What We’re Reading

Preeti Aroon

• Kabul Beauty School, by Deborah Rodriguez. This engaging book is the real-life tale of an American woman who opens a beauty school in Afghanistan … and gets an arranged marriage to an Afghan who already has another wife. It provides an excellent ground-level view of everyday life in Kabul, but it has also garnered controversy: Rodriguez may have put some of her former students at risk by discussing taboo details of their lives.

Mike Boyer

• A Cuban Death Rehearsal, by Bella Thomas in Prospect. Every hipster sporting a Che Guevara t-shirt who waxes poetic about Cuba’s successful alternative to democracy needs to read this article.

Blake Hounshell

• Defense Officials Tried to Reverse China Policy, Says Powell Aide, by Congressional Quarterly‘s Jeff Stein. If true, these are some pretty explosive charges.
• The four circles of a changing world. World Bank President James Wolfensohn weighs in on the Bank and the state of the planet in today’s International Herald Tribune.

Prerna Mankad 

• The Tale of Two Dynasties in Newsweek. Johnnie L. Roberts offers a fascinating history of the Bancroft family and Rupert Murdoch, emphasizing their vastly different backgrounds and philosophies toward journalism. But for all the differences, mutual respect for the bottom line could provide enough common ground to see Murdoch ultimately take control of The Wall Street Journal.

Carolyn O’Hara

• Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451 Misinterpreted, by Amy E. Boyle Johnston in LA Weekly, May 30, 2007. Apparently, Fahrenheit 451 isn’t about government censorship after all. It’s about the dangers of … television?
• The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It, by Paul Collier. A billion people in the world’s weakest states are falling behind. Pulling them out of poverty will be the 21st century’s greatest development and security challenge.

Tom Stec 

• Google Keeps Tweaking Its Search Engine, by Saul Hansell in Sunday’s New York Times. A lucky Times reporter hangs with Google’s “search-quality” group, the secretive team responsible for developing the PageRank algorithms.