In the 1960s, criminologists developed the theory that employed men are less likely to commit crimes because they are meaingfullly occupied. The logic eventually migrated to conflict zones: Unemployed men with lots of time on their hands have the opportunity and motivation to participate in political violence, the thinking went. Put these men to work and insurgent violence will decrease. Job creation programs led by aid and development organizations have sprouted up around the world in order to put this wisdom into action.

Remember the last time Americans elected a "postpartisan" president? Why, it was only four years ago! It was Barack Obama who hoped to soar above the sordid political wars with “eloquence, rational policies, and good faith,” writes Princeton historian Sean Wilentz. After Obama’s first year in office, however, Gallup found that he was the most polarizing president in the history of its polling efforts.

The American yearning for a politics without partisan conflict is as old as the republic, Wilentz says. It’s also a snare and a delusion. President George Washington gave voice to it in his Farewell Address of 1796, famously warning that political parties were not “natural,” and that they were led by “artful and enterprising men” (which he did not intend as a compliment). Yet Washington’s deeds belied his words—the very timing of his speech was highly partisan. Having long before decided not to accept a third term, Washington informed his vice president and chosen successor, the Federalist John Adams, but delayed a public announcement until he delivered the Farewell Address in September of that election year, handicapping Adams’s rival, Thomas Jefferson.

When Jefferson finally won the presidency four years later, he famously declared, “We are all republicans, we are all federalists,” but his words, too, were deceptive. Jefferson and his allies in what

Why do roughly 70 percent of European workers have collective bargaining coverage, while only 13 percent of their American counterparts do? Religion is a surprisingly big part of the answer.

Hit the "scan" button on your car radio and you're just as likely to land on a station with a right-wing pundit lambasting health care reform as the latest Rihanna hit. Talk radio is thriving: About 3,500 American radio stations use that format today, up from about 1,750 in 2007 and just 500 in 1991. Political scientist Jeffrey M. Berry and sociologist Sarah Sobieraj, both of Tufts University, argue that the boom is more a matter of money talking than politics.

Americans like to think of themselves as a restless people, always ready to pack up and move in search of opportunity. But in the past 30 years, they have been increasingly stuck in place.

The specter of cyberwar haunts American leaders. “The next Pearl Harbor could very well be a cyberattack,” Leon Panetta warned last year when he was still CIA director.

In 1946, poet and critic R.P. Blackmur sent a letter to many of America’s most prominent writers and critics. “For reasons that will later become apparent,” it began, “we should be very grateful for your best opinion as to what literary magazines now being published in the United States are of the most use to literature.” The impetus behind the query was the Rockefeller Foundation, which had decided to support literary magazines and had asked Blackmur to determine which were the most deserving.

The debt ceiling fracas that consumed Washington this summer made it seem as if restoring economic health was only a matter of finding a new balance of taxes and spending. But Arnold Kling of the Cato Institute and Nick Schulz of the American Enterprise Institute argue that policymakers are neglecting a transformational development on the horizon”: Health care and education are on track to become “the heart of the economy." That is, or should be, the central issue, they argue.

Unlike many fields, health care and education will enjoy solid demand and wage growth for the foreseeable future. They’ve already accounted for the vast majority of job gains in recent memory: Employment in health care, education, and other parts of the public sector increased by 16 percent over the past 10 years, while employment in all other sectors fell by eight percent. And the trend will only continue. The way the modern economy has evolved means that Americans use a smaller percentage of their income for basic needs such as food, clothing, and shelter, freeing up money for secondary but still integral services such as education and health care. What’s more, even in hard times, people refrain from tightening their belts when it comes to these secondary services: In 2008, at the height of the panic over the financial system, personal spending on education and health care continued to rise.

Kling and Schulz note that it is also hard “to squeeze

In an age when most information is just a few keystrokes away, it’s natural to wonder: Is Google weakening our powers of memory? According to psychologists Betsy Sparrow of Columbia University, Jenny Liu of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and Daniel M. Wegner of Harvard, the Internet has not so much diminished intelligent recall as tweaked it.

The trio’s research shows what most computer users can tell you anecdotally: When you know you have the Internet at hand, your memory relaxes. In one of their experiments, 46 Harvard undergraduates were asked to answer 32 trivia questions on computers. After each one, they took a quick Stroop test, in which they were shown words printed in different colors and then asked to name the color of each word. They took more time to name the colors of Internet-related words, such as modem and browser. According to Stroop test conventions, this is because the words were related to something else that they were already thinking about—yes, they wanted to fire up Google to answer those tricky trivia questions.

In another experiment, the authors uncovered evidence suggesting that access to computers plays a fundamental role in what people choose to commit to their God-given hard drive. Subjects were instructed to type 40 trivia-like statements into a dialog box. Half were told that the computer would erase the information and half that it would be saved. Afterward, when asked to recall the statements, the students who were

Women may be underrepresented in Congress, but those who get elected to office are no shrinking violets. Research by political scientists Sarah F. Anzia of Stanford University and Christopher R. Berry of the University of Chicago shows that congresswomen are more effective on Capitol Hill than their male counterparts. Female legislators secure nine percent more federal discretionary spending for their districts than congressmen do—on average, a difference of $49 million per district annually. They also sponsor about three more bills per Congress than their male peers (the average per member is 18), and cosponsor roughly 26 more bills.

Would Congress be more effective if more women were elected? (They’ve held an average of just 17 percent of the seats in recent years.) It’s not likely, Anzia and Berry say. Congresswomen aren’t overachievers because women are intrinsically better legislators, the authors argue, but because the barriers to entry for women in congressional politics are so high that those who succeed simply have more talent and put in more effort than the average man who wins at the polls. If those barriers were to fall, so would the performance level of most female legislators.

The authors attribute women’s superior performance in Congress to what they call the “Jill Robinson effect.” Like the famed African-American baseball player Jackie Robinson, whose combination of great athletic talent and outstanding character