The New Republic

We’ve come to expect grand things from the State of the Union: Major revelations about the president’s agenda, bold policy initiatives, memorable turns of phrase. And sometimes that’s what we get, for better and for worse. In 2009, for example, Obama used his budget speech (the de facto State of the Union) to lay out his ambitious first-year agenda. In 2011, he reacted to his party’s defeat at the polls by calling for bipartisan cooperation and emphasizing deficit reduction. READ MORE >>

The new jobless numbers are out. They're apparently a smidgen better than was expected, but the unemployment rate remains 9.1 percent. Letting Warren Buffet pay less in taxes than his secretary doesn't appear to be doing the trick. READ MORE >>

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Election Analysis: The Center Proves to Be the Most Popular Place in American Politics by John B. Judis Place of Grace: The Uncanny Beauty of Peter Zumthor's Out-of-the-Way Buildings by Sarah Williams Goldhagen READ MORE >>

A few months ago Warren Buffet did something pretty cool: Seeing that world governments are doing a feeble job of stopping nuclear proliferation, he offered to pony up $50 million of his own cash (via Sam Nunn's Nuclear Threat Initiative) to fund an international nuclear fuel bank--a longstanding proposal for discouraging proliferators that has never gotten off the ground. READ MORE >>