The City Bounces Back: Four Portraits

The School Lunch Wars

– Kristen Hinman

Sixty-five years ago, the federal school lunch program was created to make American schoolchildren healthier. Today, it's helping to make them fatter. Will a new law change the diets of millions of kids raised on French fries and chicken nuggets?

What Is Hugo Chávez Up To?

– Joshua Kucera

Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez has set alarms ringing with his efforts to create a global anti-American coalition.

Classical Education in America

– Daniel Walker Howe

The study of ancient Greek and Latin long ago vanished from most American classrooms, and with it has gone a special understanding of the values and virtues prized by Western civilization.

Dense, Denser, Densest

– Witold Rybczynski

Americans like their cities spacious. Will concerns about costs and the environment push them to rein in sprawl?

New to the Neighborhood

– Sarah L. Courteau

How can you be an urban pioneer when you move to an inner-city neighborhood where families have lived for generations?

Stores and the City

– David Zipper

Many cities launched revival efforts with downtown festival marketplaces such as Boston's Faneuil Hall. Can retailers work the same magic in less affluent neighborhoods?

Tweeting Toward Freedom?

– The Wilson Quarterly

Can the internet and social media really promote democracy?

Grand Strategy Revisited

– The Wilson Quarterly

In the decades since the Cold War, the United States has pursued "global dominance," working to maintain its primacy and spread democracy, trying to make the world over in its own image.

Learning From Al Qaeda

– The Wilson Quarterly

One of the greatest advantages Al Qaeda in Iraq had was the alarming speed at which it could operate. To keep up, the U.S. military needed to become more like a network.

China's Inner Struggle

– The Wilson Quarterly

Though the realists and nativists hold the keys for now, China can still be persuaded to make important contributions on issues of global concern.

The Inequality Engine

– The Wilson Quarterly

What's fueling the gargantuan income increases of the megarich?

A Higher Capitalism

– The Wilson Quarterly

Businesses have pursued narrow, short-term strategies that maximize quick profits and don't address societies greatest needs for too long.

How to Save the Euro

– The Wilson Quarterly

Every broke country is broke in its own way. With such different causes, what can the European Union do to mitigate the effects of economic crisis?

Researchers change their subjects’ behavior merely by studying them

– The Wilson Quarterly

Researchers can change the behavior of their subjects merely by studying them.

The Elusive Conservative Majority

– The Wilson Quarterly

"Voters may hate the house of government, but they love the bricks used to build it."

Oyez! Oyez! Oyez!

– The Wilson Quarterly

There are times you should not carry your argument to its logical conclusion.

Where Are the Female Politicians?

– The Wilson Quarterly

Is self-doubt the biggest hurdle that women must overcome in running for public office?

Diversity Dismantled

– The Wilson Quarterly

Only about 35 percent of four-year public institutions consider minority status in admissions decisions, down from more than 60 percent in the mid-1990s.

What War Is Good For: Advancing Minority Rights At Home

– The Wilson Quarterly

Over the last century, America's wars abroad have had the salutary side effect of advancing minority rights at home.

Work Hard, Play Harder

– The Wilson Quarterly

College-age drinking is not the problem.

The Enduring King James

– The Wilson Quarterly

Why did the King James version of the Bible prevail?

Friends Who Pray Together

– The Wilson Quarterly

What really seems to make people happy is the sense of belonging that comes from a combination of religious identity and religious friendship.

A Tale of Two Literary Cultures: MFA vs. NYC

– The Wilson Quarterly

In 1975 there were 79 programs in creative writing offering a Master of Fine Arts, or MFA. Today there are 854.

Crazy for Caravaggio

– The Wilson Quarterly

Is there anything that wouldn't be improved by a dash of Caravaggio? No, apparently. In recent years Caravaggiomania has ripped and roared across the art world.

Why David Foster Wallace Looms So Large

– The Wilson Quarterly

Since DFW died, academics have been hard at work making Wallace the next canonized American writer.

Wasted Youth

– The Wilson Quarterly

Over the course of the 20th century, the mean age at which scientists made their great achievements rose by about six years.

The Math Beneath

– The Wilson Quarterly

On the surface, it doesn't seem that financial modeling has much in common with ecology or neuroscience. But in fact these fields are grappling with similar mathematical problems.

The Revolution That Wasn't

– The Wilson Quarterly

Starts and stops of stone technology in the archaeological record brings into question the standard narrative of continual pre-human progress.

India's Vanishing Officers

– The Wilson Quarterly

India's military can’t find enough qualified and willing candidates to fill their junior officer ranks.

Who's Dying in Canada

– The Wilson Quarterly

Canada’s universal health care system is often cited as an example for the United States, but it is not without its limits.

Asia's Religious Renaissance

– The Wilson Quarterly

Intriguingly, it’s not a return to old-time religion but an explosion of religious movements that are distinctly modern in character.

Defying the Democracy Cure

– The Wilson Quarterly

When ethnic insurgencies are unable to translate their power into electoral gains, the medicine may not work.

Port of Memories

– Timothy Snyder

The great port Odessa, a designed city, represents enlightened modernity; nostalgia meets history, and the modern the postmodern.

A Revisionist's History

– David Garrow

By the final year of his life, Malcolm X had come to represent "a definitive yardstick by which all other Americans who aspire to a mantle of leadership should be measured."

America's Losers

– Nancy Isenberg

Historians have long regarded the loyalists with a jaundiced eye, dismissing them as backward-thinking defenders of monarchy. Often forgotten is the fact that loyalists made up a sizable proportion of the population.

Security At What Price?

– John Mueller

No defense of civil liberties is likely to be terribly effective as long as people believe that the threat from terrorism is nothing short of existential.

Bad Education

– Ben Wildavsky

How much do undergraduates really learn in college?

So Goes The Nation

– Jason Sokol

American itself has been quite "Southern" all along. "Neither the South nor America can ever be truly understood as anything but a part of the other."

To Get Rich Is Glorious

– Martin Walker

The key to the Industrial Revolution was a great change in the way people spoke and thought about the merchant and the manufacturer and their values.

What makes us who we are?

– Emily Anthes

The question has captivated philosophers and scientists for millennia.

Reasoning Against Reason

– Jag Bhalla

Western culture has a lobotomized view of human nature inherited from the French Enlightenment.

Words At Play

– Laura Kipnis

"Literature" is a shifting cultural status ascribed to books by critical arbiters of the moment, not an intrinsic quality.

A Life Set to Music

– Miles Hoffmann

Shostakovich managed to turn the simplest of musical building blocks into extraordinary musical structures of vast emotional range, all while living a strange double life as both privileged beneficiary and tormented victim of the Soviet regime.

Why did Helvetica eventually trump all other typefaces?

– Sara Sklaroff

What is so ubiquitous that it barely registers in the mass consciousness while others denounce it as "fascist"? Helvetica.

The Life and Times of Socrates

– F. S. Naiden

Those seeking an introduction to Socrates will find that Plati still has custody of him, and that Xenophon is still trying to liberate him from a politically controversial entourage.

Do You Want to Live Forever?

– Edward Tenner

In longing for everlasting life, humans show that they remain the death-defined animal.