The Washington Monthly

At the age of forty-three, Martine Leveque decided it was time to start over. For several years, she had worked in the movie business, writing subtitles in Italian and French for English-language films, but her employer moved overseas. She then tried her hand at sales, but each time the economy dipped sales tumbled, along with her income, and as a single mother with a teenage son, she wanted a job that offered more security. She decided to pursue a career in nursing, a high-demand field where she… more

History can also be biography, as this excellent book by Nicholas Thompson, an editor at Wired magazine, demonstrates. ... Original Article

Treating children that way is like giving a lion their food without making them hunt for it.

Jacinth Thomas-Val writes the sentence on the blackboard in her classroom at Sacramento City College, then asks her students what's wrong with it. "What does ‘them' refer to in this sentence?" she asks one young woman. The young woman doesn't know, shakes her head, then gets up and leaves the classroom without explanation, not returning for the rest of the period.

It's no secret that the United States has the most expensive health care system in the world. We spend nearly twice as much per person as do other developed countries for health outcomes that are no better and in some cases much worse. Moreover, the citizens of most other countries, including Canada and the U.K., who are routinely reviled by opponents of "socialized" medicine, express greater satisfaction with their health care systems than we do with ours.

For half a century, the United States has pursued a policy of isolating Cuba in the vain hope that doing so would lead to the downfall of the island's Communist regime. Today that policy is one of the last great historical anachronisms of the Cold War, outliving the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union, despite the fact that it has never accomplished what it was supposed to do. Political realists such as Henry Kissinger have argued for years that the policy undercuts U.S. diplomatic efforts on a host… more

The central contention of Barack Obama's vision for health care reform is straightforward: that our health care system today is so wasteful and poorly organized that it is possible to lower costs, expand access, and raise quality all at the same time--and even have money left over at the end to help pay for other major programs, from bank bailouts to high-speed rail.

"That's where the real breakdown happens," says Jennifer Cohen, a policy analyst with the New America Foundation's Education Policy Program. ...

As journalist Shannon Brownlee explains in her book Overtreated, this led to a change in the way insurance companies did business. ...

STEVE COLL: I suggest The Invisible Cure: Africa, the West, and the Fight Against AIDS, by Helen Epstein. My premise is that the new president is a serious reader, is passionate about the big issues of his presidency, and hungers for reliable explication and detail, yet has limited time and therefore needs a single volume that is both easy to read and transformational in its effects. This at least was my experience as an accidental reader of The Invisible Cure.