TIME Magazine

... Journalist and New America Foundation Fellow Joe Mathews believes the former Hollywood movie star has been a much better governor than his predecessor Davis. ...

Original article

One Wednesday afternoon this summer, 55 young men and women filed into a dark movie theater for a private screening. Sundance  this was not. There was no Robert Redford, no Diesel swag. But this audience had one important qualification: sometime recently, they had all dropped out of high school. So for a movie about America's malfunctioning education system, it was an unusually qualified focus group.

Our cover stories by Amanda Ripley and John Cloud come at an inflection point for public education in America. The combination of falling test scores, ...

The Washington Note

If you want to hone your public-policy chops, the Washington Note, a blog by think-tank director Steve Clemons, is a good place to start. The Washington Note focuses on foreign policy with a mix of clips, articles and Clemons' own thoughtful analysis. The blog subscribes to the "less is more" ideal — there isn't a huge volume, and some days have little more than a single post. But what is there, you'll want to read.

When the White House announced its National Security Strategy last month, it titled it A Blueprint for Pursuing the World That We Seek. A better title might have been The Fun Is Definitely Over. The document used the phrase "hard choices" three times, called for "a disciplined approach to setting priorities" and predicted "trade-offs among competing programs and activities." The nature of those trade-offs was never spelled out, but the implication was clear: America doesn't have as much money and power as we once thought.

There have been 35 strikes so far this year, all but two of which struck targets in North Waziristan, compared to 53 throughout 2009, according to a tally kept by the Washington-based New America Foundation. ...

Microfinance seems simple: make small loans to the poor so they will have the capital to send their children to school, pay for health care, start a business. But lifting families from poverty also requires that they be able to protect their new assets — a home, a herd, a budding enterprise. The Global Assets Project, co-led by Michael Sherraden, offers things people in developed countries take as a given: savings accounts, insurance, investment capital. ...

"Beans??" The girl said.

This week’s cover, our third annual 10 Ideas issue, was itself a new idea: we joined with the New America Foundation to assess the most important concepts that will shape our world over the next decade. The New America Foundation, an 11-year-old nonpartisan think tank in Washington with Silicon Valley roots, emphasizes next-generation thinkers and ideas—and that’s what you’ll find inside.

Viewing Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey in the year 2010 is a depressing experience. According to this 1968 movie, by now we were supposed to have moon colonies and regular passenger service on space planes. And anyone who struggles with automated receptionist messages or programmable televisions knows that today's computers are just as psychotic as HAL 9000, only dumber.