What We’re Reading

Preeti Aroon

• Terrorists Take Recruitment Efforts Online by 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley. The new battlefield in the war on terror is “jihad.com” as militant Islamic groups fight with bytes, not bullets, to radicalize Muslim youth.

Henry Bowles

• Prisons of the Stateless, by Jacob Stevens in the November/December 2006 New Left Review. Stevens argues that the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees’ insistence on repatriation and its reliance on a global network of “safe havens” represents a perversion of the UNHCR’s original charge: to secure “full political and economic rights in the country of asylum, with the hope of eventual repatriation.”

Mike Boyer

• Neither Clinton, Nor Obama, by New York Times columnist David Brooks. Brooks makes a convincing case Richardson shouldn’t be ignored. But it’s still wishful thinking to hope that the Clinton-Obama soap opera will end anytime soon.
• They Won’t Know What Hit Them, by Joshua Green in The Atlantic Monthly. Can the founder of Quark software and a group of powerful gay donors reshape American politics?

Christine Chen

• Lucky Girls, by Nell Freudenberger. Young American literary phenom writes five short stories about young American expats in South and Southeast Asia.
• Personal History, by Katharine Graham. 1998 Pulitzer Prize-winning autobiography by the Washington Post‘s grande dame, one of the most powerful women of the 20th Century.

Blake Hounshell

• China about to pass U.S. as world’s top generator of greenhouse gases, Robert Collier, San Francisco Chronicle, March 5, 2007. “China’s greenhouse gas emissions have recently been growing by a total amount much greater than that of all industrialized nations put together.” [!]

Prerna Mankad

• Australia: the new 51st state, by John Pilger in the New Statesman. A scathing assessment of Australia’s deference to U.S. foreign-policy interests at the expense of Australia’s own political freedoms, security and environment. While it reads as a touch extreme, Pilger highlights important points about Australia’s deeply contested identity and the increasing suppression of dissent in the country.