History Readings

A recent study conducted by researchers at Georgetown University, for instance, compared two groups of toddlers. One group played with plush toys that had been preprogrammed to say the child’s name, and to say that they had the same favorite food and song as the child; the other played with plush toys that called each child “Pal” and liked different things. When the same toy character on-screen presented math skills — like arranging cups in order of size — the first group of toddlers performed better than those who played with less-personalized plush toys

The company also spent months testing out jokes, songs, rhymes and questions on focus groups of children to develop conversational characters complete with their own biographies and story arcs. Mr. Jacob sees creating conversation trees for these characters as a new art form, neither film nor video game.

Mr. Jacob hit upon the idea of developing conversational characters for children a few years ago after his daughter Toby, then 7, asked him if she could use Skype to talk to her stuffed animals. He had previously worked as the chief technology officer at Pixar Animation Studios. So he talked over the possibility with a former Pixar colleague, Martin Reddy. They decided to start ToyTalk.

Left with no other allies, he turned to Singapore’s own people, who were immigrants like himself. Because they were so divided by what he called “the most hideous collection of dialects and languages,” he quickly concluded that, if full democracy were implemented, everyone would simply vote for their own ethnic group and overlook the common interests of the country.

Impressed by the economic growth enjoyed by Asian countries such as Japan, Korea, Taiwan and finally China, Lee began wondering if their common Confucian heritage was not the foundation of their success. He was soon propounding the Confucian virtues that came to be known as “Asian values”—family, diligence, filial piety, education and obedience to authority. He viewed these values as binding agents for developing countries that needed to find a way to maintain order during times of rapid change.

Where did his enormous commitment and energy come from? How was he able to create such an unusual success story from virtually nothing?

Jane Austen. She is not only a climate of opinion, she is a movement, a mood, a lifestyle, an attitude and, perhaps most tellingly of all, a fridge magnet.

there are no other writers who have quite so many imitators. Each publishing year brings its crop of Austen novels, whether they are prequels, sequels or fresh treatments of a plot from a new perspective

Last year saw a particularly good one, Jo Baker’s “Longbourn,” which was “Pride and Prejudice” viewed from below the stairs by the servants. The veteran crime novelist P.D. James also joined in with her “Death Comes to Pemberley,” which brought murder into the otherwise ordered world of Austen’s characters. That novel was duly added to the list of Austen sequels that have ended up on the screen, including the odd Bollywood contribution.

Where past Republican leaders had their disagreements with Israel, today’s Republicans have made support for the Jewish state an inviolable litmus test for anyone aspiring to national office.

“If you’re a Republican and you hedge on your support on Israel, it’s viewed as having a flawed foreign policy,” said Ron Bonjean, a party strategist who has worked for Republican leaders in Congress. “It’s a requirement for Republicans these days to be very strong on Israel if they’re going to be taken seriously by primary voters.” Any deviation on that, he said, leads to inevitable questions: “If you’re not supporting Israel, then who are you supporting? Are you supporting Iran?”

“Bibi would probably win the Republican nomination if it were legal,”

modern conservative ideology utterly depends on the proposition that conservatives, and only they, possess the secret key to prosperity.

liberals don’t need to claim that their policies will produce spectacular growth. All they need to claim is feasibility: that we can do things like, say, guaranteeing health insurance to everyone without killing the economy. Conservatives, on the other hand, want to block such things and, instead, to cut taxes on the rich and slash aid to the less fortunate. So they must claim both that liberal policies are job killers and that being nice to the rich is a magic elixir.

One enduring puzzle of political economy is why business interests so often oppose policies to fight unemployment.

the International Agency for Research on Cancer declared that glyphosate, the active ingredient in the widely used herbicide Roundup, probably causes cancer in humans. Two insecticides, malathion and diazinon, were also classified as “probable” carcinogens by the agency

an announcement by the Food and Drug Administration that new breeds of genetically engineered potato and apple are safe to eat. Which they probably are, as are the genetically engineered papayas we’ve been eating for some time. In fact, to date there’s little credible evidence that any food grown with genetic engineering techniques is dangerous to human health

unlike Europeans, Canadians, Australians and others, we don’t subscribe to the precautionary principle, which maintains that it’s better to prevent damage than repair it.

Each one of hundreds of corporate contractors and subcontractors has an incentive to contribute to political candidates and their parties because, quite simply, pay-to-play works. In a recent report, the Sunlight Foundation, a watchdog group, tallied the lobbying and campaign expenditures of 200 companies from 2007 to 2012. In all, the companies spent a total of $5.8 billion and were awarded $4.4 trillion in federal business and support, or $760 for every $1 spent.

This month, more than 50 public advocacy and good government groups publicly challenged him to back up his rhetoric with action. In a letter to Mr. Obama, they called on him to issue an executive order requiring full disclosure of political spending by corporations receiving federal contracts, as well as by their directors and officers.

Mr. Buckler’s team fields drivers in more than a dozen races a year, and he calls strategy in each of them. But racing is only half of his business. He also owns a winery in Petaluma, north of San Francisco, and he has sought out connections with the tech industry in order to turn racing into the new great nexus for business networking, or what Mr. Buckler calls “relationship marketing.”

“These Silicon Valley companies tell me that they’ve got skyboxes at the Raiders, the Giants, the 49ers for their clients, but they can’t fill them,” Mr. Buckler explained when he wasn’t barking calls over a headset to his drivers. “We let you invite your customers to Laguna Seca Raceway for a morning, where they’ll get professional instruction driving Aston Martin racecars, and then we wrap up with a nice dinner or wine tasting,” he said. “Well, they’re full, everyone wants to go.”

aside from their disproportionate number of $90,000 Tesla Model S cars, which are one of the few socially acceptable displays of wealth in the industry, the parking lots of Silicon Valley’s tech giants are generally indistinguishable from the parking lots of most blue-state office parks. Mark Zuckerberg, for example, drives a Volkswagen GTI. It’s not unusual to hear techies profess their disinterest in cars.

Voters have a lot of economic anxieties. But they also have a template in their heads for what economic dynamism looks like.

That template does not include a big role for government. Polls show that faith in government is near all-time lows. In a Gallup survey, voters listed dysfunctional government as the nation’s No. 1 problem. In fact, American voters’ traditional distrust has morphed and hardened. They used to think it was bloated and ineffective. Now they think it is bloated and ineffective and rigged to help those who need it least.

In short, economic philosophy is mitigating the effect of demographic change, at least for a little while longer.

the senator sees the GOP base in terms of bracketology. A sizable portion of the base is composed of moderates, another of conservative/tea party activists. Then there are evangelicals, then libertarians. Mr. Cruz’s plan is to nail down his own bracket, conservative/tea party. At the same time he is going for evangelicals, big time, which is why he announced at Jerry Falwell’s university and not in Texas. Mike Huckabee is strong with evangelicals, but Mr. Cruz figures that while he can take some of that bracket, Mr. Huckabee won’t be able to get any of the tea party because of his spending record as governor of Arkansas.

Mr. Cruz believes he’s the only candidate who can compete with Rand Paul in the libertarian bracket. He sees a sweet spot with those who are economically libertarian but have doubts about Mr. Paul’s foreign policy.

It is not hard to notice that every Cruz conversation, every interview, seems to be the rote performance of a speech. In public, and often in private, he moves his hands and face and modulates his voice like a TV pro. Politicians have to be actors, but the trick is to be an actor without being a phony.

Republican presidential hopeful Rand Paul filed an amendment to the Senate budget on Wednesday calling for a significant boost to defense spending, a reversal for the libertarian senator who has previously called for across-the-board cuts to domestic and military spending.

The amendment, filed without public notice and first reported by Time, is the latest of several moves by the Kentucky senator seemingly aimed at placating the GOP's ascendant hawkish wing ahead of a reported campaign announcement next month.

One of Paul's signature issues has been a non-interventionist foreign policy and less U.S. military involvement around the world, a philosophy that was gaining traction among some Republicans before the emergence of the Islamic State threat. His budgets in prior years have called for reducing spending on defense.