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The sudden announcement that Lisa Jackson, the controversial head of the Environmental Protection Agency, will be resigning later this month means that the mysterious Richard Windsor will be leaving the building with her.

His is apparently one of several fake names on official EPA e-mail accounts that Jackson used to conduct business while at EPA. Her office claims the name is a combination of her dog’s name and that of the town of East Windsor, N.J., where she once lived.

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When Eric Metaxas spoke last year at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C., he used the opportunity to challenge his listeners. In his new book No Pressure, Mr. President: Real Faith in a Time of Crisis, he makes his remarks available to a broader audience and recounts the journey of a writer trying to be a Christian witness.

KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: The e-book version of your book is titled “Jesus Hates Dead Religion.” How can you claim to know what Jesus hates? 

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Robert H. Bork

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Robert H. Bork, we all know, didn’t sit on the Supreme Court. His legacy thus cannot lie in votes cast and opinions written. You have to look elsewhere, and you certainly could begin with his earliest work at Yale Law School, which was in antitrust. In a series of law review articles and ultimately a game-changing book, The Antitrust Paradox, published in 1978, Bork worked out a powerful critique of the case law. In showing its defects, he influenced the movement toward deregulation.

“The world of 2030 will be radically transformed from our world today. By 2030, no country​—​whether the United States, China, or any large country​—​will be a hegemonic power.” However, the coming transformation will favor emerging powers, “largely reversing the historic rise of the West since 1750.”

The governor of Mecca and members of the Saudi royal family at the Kaaba, 2008

associated press

If I were of a cynical nature, I might suspect that this volume possesses an agenda beyond explaining the world’s most important and least predictable Muslim country to Westerners. But an awkward combination of a pretentious title and a lightweight style employed by its author should not distract Saudi-watchers and other interested readers from the importance of this work. 

Perhaps the least surprising headline in the aftermath of the tax deal last week was the one in Politico declaring that congressional Democrats are planning to run against “chaos” in the 2014 midterm elections. It’s unsurprising because Democrats have been working, with considerable success, to establish the proposition that Washington is dysfunctional because of the GOP.

John Allison

pr newswire / ap

To appreciate this landmark work it is necessary to know a bit about the author’s background. 

We are in the midst of a crisis of federalism and we don’t even know it. In November, the states of Colorado and Washington legalized recreational marijuana use, while 16 other states and Washington, D.C., already permitted the medical use of marijuana. Yet at the same time, the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 prohibits the cultivation, sale, and use of marijuana in all its forms. State and federal law are at odds.

The ‘grand design’ spiral galaxy, M81

associated press

In Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall, there’s a wistful character named Prendergast, who had been a contented rural curate until he was suddenly beset by  “Doubts”—not about God’s existence, but:  “I couldn’t understand why God had made the world at all.” His bishop tries to reassure him, saying that “he didn’t think the point really arose as far as my practical duties as a parish priest were concerned.” But Prendergast resigns his living and ends up teaching at a dismal school in Wales.  

Anne Hathaway and Hugh Jackman

Les Misérables grabs you by the lapels from the first moment and never lets you go. In this respect it is little different from the stage musical from which it derives—and not so different from the Victor Hugo novel from which the stage musical derives.

Hulton Archive / Getty Images

Defeat, like death, concentrates the mind wonderfully. It also liberates the mind. People venture to think the unthinkable, or at least, the impermissible. A new generation of conservatives may be moved to reconsider some ideas that have fallen into disuse or even disrepute. Compassion is one such idea. 

At the Mass of Christian Burial conducted for Robert Bork on December 21, the program for guests included two quotations from Thomas More, traditional patron saint of lawyers. They were presumably favorites of Bob Bork’s, or perhaps the family felt they exemplified the principles of his public service. But they also happen to be useful guides for conservatives and Republicans over the next few years .  .  . and beyond.

First: “What you cannot turn to good, you must make as little bad as you can.”

Tracy Spiridakos, Billy Burke, Daniella Alonso, Paras Patel

associated press

NBC’s Revolution (Mondays, 10 p.m. ET/PT) features swordfights, gun-fights, and crossbow fights, chases on horseback, chases on trains, and chases on foot. It is gripping, loud, and entertaining. Who cares that its high-concept premise (all electricity in the world suddenly and mysteriously stops working, resulting in the collapse of civilization) is taken directly from S. M. Stirling’s pulpy sci-fi Emberverse series of novels?