Category Archives: Opinion

The Economist Magazine – January 13, 2024 Preview

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The Economist Magazine (January 12, 2024): The latest issue features ‘China’s EV Onslaught’ – An influx of Chinese cars is terrifying the West; Europe’s Silicon Valley; ‘America Fights Back’ The new contest for sea power; Why Olaf Scholz is no Angela Merkel – Germany is unable and unwilling to lead Europe; What science says about old leaders…

An influx of Chinese cars is terrifying the West

But it should keep its markets open to cheap, clean vehicles

America fights back

The war against the Houthis is part of an escalating struggle for the seas

Why Olaf Scholz is no Angela Merkel

Germany is unable and unwilling to lead Europe

The New York Times Magazine- January 14, 2024

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THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (January 12, 2024): The new issue features ‘Why Are American Drivers So Deadly’ – After decades of declining fatality, dangerous driving has surged again….

Why Are American Drivers So Deadly?

A photo illustration of a skeleton in a suit driving a car.

After decades of declining fatality rates, dangerous driving has surged again.

By Matthew Shaer

In the summer of 1999, a few years after graduating from medical school, Deborah Kuhls moved from New York to Maryland, where she had been accepted as a surgical fellow at the R Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center in Baltimore. Founded by a pioneer in emergency medicine, Shock Trauma is one of the busiest critical-care facilities in the country — in an average year, doctors there see approximately 8,000 patients, many of them close to death.

The All-Time-Great Coach Who Makes Football Fun

Andy Reid with Mahomes and other Chiefs players.

Andy Reid’s diligence and sense of mischief have made him one of the game’s best-ever coaches. Can he get his struggling Chiefs back to the Super Bowl?

By Michael Sokolove

Andy Reid, the coach of the Kansas City Chiefs, has won more than 250 games in his career, fourth all-time, which puts him high on any list of the N.F.L.’s greatest coaches. Most of the others in that pantheon are men who personify the sport’s militaristic soul — Vince Lombardi, for example, the fabled coach of the 1960s-era Green Bay Packers, or Reid’s contemporary, the grim Bill Belichick of the New England Patriots. But Reid is no Lombardi or Belichick; he’s Steve Jobs. He’s a designer, a tinkerer, a product engineer who imbues his football with creativity and even an occasional touch of whimsy.

The Economist Special Report: ‘Philanthropy’

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The Economist SPECIAL REPORTS (January 12, 2024): The latest issue is focused on ‘Philanthropy’ – Move fast and mend things. Charitable organizations are hoping to get money to the needy faster….

The super-rich are trying new approaches to philanthropy

Billionare on a rollercoaster doing a loop-de-loop, holding a spanner with money and tools falling out of the cart

They are hoping to get money to the needy faster, says Avantika Chilkoti

A nudge is not always enough to force change within an industry. Sometimes a series of forceful shoves is required. In the rarified world of Western philanthropy, the shoves began in 2020. The covid-19 pandemic, protests for racial justice across America that summer and the outflow of refugees from Ukraine starting in early 2022 created a new urgency around charitable giving and revealed failings in how it worked. Donors began to consider how they could disburse money faster and with more impact.

No-strings philanthropy is giving charities more decision-making power

Organizations on the ground know best how money should be spent

Give Directly does what it says on the tin

Cash hand-outs can transform communities

Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – Jan 15, 2024

Former President Donald Trump marching on pavement blocks that read “2023” and “2024.”

The New Yorker – January 15, 2024 issue: The new issue‘s cover features Barry Blitt’s “Back to the Future” – The artist depicts a goose-stepping Donald Trump, determined to march back into political relevance.

Has School Become Optional?

A silhouette of a kid sitting on a desk revealing two people walking.

In the past few years, chronic absenteeism has nearly doubled. The fight to get students back in classrooms has only just begun.

By Alec MacGillis

Absenteeism underlies much of what has beset young people, including falling school achievement, deteriorating mental health, and elevated youth violence.

What Frantz Fanon and Ian Fleming Agreed On

Portraits of men divided by photos of protest.

From opposite directions, the revolutionary intellectual and the creator of James Bond saw violence as essential—psychologically and strategically—to solving the crisis of colonialism.

By Daniel Immerwahr

More than fifty years later, Zohra Drif could still picture the Milk Bar in Algiers on September 30, 1956. It was white and shining, she recalled, awash in laughter, young voices, “summer colors, the smell of pastries, and even the distant twittering of birds.” Drif, a well-coiffed law student in a stylish lavender dress, ordered a peach-Melba ice cream and wedged her beach bag against the counter. She paid, tipped, and left without her bag. The bomb inside it exploded soon afterward.

The New York Times Magazine – January 7, 2024

THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (January 5, 2024): The new issue features “Letting Naomi Die” – Treatment wasn’t helping her anorexia, so doctors allowed her to stop, no matter the consequences. But is a ‘palliative’ approach to mental illness really ethical?

Should Patients Be Allowed to Die From Anorexia?

A portrait of Naomi.

Treatment wasn’t helping her anorexia, so doctors allowed her to stop — no matter the consequences. But is a “palliative” approach to mental illness really ethical?

By Katie Engelhart

The doctors told Naomi that she could not leave the hospital. She was lying in a narrow bed at Denver Health Medical Center. Someone said something about a judge and a court order. Someone used the phrase “gravely disabled.” Naomi did not think she was gravely disabled. Still, she decided not to fight it. She could deny that she was mentally incompetent — but this would probably just be taken as proof of her mental incompetence. Of her lack of insight. She would, instead, “succumb to it.”

What If People Don’t Need to Care About Climate Change to Fix It?

A photo illustration of Hannah Ritchie.

By David Marchese 

“It seems like we’ve been battling climate change for decades and made no progress,” Dr. Hannah Ritchie says. “I want to push back on that.” Ritchie, a senior researcher in the Program on Global Development at the University of Oxford and deputy editor at the online publication Our World in Data, is the author of the upcoming book, “Not the End of the World.” In it, she argues that the flood of doom-laden stats and stories about climate change is obscuring our ability to imagine solutions to the crisis and envision a sustainable, livable future.

The Economist Magazine – January 6, 2024 Preview

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The Economist Magazine (January 4, 2024): The latest issue features ‘The man supposed to stop Donald Trump is an unpopular 81-year-old; Israel-Hizbullah – Can war be avoided?; The stakes in Taiwan’s election; An interview with Volodymyr Zelensky; The surge in AI nationalism…

The man supposed to stop Donald Trump is an unpopular 81-year-old

In failing to look past Joe Biden, Democrats have shown cowardice and complacency

Binyamin Netanyahu is botching the war. Time to sack him

To be safe, Israel needs new leadership


Another war could break out on the Israel-Lebanon border

Israeli officials see Hizbullah as an unacceptable threat

The New York Times Magazine – Dec 31, 2023

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THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (December 30, 2023):

Rosalynn Carter Was a Political Genius

Rosalynn Carter, the first lady, traveling in Texas in September 1978.

She fell in love with a future president at 17. Marriage never waylaid her dreams.

By MICHAEL PATERNITI

Three miles lie between this life and another, between their two houses, hers in downtown Plains, Ga., and his family farm in the country surrounded by peanuts planted in red clay. Three miles between the ordinary and extraordinary.

When Sinead O’Connor Unleashed Her Ghosts

Sinead O’Connor in 1990.

Uncovering the unlikely story behind the singer’s first album.

By JOHN JEREMIAH SULLIVAN

To say that Sinead O’Connor never quite regained the musical heights of her 1987 debut album, “The Lion and the Cobra,” is not to slight the rest of her output, which contained jewels. There is no getting back to a record like that first one. It was in some sense literally scary: The label had to change the original cover art, which showed a bald O’Connor hissing like a banshee cat, for the American release. In the version we saw, she looks down, arms crossed, mouth closed, vulnerable. The music had both sides of her in it.

Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – Jan 1 & 8, 2024

A person pauses from working at their desk and looks out the window at fireworks over a city skyline.

The New Yorker – January 1 & 8, 2024 issue: The new issue‘s cover features Bianca Bagnarelli’s “Deadline” – The artist evokes a moment suspended between the old and the new.

How Camille Pissarro Went from Mediocrity to Magnificence

A painting of a young girl with flowers by Camille Pissarro

He began as more of a tutor than a talent. But in his final decade he lent a keen eye-in-the-sky view to the Paris streets, rendering miracles of kinetic characterization.

By Adam Gopnik

It’s one of the stranger anomalies of French intellectual life that Impressionist painting—by far the most influential of French cultural enterprises—has received so little attention from the most ambitious French critics and philosophers. One can page through André Gide’s journal entries, a lot of them on art, or through Albert Camus’s, and find very little on Claude Monet or Edgar Degas (and much more on the Symbolists, a group that was far easier for a literary man to “get”). Marcel Proust cared passionately for painting, and his hero-painter Elstir has touches of Monet, but in order to make him interesting Proust had to model him on the more histrionic James McNeill Whistler, with samplings from a forgotten American painter added in.

A Palestinian Poet’s Perilous Journey Out of Gaza

A photograph of the writer Mosab Abu Toha and his family

Following Hamas’s October 7th attack and Israel’s invasion, Mosab Abu Toha fled his home with his wife and three children. Then I.D.F. soldiers took him into custody.

By Mosab Abu Toha

The New York Times Magazine – Dec 24, 2023

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THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (December 22, 2023):

He Was My Role Model. My Mentor. My Supplier.

A portrait of Lonnie in a car looking into the camera.

Decades after I left hustling to become a writer, why did I seek out the man who drew me into that world?

By Mitchell S. Jackson

O.G. rings me in the a.m. to say he’s just touched down in Phoenix. It’s the day before he said he’d arrive, and while there was a time when I’d treat the seeming opacity of his plans as par, the call’s a minor surprise. He asks for my address and tells me he can drop by as soon as he grabs his rental car. “Cool,” I say, as if the call ain’t ramped my pulse, as if my crib is presentable for guests. It isn’t. So I shoot out of bed and get to cleaning and straightening the first floor, going so far as to light a candle. It’s been umpteen years since I’ve seen O.G. — Lonnie’s his name — and God forbid he judge me anything less than hella fastidious.

In Jordan, a Sprawling Palestinian Diaspora Looks Towards Gaza

The story of 2.3 million Palestinian refugees in Jordan has been shaped by generations of war and exile.Photographs

by MOISES SAMAN

How Do You Make a Movie About the Holocaust?

A photo illustration of various stills from movies about the holocaust collaged together.

With “The Zone of Interest,” Jonathan Glazer is just the latest director to confront the problem.

Poetry makes nothing happen, W.H. Auden said in 1939, when words must have seemed especially impotent; but cinema is another matter. For several decades after the end of the Second World War, what’s come to be seen as its central catastrophe — the near-total destruction of the European Jews — was consigned to the status of a footnote. The neglect was rooted in guilt: Many nations eagerly collaborated in the killing, while others did nothing to prevent it. Consumed by their own suffering, most people simply didn’t want to know, and a conspiracy of silence was established.

Opinion & Politics: Reason Magazine – February 2024

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REASON MAGAZINE (December 21, 2023)The latest issue features ‘The Conformity Gauntlet’ – How Universities use DEI Statements to Enforce Groupthink; The Post-Neoliberalism Moment; We Absolutely Do Not Need an FDA for AI, and more…

Universities Use DEI Statements To Enforce Groupthink

An illustration showing college graduates navigating a maze | Illustration: Joanna Andreasson

DEI statements are political litmus tests, write Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott.

The Post-Neoliberalism Moment

An illustration of Milton Friedman, Ludwig von Mises, and Friedrich Hayek | Illustration: Friedrich Hayek, Margaret Thatcher, and Milton Friedman; Joanna Andreasson REASON 27 Source images: Graphic Goods/Creative Market, Mosi/Fiverr

Anyone advocating neoliberal policies is now persona non grata in Washington, D.C.

DANIEL W. DREZNER

We Absolutely Do Not Need an FDA for AI

topicsfuture | Photo: @eshear/X

If our best and brightest technologists and theorists are struggling to see the way forward for AI, what makes anyone think politicians are going to get there first?

KATHERINE MANGU-WARD