Fareed's take on the tech companies that dominate the American economy (and life); Is America ascendant... or on the decline?; What in the world? How to fix America's schools; How to fix politics, Moy

A new direction on tech, courtesy of India; Silicon Valley should prepare for a new power dynamic; Beyond the Beltway: the state of the real America; Journalists James and Deborah Fallows have been traversing America & visiting small cities & towns in their single-engine plane for years; Fallows: if a town or city has a craft brewing industry, it gets half point on our scale of "signs of civic success"!; Brill: this job training program takes people who average $18k/year and 11 months later they graduate into jobs that pay $85k/year/ Brill: the U.S. is learning the lesson that you need leaders who are qualified, prepared and have answers/ Brill: If enough water mains break ad enough bridges collapse at the same time, America will understand the need to spend $$$; Deborah Fallows: When we went into towns across the country, we never asked about national politics & nobody brought it up;

What America can learn from other countries about education; Schleicher: Chinese parents spend on education. American, European parents spend on consumption; At the OECD, Andreas Schleicher oversees the PISA exams which test students in 72 countries to evacuate educational systems; Schleicher: in the world's best educational systems, neither wealth or background matter to performance; Schleicher: The least wealthy 10% of students in Shanghai do as well on the PISA math test as America's wealthiest 10%; Ten steps to better democracy; In search of lost time, why medieval peasants understood time better than we do; Rovelli: Trains were the main reason for the standardization of time; The mystery of time, Rovelli: there's no more time up there than down here; Rovelli: time is tied to everything that makes us suffer; Physicist Carlo Rovelli on how time shapes our identitiesTo learn more about how CNN protects listener privacy, visit cnn.com/privacy

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