History Readings

Few even talk about the Palestinians or the Arab world on their borders, despite the tumult and the renewed peace efforts by Secretary of State John Kerry, who has been visiting the region in recent days. Instead of focusing on what has long been seen as their central challenge — how to share this land with another nation — Israelis are largely ignoring it, insisting that the problem is both insoluble for now and less significant than the world thinks. We cannot fix it, many say, but we can manage it.

Jewish Israelis seem in some ways happier and more united than in the past, as if choosing not to solve their most difficult challenge has opened up a space for shalom bayit — peace at home. Yes, all those internal tensions still exist, but the shared belief that there is no solution to their biggest problem has forged an odd kind of solidarity.

Israel has never been richer, safer, more culturally productive or more dynamic. Terrorism is on the wane. Yet the occupation grinds on next door with little attention to its consequences. Moreover, as the power balance has shifted from the European elite, Israel has never felt more Middle Eastern in its popular culture, music and public displays of religion. Yet it is increasingly cut off from its region, which despises it perhaps more than ever.

As he embarked on another round of meetings with Israeli and Palestinian leaders on Thursday in an effort to revitalize the peace process, Secretary of State John F. Kerry acknowledged the doubts being expressed on both sides over his chances of success

“It is our hope that by being methodical, careful, patient, but detailed and tenacious, that we can lay out a path ahead that could conceivably surprise people, but certainly exhaust the possibilities of peace.”

Palestinian officials have said that they expect Kerry to present a proposal for restarting Israeli-Palestinian peace talks by early June

Secretary of State John Kerry held a round of meetings Thursday with Israeli and Palestinian leaders.

Mr. Kerry has said that the next 18 to 24 months is a crucial period for achieving a breakthrough in the Middle East peace process and the creation of an independent Palestinian state.

“Our hope is that the leaders in both Israel and the Palestinian Authority will find the way to compromise and to achieve both of their goals,” Mr. Kerry added.

President Obama, in one of his most significant speeches since taking office, did not simply declare an end to the post-9/11 era on Thursday. He also offered a vision of America’s role in the world that he hopes could be one of his lasting legacies.

there are a multitude of hurdles to Mr. Obama’s goal of taking America off “perpetual war footing.”

Of all these threats, Mr. Rhodes said the White House was most worried about a surge of extremism in the wake of the Arab Spring. And yet the bloodiest of those conflicts, in Syria, reveals the limits of Mr. Obama’s policy.

North Korea gave a positive spin Saturday to the visit of its special envoy to China but made no mention of China’s push for the North to resume negotiations

Vice Marshal Choe Ryong-hae, was at odds with portrayals in China’s state-run media,

Kim Jong-un, whose belligerent behavior has annoyed China, sent a personal letter to Mr. Xi that referred to the deep friendship between the two allies that “cannot be exchanged for anything.”

The RSC today is much more than an affinity group; it's a fraternity, a place where "kindred souls" come together to trade political ideas and share life experiences, Price says. Members go to dinner, play golf, and attend Bible study--activities that strengthen relationships forged by former strangers with a shared political philosophy. It's a clubhouse. "The thing I like most about it is, you get a chance to work with people who believe in the same things you do," Jordan says. "My best friends are in the RSC."

Four months later, both Boehner and Scalise have delivered. Consistent with the Kingsmill Resort compromise, the sequester cuts went into effect; the continuing resolution was passed with lower spending levels; and the House's proposed budget would balance in 10 years. Meanwhile, thanks to the RSC-favored "No Budget, No Pay" provision attached to the debt-ceiling deal, Senate Democrats were forced to come up with their first budget in four years. "We're not a think tank," Scalise says. "We're a group of 171 legislators who all came here to fight to pass conservative policy into law."

he Republican Study Committee has, throughout its history, been ideologically pure yet often impotent to achieve legislative results. In the minority, it lacked power or numbers to drive the agenda; in the majority, it focused on infighting over policy. Now, for the first time in its 40-year history, the stars have aligned. Not only is the RSC still emphasizing ideology over partisanship--and passing conservative policy in the process--but it is also pulling the entire conference rightward.

Unlike routine tests for diabetes or high cholesterol, however, the BRCA gene evaluation — performed by only one company in the United States, Myriad Genetics — is phenomenally expensive, with a “list price” close to $4,000

if this is the model for the future — when testing for genetic markers is certain to become a far greater part of health care than it is now — we’re all in trouble.

Without competition, Myriad can effectively charge whatever it wants. Later this year, the company said it would begin incorporating the BRCA test into a 25-gene cancer-risk evaluation and phase out the à la carte BRCA test by 2015. For that broader test, it projects a gross profit margin of 87 percent.

the really remarkable thing about “Abenomics” — the sharp turn toward monetary and fiscal stimulus adopted by the government of Prime Minster Shinzo Abe — is that nobody else in the advanced world is trying anything similar. In fact, the Western world seems overtaken by economic defeatism.

In America, for example, there are still more than four times as many long-term unemployed workers as there were before the economic crisis, but Republicans only seem to want to talk about fake scandals. And, to be fair, it has also been a long time since President Obama said anything forceful publicly about job creation.

It would be easy for Japanese officials to make the same excuses for inaction that we hear all around the North Atlantic:

Yes, there will still be attacks, perhaps (I hope not) even as horrific as the recent one in London. But we do not let the tens of thousands of annual highways deaths justify banning cars; nor the toll of alcohol justify a new Prohibition; nor take an absolutist approach to a range of other risks, starting with guns. So too with "terror" risks.

These are complex trade-offs. Think of having a president who recognizes their complexity -- and comes down on the side of liberties.

The brilliance of the Bubble idea, as designed by the New York-based architecture firm of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, is that it would cost less than one-tenth of the projected cost of the Gehry wing at the Corcoran, yet would have an outsized impact on architectural thinking in Washington. Koshalek and his architects have finessed one of this city’s hardest design challenges: How to make something new, in the center of the city, but in such a way that no permanent violence is done to the historic character of the Mall and its environs.

The Bubble would also bring innovative temporary architecture — one of the most intellectually exciting currents in contemporary architectural thinking — to the District. It would enliven the generally moribund civic space of the Mall, and demonstrate something that is now seriously in question: that Washington has developed progressive instincts when it comes to architecture, design and culture.

Since he arrived in 2009, Koshalek has rigorously addressed the most obvious and fundamental question of any art museum today: How to break out of the institutional bunker, and into a larger dialogue with the city and the country at large?

By 2025, technologies that raise productivity by automating jobs that are not practical to automate today could be on their way to widespread adoption. …  Given the large numbers of jobs that could be affected by technologies such as advanced robotic and automated knowledge work, policy makers should consider the potential consequences of increasing divergence between the fates of highly skilled workers and those with fewer skills. The existing problem of a creating a labor force that fits the demands of a high-tech economy will only grow over time.

America’s future does not have to be “Bladerunner with food stamps.” But to avoid that, we need entrepreneurs to keep inventing new ways of combining technology and better-educated workers to create new industries and innovations. And government has a role to play in creating a fertile environment for education and entrepreneurship.

Failure could mean, writes Walter Russell Mead, the US ends up with the “mother of all welfare states [where] something like 80 percent or more of the population is going become superfluous to the economy. There will be no jobs where the work of this group could command a living wage; the state must somehow make provision for them or wait for them to fall into poverty and risk the social explosion that will probably follow.” And a  demoralized, stagnant society is more likely to push for redistributionist policies that will ensure the stagnation is permanent.

As muddled and broken as the individual income tax system may be, the rules under which the government collects corporate levies are far more loophole-ridden and counterproductive.

Unlike individuals, multinational corporations can shuttle profits — and sometimes even their headquarters — around the globe in search of the jurisdiction willing to cut them the best deal on taxes (and often other economic incentives). Much of this occurs under the guise of “transfer pricing,” the terms under which one subsidiary of a multinational sells products to another subsidiary. The goal is to generate as high a share of profit as possible in the lowest-taxed jurisdictions.

subsidiaries of United States corporations operating in the top five tax havens (the Netherlands, Ireland, Bermuda, Switzerland and Luxembourg) generated 43 percent of their foreign profits in those countries in 2008, but had only 4 percent of their foreign employees and 7 percent of their foreign investment located there.

In fact, as Apple executives tried to point out at the Senate hearing at which their tax strategies were detailed, they could have chosen to pay much less in American taxes than they did.

The news in the Senate report about Apple was not that the company had found ways to shift income to low-tax jurisdictions. Lots of multinational companies do that. The news was that Apple had found a way to move a large part of its income to subsidiaries that claimed to not exist anywhere, at least when it came to paying taxes.

It had been common knowledge that private equity firms had found ways to have most of the money earned by partners taxed at low capital gains tax rates, through what is known as carried interest. What came out last year was that some had found a way to treat all of their compensation that way.

“Some of the countries that have been targeting our system have offshore centers that are far less transparent than Switzerland,” Mr. Cuendet said. ‘’Just look at a place like Delaware.”

we still have much to learn about the composition of plants and the aspects of them that are good for us[3] , although it’s becoming clear that they’re beneficial not so much as a combination of nutrients but as the right package of nourishment, which we might as well call real food. In other words, you’re better off eating a carrot than the beta-carotene that was once thought to be its most beneficial “ingredient.”[

there are non-dietary reasons to eat fewer animal products. Even if their nutritional profile were unambivalently beneficial, they use too many resources: land, water, energy and — not the least important — food that could nourish people

there are two other factors to consider: the industrial production of livestock is a major (if not the leading) contributor to greenhouse gases, and the rampant and nearly unregulated use of antibiotics in that production is making those drugs less effective while encouraging the development of hardier disease-causing germs.

He did not favor making outlaws of people for enjoying a drug that is less injurious than alcohol or tobacco. But he worried that a robust commercial marketplace would inevitably lead to much more consumption.

Today the most interesting and important question is no longer whether marijuana will be legalized — eventually, bit by bit, it will be — but how.

He has not come to believe marijuana is harmless, but he suspects that the best hope of minimizing its harm may be a well-regulated market.

Google released a database of 5.2 million books published between 1500 and 2008. You can type a search word into the database and find out how frequently different words were used at different epochs.

The first element in this story is rising individualism

between 1960 and 2008 individualistic words and phrases increasingly overshadowed communal words and phrases.

Influenced by an eclectic range of thinkers, including sociologists Christopher Lasch and Philip Rieff, political theorist Wilson Carey McWilliams, Catholic philosopher David Schindler, and poet and essayist Wendell Berry, the Porchers see conservatism as a disposition or way of living locally, within moral, religious, economic, and environmental limits, in tightly knit, sustainable community with neighbors and the natural world.

it’s an ideology of rootedness, as applicable in the suburbs

a communitarianism that just tells people to “stay put!” more generally, whether in cities or suburbs or exurbs, is likewise insufficient … because to a surprising extent, Americans are already doing just that.