What We’re Reading

Preeti Aroon

“The Outsider,” by Phuong Ly in the Washington Post Magazine. Juan Gomez has a problem: He’s a 20-year-old student at Georgetown University who has been living in the United States since he was 2, but he has no permanent legal right to live in the States. His family came from Colombia in 1990 with tourist visas and never left. Can any leeway be made for youth in Gomez’s situation?

Elizabeth Dickinson

Only a poet like Breyten Breytenbach could take on this comparison: Barack Obama and Nelson Mandela. And after reading more in Breytenbach’s analysis for Harpers, “Obamandela,” you’ll wonder why you didn’t think of it before. Both are transformative leaders, both command the speaking floor, and “The People” can relate to both men (though the two are often accused of aloofness). Has Breytenbach just debunked the formula for leading change? Believe it.

Rebecca Frankel

In the TimesOnline, Felipe Fernández-Armesto reviews Raymond Howgego’s new volume of his Encyclopedia of Exploration, which “begins roughly at that moment of resurgent adventure, in 1850, and ends in 1940.” Apparently, all the “good” stuff had already been discovered by this point but the book still “teem[s] with specimens of romantic life –- defiant utopians, dauntless dreamers, hapless visionaries, hopeless incompetents, insane idealists.” Ah, wanderlust. Better to read about it here cause the book costs $245.00.

Joshua Keating

I was recently alerted (by my mom) to a veritable yuppie intifada brewing in my old neighborhood, Park Slope, Brooklyn. The local food co-op — a bastion of totalitarian collectivism rigid enough to turn the most earnest liberal into an Ayn Rand devotee — is considering a ban on Israeli products (they only sell four) provoking howls of self-righteousness from New Yorkers on both sides of the Israel-Palestine debate. The Forward has a good summary of the situation thus far, and the New York Post and Time Out New York add some color. I don’t have strong feelings on whether these folks express their solidarity with Gaza by banning kosher marshmallows, but I do find the debate oddly fascinating.

Greg Shtraks

“What’s Cooking?” Next time you’re grilling that steak consider eating it raw. In their weekly science installment, The Economist explains why cooking may be humanity’s “killer app” — the underpinning evolutionary change that has made man such a unique animal.

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