When the governor of Michigan ran for the Republican nomination, in 1968, he tried to stand up against the more radical wing of his party. His defeat was swift, tragic, and, for his son, instructive.

A year after the Tahrir Square uprising, Wael Ghonim is the international superstar of the Arab Spring, with a big new book out this month celebrating the Egyptian revolution he helped unleash. But triumph may be the last thing on his mind.

Somehow, earlier this year, a philosopher managed to goad the world into vanquishing an evil villain. Perhaps more surprising was the philosopher in question: the man French society loves to mock, Bernard-Henri Lévy.

At Bain Capital, Romney remade one American business after another, overhauling management and directing vast sums of money to the top of the labor pyramid. The results made him a fortune. They also changed the world we live in.

An idea with many authors.

The kitchen-sink approach to national security.

The reemerging, divergent, politics of the street.

Paul Krugman’s lonely crusade.

For decades, Martin Peretz taught at Harvard and presided over The New Republic—a fierce, if controversial, lion among American intellectuals and Zionists. Now, having been labeled a bigot, taunted at his alma mater, and stripped of his magazine, he has found peace in a place where there is little: Israel.

Peter Galbraith built a career in statecraft, pursuing a humanitarian foreign policy despite a very immodest temperament. But when the U.N. fired him for insubordination in Afghanistan, he suddenly had a reputation to defend—and nothing left to lose.