An American reactor starts up, a Taiwanese reactor shuts down

Plus an update from my recent trip to Israel.

Greetings from gusty Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where the snow stopped flurrying but the wind is still howling and shaking the leafless limbs of the American elm outside my window.

In the five weeks since I last wrote to you, I visited Israel for the first time in 11 years, arriving on the day of the biggest nationwide protests in the country’s 75-year history…