Slate

In the summer of 1991, Paul Ginsparg, a researcher at the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory, set up an email system for about 200 string theorists to exchange papers they had written. The World Wide Web was a mere infant—it had been opened to the public on Aug. 6 of that year. The string theorists weren’t particularly interested in making their research widely available (outsiders would have a tough time following the conversation anyhow). Ginsparg’s archive was a way for the theorists to communicate with one another.

Entrepreneurs, businesses, NGOs, and governments exalt mobile technology as a game-changing tool to fight global poverty. But what if our eagerness to connect the world is inadvertently exacerbating the global economic divide?

In October 1966, as the Vietnam War was spiraling out of control, Sen. George Aiken, R-Vt., now-famously suggested that we simply declare victory and bring the troops home. He added, in a less well-known coda, “It may be a far-fetched proposal, but nothing else has worked.”

Lyndon Johnson would have done well to take the idea seriously. Now it seems Barack Obama is doing just that in Afghanistan.

The Pentagon revealed a bit more of its defense budget today, and, really, the proposed cuts in spending amount to no big deal. It would be hard to justify not making these cuts. If Congress winds up wanting to cut deeper, there’s plenty of room for more hacking.

First, a word of caution: There are many ways to calculate a “cut,” and some will no doubt invoke a few to claim that the Obama administration’s cuts are severe. Let’s go to the numbers.

Unless you’re former First Lady Barbara Bush, pearls may not be in style. But accusing people of clutching them is.

When I was a student at Penn State, we sometimes speculated about what the university would do when Joe Paterno died. A day off, we generally agreed, but then the conversation would end. It seemed a bit like discussing who would get the good china when the grandparents died—too painful to consider seriously, lest it come to pass and leave one feeling not just grief, but guilt about having aired such selfish thoughts.

In its early days, the Web was often imagined as a global clearinghouse—a new type of library, with the sum total of human knowledge always at our fingertips. That much has happened—but with a twist: In addition to borrowing existing items from its vast collections, we, the patrons, could also deposit our own books, pamphlets and other scribbles—with no or little quality control.

Defending the motion were Daniel Levy, an Israeli citizen who had drafted key language for the 2003 Geneva Accord, and Mustafa Barghouthi, the general secretary of the Palestinian National Initiative, a third-party movement in Ramallah devoted to nonviolent activism.

Almost a year ago, President Obama set a challenge in his State of the Union speech: "We need to out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world." He had just signed a law that ordered the Department of Commerce to write a report on American “competitiveness.” That report was released last week and claims that "elements of the U.S. economy are losing their competitive edge which may mean that future generations of Americans will not enjoy a higher standard of living."

While 2011 will be remembered as a tumultuous year in the Middle East, that most headline-grabbing of regional issues—the Israel-Palestine conflict—barely merits a footnote. The glacial pace of developments on that front could not have been more out of sync with the surrounding frenzy. There has been no Palestinian Spring to date (although there have been weekly demonstrations in Palestinian villages impacted by Israeli land confiscations) and the entire year passed without even a day of Palestinian-Israeli peace talks (those were in part resumed on Jan.