The New Republic

Outliers: The Story of Success By Malcolm Gladwell (Little, Brown and Company, 309 pp., $27.99) READ MORE >>

Meeting with Joe Biden, Bill Gates seconds my* motion about foreign aid levels. (OK, I don't think Gates actually cited me. But you know that's where he got the idea.) --Michael Crowley READ MORE >>

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Permanent repeal of the estate tax did not pass Congress in 2006. And with the Democrats now in charge, it seems unlikely to pass in the near future. But plenty of conservatives still agitate for it -- and the cause still has plenty of supporters. READ MORE >>

GEORGE SOROS LUNCHED with some reporters on Saturday at Davos. He talked about spending $600 million on civil society projects during the 1990s, then trying to cut back to $300 million, and how this year it will be between $450 and $500 million. His new projects aim, in Floyd Norris’s words, to promote a “common European foreign policy” (read: an anti-American foreign policy) and also to study the integration (or so he thinks) of Muslims in eleven European cities. READ MORE >>

Will the rich save the world? This has not been their traditional service to humankind; but in contemporary America you may be forgiven for believing in the messianic power of personal wealth. We are still enjoying the economicist fantasy that was inaugurated by technology in the Clinton years and consolidated by ideology in the Bush years. Could it be that the rich did not previously save the world because they were not rich enough? But they are rich enough now, right? I do not mean to be too clever. READ MORE >>

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Apart from Austin Powers, there can be few British institutions as groovy right now as The Economist. Der Spiegel has hailed its "legendary influence." Vanity Fair has written that "the positions The Economist takes change the minds that matter." In Britain, the Sunday Telegraph has declared that "it is widely regarded as the smartest, most influential weekly magazine in the world." In America, it is regularly fawned on as a font of journalistic reason. READ MORE >>

When you first meet David Rubenstein, you have to force yourself to remember that as a young staffer in the Carter White House he believed that the best thing in the world to be was a public servant. In those days he was known mainly for his unwillingness to go home at night. READ MORE >>