What We’re Reading

Erica Alini

• How the Right Was Knocked Off Balance and How It Can Recover, (pdf) by Gideon Rachman in the Washington Quarterly. A witty assessment of the transatlantic crisis of the right by the chief foreign affairs columnist for the Financial Times. After a hilarious but vitriolic depiction of leftist peace-protesters, Rachman admits that, when it comes to democratization and greenhouse gases, “the disheveled college lecturers in cardigans and the fierce-looking women in sensible shoes” got it right.

Mike Boyer

• Party Politics, by Robert Service in The New Statesman. Responding to a review of his book by Guardian op-ed page editor Seumas Milne, Service looks at why the left insists on having an enduring nostalgia for communism, despite the fact that failed ideology has cost millions of lives.

Dave M. Benett/Getty Images

Christine Chen 

• What Does Tina Brown Have to Do to Get Some Attention? by Vanessa Grigoriadis, New York magazine. A fascinating profile of the queen of media in the 1980s and 1990s, who has just written a biography of Princess Diana. Tina Brown, former editor of Britain’s Tatler, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker, created the mix of high-brow culture and celebrity worship that’s become so common today.
• Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro. The latest novel by the Japanese-British author of The Remains of the Day tells the unsettling story of a group of students raised at an isolated and mysterious boarding school in rural England. (Spoiler alert: Read no further if you plan on getting the book!) Ishiguro examines the troubling moral implications of genetic engineering and what it means to be human.

Sam duPont 

• Toward an Angola Strategy: Prioritizing U.S.-Angola Relations, a report sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations. Upshot: The United States should do more to cultivate a closer relationship with Angola and help the country rebuild in the wake of its 27-year civil war.

Blake Hounshell

• The Right to Know: Secrecy for an Open World, edited by Ann Florini of the Brookings Institution. Short version: Secrets, secrets, are no fun. Secrets, secrets, hurt someone.

Prerna Mankad

• Women and money make a perfect match, in The Spectator. Merryn Somerset Webb explains why women make better investors and money managers than men—and why they they aren’t doing more of it.