Salon

Before an audience of voters in Yeadon, Pa., on Tuesday, President Obama announced major changes to the Head Start program, which provides preschool access for children from low-income families, and scolded Congress for not doing more for education.

Brill's advocacy of "reform" has sparked different strands of criticism from the New York Times, New York University's Diane Ravitch and the Nation's Dana Goldstein. But behind the high-profile back and forth over specific policies and prescriptions ...

Are we living at the beginning of the Age of Fossil Fuels, not its final decades? The very thought goes against everything that politicians and the educated public have been taught to believe in the past generation. According to the conventional wisdom, the U.S. and other industrial nations must undertake a rapid and expensive transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy for three reasons: The imminent depletion of fossil fuels, national security and the danger of global warming.

In his thoughtful criticism of my essay on the future of fossil fuels and the poor prospects for renewable energy, Andrew Leonard characterizes my message as one that "we have nothing to worry about." This may be partly the fault of my presentation, because in the course of being provocative I did not make it sufficiently clear that I was engaged in analysis, not advocacy.

If Michael Lind's intention, in his Salon article published Tuesday, "Everything You've Heard About Fossil Fuels May Be Wrong," was to throw so many bombs at once that critics would be too buried by shrapnel to respond, then he at least partially ...

The ethos is win by any means necessary, legal or quasi-legal (or worse, as long as you never get caught), and McHenry was very good at that, according to Benjamin Wallace-Wells' memorable profile of the then-freshman in the Washington Monthly. ...

The right-wing British historian Niall Ferguson seems to have conquered America: pushing his latest perishable book, "Civilization," this one based on the trendy and quickly dated conceit of the six (or is it seven?) "killer apps" of Western civilization; writing cover stories for Newsweek; debating foreign policy on TV with Zbigniew Brzezinski; and pouting and snarling his way through a debate about economics with Paul Krugman, Jeff Madrick and Bill Bradley.

Comprehensive immigration reform is dead. For the foreseeable future, there is no chance that Congress will pass a grand bargain on immigration reform like the one that fell apart in 2007 including a mass amnesty or path to citizenship for most illegal immigrants already in the U.S. Nor is there any chance that the Dream Act, which would provide citizenship for many illegal immigrants as long as they attended college or served in the U.S. military, will be enacted into law. The Democrats could not pass the unpopular Dream Act even when they controlled both houses of Congress last December.

A.C. Grayling, a British professor of philosophy, recently published a secular version of the Bible, "The Good Book: A Humanist Bible."  To create his scriptures, Grayling has rewritten thoughts from many sages of the past in archaic language that evokes the King James Bible. His humanist Bible has sections titled Genesis, Proverbs and Epistles.

According to the New Yorker's Steve Coll, bin Laden's death was a "significant" loss for the terror network, which now faces an unprecedented leadership crisis. But he also pointed out that central leadership isn't vital to the continued presence of ...