What We’re Reading

Preeti Aroon

• Tiny Irish Village Is Latest Place to Claim Obama as Its Own, by Mary Jordan in the Washington Post. U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama’s great-great-great-great-grandfather was likely a shoemaker in Ireland.

Mike Boyer

• General says he needs more troops, by Peter Spiegel, Tina Susman, and Garrett Therolf in the LA Times. After being accused of failing the American public, an increasing number of Army generals in Iraq have decided to start speaking their minds.

Christine Chen

• The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. Pulitzer Prize-winning and Oprah-sanctioned novel about a father and his young son’s harrowing journey through post-apocalyptic America. A heartbreaking book that earns its kudos and more.

Michael Cognato

• Mario Livio, The Equation that Couldn’t Be Solved: How Mathematical Genius Discovered the Language of Symmetry. It’s a rare accomplishment to make math even barely tolerable, let alone a window into ideas about art and beauty. Livio pulled it off before with The Golden Ratio, and seems to have done it again here.

Travis Daub

• The Army We Have, by  Brian Mockenhaupt in The Atlantic Monthly. Is the “me” generation fit to be Doughboys, or just … dough? Mokenhaupt, a former grunt himself, explores how the Army has softened boot camp to increase retention rates.

Will Dobson

• Twice As Good: Condoleezza Rice and Her Path to Power. Probably no U.S. Secretary of State has been less public—and less publicly understood—than Condoleezza Rice. In this brand-new biography, Newsweek‘s Marcus Mabry uses his considerable journalistic chops to unpack the contradictions that make Condi who she is. Mabry walks into all of Condi’s worlds—her early years in Birmingham, her time as professor and Provost at Stanford, as a leading member of the foreign policy establishment—and comes away with the most complete account of the most private and powerful woman in America. (See also Mabry’s full debunking of many of the mythologies surrounding the Secretary in Think Again: Condi in FP‘s current issue.)

Prerna Mankad

• A Brave Woman Scorned in Slate. Christopher Hitchens offers an impassioned defense of Shaha Riza, and by extension, Paul Wolfowitz. Hitchens writes, “The campaign against Shaha Riza is the nastiest character assassination I have ever seen.”

Kate Palmer

• The New York Review of Magazines, 2007. The fourth installment of Columbia Journalism School’s grad student-produced reflection on the state of magazine publishing. There’s some doom and gloom, but several articles—including an essay calling for a magazine for Africa and a slideshow of the different covers Newsweek chooses for its U.S. and international audiences—highlight the emphasis tomorrow’s writers and editors place on issues of global importance.