In design as in life, smart can also mean wise, kind, inspiring - and cost-effective. And that has a charm all its own.
From Nancy Gibbs
Americans sometimes ask what the government does and where their tax money goes. Among other things, it pays for all kinds of invisible but essential safety nets and life belts and guardrails that are useless right up until the day they are priceless.
Decision making in a democracy depends above all on knowledge and not just the intel available to presidents and policymakers.
War is being waged all across the country against the invasive plant and animal species - some 50,000 of them - now spreading across the U.S.
While many alien species are harmless, others pose expensive threats to seas and fields and forests.
Once a conflict has dragged on for a decade, most people are tired of war - and the troubles that flow from it.
Photographer James Nachtwey has spent his professional life in the places people most want to avoid: war zones and refugee camps, the city flattened by an earthquake, the village swallowed by a flood, the farm hollowed out by famine.
Pain is the most private experience, but its causes, whether natural or man-made, demand public accounting.
As a candidate, Obama disdained the game of politics, a self-conscious contrast to all the tireless political athletes named Clinton.
After the 1960s and '70s, there were real doubts about whether a mortal man could handle the country's highest office. It had destroyed Johnson, corrupted Nixon, and overwhelmed Ford and Carter.
8 perspectives
5 perspectives
4 perspectives
1 perspectives