Describing the unfolding torture of Guantanamo detainee Abu Zabaydah, Mark Danner paints a vivid portrait with unsettling bodily and material details. But this portrait is not presented simply for us to condemn; it serves to crystallize a larger political condition. Sometime on or about September 11, 2001, Danner argues, our political condition changed. The events of Zabaydah's torture were the consequence of a set of political choices that created what Danner calls "the style of the exception." That style coalesces around distinctive features that have become familiar in our-post 9/11...

In Giving Kids a Fair Chance, Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman argues that the accident of birth is the greatest source of inequality in America today. Children born into disadvantage are, by the time they start kindergarten, already at risk of dropping out of school, teen pregnancy, crime, and a lifetime of low-wage work. This is bad for all those born into disadvantage and bad for American society.

Current social and education policies directed toward children focus on improving cognition, yet success in life requires more than smarts. Heckman calls for a refocus...

Akbar Ganji, called by some "Iran's most famous dissident," was a member of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. But, troubled by the regime's repressive nature, he became an investigative journalist in the 1990s, writing for Iran's pro-democracy newspapers. Most notably, he traced the murders of dissident intellectuals to Iran's secret service. In 2000 Ganji was arrested,...

The revelations of prisoner abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib and more recently at Guantanamo were shocking to most Americans. And those who condemned the treatment of prisoners abroad have focused on U.S. military procedures and abuses of executive powers in the war on terror, or, more specifically, on the now-famous White House legal counsel memos on the acceptable limits of...