Emily

He dipped into Middle Eastern foreign policy at Thursday's Republican Jewish Coalition forum.

The candidate presents a threat to our democracy.

"The New Colossus

A long look into the sad, dark heart of what it takes to shoot the average political campaign ad.

Pornographic audio has been blaring out at Target stores across California. A weak system is to blame.

To me, there is no food item more downright disrespectful to its origins than the burrito. Everything that makes food amazing is lost on this twilight zone wrapped in a flour tortilla.

Ohio state Sen. Nina Turner Ohio state Sen. Nina Turner (D) isn't happy with bills that seek to control women's access to contraception and abortion. She has joined a trend across the nation by ...

Peeple wants you to rate your friends, enemies and exes on a five-point scale for everyone to see. If you don't like it, you can't opt out.

Public walks are scheduled for Aug. 22 in Ipswich, Aug. 28 in Boston and Sept. 10 in Cambridge.

Curtis Carroll taught himself to read in prison. He also discovered a passion for finance. Now inmates and guards seek out his advice, and everyone calls him Wall Street.

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Thursday is the seventieth anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. To mark it, we’ve made all of “Hiroshima,” John Hersey’s landmark 1946 report on the bombing and its aftermath, available online.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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The Republicans know that Thursday night's presidential debate could potentially devolve into the political equivalent of a 1970s disaster film -- call it "The Trumpeting Inferno" if you must -- and are desperately trying to stage-manage the debate so that it doesn't turn into something only Democrats can kick back with a bucket of popcorn and enjoy, like Fox News' most recent focus group.

In addition to controlling both who can participate and engaging in a rearguard legitimization of the selected candidates, Fox News and the Republican National Committee are collaborating to make sure that one particular candidate doesn't dominate the debate, either temporally or tonally. Tuesday night, the candidate in question told Bill O'Reilly that he would "hurt anybody" who attacked him.

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Right now, all sorts of people are trying to rethink and reinvent education, to get poor minority kids performing as well as white kids. But there's one thing nobody tries anymore, despite lots of evidence that it works: desegregation. Nikole Hannah-Jones looks at a district that, not long ago, accidentally launched a desegregation program.

Darren Wilson, the former police officer who shot and killed Michael Brown, an eighteen-year-old African-American, in Ferguson, Missouri, has been living for several months on a nondescript dead-end street on the outskirts of St. Louis. Most of the nearby houses are clad in vinyl siding; there are no sidewalks, and few cars around. Wilson, who is twenty-nine, started receiving death threats not long after the incident, in which Brown was killed in the street shortly after robbing a convenience store. Although Wilson recently bought the house, his name is not on the deed, and only a few friends know where he lives. He and his wife, Barb, who is thirty-seven, and also a former Ferguson cop, rarely linger in the front yard. Because of such precautions, Wilson has been leading a very quiet life. During the past year, a series of police killings of African-Americans across the country has inspired grief, outrage, protest, and acrimonious debate. For many Americans, this discussion, though painful, has been essential. Wilson has tried, with some success, to block it out.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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If you want to know where Hasan Elahi is, just check his website. Every day for the past decade, the University of Maryland art professor has voluntarily updated his location and posted snapshots of his day online so the Federal Bureau of Investigation

A car plant in Fremont California that might have saved the U.S. car industry. In 1984, General Motors and Toyota opened NUMMI as a joint venture. Toyota showed GM the secrets of its production system: How it made cars of much higher quality and much lower cost than GM achieved. Frank Langfitt explains why GM didn't learn the lessons—until it was too late.

On Tuesday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel stood in front of a live TV camera and told a sobbing teenage girl that she couldn't stay in Germany.

The 13-year-old girl had, years earlier, fled a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon with her family. They settled in the German city of Rostock where, four years later, she ended up as one of several local teenagers on a TV program called "Good Life in Germany," meeting Angela Merkel.

"I have goals like everyone else," she explained in fluent German to a visibly shocked Merkel. "I want to go to university, that’s a goal I want to achieve."

But instead, she explained, she faces deportation along with the rest of her family. It was terribly difficult, she said in a shaky voice, to see others enjoying their lives in Germany but feel she could not participate.

Merkel seemed momentarily speechless, at first responding with nothing more than a stern "Hmm."

Although she collected herself after a moment, the response she came up with wasn't much of an improvement: "Politics is hard sometimes."

In what was presumably an attempt to be friendly, Merkel told the devastated teen that "when you are standing in front of me, you are a very likable person," but that "there are thousands and thousands more in the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. And if we say ‘you can all come here, you can all come over from Africa,’ we can’t cope with that."

Merkel pivoted to a dry discussion of her plans to speed up processing times for refugee cases, but by then the stricken teen had begun to sob. Merkel walked over and patted the girl on the shoulder, but couldn't console her.

Merkel's response feels wrong, because it is

If it feels unjust to see one of the most powerful people in the world tell a crying child that her future dreams have to be destroyed because "politics is hard sometimes," that's because it is unjust. Germany's attitude toward refugees is wrong, and it's hurting innocent people. And Merkel knows that — she's just not used to being confronted with evidence of it on live TV.

In her response, Merkel was trying to imply that if Germany treats this girl and her family leniently, it will somehow be obligated to accept the entire world’s refugees. But that’s disingenuous. There is no mechanism by which that would happen. There is no rule that says that if Germany grants asylum to a family in Rostock then it has to accept every Palestinian in a Lebanese camp, or everyone from "Africa." There is no slippery slope here because there isn’t a slope at all. Right now, Germany has a legal obligation to protect refugees who are inside its borders, and no legal obligation to protect those who are outside them. Granting this girl and her family refugee status, visas, or even just temporary relief from deportation wouldn’t change that in the slightest.

What Merkel really means is that there are currently millions of people in the world who could have valid asylum claims, and she's worried they'll all come to Germany if it seems even slightly welcoming. So Germany deports people like this young Palestinian and her family to set an example that's just cruel enough to serve as a deterrent.

But that is also deeply unjust. Refugees exist. They are already desperate, already fleeing their homes, and they have to go somewhere. Germany may think it's facing a refugee crisis, but the truth is that it's hosting only a tiny fraction of the people who are fleeing war or other persecution.

Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon are hosting millions of refugees. This is a global problem and Germany is doing remarkably little to shoulder its share of burden, though it is far more capable of doing so than is, say, Lebanon. What Merkel is arguing isn't that she is incapable of doing more, but rather that her country — like other European countries — is somehow exempt from the responsibility of giving shelter to vulnerable people.

The implication of this is that far poorer and less stable countries must carry Germany's burden for it, and because they have no other choice, they are. Because refugees are unable to reach countries such as Germany or know they face possible deportation once they reach there, they are stuck in what are often underfunded or unsafe camps.

Sure, "politics is hard sometimes." For Merkel, it's hard because she might lose an election. For refugees, it's hard because it leaves them vulnerable to persecution or death.

I can see how she would expect a desperate, sobbing child to understand that.

Of course Germany could "cope" with more refugees

Even if it were somehow true that treating existing asylum seekers more leniently would force Germany to accept much greater numbers of people, it's simply nonsense that Germany "can't cope with that."

Of course it can.

Germany is one of the wealthiest nations on earth. Its GDP is the fifth-largest in the world and the largest in Europe. If there were a commission somewhere making an objective evaluation of which countries have the resources and stability to handle an influx of refugees from humanitarian crisis, Germany would surely be high on the list. It would certainly be higher than the countries actually hosting large refugee influxes such as Jordan, Lebanon, or Turkey, which are not only poorer (ranked No. 85, 86, and 17 by GDP respectively), but also face greater political instability and are threatened directly by the conflicts on their borders.

More importantly, the question of "coping" assumes that taking in more refugees would be a burden on the German economy — but there's no compelling reason to believe that they would. As my colleague Dylan Matthews points out, the economic case that immigration harms receiving countries is very weak. While there could potentially be some narrow negative effects, such as unskilled wages falling because of an influx of unskilled labor, there's no reason to believe that more immigration, humanitarian or otherwise, is a net negative.

Germany also, by the way, is suffering from a demographic decline. Not only can its economy handle more people, but it is imperiled by having too few people. Letting this girl and her family stay in Rostock wouldn't be some burden on Germany, but a boon to it.

Merkel simply wasn't telling that crying teenager the truth. Germany can cope with taking in more refugees, and would probably even benefit from doing so. It just doesn't want to.

Germany's shameful treatment of asylum seekers

The televised encounter between Merkel and the sobbing girl was especially upsetting because it was so personal, and so unexpected. It's not every day that one watches a world leader coldly tell a vulnerable child that she'll need to take her concerns elsewhere because "politics is hard."

But the truth about the situation of asylum seekers in Germany is actually much uglier. Arson attacks on refugee hostels are a growing problem across the country. Just today, arsonists burned down a building outside Munich that was supposed to house 67 refugees. In April, there was an attack on a building in the city of Tröglitz. Before that, Der Spiegel reports, there were similar attacks in and around Hamburg, Munich, Berlin, and Sanitz. Right-wing groups committed more than 500 violent xenophobic attacks last year.

One neo-Nazi group has created a searchable online map called "no refugee center in my backyard" that shows refugees' homes as well as other refugee facilities. In the context of the other arson attacks, that cannot be taken as anything but a threat that they should be next.

Imagine, for a moment, how it must feel to be a refugee living with that kind of fear: knowing that you fled persecution in your home country only to be confronted by xenophobic violence after you thought you had reached safety.

It would be ridiculous to argue that governments should make policy based on what a sad child asked for during a televised town hall. But in this case, Merkel was confronted with the human face of the inhumane, unsound, and hypocritical policies she already has in place, and couldn't come up with a better response than "politics is hard."

Sure, politics is hard. But while that might be a reason for doing the wrong thing, it isn't an excuse for it.

After Sunday's decisive vote to reject a financial bailout offer, Greece may now be inching closer to leaving the eurozone—the collection of 19 countries that maintains the euro. If it does, it will need a new currency, of course, likely the drachma—the name of Greece's currency going back to ancient times.

Ancient Greek drachma coins, as it happens, were famous for their artistry, especially the handcrafted, high-relief designs—three-dimensional and elaborate—that rose from the faces of the coins. Many coins from Athens featured an owl, the bird representing the goddess Athena, with her face on the flip side of the coin (the owl design was replicated for Greece's modern-day 1 euro coin). "Ancient Greek coins are undeniably some of the most beautiful coins ever produced in the ancient world," said Philip Kiernan, a professor of archeology at the University of Buffalo where he studies ancient money, a field known as numismatics. "They're little miniature works of art."

The Athenian tetradrachm (worth four drachmas) was probably the most commonly used coin, starting around the 6th century B.C., and lasting until the 2nd century B.C., according to Kiernan. The Romans finally sacked Greece and installed their own currency, but at its peak, "Athens once produced what was essentially the US dollar of the ancient world," Kiernan said. "They were considered, remarkably, a very stable currency in the ancient world."

"Would that our coins today were as pretty as that!" he bemoaned when I spoke to him.

In fact, the enduring beauty of the ancient drachma has reached far into the modern world, even captivating, for several intense years, President Theodore Roosevelt.

Roosevelt thought the designs of US coins at the time were lifeless and stale, unbecoming of a great nation. "I think our coinage is artistically of atrocious hideousness," he wrote to the treasury secretary in 1904. Roosevelt wanted new designs that harked back to the high-relief Hellenic masterpieces but also captured the spirit of a nation growing in stature around the world.

At a White House dinner the following year, an obsessed Roosevelt located his kindred spirit: an Irish-born, New York-raised sculptor named Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who had already designed the president's inaugural medal and shared the president's love of drachma coins. Roosevelt—so moved to redesign the country's currency that he feared the treasury secretary thought him "a crack-brained lunatic on the subject"—commissioned the master sculptor to make designs for a new penny, $10, and $20 coin. "This is my pet crime," said the president, referring to his passion for the subject.

Saint-Gaudens got to work. "You have hit the nail on the head with regard to the coinage," he wrote to the president. "Of course the great coins (and you might say the only coins) are the Greek ones you speak of."

What emerged from his arduous commission, which was plagued by political, bureaucratic, and technological problems, was the famous 1907 $20 gold coin, a.k.a the double eagle, widely regarded as an artistic triumph.

Saint-Gaudens' Lady Liberty powers toward the viewer of the coin, carrying an olive branch and a torch, with dawn light splintering behind her. The US Capitol building can be seen in the bottom left-hand corner. Law required the artist to use an eagle for the design on the flip side of the corn.

But the coin was hard to make: It took nine strikes from a hydraulic press to fashion each one, making mass production impossible. Fewer than 24 were minted, in February and March 1907, according to the Smithsonian.

"The minting process of the day was not conducive to high-relief coins," says the US Mint. "As a result, despite being considered one of the most beautiful gold pieces ever minted, Saint-Gaudens' full vision for the production of an ultra high relief coin was never realized."

Roosevelt was nonetheless deeply impressed by Saint-Gauden's work. Writing about the sculptor's prototypes for a new $10 coin, Roosevelt wrote ecstatically: "Those models are simply immense—if such a slang way of talking is permissible in reference to giving a modern nation one coinage at least which shall be as good as that of the ancient Greeks… it is simply splendid. I suppose I shall be impeached for it in Congress; but I shall regard that as a very cheap payment!"

The sculptor died of cancer in August 1907, amid mounting problems with manufacturing the new coins. His design, though, lasted in some form until 1933, though it was fundamentally altered from his dramatic, high-relief original.

The fascinating, and quite personal, correspondence between Roosevelt and the sculptor was published in April 1920, in the Century, which editorialized enthusiastically about the project:

"The President's share in the new issue of coins, the thought, the patience, the unflagging enthusiasm, and the insistence that he brought to bear is a vivid example of his high regard for the need of artistic development in our national life."

In 2002, one of the only 1933 "double eagles" known to have survived sold for more than $7 million at auction.

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston has found itself mired in controversy over an in-gallery program responding to Claude Monet’s La Japonaise, a portrait of the artist’s wife Camille clad in a kimono ...

Give more money to keep people happy and healthy — that’s the bet the city of Utrecht in the Netherlands will be taking soon.

Following the principles of “basic income,” Utrecht will be giving between $900 and $1,450 per month to households already receiving welfare. Recipients will be free to spend it as they wish.

Because let's face it: no matter which side of the ticket you'll be punching, you think at least one of these guys is the antichrist.

As the primaries fast approach, presidential hopefuls are unveiling their official campaign logos, and let's speak plainly. Whether the logo is an "H" that functions as a sort of political Rorschach test; a logo that looks like it was just plucked from the side of the pyramid HQ of a dystopian mega-corporation in Blade Runner; or the exclamatory wordmark of a country-fried bumpkin who seems surprised that he's running for president, the logos we've seen so far leave us mostly underwhelmed.

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An Uber driver in San Francisco will be paid more than $4,000 in expenses.

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