Decius wrote:

These articles are short and to the point. ... Unfortunately, many require a subscription to read in full.

I was able to locate alternate sources for the full text of some articles that were walled off at the magazine's web site. Along the way I also found a few other items of potential interest.

A Patently Simple Idea By Sebastian Mallaby

Fighting Poverty: What Works?

Esther Duflo: "Sometimes ideas that become conventional wisdom are erroneous and need to be rethought."

Another day, another $1.08

According to Mr Banerjee and Ms Duflo, the typical poor household in Udaipur could spend up to 30% more on food than it does, if only it stopped devoting money to alcohol, tobacco and festivals.

Save the Russians! By Nicholas Eberstadt [alt]

Time for a Sea Change By Paul Saffo

Why We Listen By Philip Bobbitt

A president does have an obligation to assess the constitutionality of statutes, but when he secretly decides a measure is unconstitutional and neglects to say so (much less why), he undermines the very system of public consent for which we are fighting. Having said that, we also must not be so absorbed by questions of statutory construction that we ignore the revolutionary political and technological events that are transforming the world in which our laws must function.

Jeffrey D. Sachs Gives The 2007 BBC Reith Lectures: Bursting at the Seams, April 11- May 9, 2007

Jeffrey Sachs argues that the world faces challenges on an unprecedented scale - the destruction of the planet through global warming, terrorism, extreme poverty, disease and bad governance.

Excerpts from Spokesmen for the Despised; Fundamentalist Leaders of the Middle East, Edited by R. Scott Appleby

The word fundamentalism, therefore, aptly describes the basic method of the modern religious leader who reaches into the sacred past, selects and develops politically useful (if sometimes obscure) teachings or traditions, and builds around these so-called fundamentals an ideology and a program of action. What we mean by fundamentalism, in other words, is the b... [ Read More (0.4k in body) ]

noteworthy wrote:
Why We Listen By Philip Bobbitt

A president does have an obligation to assess the constitutionality of statutes, but when he secretly decides a measure is unconstitutional and neglects to say so (much less why), he undermines the very system of public consent for which we are fighting. Having said that, we also must not be so absorbed by questions of statutory construction that we ignore the revolutionary political and technological events that are transforming the world in which our laws must function.

I decided to respond to this one as it's been a frequent topic of discussion here and an interest of mine. I appreciate some of the comments here, but not others. There is a tacit assumption that those two random intercepts from Afghanistan could have been turned into actionable intelligence and in the "post 9/11 world" we've got to look at stuff like that. How many total random intercepts were made? How much work would have been required to turn the words "tommorow is the zero hour" into a list of specific people who were planning a specific act, and their specific locations? Does the author suggest that if it wasn't for that damn FISA court the NSA would have been able to do it?

As you've often noted, more signals intelligence is what we get not because its what is needed, but because its what we know how to do.

Its extremely difficult to talk about what is really needed here, both because the administration is more interested in simply taking what they want then they are in maintaining a system of checks and balances, and because they aren't interested in disclosing what they've taken and what challenges they face.

However, I have a proposal. Fine, listen to whatever you want. No warrants. You classify everything, and you put a court between the NSA and the rest of the administration. Any information shared to the administration by the NSA must relate to a direct threat to american lives. No drugs. No taxes. No stock market manipulation. No theft. Only terrorism. And REAL terrorism. Not "well these guys have some political ideas we don't iike." You define the lines of the information hole with a Constitutional Amendment.

If you need extrodinary power to fight a foreign terrorist threat, then you ought to have it, but you ought to have it only for the purpose of fighting that terrorist threat, and not as a general purpose tool for doing whatever the hell you want, such as spying on your domestic political opponents.

I don't honestly think this is a practical proprosal, both because I don't think the Administration has the discipline to use extraordinary powers only for extraordinary purposes, they've certainly shown just the opposite behavior, and because I don't think the American people have the strength to fight mission creep. There are a lot of people in this country who have utopian ideas about perfect law enforcement and they are going to grab onto stuff like this and march us right off a cliff.