From The Nation, a review of A World of Trouble: The White House and the Middle East — From the Cold War to the War on Terror by Patrick Tyler. The language that absolves Israel: A special political vocabulary prevents us from being able to recognize what's going on in the Middle East. Jonathan Chait on The Obama Method: His rhetoric may be conciliatory, but his strategy is ruthless. A review of Stefan Szymanski's Playbooks and Checkbooks: An Introduction to the Economics of Modern Sports. An excerpt from Bill Gurstelle's Absinthe and Flamethrowers: Projects and Ruminations on the Art of Living Dangerously. Mark Greif reviews The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing by Mark McGurl. From Scientific American, a special report on 10 people guiding science for humanity; and Lester Brown, at

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