Rolling Stone

"In an age when our frontiers are digital, the criminal system threatens something tangible but incredibly valuable," Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School, wrote on The New Yorker's website. "Swartz was a passionate eccentric who could have been ...

"The administration has done a good job of talking about, and even funding, career training for high-school graduates," says education expert Dana Goldstein of the New America Foundation.

"Obama gets credit for checking off that box," says Steven Clemons, director of American strategy at the New America Foundation. ...

I. Ice

On July 18th, 2005, around four in the morning, a research ship called the Arctic Sunrise was slowly making its way south along the eastern coast of Greenland. It was already bright out, and very still. An ice scientist named Gordon Hamilton stood on deck, watching the rocks and eddies along the water's edge. The rest of the crew was still sleeping below. There was a helicopter on the deck, painted bright orange so it could be spotted easily if rescue were needed, and Hamilton saw its pilot, the only other person awake so early, coming down a nearby staircase.

"The student-loan industry is as close as you can get to letting industry set their own subsidy rates," says Jason Delisle, a veteran Republican budget staffer who now directs the Federal Education Budget Project for the nonpartisan New America Foundation. "Congress was writing these subsides into law, and the lobbyists encourage them to make it as high as possible." ... Original Article

The highway that leads south out of Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, passes through a craggy range of arid, sand-colored mountains with sharp, stony peaks. Poplar trees and green fields line the road. Nomadic Kuchi women draped in colorful scarves tend to camels as small boys herd sheep. The hillsides are dotted with cemeteries: rough-hewn tombstones tilting at haphazard angles, multicolored flags flying above them. There is nothing to indicate that the terrain we are about to enter is one of the world's deadliest war zones.

It's a cold, gray day in December, and I'm walking down Sixtieth Street in the Dora district of Baghdad, one of the most violent and fearsome of the city's no-go zones. Devastated by five years of clashes between American forces, Shiite militias, Sunni resistance groups and Al Qaeda, much of Dora is now a ghost town. This is what "victory" looks like in a once upscale neighborhood of Iraq: Lakes of mud and sewage fill the streets. Mountains of trash stagnate in the pungent liquid. Most of the windows in the sand-colored homes are broken, and the wind blows through them, whistling eerily.

Pul-e-charkhi prison, a vast crumbling Afghan fortress twenty miles outside of Kabul, is not an easy place for an American to wind up. Its dank cellblocks house scores of Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters. Pul-e-Charkhi is also home to Jack Idema, a former U.S. Special Forces sergeant, who, in one of the more bizarre twists in the War on Terror, was arrested in Kabul last year and charged by Afghan authorities with running his own prison -- a sort of freelance Abu Ghraib -- where he was accused of torturing eight Afghan men he said were terrorists.