Jeffrey Goldberg

A few weeks ago, agents of the Transportation Security Administration assigned to Washington’s Reagan National Airport stopped my mother-in- law, a very nice and unthreatening 79-year-old who was in Washington to lobby on behalf of public libraries, and asked her an enormously rude question.

When U.S. President Barack Obama dispatches his negotiators to Baghdad next week to join talks with Iran over the future of its nuclear program, he’ll be most concerned about the reaction of one man: Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak.

The crackdown by Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad against his own citizens counts as one of the most blood-soaked acts of political repression in the Middle East since his father and predecessor, Hafez al-Assad, waged his own onslaught against anti-regime activists three decades ago.

The historian Benzion Netanyahu, who died today at 102, was sometimes asked to explain the miracle of Jewish survival through millenniums of persecution. Netanyahu -- the father of Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin -- would answer the question in a way his interlocutors did not at all expect.

Rob McEwen, chief executive officer of McEwen Mining Inc., and Michael Crofton, CEO of Philadelphia Trust, talk about the potential benefits and challenges of returning to the gold standard in the U.S.

The morning of April 17, on the tarmac at Reagan National Airport: The Delta shuttle to LaGuardia appeared to be No. 287 in line for takeoff. The plane was full, mainly with purposeful-looking middle-aged men in quality suits, fully absorbed in whatever it is that absorbs them.

Nicholas Snowdon, a commodities analyst at Barclays Capital, talks about the outlook for the copper market.

The multipronged attack carried out by a Taliban faction in Afghanistan last weekend, including sustained raids in the capital’s diplomatic quarter and on Parliament, was meant, the New York Times reported, to “undermine confidence in NATO and Afghan military gains.”

Guenter Grass, the German writer and recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, brought forth last week an odious little poem that focuses on the threat to world peace posed by the Jewish state, and congratulates its author for the courage to point out this truth.

A couple of years ago, Vice President Joe Biden, on a visit to Israel, offered Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a piece of advice. He shared something his father often said: “There’s no sense dying on a small cross.”