What We’re Reading

Preeti Aroon

• The Network, by 60 Minutes correspondent Bob Simon. A former terrorist recruiter who has since renounced violence reveals fascinating details about terrorist groups, including an unlikely recruitment technique: offering freedom—the freedom to marry whomever you want.

Christine Chen

• Army deployed seriously injured troops, by Mark Benjamin, Salon.com, March 26, 2007. The military sent wounded soldiers with broken bones and other ailments to training camps in remote deserts. Analysts say it was an effort to boost the numbers to show that the Army had enough manpower.
• You want to do what? And you want to do it when? New York Times, March 25, 2007  Don’t go to the theater on a Saturday night. Don’t have a baby on a weekend. Don’t e-mail your parents and ask for money late at night. All these, and other morsels of advice, can be found in the New York Times‘ Worst Day roundup.

Travis Daub

• The Measure of All Things: The Seven-Year Odyssey and Hidden Error That Transformed the World, by Ken Alder. Without a standard system of weights and measures, there can be no global economy—and there wasn’t until a group of passionate scientists and surveyors devoted their lives to painstakingly measuring the natural world, the basis for all measurements in the metric system. Fun fact: The original meter was defined as one/ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole along a meridian through Paris. Today the meter is defined as the distance traveled by light in 1/299,792,458 of a second in a total vacuum.

Blake Hounshell

• Frontline Pakistan: The Struggle with Militant Islam, a masterfully-timed new book by veteran correspondent Zahid Hussein.
• China’s Longest Campaign: Birth Planning in the People’s Republic, 1949-2005, by Swarthmore’s Tyrene White. All you ever wanted to know about the one-child policy and its history.

Prerna Mankad

• The rage over (Red) in Newsweek. Is “shopping to help charity” just an effective marketing trick? Jessica Bennett examines retailers’ promises to donate a portion of their sales profits to, say, help with HIV/AIDS or the environment. The corporations involved in Bono’s “(Red)” campaign have spent $100 million on advertising for it and raised only $18 million for the causes they promote.