Newsweek

Mark Hertsgaard is a fellow at the New American Foundation and the author, most recently, of HOT: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth. This article was reported in partnership with the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute. Get Newsweek ...

A world without pasta seems inconceivable. Mac-and-cheese-loving children across the United States would howl in protest. Italy might suffer a cultural heart attack. Social unrest could explode in northern China, where noodles are the main staple.

But if humans want to keep eating pasta, we will have to take much more aggressive action against global warming. Pasta is made from wheat, and a large, growing body of scientific studies and real-world observations suggest that wheat will be hit especially hard as temperatures rise and storms and drought intensify in the years ahead.

When muslim extremists attacked their third American church in three days, the cable networks cut away from regular programming to cover the news. When militants vandalized a Christian school in Illinois two days later, both presidential candidates issued statements denouncing the wave of jihadist violence. When terrorists shot up another church the day after that, President Obama flew to comfort the parishioners. By the sixth attack, Rush Limbaugh was demanding that the Obama administration ditch its politically correct pussyfooting and acknowledge the Muslim fifth column in our midst.

Four years ago a 38-year-old adjunct professor at American University named Fred Holliday began suffering from a variety of ailments: he was losing weight, his blood pressure went up. Then he cracked a rib. And he started suffering from debilitating back pain. Each time a new problem arose, the Washington, D.C., resident visited his doctor, who dealt with his symptoms piecemeal. First she prescribed blood-pressure medication. At another visit, she chalked up his fractured rib to violent coughing from a cold he had. Then she prescribed narcotics for his back.

Bibi was coming again, and the White House was determined: this visit would not play out like the last one. On Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu previous trip to Washington, Obama had proposed that Israel and the Palestinians negotiate a peace deal based on the armistice lines drawn after Israel’s birth. Netanyahu reacted badly, lecturing the president publicly that “we can’t go back to those indefensible lines.”

Sherle Schwenninger, an infrastructure expert at the New America Foundation, a leading Washington think tank, says that a kind of anti-bigness mindset developed in the 1990s, that era in which the besotting buzzwords were “Silicon Valley” and “West ...

The fate of Muammar Gaddafi's son wasn't inevitable. There was a choice and a decidedly better one. In February, as the Arab Spring unfolded, he dispatched an op-ed to several American newspapers, expressing a willingness to move toward a more open Libya. Every paper rejected it. But if that lost piece had been published, perhaps the dictator's son, Saif al-Islam, would have found a place among the rebels.

U.S.-Pakistan relations in recent years have been founded on a kind of bargain—an unstated and unstable bargain, but one that until this week seemed basically workable. The U.S. administration would turn a partially blind eye to the shelter given by Pakistan to the Afghan Taliban leadership; in return, Pakistan would genuinely cooperate against international terrorist plots directed at the American homeland. The location and death of Osama bin Laden in the vicinity of a Pakistan military academy calls that bargain, and the whole future of the American-Pakistani alliance, into question.

Predator drone attacks have drawn intense criticism and protests for causing civilian deaths, but they are also very effective at their primary goal: killing terrorists. The New America Foundation estimates that as many as 1800 militants—including 33 ...

“I just don't see a reasonable way to get there through spending cuts alone,” says Maya MacGuineas, director of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. “And I'm saying that as someone who doesn't think revenues should be the bulk of the ...