Vol. 44 No. 11-12, November 2012
Index
- George W. Bush, on the ballot again.
- Brave new world?
- Math is hard.
- Too little, too late.
- Correction.
- Party over policy.
- Tilting at windmills.
- Last call: industry giants are threatening to swallow up America's carefully regulated alcohol industry, and remake America in the image of booze-soaked Britain.
- How we could blow the energy boom: America's vast new surplus of natural gas could lead to greater prosperity and a cleaner environment. But if we don't fix our decrepit, blackout-prone electric grid, we could wind up sitting in the dark.
- The conservative war on prisons: right-wing operatives have decided that prisons are a lot like schools: hugely expensive, inefficient, and in need of root-and-branch reform. Is this how progress will happen in a hyper-polarized world?
- Obama's game of chicken: the untold story of how the administration tried to stand up to big agricultural companies on behalf of independent farmers, and lost.
- Drone on: it's probably a matter of when, not if, al-Qaeda in Yemen successfully strikes the U.S. Yet the drone attacks currently keeping the organization at bay are also helping recruit more terrorists. Can you say "no-win situation"?
- Brass backwards: Thomas Ricks explains the declining competence of America's senior military commanders.
- Act of recovery: only one national reporter, Michael Grunwald, bothered to take a detailed look at how well the $787 billion stimulus was spent. What he discovered confounds the Beltway conventional wisdom.
- Up from independence: Harry Truman was a classic American striver, and a failure, until war and politics intervened.
- Memoirs of an academic fraudster: inside the shadowy business of ghostwriting college students' papers.
- Spread too thin: scholars have discovered that certain everyday food items have played pivotal roles in the history of civilization. Apparently, peanut butter is not one of them.