What We’re Reading

• The World in 2007, The Economist. It’s that time of year again. The new annual forecast is out, complete with bylines by the likes of John McCain, Madeleine Albright, and Angela Merkel.

Kate Palmer

• A Vote for More Cooked Intelligence? by Mark Benjamin, Salon.com, Dec. 4, 2006. Is Bob Gates responsible for the same kind of inaccurate threat assessments that led to the Iraq war?
• The Heroes, the Healing: Military Medicine from the Front Lines to the Home Front, by Neal Shea, photos by James Nachtwey, National Geographic, December 2006. One of those pieces that transcends the politics about the war and simply tells the kind of story people will readyears from now.
• The Geopolitics of Asian Cyberspace, by Rob Deibert, Far Eastern Economic Review, December 2006. A look at the jostling in Asia between citizens who want greater access to information, businesses who want to use the Web to their advantage, and governments reluctant to cede control.

Travis Daub

• Chessboard Endgame, by Gary Kasparov, Opinion Journal, Dec. 2, 2006. Obsessed with Iraq, we’ve lost sight of the rest of the world.

• Will Bush Listen? by Evan Thomas, Newsweek, Dec. 11, 2006.
• Fortune‘s exclusive interview with U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson.

Mike Boyer

• Jimmy Carter Aloft, by Nick Paumgarten, New Yorker, Dec. 11, 2006. 
• Is This Victory? by Tommy Franks, Stephen Biddle, Peter Charles Choharis, John M. Owen IV, Daniel Pipes, Gary Rosen, and Dov S. Zakheim, National Interest.

Aditya Tiwathia

• Open-Source Spying, by Clive Thompson, New York Times Magazine, Dec. 3, 2006. A look into the lessons that spy agencies get from Wikipedia and the blogosphere.

• YouTube vs. Boob Tube, by Bob Garfield, Wired, December 2006. What Google gets for a billion and change.

Christine Chen

• Success Is Relative, and Height Isn’t Everything, New York Times, Nov. 28, 2006. Seeing as how I’m 5’1″ on a good day, it’s reassuring to read that the conventional widsom that taller people are smarter isn’t actually true.
• The Treasure of Mumbai, by Erika Check, Wired, December 2006. Erika, who wrote “Quest for the Cure” for FP‘s July/August issue, writes in Wired this month about the Indian pharma company Cipla, which agreed last week to make HIV drugs available at lower cost.
• Everybody’s Business: In Class Warfare, Guess Which Class is Winning? New York Times, Nov. 26, 2006. Comedian/Economist/Republican Ben Stein makes the case for why rich people should pay more taxes.