There’s always tons of interesting stuff in The Atlantic‘s “primary sources” section in the front of the book. It’s kind of like a blog, but in a magazine. Except now, it’s also on a website. At any rate, I thought this was a neat finding:

Alumni contributed $7.1 billion to higher education in 2004–05. The study reveals that graduates with children are about 13 percent more likely to give back to their schools and that they tend to give more as their children approach college age. But donations among this group decline after an admissions decision has been made—and plummet if their kids aren’t accepted. Though the authors note that alumni without a stake in the cycle still often give generously, many alums who are parents “believe that donations buy them entrance into a lottery whose prize is admissions for their children.”

It’s completely intuitive, of course, but there’s still need for proper research to confirm one’s guesses about such things. Here’s a link to the original paper “Altruism and the Child-Cycle of Alumni Giving,” by Jonathan Meer and Harvey S. Rosen.

One often hears it said that the Israel-Palestine conflict isn’t really about Israeli occupation of the territories conquered in the 1967 war. That Israel is prepared to withdraw from these territories in order to make a secure peace but that, unfortunately, the Palestinians won’t agree. The New Republic‘s editor in chief, Martin Peretz, had one of his occasional posts in which he usefully points out that this isn’t actually the case a couple of days ago:

Greater Jerusalem is still a vague concept and a vaguer reality. But its outlines are clear. There are some contiguous Jewish neighborhoods east of the city proper, big neighborhoods. There is no way these will be forfeited from Israeli under any agreement. Basta! Finito! Gemacht! Dayenu!

These “neighborhoods” are, of course, settlements built on conquered land. Somewhat similarly, although this time not presuming to speak for the Israeli government, Peretz wrote of his desire to maintain Israeli occupation of the Jordan River Valley and to see the population of 10,000 Israeli settlers living there grow.

Kevin Drum and Ilan Goldenberg raise some doubts as to how trustworthy David Petraeus’ much-anticipated September report on the “surge” is really going to be. And, of course, they’re right to. I’m not sure what else one would expect — when people self-evaluate, they usually come up with positive accounts of themselves. Besides which, as long as Petraeus thinks what he’s doing is working on any level, he’s going to decide that he ought to exaggerate how well it’s working in hopes of bolstering support. And, of course, if the war ever does end Petraeus is going to want it to be because politicians decided to end it despite his brilliant successes rather than because he failed.

At any rate, it seems safe to assume that the most recent round of congressional junkets has adequately previewed what we’re going to hear in DC, namely some misleading spinning of the Anbar Awakening plus some unconvincing data about declining civilian casualties plus the usual screwed up political situation.

I keep forgetting to link to something about Zbigniew Brzezinski’s endorsement of Barack Obama. I see this as a significant development. Brzezinski is one of the leading members of what you might call the foreign policy counterestablishment that’s slowly emerged over the past four years. This all dates back, in my experience, to his electrifying October 2003 speech at the New American Strategies conference that was organized in DC by progressives looking to formulate a meaningful challenge to neoconservatism.

Brzezinski fears (and I think it’s a reasonable fear) that Hillary Clinton and her circle is dominated by the kind of people and thinking who played the dominant role in shaping Democratic policies between 9/11 and Kerry’s defeat in 2004 — Ari Berman’s “strategic class” in short.