The Verge claims that the U.S. has very few options to save Iraq:

Less than four years after the withdrawal of American troops, Iraq is once again descending into chaos and violence. Islamist insurgents from an al-Qaeda breakaway group have seized large swaths of northern Iraq, and are marching toward Baghdad. The unrest has inflamed deep-seated sectarian divides between Sunni and Shiite Muslims in Iraq, resulting in widespread deaths. According to estimates from the United Nations, more than 1,075 people have been killed in Iraq this month, more than any month this year. It’s also raised the specter of another US-led military intervention amid fears that parts of Iraq and Syria could become a new hotbed of terrorist activity.

Jason Micheli presents an illustrative 10 reasons why Christians should oppose the death penalty:

The Stoning of Stephen

The New Republic ponders if the dogma of democracy always makes the world better:

It is time, twenty-five years on, to discuss the cold war again. In the decade following the events of 1989, we spoke about little else. None of us anticipated the rapid breakup of the Soviet empire, or the equally quick return of Eastern Europe to constitutional democracy, or the shriveling of the revolutionary movements that Moscow had long supported. Faced with the unexpected, we engaged in some uncharacteristic big thinking. Is this the “end of history”? And “what’s left of the Left?” Then life moved on and our thinking became small again. Europe’s attention turned toward constructing an amorphous European Union; America’s attention turned toward political Islamism and the pipe dream of founding Arab democracies; and the world’s attention turned to Economics 101, our global Core Curriculum. And so, for these reasons and others, we forgot all about the cold war. Which seemed like a very good thing.

Ta-Nehisi Coates of The Atlantic makes a case for reparations:

Recently, a young woman told me that this generation of Americans was “the most diverse in American history.” The assumption was that across the span of that history, there was some immutable group of racial categories whose numbers we could compare. I am not sure this holds up. Biracial is a new category for America, but it is not clear to me that today there are relatively more children of black and white unions than there were in the past. We certainly are more apt to acknowledge them as such, and that is a good thing. Nevertheless, the assumption of that “something new” is happening “racially,” that these terms are somehow constant is one of the great, and underestimated, barriers to understanding the case for reparations.

David Brooks demonstrates why a more humble self-image may be helpful:

Most advice, whether on love or business or politics, is based on the premise that we can just will ourselves into being rational and good and that the correct path to happiness is a straight line. These writers, in the “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” school, are essentially telling you to turn yourself into a superstar by discipline and then everything will be swell. But [Lydia] Netzer’s piece is nicely based on the premise that we are crooked timber. We are, to varying degrees, foolish, weak, and often just plain inexplicable — and always will be. As Kant put it: “Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.”

Ross Douthat offers a climate change opinion from a reform conservative perspective:

When the “Room to Grow” collection of reform conservative essays dropped last month, some of the most frequent criticisms from liberals focused on topics that the book did not address: In particular, comprehensive immigration reform (the subject of my last post) and climate change legislation. Vox’s Matt Yglesias, for instance, thought it noteworthy that a book “hailed as representing the best, freshest conservative thinking on the pressing issues of the day” has “nothing to say” on how American policymakers should tackle climate change.

Introducing the first trailer of Hunger Games: Mockingjay.

(via The Verge)