This week's summit at the United Nations on how to reach the ambitious Millennium Development Goals (MGDs) by 2015 marked a clear contrast with the original summit ten years ago. When the leaders of nearly two hundred nations met in New York in 2000, the term "social protection"...

President Obama's two ambitions as a young man were to write fiction and to work for social change. The jarring contrast between his inspiring speeches and his compromising politics, it seems, mirrors these dual influences: the writer in him as the pure idealist; the politician as the strategizing pragmatist.

One...

Last week, a Gallup poll revealed that while white optimism about race relations remains at November 2008 levels, black optimism has fallen to where it stood before Barack Obama's rise to prominence.

We can excuse descriptions of America as "postracial" last year. Obama's campaign themes encouraged the term,...