What We’re Reading

Kate Palmer 

• Worldchanging: A User’s Guide For the 21st Century. If you like the blog, you’ll love this book.

Mark I. Levenstein

• Lebanon’s Shiites Grapple With the New Feeling of Power by Anthony Shadid in the Washington Post. Sunday, Dec. 10, 2006. An interesting, if not exhaustive, modern history of Shiites in Lebanon.
• The New Hegemon by Vali Nasr in The New Republic, Dec, 18, 2006. A review of three recent books about Iran.

State of the World 2007: Our Urban Future by the The Worldwatch Institute.

Tibet, Now by Joshua Kurlantzick in Sunday’s New York Times. Better make that life-altering trip to Lhasa before hordes of tourists ruin it.

Banker to the Poor, the autobiography of Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus. Unfortunately, he’s a better micro-banker and salesman than writer.

 Carolyn O’Hara

• The 6th Annual Year in Ideas by the New York Times Magazine. It’s always amusing to read about the researcher who alleges that being hungry makes you smarter, the reverse graffiti artist who “clean tags” city streets, and the guy who came up with the equation for the perfect female ass. This year, the round-up also flagged a few items you could have read about on Passport months ago, including why wearing a bike helmet puts you at more risk and why the number of parking tickets that diplomats in NYC accumulate correlates to corruption levels in their home country.

Christine Y. Chen

• Emma’s War by Deborah Scroggins. A book about 1990’s Sudan that tells the story of Westerners in Africa by profiling a 27-year-old British aid worker in Sudan who ends up marrying a rebel leader and “goes native,” so to speak.

• This hand-drawn map of the internet (explained here).

Jeff Marn

• Newsweek – The Perils of the Pentagon’s New Iraq Strategy.

Diyana Ishak

• Ethical Food and Voting with Your Trolley, The Economist. Just when you thought you could feel good about responsible shopping, The Economist seriously calls into question arguments for fair trade, organic farming, and local produce.