The New Republic

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[Guest Post by Isaac Chotiner] Julia Ioffe has a report on the Putin-Berlusconi friendship that includes this charming anecdote: READ MORE >>

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[Guest post by Isaac Chotiner] A few years ago I engaged in a friendly debate with Ross Douthat about the number of books that President Bush had read in 2006. According to Karl Rove, the former president had read 94 books (some of the 94 were big history books). I found this claim dubious, but Ross thought it was believeable. Now, to Sarah Palin. At the end of his big piece on the onetime Alaska governor, Robert Draper writes: READ MORE >>

[Guest post by Isaac Chotiner] Sarah Lyall's New York Times write-up of the news that Prince William is engaged goes through the predictable handwringing over the bride-to-be's relatively "modest" upbringing before giving an account of how David Cameron and his cabinet reacted to the announcement. Prime Minister David Cameron said that when he announced the news, members of his cabinet responded with a “great cheer” and “banging of the table.” READ MORE >>

[Guest post by Isaac Chotiner] Jonah Goldberg, author of the book Liberal Fascism, on C-Span this weekend: One of the great failures of my book is that it has popularized the use of 'fascism' as an epithet. And one of the things I was hoping to do, and I failed miserably, is shut down the use of the word 'fascist' as an epithet. Instead it's become bipartisan. And I don't like it. I don't think it's all that helpful. It might help my books sales, but that's not what I had hoped to do. READ MORE >>

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[Guest post by Isaac Chotiner] The Times has a piece today on the tests given to children who apply to elite New York preschools. It turns out that the schools sometimes offer certain children a chance of taking another test, in case the kids' original scores were too low. Who are these kids? [Amandy Uhry, a private school admissions adviser] said 2 percent to 5 percent of her clients each year were offered the option [of taking a re-rest]. READ MORE >>

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