What We’re Reading

Christine Chen

• What a Billionaire Should Give – and What Should You? by Peter Singer, NYT Magazine, Dec. 17, 2006. Princeton ethicist Singer makes the case for why everyone from the moderately well-off to Bill Gates ought to open up their wallets more often.

Yet it was not until, in preparing this article, I calculated how much America’s Top 10 percent of income earners actually make that I fully understood how easy it would be for the world’s rich to elimate, or virtually eliminate, global poverty.[…] Meausured against our capacity, the Millennium Development Goals are indecently, shockingly modest. If we fail to achieve them…we have no excuses.

Carolyn O’Hara

• Ten Tech Concepts You Need to Know for 2007, by Alex Hutchinson, Popular Mechanics, January 2007. From bendable concrete to smart pills and data clouds, these are the technologies you’ll be talking about next year.

Aditya Tiwathia

• In Chinese Boomtown, Middle Class Pushes Back, by Howard French, NYT. Dec. 18, 2006. How Shenzhen’s middle class is creating responsive government.
• All that glisters…,  The Economist, Dec. 13, 2006. A look at the boldness of Dubai in its bid to become an international financial center.

Travis Daub

• Discover‘s December issue, which ranks the top 100 science stories of 2006. Alternative energy is #1. Growing a human bladder in a petri dish is #2. This incredible Saturn photo is #100. 

Kate Palmer

• Knowing the Enemy, by George Packer, New Yorker, Dec. 18, 2006.
• Books of the Year, Prospect, January 2007. Prospect asks prominent writers, critics, and literary types for their picks of the year’s most over and underrated books of 2006.

Diyana Ishak

• India’s Shame, by Arundhati Roy, Guardian, Dec. 15, 2006. The Indian novelist-activist raises questions about India’s war on terror.
• Last Resort Gift Guide, by Dave Barry, Washington Post Magazine, Dec, 17, 2006. If you’re stuck for holiday gift ideas, check out this hilarious guide to some of the most useless gifts to stick under the tree.

Mike Boyer

• A Hold on the Past, Tristram Hunt’s Guardian review of Chris Wrigley’s new biography, AJP Taylor: Radical Historian of Europe.
• Why Women Aren’t Funny, by Christopher Hitchens, Vanity Fair, January 2007.
• Don’t Fight Somalia, a PostGlobal exchange

Mark Levenstein

• Effective Counterterrorism and the Limited Role of Predictive Data Mining, by Jeff Jonas and Jim Harper, Cato Institute, December 2006.