Recently, I’ve been suggesting that Republicans ought to counter the president’s call for eliminating various tax expenditures to increase tax revenues beyond the levels reached under ATRA, AKA the fiscal cliff deal, by suggesting that we apply the revenue from the elimination of tax expenditures to an expanded child credit that could be used to offset payroll taxes, a la the Stein plan. This would leave the top rate under ATRA untouched while shifting the terms of the tax debate to friendlier terrain. Granted, this isn’t a consensus view among Republicans, but I think realism demands that conservatives recognize that for now at least, the political case for reducing the top marginal tax rate is relatively weak.

We aren't getting a top rate tax cut without a Republican in the White House, and we aren't getting a Republican in the White House without policies that broadly benefit the middle class. Whether elected Republicans recognize this is another matter, but for now, there are far more important concerns than the top marginal tax rate for our nation's best off.

You masterfully tied together a set of emotional symptoms that looked enough like attention deficit disorder to buy you extra time on all your finals and standardized tests. Plus, you got to take the exams in special quiet rooms, where a test facilitator would sharpen the pencils outside, because the grinding sound triggered your acute sensory overload. (Which somehow didn't preclude your part-time summer job at Blenders Juicery.)

You hired private college advisers to read your essays and hone your interview skills. Just think back to those valuable sessions where you learned to practically leap out of the chair talking about your passion for writing one-act plays in Cherokee, or how your heart raced that summer on the Mongolian steppes when you first spotted an ovoo monitor lizard, once thought to be extinct.

And you learned to deftly walk the college interviewer through your many achievements while still showing carefully modulated self-effacement: "Yes, I helped design the CO2 scrubber that will save humanity from global warming, but it was totally a team effort."

The Wehrmacht, Germany's World War II army, ended up distributing millions of the Pervitin tablets to soldiers on the front (they called it "Panzerschokolade," or "tank chocolate"). The air force gave the tablets to its flyers (in this case, it was "pilot's chocolate" or "pilot's salt"). Hitler himself was given intravenous injections of methamphetamine by his personal physician, Theodor Morell. The pill, however, was the more common form of the drug. All told, between April and July of 1940, more than 35 million three-milligram doses of Pervitin were manufactured for the German army and air force.

News of meth's powers, unsurprisingly, spread. British papers began reporting on German soldiers' use of a "miracle pill." Soon, Allied bomber pilots were experimenting with the drug. Their tests ended quickly, though; while the soldiers who used pilot's salt were able to focus on their flying in the short term ... they also became agitated, aggressive, and impaired in their judgment over the long.

That shrug and smile carried my father further in one lifetime than you might think it possible for any human being to go. His optimism always made the best of everything … even a looming nuclear war. During the Cuban missile crisis of 1963, my father purchased a painting he could not then prudently afford. He thought, "If we're going to die, let's at least die with great art on the walls."

Yet his optimism never overstepped his analytic rigor. In my father’s memoir, he tells a story of finding an exotic mask at an antique store in China. My father knew little about Chinese art. But he said the mask looked old. Its edges were oxidized in the right way. The holes in the earlobes were punched, not drilled, and the jade earrings that hung from those lobes appeared to have been carved by stone, not metal. He gambled and made the purchase. When he brought the mask home to show the experts at the Royal Ontario Museum, they pronounced it a Mongolian funerary mask, more than 1,000 years old, and a finer example than in the ROM’s own collection.

This year's Brood II cicadas are currently appearing on the East Coast (although not quite with the drama we initially expected). But John Cooley, a cicada researcher in Connecticut, has seen evidence of extinction elsewhere, in the sprawling subdivisions around Champaign-Urbana in Central Illinois.

"When they go out and build these things around Champaign-Urbana, they cut the trees down, they bring in the bulldozers, they pull up the top soil, and they stick the houses down," Cooley says. "None of the cicadas in the ground there would have survived that. None of anything in the ground would have survived that."

I've been patiently waiting for the arrival of our noisy overlords, and have thus far been disappointed at the events. Readers, have you encountered Brood 2? And if so, how did it go?

For many observers, those are subtle signs that, come 2014, Mr. Perry’s name will be missing from the statewide ballot for the first time in nearly 25 years.

On the other hand, Mr. Perry just called a 30-day special session, and he still has not combed through the newly passed state budget and most of the bills passed during the recently concluded regular session. So there is plenty of time to shake things up with his veto pen or by pushing for the enactment of hot-button measures on abortion, guns and school vouchers — which is just what one of his top allies, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, is asking him to do.

It has not escaped Team Perry’s notice that the governor was leading Mr. Abbott almost three to one in a spring University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll of likely Republican voters. And while Mr. Abbott has a bigger and better-financed organization, the governor is far better known, and allies say he would have no trouble putting together a campaign in a hurry. His campaign manager in the 2010 race for governor, Rob Johnson, did not settle into the post until June 2009.

Cummings-Thomas said many couples who travel to the D.C. area to marry are from states that ban same-sex marriage. Returning home, they find that "being able to change their name is a way to have their home state recognize their marriage," in spirit if not in fact. For their own part, the two women had shown up at the courthouse early, the first same-sex couple to get a license in Howard County, Maryland. They were planning to share a name: They just had to figure out which one. Probably Reid, they were thinking.

The decision to take the same surname is one way same-sex couples are rehabilitating—repurposing, you might say—some of the most ancient marital traditions. Name-change dates back to the common-law doctrine of "coverture," when a bride assumed her husband's name and legal identity and, in what is called "civil death," ceased to exist as a separate legal person. Feminism inspired some women to reject this tradition—about 10 percent of women, according to studies, decline to take their husband's surname—taking a stand for autonomy but contributing to a world in which teachers are sometimes unsure which children belong to which parents, and the generation who grew up with hyphenated names must decide whether to exponentially burden their own offspring. In embracing the standard option, same-sex couples are lending it a new, radicalized flavor. Not only lesbian brides but some gay grooms change their names; whether this will pave the way for straight men remains to be seen. Name-changing may turn out to be something men do when partnering with men, but not when partnering with women. The number of straight men who change their name upon marriage, remains so tiny as to be imperceptible.

Senator John McCain’s office is pushing back against reports that while visiting Syria this week he posed in a photo with rebels who kidnapped 11 Lebanese Shi’ite pilgrims. The photo, released by McCain’s office, shows McCain with a group of rebels. Among them are two men identified in the Lebanese press as Mohamed Nour and Abu Ibrahim, two of the kidnappers of the group from Lebanon.

The study weighed more than a dozen factors to see which were causing the divergence in mortality rates. Poverty, obesity, homeownership, marital status and alcohol consumption were among the factors investigated.

But they mattered little. As it turned out, smoking was important, as had long been established, but researchers were surprised that joblessness had a dramatic effect, even after controlling for factors that employment would have generated, like income and health insurance.

“What is it about employment that has this huge impact on mortality, beyond the material resources it brings?” said Jennifer Karas Montez, the study’s lead author, a researcher at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies.

The most glaring example took place earlier this month in Virginia, where Republican Party leaders nominated for lieutenant governor E.W. Jackson, a minister whose thunderous opposition to gay marriage and invective against Obama threaten to damage the Republican ticket. His emergence was enabled by party leaders opting to choose their statewide candidates at a convention filled with single-issue activists instead of through a primary involving a wider swath of Republican voters. The party's gubernatorial nominee, Ken Cuccinelli, who engineered the convention process, is trying to downplay his socially conservative background, but is struggling to do so with his new ticket mate. Meanwhile, Republicans are empty-handed in next year's Senate race against Sen. Mark Warner, not even entertaining the notion that term-limited Gov. Bob McDonnell could follow in his predecessor's footsteps and pursue a congressional career.

Less noticed, but equally as damaging, is the party's persistent inability to contest statewide races in Colorado, which is rapidly becoming a Democratic-leaning state—in large part because of GOP mismanagement. The party's brightest recruit, Rep. Cory Gardner, just opted to pass up a Senate campaign against Mark Udall, leaving the GOP empty-handed. Even more startling is the reemergence of immigration hardliner Tom Tancredo as a legitimate gubernatorial candidate, jumping in the race this month against Gov. John Hickenlooper. (Tancredo won 36 percent of the vote as a third-party candidate in 2010.) If Republicans can't contest the Senate and governorship in 2014, it would mark eight straight setbacks in presidential, Senate, and gubernatorial contests dating back nearly a decade. An 0-8 record would get the Denver Broncos coach fired, but there hasn't been a comparable shakeup in the state party's practices in a long time.