What We’re Reading

Preeti Aroon

• A Good Provider Is One Who Leaves, by Jason DeParle in the New York Times. What’s the world’s biggest source of foreign aid? It isn’t donations from rich countries. It’s remittances from workers who migrate overseas and send money home. In the Philippines, remittances make up 14 percent of the country’s GDP. Workers go abroad, leaving their children behind, but send home money to improve their families’ lives.

Henry Bowles

• Russia Redux? by Vladimir Popov in New Left Review. Relying extensively on social and economic data since the early 1990s, Popov makes the case for Putin’s legacy as an effective president—especially on corruption, crime, and government spending—and outlines the (mostly economic) problems that Putin’s successor will inherit next spring.

Mike Boyer

• Our Wall. National Geographic‘s Charles Bowden looks at why nations build walls—and what the one on the U.S.-Mexico border not only means for United States, but what it tells us about ourselves.

Michael Cognato

• The Economist‘s Correspondent’s Diary. The magazine’s online editor has just snuck into Zimbabwe for some surreptitious reporting, and is posting daily updates on the experience this week. Dangerous for him or her. Riveting for us.

Robert Mora/Getty

Blake Hounshell

• Pulitzer-winning writer David Halberstam killed in California car crash at age 73, Associated Press. The United States lost one of its best and brightest today.
  
• To Change China: Western Advisers in China, by Jonathan Spence. It’s a few years old, but more relevant than ever. Spence, who literally wrote the book on Chinese history, cautions that ambitious efforts by outsiders to change China have a not-so-glorious history.

Prerna Mankad

• Paris Matchup in Slate. Mike Steinberger explains why French voters “voted with their heads, not their hearts” to see Royal and Sarkozy fight it out in the French presidential election. He argues that while voters question Royal’s competence, they are equally unsettled by the feeling that Sarkozy may be ruthlessly competent—a “bitter pill that must be swallowed” for France’s long-term prosperity.