politics
THIS IS WHY OBAMA CAN’T MAKE A DEAL WITH THE REPUBLICANS
Ezra Klein | Wonkblog / The Washington Post
. . ..
THE SEQUESTER’S MARKET UTOPIANS
Adam Gopnik | Daily Comment / The New Yorker.
europe
ITALY EXPOSES WIDER CRISIS OF DEMOCRACY
Mark Mawozer | The Financial Times
. . ..
Technocrat prime minsters, such as Italy’s Mario Monti or Greece’s Lucas Papademos, are no alternative: they may have clean hands because they remained outside party politics. But. . . The response from Brussels and the creditor north to all this has been robotically unimaginative – to insist that the debtors, like the little fish in Finding Nemo, must just keep on going.
economics
TO CREATE GROWTH, UNLEASH THE INVISIBLE FOOT
Reihan Salam | Reuters.
law
IN VOTING RIGHTS, SCALIA SEES A “RACIAL ENTITLEMENT
Amy Davidson | Close Read / The New Yorker.
science
THE INFORMATION: A HISTORY, A THEORY, A FLOOD
Shane Parrish | Farnum Street
A look at James Gleick‘s book..”
THERE SHOULD BE GRANDUER: BASIC SCIENCE IN THE SHADOW OF THE SEQUESTER
Tom Levenson | The Scientific American sequester wreaks its havoc by striking hardest at particular points in the life cycle of a university researcher. New tenure-line faculty are actually somewhat insulated from the very worst of the pressure. “Every agency has set aside money for young investigators,” he says,”some from private foundations, and a lot from the feds.” Cuts in budget strike those dependent on other people’s grants — graduate students, post docs and soft-money research scientists — but a new faculty hire has somewhat better prospects than most for the first few years..
television
ABBEY DOWN, PARADE UP
Henrick Hertzberg | The New Yorker.
health
EXPERTS WANT MORE STUDIES FOR DIET’S ROLE FOR THE HEART
Gina Kolata | The New York Times
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sex
FINALLY! A NUANCED LOOK AT HOOKUP CULTURE
Tracy Clark-Flory | Slate?
literature
THE DAILY ROUND: ESSAYS AND A WRITER’S GUIDE BY PHILLIP LOPATE
Morris Dickstein | The New York Times
Lopate’s essays have taken a different course..” Lopate’s three earlier collections and his book-length essays match Hazlitt’s promiscuous host of interests with Montaigne’s piercing attention to his inner life, his quicksilver thoughts and fugitive impressions. No other writer could have written books on both Susan Sontag (“Notes on Sontag,” 2009) and the Manhattan shoreline (“Waterfront,” 2004), each of them exhaustively well informed yet disarmingly subjective. Lopate’s new collection, “Portrait Inside My Head,” gives full play to an even wider range: immensely readable essays on his family, on remaining a baseball fan, on his sex life (“Duration; Or, Going Long”), on the tense romance between movies and novels, on old and new features of New York’s urban landscape, and on elusive writers like James Agee and Leonard Michaels, themselves bold essayists who blurred the lines between fiction and nonfiction.
sport
MARADONA: THEN AND NOW
Brian Phillips | Grantland.