Newsweek

This story has been brought to you by the letter S and the numbers 15 and 40. (Or, as the Count might say in his adorable Transylvanian accent, "fivteen and forrrty-HA, HA, HA!") The S, as anyone who has ever watched television can deduce by now, stands for Sesame Street. The 40 is almost as easy: this year marks the 40th anniversary of sunny days, friendly neighbors and the fuzzy creatures who live on that street where the air is sweet. If you haven't watched recently… more

Peter Bergen, author of The Osama bin Laden I Know, also argues that drones "might fatally undermine US efforts" as people on the ground feel besieged. A poll last year bore this out: 52 percent of Pakistanis blame the US for rising violence; ...

"Whatever is done has to be accompanied by a whole series of other changes," says Shannon Brownlee, Schwartz senior fellow for the New America Foundation, which is in the forefront of studying this issue. "There are a whole series of good little ideas...

..."All doctors think they're practicing good medicine," says Len Nichols, director of the health-policy program at New America...

"He is the candidate Rush Limbaugh and countless others who embrace the cause of shrinking government have been waiting for," writes conservative journalist Reihan Salam: more Barry Goldwater than George W. Bush. A savvy salesman, Sanford clearly ...

Geopolitics makes for strange bedfellows indeed. After President Barack Obama's performance at last weekend's Summit of the Americas (and before that, on a quick visit to Mexico City) nearly everyone in Latin America and the United States was applauding the new president and fawning over his impressive performance. Everyone, that is, except for American conservatives, such as Newt Gingrich, and ... Fidel Castro. How in the world did Gingrich and an obviously rejuvenated Fidel end up as political blood brothers?

Peter Bergen of CNN says that "doing deals with the Taliban today could further destabilize Afghanistan." "It's change for change's sake," Gelb writes ruefully. Ah, if we just kept in place all those Bush-era policies that were working so well.

For years, two tidbits of conventional wisdom have dominated debates among Cubanologists (a tropical subspecies of former Kremlinologists). First, that Deputy Prime Minister and economic czar Carlos Lage has been in charge of running the island economy since the early '90s, and, despite differences of opinion regarding his performance, was seen as one of the most likely successors to Fidel Castro's brother and successor, Raúl. Second, that Foreign Minister Felipe Pérez Roque was not only in charge of the international relations Fidel Castro took

There is still no better theory of human motivation than Abraham Maslow's "hierarchy of human needs." Maslow, an American psychologist writing in the 1940s and '50s, argued that man's primary or basic needs are physiological: food, water, sleep, shelter. Only with these needs satisfied could one move up the pyramid toward security and employment, friendship and family, toward self-actualization and morality. No matter what your religion, you are human first and faithful second.

Venezuela's Hugo Chávez finally emerged from his electoral slump. After mediocre results in municipal and state governors' elections late last year, and a scathing defeat in a constitutional referendum in December 2007, in February he convincingly won a virtual plebiscite on his indefinite stay in office by a margin of nearly 10 percent. While the constitutionality of the referendum was arguable--the same proposition allowing the eternal reelection of the president was rejected in 2007--and there is some evidence of electronic tampering, even the