AP Photo

Across Syria, checkpoints in protest areas have been set up to search people for mobile phone pictures and footage of the violence. Telephone and Internet networks have been cut, and few people have been able to leave or contact the outside world. There are reports of government snipers firing on pedestrians, and residents no longer dare leave their homes. Foreign journalists, who in recent weeks have been harassed and dissuaded from pursuing their stories (and in a few cases arrested and beaten), have now been expelled. The dearth of information has raised questions about who is involved in the protests and what prospects they might have—in the face of such repression—to bring about a broader change. While it has been increasingly difficult to get a full picture of the towns and cities where the government has responded with force, some insights can be gained from the situation in Douma, a Damascus suburb and flash point in the protests, where I was able to visit shortly before the most recent violence.

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If William and Kate have three girls and one boy, in that order, it will be the boy, the youngest, who becomes king. There are very few places where there is still egregious and blatant gender discrimination like that, and not only is it not against the law, which it would be in any workplace, it is actually enshrined in the law. In that sense, the royal family is fascinating, because it enshrines a view of men and women and how they relate to each other, and the order of things, that in all other aspects of British life has been reviewed, reformed, revised, or just plain thrown out.

Consider the Supreme Court’s newest electoral reform case. In their earlier Citizens United decision the five justices in the majority—Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito—guaranteed corporations a constitutional right to use their own capital for political advertising. They said that the point of the First Amendment is to provide the electorate with as much political speech as possible. They did not deny that the political process would be fairer if candidates and political organizations were more equal in their campaign resources. But the First Amendment forbids infringing free speech for the sake of equality, they said, and so “leveling the playing field” is no justification for stopping corporations or anyone else from spending as much on political advertising as they wish. Some commentators said that the Citizens United decision would make little practical difference: though it was wrong in principle, they thought, it would not actually do much harm. They were mistaken: the decision’s impact has already proved dramatic.

James Ewing

Statues of the illustrious (or at least famous) dead used to be added to the American cityscape with predictable regularity, especially after wars, assassinations, and the demise of beloved (or at least respected) public figures. But by the second half of the twentieth century, the ascendancy of abstract art, coupled with the unprecedented horrors of recent combat and genocide, made representational memorials seem increasingly inadequate.

Now, twenty-four years after Andy Warhol’s death, the long-obsolete memorial statue has been given new life with The Andy Monument, a dazzling, lifelike, ten-foot-tall effigy by Rob Pruitt, lately unveiled in front of 860 Broadway, the building on New York’s Union Square that housed the subject’s studio (which, like his original space on 47th Street, he called the Factory) from 1974 to 1984.

Doug Mills/The New York Times/Redux

Five conservative justices now dominate our Supreme Court—Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito. They continue to revise our historical constitution and two new cases show that the arguments they offer continue to be embarrassingly bad. One concerns contributions to religious schools; the other, public financing of elections. I will describe those cases and defend that criticism, but it might be well to notice, first, why the justices have had to resort to arguments of such poor quality.

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Like many artists, Ai Weiwei enjoys provoking. It isn’t just his finger-to-the-Chinese-government images that he has become known for but also how he does it: his obsessive-compulsive documentation of himself in photos, blogs, tweets, and rants into a digital recorder. In a country obsessed with walls, he is a living challenge to the political system.

Jules Feiffer

When I was a boy I read, in a biography of Daniel Boone, or of Daniel Beard, that young Dan (whichever of the two it may have been—or maybe it was young George Washington) had so loved some book, had felt his heart and mind inscribed so deeply in its every line, that he had pricked his fingertip with a knife and, using a pen nib and his blood for ink, penned his name on the flyleaf. At once, reading that, I knew two things: 1) I must at once undertake the same procedure and 2) only one, among all the books I adored and treasured, was worthy of such tribute: The Phantom Tollbooth. At that point I had read it at least five or six times.

Ashraf Amra/AP Photo

Richard Goldstone’s much-discussed retraction of key findings in his committee’s report on the 2009 Gaza war has produced in Israel a predictable burst of self-congratulation. From the prime minister on down, the message from the Israeli government is a defiant “We told you so!” spoken from the always-privileged vantage point of an innocent victim wrongly accused. Along with this, we have an updated Israeli version of the Prodigal Son; Goldstone, a South African former judge and liberal Zionist of the old school, has supposedly come (rather shamefacedly) back home.

Center on Budget and Policy Priorities | cbpp.org

Among the economic fallacies embraced in Congressman Paul Ryan’s budget proposal, two are particularly egregious: that getting rid of Medicare will reduce health care costs and that enacting yet further tax cuts for the rich will spur growth and investment.

Critics on the left are up in arms because Ryan’s proposal to force Medicare recipients to buy private insurance will raise the amount those now under 55 will pay when they are old enough to get Medicare by an average of $6,000 a person. In other words, critics say, we are trying to cut health care costs—and supposedly reform it through more privatization—on the backs of future elderly Medicare recipients. But the Ryan plan won’t reduce health care costs.

Berg Collection/New York Public Library

Andrew Martin: It seems like the public perception of Twain remains the guy on the porch, this sort of genteel Southern nostalgia.

Andrew Delbanco: That’s a part of him, but to the extent that he puts it out there as his public face, it’s a construction. He was immensely sophisticated about a lot of things, with the possible exception of investment practices, which he wasn’t so good at. I think you can make the case that he was fundamentally a travel writer. I mean, he was children’s writer, he was a young-adult storyteller, he was a social critic, he was a lot of things. But his mode was really just to watch the world go by, and he was a relentless, compulsive traveler. Even if he was living in the same town, he would move constantly: he had multiple addresses in Washington, multiple addresses in New York, and so on and so forth. And then he took many long and arduous trips to Europe and around the world, often under financial pressure to make money by speech-making and by writing travel articles. It’s really in his travel writing that you find him at his most alert.