and hundreds of millions of Chinese men with no hope of marrying a bona-fide, flesh-and-blood woman come of age, sex robots will become as common and acceptable as dildos and vibrators are today. After all, the safest sex is that which involves no other living things…

For more than three decades, the Republican Party brand has been deeply tied to a worldview in which the aggressive use of American power abroad is both a policy imperative and a political advantage.

Now, a new generation of Republicans like Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky is turning inward, questioning the approach that reached its fullest expression after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001

That holds the potential to threaten two wings of a Republican national security establishment that have been warring for decades: the internationalists who held sway under the elder President George Bush and the neoconservatives who led the country to long and costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan under President George W. Bush.

Given the Jesuits’ watchword to find God “in all things,” some are hoping that the leadership of a Jesuit pope will allow the church to engage more openly and fearlessly with the world, to project the church’s message in new ways and to emphasize service to, and solidarity with, the poor. With an outsider now at the helm, they hope Francis will be able to shake up the culture of the Vatican.

Shaped by their experiences with the poor and powerless, many Jesuits lean liberal, politically and theologically, and are more concerned with social and economic justice than with matters of doctrinal purity. Jesuits were in the forefront of the movement known as liberation theology, which encouraged the oppressed to unite along class lines and seek change.

Francis, when he was head of the Jesuits in Argentina in the 1970s, was opposed to liberation theology, seeing it as too influenced by Marxist politics. The future pope came down hard on Jesuits in his province who were liberation theology proponents and left it badly divided, according to those who study the order and some members who did not want to be identified because he is now pope.

Francis’s reign will be a success if it begins to restore the moral credibility of the church’s hierarchy and clergy, and it will be a failure if it does not.

In that culture — our culture — priestly sex abuse and corruption in the Vatican aren’t just seen as evidence that all men are sinners. They’re seen as evidence that the church has no authority to judge what is and isn’t sin, that the renunciation Catholicism preaches mostly warps and rarely fulfills, and that the world’s approach to sex (and money, and ambition) is the only sane approach there is.

Our age is still religious; it’s just made its peace with human appetites and all the varied ways they intertwine. From the sermons of Joel Osteen to the epiphanies of “Eat, Pray, Love,” our spiritual oracles still urge us to seek the supernatural, the numinous, the divine. They just dismiss the idea that the divine could possibly want anything for us except for what we already want for ourselves.

this former vice president comes off more as Mrs. Danvers, the housekeeper in “Rebecca.” Both guided young, inexperienced protégés to the brink with unflappable certitude, self-assurance and an unsettling monotone. They were so persistent and persuasive that it was almost a shock when it turned out that each had an idée fixe that could burn down the house, or, in Mr. Cheney’s case, whole countries.

Mr. Cheney privately misled his friend, telling Mr. Armey that the top-secret evidence was actually worse than he had said publicly and that Iraq was close to developing a suitcase nuke that could be used by Qaeda terrorists. Mr. Armey changed his position and voted for war.

Both Apple’s patent and Amazon’s are incredibly broad. And they give the publisher and bookstore a lot of control over what would happen — including, possibly, providing for a cut of each resale.But what about the one-penny problem? These patents also give the publisher or bookstore the right to impose a minimum price for reselling an e-book. That limit could drop over time, as Apple’s patent makes clear: “As another example, all digital movies must be sold for a minimum of $10 until six months after their respective original purchase date. After the six month period, all digital movies must be sold for a minimum of $5.”Both proposals suggest that publishers could also limit the number of times a digital item can be resold: “A threshold may limit how many times a used digital object may be permissibly moved to another personalized data store, how many downloads (if any) may occur before transfer is restricted, etc.,” says Amazon’s patent. “These thresholds help to maintain scarcity of digital objects in the marketplace.”

huge reader response to his Disruptions column in which he wrote about the etiquette of communicating in the totally wired era.

Mr. Bilton started his column with this:Some people are so rude. Really, who sends an e-mail or text message that just says “Thank you”? Who leaves a voice mail message when you don’t answer, rather than texting you? Who asks for a fact easily found on Google?Don’t these people realize that they’re wasting your time?Of course, some people might think me the rude one for not appreciating life’s little courtesies. But many social norms just don’t make sense to people

By 2020, the United States will overtake Saudi Arabia as the world’s largest oil producer, according to the International Energy Agency. The U.S. has already overtaken Russia as the world’s leading gas producer. Fuel has become America’s largest export item. Within five years, according to a study by Citigroup, North America could be energy independent. “OPEC will find it challenging to survive another 60 years, let alone another decade,” Edward Morse, Citigroup’s researcher, told CNBC.

Joel Kotkin identified America’s epicenters of economic dynamism in a study for the Manhattan Institute. It is like a giant arc of unfashionableness. You start at the Dakotas where unemployment rates are at microscopic levels. You drop straight down through the energy belts of the Great Plains until you hit Texas. Occasionally, you turn to touch the spots where fertilizer output and other manufacturing plants are on the rebound, like the Third Coast areas in Louisiana, Mississippi and Northern Florida.

Vanity Fair still ranks the tech and media moguls and calls it The New Establishment, but, as Kotkin notes, the big winners in the current economy are the “Material Boys” — the people who grow grain, drill for fuel and lay pipeline. The growing parts of the world, meanwhile, are often the commodity belts, resource-rich places with good rule of law like Canada, Norway and Australia.

While economists generally agree that narrowing the government’s deficit and limiting the size of the debt are necessary in the long run, most argue that balancing the budget would not restore the nation’s still-weak economy to health in the near term. Indeed, rushing to do so with unemployment still elevated and the economy growing at only a sluggish pace could even set back the effort to reduce the deficit.

“The really important thing is to keep the debt from growing faster than the economy.”

Mr. Ryan, whose previous budget proposals did not bring spending below revenue for decades, vowed this time to do so by 2023, in part to satisfy the demands of the more conservative members of the Republican Caucus.

But among Italy’s estimated six  million companies, businesses of all  sizes have been going belly up at the rate of 1,000 a day over the  last year, especially among the small and midsize companies that  represent the backbone of Italy’s 1.5 trillion euro, or $2 trillion, economy.

'‘This underscores the likelihood of Italy having a Japan-like decade  with phenomenally slow growth,’' said Kenneth S. Rogoff,  a professor  at Harvard University and former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund. '‘And it raises painful questions about the long-run stability of  growth in the euro zone over all.’'

the Department of Homeland Security has issued an open purchase order for 1.6 billion rounds of ammunition. 

some of this purchase order is for hollow-point rounds, forbidden by international law for use in war, along with a frightening amount specialized for snipers

DHS now is showing off its acquisition of heavily armored personnel carriers, repatriated from the Iraqi and Afghani theaters of operation.