Imagine that you had $75 billion that could be put to work addressing the most pressing problems of the day. What problems would you attend to, and how would you allocate the money?

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» Read more of Saving the World for $75 Billion: The Copenhagen Consensus

The Democrats, it seems to me, have both a problem and an opportunity.

Obama and Clinton got where they are largely because of the positions they staked out on the Iraq War, which was seen during most of the primary season as THE issue. Now, with the economy in a slow slide, the election is likely to turn on the issue most elections turn on: the domestic economy. And neither of these candidates have really put a whole lot of emphasis on this issue.

» Read more of Guns vs. Butter (with Butter in the Lead)

The global spike in food prices is increasing the prospect of a “perfect storm” for North Korea. Fresh analysis is required on a fast moving, complex situation that has a high likelihood of catching the community of specialists off guard. We may be too secure in monitoring conventional factors that give a high degree of confidence that a repeat of the famine in the 1990s, in which as many as one million perished, can be averted. This previous minefield map may no longer be applicable to changes in North Korea’s food situation.

» Read more of North Korea Food Crisis: Catching Us Off Guard?

This is the 137th birthday of the working-class hymn “The Internationale,” a song that reverberates today. To hear it in some 40 languages, from Albanian to Zulu, and for a sense of how the song reverberates around the world today—read on.

» Read more of The Internationale (Happy Birthday!)

Life is noisy, and silence is rare. So it is that New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has been making efforts to reduce noise in the city through an active program of incentives and disincentives. Elsewhere, the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has initiated an ambitious noise-mapping project across Great Britain, while in 2003, the European Union established April 30 as International Anti-Noise Day—a commemoration that, beg pardon, would seem to be in need of a slightly noisier program of publicity.

» Read more of Notes on Noise Pollution

Of rising food costs, bats, speed limits, and plastic bags: a few talking points for this Earth Day week.

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» Read more of Bats, Plastic Bags, and the Autobahn: Talking Points for “Earth Day Week”

These being undeniable days of crisis on the environmental as well as political and economic fronts, here with a few useful readings for Earth Day.

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» Read more of Readings for Earth Day

Mountains create weather. They also store its consequences, in the form of rain and snow. Without them, the cities below the mountains—New York, Beijing, San Francisco, Milan, the list goes on—would be bone-dry, and so would much of the rest of the world.

» Read more of Mountains, Snow, and Water: The Cycle of Life

A 150-inch TV? A remote-controlled mobile beer cooler? GPS, videogames, and salacious material aplenty? All these things are the domain of the Consumer Electronics Show, the largest trade show in the United States. Our intrepid correspondent ponders the meaning of it all….

» Read more of The Consumer Electronics Show: A Cocooner’s Paradise

Thanksgiving puts a smile on the face of cranberry farmers, poultry farmers, sweet-potato farmers, and bookies. Valentine’s Day gives the executives at Hallmark a warm fuzzy feeling. Come Mother’s Day, florists are the happiest people in town, having jacked up their prices by orders of magnitude that would bring a federal suit down on any other industry. Easter is a holiday beloved of observant Christians—but also of chocolatiers and confectioners and egg farmers, to say nothing of the evil trolls who manufacture the cellophane grass that lines environmentally unfriendly baskets.

But Christmas is the time when capitalism goes uncloaked, when alienation blossoms, when much of the world succumbs to a frenzied potlatch of one-upmanship, debt, and disappointment.

» Read more of Christmas, Cash, and Commodities