The New York Times

“What this did show is as a citizen in the Internet age, you have to add the Internet and your digital rights and liberties onto the list of things you need to be worried about if you want to retain your political freedoms,” said Rebecca MacKinnon, a fellow at the New America Foundation and the author of a book on digital rights, “Consent of the Networked.”

The answer, according to Lisa Guernsey of the New America Foundation’s Early Education Initiative, is that when we read with a child on an e-reader, we may actually impede our child’s ability to learn. Ms. Guernsey interpreted recent research on childhood literacy for Time magazine, and found that parents interact differently with children over an e-reader than over a physical book. That difference may make children slower to read and comprehend a story.

But Liza Mundy, a Washington Post reporter who wrote her own biography of Michelle Obama in 2008, was more understanding. “I found myself thinking about marriage — the real topic of Kantor's book,” she wrote in her review for The Post. ...

His first, in 1995, considered Michael Lind's book “The Next American Nation,” and it featured the sharp opinions and elegant phrases that would appear regularly in our pages in the ensuing years: “Mr. Lind is one of the few contemporary writers to ...

“Many couples are perfectly content and well adjusted, but for the stigmatizing opposition of friends, family, in-laws and even religious traditions,” said Liza Mundy, a fellow at the New America Foundation and author of a new book, “The Richer Sex: ...

... THE NET DELUSION: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom. By Evgeny Morozov. (PublicAffairs, $27.95.) In this challenging and often contrarian book, Morozov explores how the Internet is used to constrict or even abolish political freedom. ...

Original article

This may be the most long-awaited single-volume biography ever. In 1981, the renowned cold war historian John Lewis Gaddis approached the pre-eminent cold war diplomat George F. Kennan about writing his life story. Kennan, who was 78 at the time, turned over mountains of papers, diaries, letters, even dream notebooks, on the condition that the book not be published until after he died. Who knew that he'd live to be 101, or that Mr. Gaddis would take more than a half-decade after his subject's death to finish writing?

“The message was always 'Come to Southern California and grow,' and everyone wanted to be a part of that,” said Joe Mathews, an Irvine senior fellow at the New America Foundation and a Pasadena native who has attended dozens of parades. ...

A decade ago, as a bookish schoolgirl in the southern Egyptian city of Sohag, Samira Ibrahim Mohamed was fascinated by Egyptology and yearned to see the antiquities at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo one day.

But when she finally set foot on the grounds of the landmark pink stone building, on March 9, the museum had been turned into a makeshift torture center. Ms. Mohamed, who had just been arrested by the army during a protest on nearby Tahrir Square, was given electric shocks that she said made her body twitch spasmodically for days afterward.

Until September of 2010, Pam Boucher’s life was small. Living in Brunswick, Me., a rural town of 21,000, she was dependent upon others to move. At the time, she used crutches or a walker to get around and seizures prevented her from driving. She’d get rides to medical appointments from a social service agency. Trips to buy groceries, or visit her husband in a nursing home, required the help of her adult sons or scheduling a social service staff member. A trip to the local Wal-Mart would cost $28 in taxi fees. Socializing outside her apartment was pretty much impossible.