For two decades automakers have been developing technology that could make vehicles go farther on a gallon of gasoline. But instead, they have chosen pep and size — making vehicles like the new Murano accelerate faster than cars like the old Mustang, and making them bigger.

The average vehicle, which 25 years ago accelerated to 60 miles an hour in 14.4 seconds, now does it in 9.9 seconds, a pace once typical only of sporty or luxury cars like Camaros and Jaguars. And vehicle weight now averages about 4,100 pounds, up from about 3,200 in the early 1980's, as many buyers switched to larger, roomier cars or to sport utility vehicles and minivans, and as automakers added safety equipment.

Buyers like the extra zoom and room, but these have come at a cost: average fuel economy has fallen slightly over the last two decades. The government's new standards for light trucks like S.U.V.'s, published yesterday, will require an 8.1 percent increase in miles per gallon over the four model years from 2008 through 2011.

But over the longer term, significant improvement appears to be lagging. As scientists and engineers look for ways to satisfy the fast-growing demand for energy and to slow climate change, many of them say that fundamental changes are needed in the way fuel is produced and consumed.

Automakers Use New Technology to Beef Up Muscle, Not Mileage

In a time of bold divisions between good girls and bad, Ms. Page colored outside the lines.

So does the Canadian-born, Oxford-educated Ms. Harron, whose visually adventurous new film drew praise on the festival circuit and some sharp complaints for not probing its subject's psyche more deeply. Speaking recently from the Brooklyn home she shares with the filmmaker John Walsh and their two daughters, she talked about why "The Notorious Bettie Page" bypasses the usual tell-all tropes of a conventional biopic to show a woman who, domesticating lust as effectively as Hugh Hefner ever did, became a magnet for a decade's thrilled, guilty, convoluted attitudes toward sex.

As Costume Dramas Go, Bettie Page's Is Rather Brief

As his 80th birthday approaches, Hugh Hefner is proud of his achievements. He shouldn't be.

"When I found the vault next door to Marilyn was available," he explained to the Daily Telegraph, "it seemed natural."

The Playboy Legacy | OpinionJournal - Taste

Salim Ahmed Hamdan must have thought he'd hit the jackpot when he landed a job as a driver for Osama bin Laden on a farm in Afghanistan, making an extravagant $200 a month. Things presumably look different from the vantage point of Hamdan's cell in Guantanamo Bay.

Driving Miss Jihadi: Osama bin Laden's chauffeur vs. military tribunals

So now to the subject at hand: the nexus between the life of the mind and the world of public affairs.

"Independence" and "impact" are two thirds of a trinity of virtues that are critical to public policy research. The third, overriding virtue, I'm sure you'd all agree, is quality—as in intellectual quality: the kind of quality that can only be attained in an atmosphere that fosters the right combination of discipline and imagination, an openness to the constructive criticism of peers, and the active encouragement of a diversity of views.

"We're all entitled to our own opinions, but we're not entitled to our own facts."

The 2008 race is shaping up to be the first one in 56 years -- since 1952 -- when neither ticket will feature an incumbent president or vice president.

The Role of Independent Research in Partisan Times

The really hard question—and one that we do not answer as well as we might have in Who Controls the Internet? -- is whether new technologies empower individuals or organizations more.

Who Controls the Internet? and An Army of Davids By Jack Goldsmith, Glenn Reynolds, and Tim Wu

WITH NEW HOME SALES DOWN 10.5 percent in February, and with home prices declining for the fourth month in a row, it's high time for a sober look at the consequences of a major housing correction.

Roughly a quarter of the jobs created since the 2001 recession have been in construction, real estate, and mortgage finance.

Consider the price-to-income ratio (above, right), an obvious measure of affordability. This ratio has reached an unprecedented level in the bubble markets. While this ratio hovered around its average of 4-to-1 for the past 30 years, it has zoomed to nearly 8-to-1. The current figure is 3.6 standard deviations from its average level, which, if the data have a normal bell-shaped distribution, means the odds of the price-to-income ratio reaching this level would be less than 1 in 300. In other words, it is off the charts.

Housing Bubble Trouble

Prizing "stability" over democracy: That doesn't sound like a rhetorical trope of President Bush, does it? Certainly not when he's waxing apologetic about the Arab and Muslim worlds.

"For 60 years," Condoleezza Rice said at the American University in Cairo last June, "my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region here in the Middle East--and we achieved neither. Now, we are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspirations of all people."

What about Pakistan?

Pakistani Exceptionalism

This proposal is drawing national attention as visionary, though it is more remarkable for the manner in which it neatly illustrates the problems with how we think about technology and schooling.

Absent in Michigan, and often elsewhere, is serious thought about how technology might help cut costs or modernize educational delivery.

There is no reputable analysis suggesting that the billions invested in technology have enhanced the productivity or performance of America's schools.

Technically Foolish

Middle East expert Anthony Cordesman tells cfr.org's Bernard Gwertzman in a recent interview that US officials have exaggerated the progress made by Iraqi security forces, saying they will need US support at least one or two more years.

Downturn in U.S.-Shiite Relations