Lessons learned about Washington from investigating how the “grand bargain” fell apart.

The inside story of the Affordable Care Act.

An obituary for Richard Nixon.

Marion Barry is running for reelection — and nobody cares.

The United States, which took a forceful stance on other Arab revolts, remained relatively passive in the face of the kingdom’s unrest and crackdown. To many who are familiar with the region, this came as no surprise: of all the Arab states that saw revolts last year, Bahrain is arguably the most closely tied to American strategic interests.

A report on Bahrain, the Arab Spring’s most ill-fated uprising.

A report from the trial of Ivan Demjanjuk—a.k.a. “The Last Nazi”—who died on March 17.

The Republican candidate works a room, as excerpted from Richard Ben Cramer’s biography of the senator:

No one can do that day after day, week after week, for years … without some rock-hard certainty that can’t be milled away by nonsense and stress. He has to know: Why him? And: Why now? … He has to know that he is The One.

And if he’s strong enough to keep going-if he’s able, smart, and lucky-then, he’ll get to the final twist in the road, when things catch fire, he can see how his words make the people feel, he can feel how those words now matter to him. He can make all the difference just by walking into a room. There are thousands of people — and they want him. He and his campaign fill the lives of people who are almost strangers, and he takes over the life of everyone dear to him. He has to, it’s all right — because it’s that important. Now, he knows:

Not only should I be President, I am going to be President!

All violence is not like all other violence. Every Jewish death is not like every other Jewish death. To believe otherwise is to revive the old typological thinking about Jewish history, according to which every enemy of the Jews is the same enemy, and there is only one war, and it is a war against extinction, and it is a timeless war.

In 1970s Britain, conservative philosophy was the preoccupation of a few half-mad recluses. Searching the library of my college, I found Marx, Lenin, and Mao, but no Strauss, Voegelin, Hayek, or Friedman. I found every variety of socialist monthly, weekly, or quarterly, but not a single journal that confessed to being conservative.

A young Brit goes against the political grain.

It’s rare that a magazine article really introduces you to a whole brand new idea. This piece is ostensibly a profile of Bill Cosby, but it’s much more profoundly an introduction to the notion of a “black conservative” political tradition. Not a tradition of African-Americans being aligned with the (white-dominated) mainstream American conservative movement, but a separate black conservative tradition within the African-American community that serves as a counterpoint to the liberal integrationist tradition. Once I started to see this, it really changed around how I think about the meaning of political ideology.

- M. Yglesias

In an odd way, crime has fallen off the political landscape. To an extent it’s been replaced on the agenda by concern about the dire consequences of mass incarceration. But violent crime itself remains a major area in which the United States lags behind other developed countries. To suggest that smarter management of the criminal justice system could make it less brutal while simultaneously creating large reductions in the quantity of crime sounds utopian. And yet the proposals for parole system reform found in this article are utterly convincing.

-M. Yglesias

“I thought dying for your country was the worst thing that could happen to you, and I don’t think it is. I think killing for your country can be a lot worse. Because that’s the memory that haunts.”

On February 25, 1969, Bob Kerrey led a raid into a Vietnamese peasant hamlet during which at least 13 unarmed women and children were killed.