History Readings

“Our relationship with Israel is close and one of the best we have in the region, but only with Israel in its 1967 lines unless there is a peace agreement,” said a senior European Union official who spoke on the condition of anonymity in keeping with diplomatic protocol. “We are clear, however, that what came under Israeli control in 1967 is not a part of Israel, so the settlements are illegal under international law and not helpful in the peace process.”

The European Union has gone considerably further than the United States, declaring that Israeli settlements over the Green Line are “illegal” under international law; the United States simply calls them “illegitimate” and “obstacles to peace.”

Some countries, like Britain, have gone further. Britain issued voluntary labeling guidelines in December 2009 “to enable consumers to make a more fully informed decision concerning the products they buy,” according to the UK Trade and Investment agency, because “we understand the concerns of people who do not wish to purchase goods exported from Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

More troubling to Israel, in December the agency warned companies and citizens to be “aware of the potential reputational implications” of investments in settlement areas. “We do not encourage or offer support to such activities,” it said.

Sustaining one poor student who needs $45,000 a year in aid requires $1 million in endowment devoted to that purpose; 100 of them require $100 million. Only the wealthiest schools can do that, and build new laboratories, renovate dining halls, provide small classes and bid for top professors.

College presidents are under constant pressure to meet budgets, improve graduation rates and move up in the rankings,” Dr. Carnevale said. “The easiest way to do it is to climb upstream economically — get students whose parents can pay more.”

A big part of that climb has been the rise of “merit aid,” price breaks offered to desirable students regardless of their parents’ wealth. A few dozen top schools give no merit aid, but they are the exception. Historically, American colleges gave far more need-based aid, but it is outweighed today by merit aid.

In 2006, at the 82 schools rated “most competitive” by Barron’s Profiles of American Colleges, 14 percent of American undergraduates came from the poorer half of the nation’s families, according to researchers at the University of Michigan and Georgetown University who analyzed data from federal surveys. That was unchanged from 1982.

What distinguishes those who apply to elite schools is not family income or their parents’ level of education, according to a groundbreaking study published last year, but location. Exposure to just a few high-achieving peers or attending a high school with just a few teachers or recent alumni who went to highly selective colleges makes a huge difference in where low-income students apply.

Cost remains a barrier, but so does perception, he said, adding, “It’s a psychology and sociology thing, as well as a pricing thing.”

Public colleges remain less expensive, but in an era of declining state support, their prices have risen faster than those of private colleges, and they vary widely from state to state. Private colleges have sharply increased financial aid since the turn of the century, so that the average net price that families really pay has barely changed over the last decade, adjusted for inflation — and for low-income students, it has actually dropped.

even top private colleges with similar sticker prices differ enormously in net prices, related to how wealthy they are, so a family can find that an elite education is either dauntingly expensive or surprisingly affordable. In 2011-12, net prices paid by families with incomes under $48,000 averaged less than $4,000 at Harvard, which has the nation’s largest endowment, for example, and more than $27,000 at New York University, according to data compiled by the Department of Education.

Public health experts also point out that there’s much we don’t know about how foods nourish us. Stripping out and recombining a food’s constituent parts or growing it in a petri dish is unlikely to replicate all the benefits.

High-tech food entrepreneurs, mostly white, well-educated young men who have spent much of their lives fueling up on fast food, say they want to provide more convenience and better taste.

Instead of centrifuging out plant proteins, “Why not just eat the vegetables?”

ike sex, food is fraught with emotional, psychological, social, cultural, gender and religious associations. Sharing a meal is how we establish and maintain relationships. It is how we celebrate and mourn. Some attach their identity to the food they eat. Others use it to exert or lose control. These unpredictable and perhaps intransigent views and expectations may be Food 2.0’s most daunting challenge.

With both the nuclear and climate threats, the swerve in awareness has had a crucial ethical component. People came to feel that it was deeply wrong, perhaps evil, to engage in nuclear war, and are coming to an awareness that it is deeply wrong, perhaps evil, to destroy our habitat and create a legacy of suffering for our children and grandchildren.

In earlier movements there needed to be an overall theme, even a phrase, that could rally people of highly divergent political and intellectual backgrounds. The idea of a “nuclear freeze” mobilized millions of people with the simple and clear demand

AMERICANS appear to be undergoing a significant psychological shift in our relation to global warming. I call this shift a climate “swerve,” borrowing the term used recently by the Harvard humanities professor Stephen Greenblatt to describe a major historical change in consciousness that is neither predictable nor orderly.

the main lesson of the analysis is a sobering one. The rise of inequality over the last four decades has created two very different Americas, and life is a lot harder in one of them.

Income has stagnated in working-class communities, which helps explain why “selling avon” and “social security checks” correlate with the hardest places from our index. Inequality in health and life expectancy has grown over the same time. And searches on diabetes, lupus, blood pressure, 1,500-calorie diets and “ssi disability” – a reference to the federal benefits program for workers with health problems – also make the list. Guns, meanwhile, are in part a cultural preference, but they are also a health risk.

In the places on the other end of the spectrum, the picture is much brighter. People have disposable income to buy new technology and take faraway vacations. Their time spent prostrate on a foam roller or out running with the baby in a jogging stroller is more than enough to make up the occasional cupcake. And of course they are intent on passing down their way of life to the next generation, via Baby Bjorns and early access to technology.

One answer is that leaders may not understand the arithmetic.

the Bush administration predicted that overthrowing Saddam and installing a new government would cost only $50 billion or $60 billion

The larger problem, however, is that governments all too often gain politically from war, even if the war in question makes no sense in terms of national interests.

nations almost always rally around their leaders in times of war, no matter how foolish the war or how awful the leaders.

For years conservatives bemoaned the problem of risky and violent behavior among children and teens of the post-60s era, mostly blaming it on the breakdown of the family and a general decline in discipline.

Liberals tended to take this less seriously, and in any case mostly blamed it on societal problems.

conservatives were right. It wasn't just a bunch of oldsters complaining about the kids these days. Crime was up, drug use was up, and teen pregnancy was up. It was a genuine phenomenon and a genuine problem.

liberals were right that it wasn't related to the disintegration of the family or lower rates of churchgoing or any of that. After all, families didn't suddenly start getting back together in the 90s and churchgoing didn't suddenly rise. But teenage crime, drug use, and pregnancy rates all went down. And down. And down.

Most likely, there was a real problem, but it was a problem no one had a clue about. We were poisoning our children with a well-known neurotoxin, and this toxin lowered their IQs, made them into fidgety kids, wrecked their educations, and then turned them into juvenile delinquents, teen mothers, and violent criminals. When we got rid of the toxin, all of these problems magically started to decline.

This doesn't mean that lead was 100 percent of the problem. There probably were other things going on too, and we can continue to argue about them.

I’d bet she is going to get a more serious challenge than people now expect.

Clinton speaks as a Truman-Kennedy Democrat. She’s obviously much, much more multilateral than Republicans, but there’s a certain muscular tone, a certain assumption that there will be hostile ideologies that threaten America. There is also a grand strategic cast to her mind. The U.S. has to come up with an “overarching” strategy, she told Goldberg, to contain, deter and defeat anti-democratic foes. She argues that harsh action is sometimes necessary. “I think Israel did what it had to do to respond to the rockets, “ she declared, embracing recent Israeli policy. “There’s no doubt in my mind that Hamas initiated this conflict. ... So the ultimate responsibility has to rest on Hamas.”