Memo from the Editors

We chose to build this, The Atlantic's first Ideas Issue, not around speculative experimentation, academic abstraction, or gee-whiz gizmos, but around real-world attempts to rethink big questions. [Web only: Submit your own suggestions for the idea (or ideas) that have been most important this year. Some submissions may be included in part or in full in a future issue of the magazine.]

American Murder Mystery

Why is crime rising in so many American cities? The answer implicates one of the most celebrated antipoverty programs of recent decades.

by Hanna Rosin

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

What the Internet is doing to our brains

by Nicholas Carr

What Rumsfeld Got Right

How Donald Rumsfeld remade the U.S. military for a more uncertain world [Web only: Video: "Donald Rumsfeld—The Change Agent"]

by Robert D. Kaplan

The 11 1/2 Biggest Ideas of the Year

A thumbnail intellectual history of the year. [Web only: Video: "Where Ideas Come From": Interviews with David Lynch and Donovan ]

Electro-Shock Therapy

With the Chevy Volt, General Motors—battered, struggling for profitability, fed up with being eclipsed by Toyota and the Prius—is out to reinvent the automobile, and itself.

by Jonathan Rauch

Re-Thinking Jeffrey Goldberg

Intrigued (and alarmed) by the new science of “neuromarketing,” our correspondent peers into his own brain via an MRI machine and learns what he really thinks about Jimmy Carter, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Bruce Springsteen, and Edie Falco.

by Jeffrey Goldberg

Distracting Miss Daisy

Why stop signs and speed limits endanger Americans

by John Staddon

Mr. Murdoch Goes to War

Rupert Murdoch wants his Wall Street Journal to displace The New York Times as the world’s paper of record. His ambitions could be good news for the newspaper industry— or another nail in the coffin of serious journalism. [Web only: Video: "Rupert Murdoch: The Last Hope for Journalism"]

by Mark Bowden