Michael Lewis produced a long piece that gives the reader some sense of the day-to-day reality of the modern American presidency. It is manic—issues, many non resolvable nor worthy of a President’s time, are thrust upon his agenda. One of the hallmarks of the modern presidency is this expectation that the president must be involved […]
Adrienne LaFrance, “Library of Congress
The Library of Congress, where I am employed, archives the posts on Twitter. The collection goes all the way back until the birth of Twitter in 2006—some 170 billion tweets. It is an interesting arrangement between the private sector (Twitter) and the government sector (the Library). Additionally, the two parties have very different expertises. Twitter […]
Raffi Khatchadourian, “Operation Deliriu
Raffi Khatchadourian has produced yet another eye-popping piece of reporting. “Colonel James S. Ketchum dreamed of war without killing. He joined the Army in 1956 and left it in 1976, and in that time he did not fight in Vietnam; he did not invade the Bay of Pigs; he did not guard Western Europe with […]
Elizabeth Kolbert, “Paying for It,” The
Question: Is it immoral to impose costs upon others? Elizabeth Kolbert write on this and the proposal of a carbon tax. Her piece instructively begins, It’s been almost a century since the British economist Arthur Pigou floated the idea that turned his name into an adjective. In “The Economics of Welfare,” published in 1920, Pigou […]
Michael Specter, “Germs Are Us,” The New
Bacteria=bad, right? Well, not always, and perhaps not usually. The abstract for this story gives one a taste for the discoveries within it: Human beings are inhabited by as many as ten thousand bacterial species; the bacteria living inside us weigh, all told, about three pounds (the same as our brain). These bacteria work constantly […]
Caleb Crain, “Unfortunate Events,” The N
“What was the War of 1812 about?” this review asks. The United States and Britain had fought a few decades earlier over independence—but the War of 1812 was not a logical successor. The Mother Country didn’t want to recolonize America. The causes for the belligerence are many, but none seems substantial enough to justify spending so […]