What We’re Reading

Preeti Aroon

• Migrants Stream Into South Mexico, by James C. McKinley Jr. in Sunday’s New York Times. Mexico doesn’t just have migrants crossing its northern border—it also has migrants from Central America, who come into the country from the south on their way to the United States. They face robbery, deportation, extortion, and even amputated legs in their search for the American dream.

Mike Boyer

• Mandatory Testing and News in the Schools (pdf), by the Carnegie-Knight Task Force at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Standardized testing in U.S. schools is resulting in students that are less versed in what’s happening in the world.
• Chemicals Within Us, by David Ewing Duncan in National Geographic. What kinds of chemicals are floating around in our bodies? Nat Geo paid big bucks to have a writer tested for 320 chemicals he might have picked up from food, drinks, the air, and everyday products. The results will make you want to seriously detox.

Will Dobson

Two CIA Prisoners in China, 1952–73, by Nicholas Dujmovic. This piece, from Studies in Intelligence, the CIA’s house journal, offers a fascinating look into the story of John T. Downey and Richard Fecteau, two CIA operatives who were captured in China in 1952 and spent the next two decades in a Chinese prison. Besides their incredible story, the piece offers a “series of ‘lessons learned’ that could be relevant to others facing long captivity.”

Blake Hounshell

• Wired‘s package of stories on What We Don’t Know is a human-readable snapshot of science’s burning questions.

Jeff Marn

• Whose Iran? by Laura Secor in the New York Times Magazine. A trip to the heart of schizophrenic Tehran reveals just how conflicted many Iranians are about their president.

Prerna Mankad 

• Wolfgang Manchau argues in yesterday’s Financial Times that Nicolas Sarkozy’s newly-defined economic plan is merely “Reaganomics with a French accent.” Without state-sector reform, he says, Sarkozy’s proposals would be disastrous for the country.

Carolyn O’Hara

• The Esquire Napkin Project, February 2007. Esquire put 250 cocktail napkins in the mail to writers all over the United States. This is what they got in return. Plus, don’t miss this issue’s Answer Fella on whether cloned humans will have souls and why the South Dakota badlands are so bad-ass.

Passport is also experimenting with a new feature today: Must Reads. Over on the right sidebar, you’ll see constantly-updated links to great stories at other publications, with brief comments from one of us. Check it out.