Earlier this week, Vice President Joe Biden spent five and a half hours with Chinese President Xi Xinping.  They met in three formats — one a restricted meeting with a small handful of advisers, the second a larger meeting with many more advisers, and the third a small working dinner

A juicy TIME staff-written teaser from Mark Halperin’s and John Heilemann’s new book, Double Down: Game Change 2012, on the elections fiascos last round: Codenamed “Pufferfish,” in the aquatic-themed parlance of the campaign’s vetting team, Christie was a constant  thorn in the side of the Romney campaign, going back to a 2011 demand that the…

As I witness from the far-off vantage point of India this week the collapse of American authority and gravitas around the world because of the debt ceiling debacle still in play in Washington, I ran across a clip about the one-hundred year rise to global power and ferocity of the Mongol tribes at a great…

Recently, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel sent a 904-page book to Egyptian Army Commander-in-Chief Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi, with whom he has had over twenty conversations since assuming his Pentagon role.  The book, Washington: A Life, won for its author Ron Chernow the Pulitzer Prize

My quote in today’s Financial Times article by Geoff Dyer on the latest in US-Iran relations: It is not getting carried away to say this is an extraordinary moment because rapprochement with Iran would be the biggest positive shift in global affairs since the end of the Cold War and the normalisation of relations with…

In these times, it may be useful to some to go back and read the poems of Rupert Brooke, Ezra Pound, Wilfred Owen and others who captured and froze in time the horrors of chemical weapons in the world’s first great war. Wilfred Owen died in November 1918, the last week of World War I….

Christopher Lane, an Australian who was on a baseball scholarship at East Central University in Ada, Okla.

My Atlantic colleague Marc Ambinder tweeted an Amazon like set of options for Jeff Bezos, who is making a wow wow wow purchase of the Washington Post: Marc Ambinder ‏@marcambinder Based on your previous purchases, Jeff Bezos, you might also like: — The Los Angeles Times — The Orlando Sentinel — Newsweek Based on your…

Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) are heading to Egypt, apparently as symbols of democratic magnanimity that losers in political contests should not be rounded up and thrown in prison.

For those interested in following the “real unemployment” rate, which businessman Leo Hindery and others have been promoting as a better measure of unemployment than the more limited data on official unemployment which the government and media tend to prioritize, I attach his letter: In July 2013, the number of Real Unemployed Persons decreased by…