What We’re Reading

Preeti Aroon

“The Canadian Oil Boom,” by Robert Kunzig in National Geographic. Many people have said that the oil sands of Alberta, Canada, are too expensive to exploit. But now, squeezing oil from sand is looking like it might be worth it.

Elizabeth Dickinson

During the year-and-a-half since Mexico’s war on drugs began, gun shops have popped up en masse on the U.S. side of the border. As Joel Millman of the Wall Street Journal reports today, an Arizona gun shop became the first such outpost to face legal investigation for selling arms to the drug cartels. It’s a step toward the kind of U.S.-Mexico cooperation that Shannon O’Neill recently called for on FP‘s The Argument.  

Rebecca Frankel

I was thrilled to see Roger Cohen’s op-ed, “Iran, the Jews and Germany,” in today’s NY Times. “Life [in Iran] is more difficult for [Jews] than for Muslims,” writes Cohen, “but to suggest they inhabit a totalitarian hell is self-serving nonsense.” Present-day Iran is not Nazi Germany and Ahmadinejad, while no friend to Jews, is not Adolf Hitler. It is worth noting, as Cohen does, that Iran has a history of taking care of its Jews.

Joshua Keating

The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington. Ever wonder what the author of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” did during World War II? He was in Washington, spying on the U.S. Government for the British along with future James Bond author Ian Flemming. No, really.

Andrew Polk

The Telegraph‘s Bruno Waterfield offers an excellent run down of the tensions that plagued the EU’s emergency summit over the weekend. Dubbing this split, the “New ‘Iron Curtain,'” Waterfield gives insight into the economic dynamics dividing the western and eastern blocs and explains how they are bubbling over into social and political realms.

Greg Shtraks 

With the 50th anniversary of the Dalai Lama’s exile to India approaching next week, there’s plenty to read on Tibet’s struggle for autonomy. Check out The Dragon in the Land of Snow: History of Modern Tibet since 1947 by Tsering Shakya, the new report from the International Campaign for Tibet about the effects of the Qinghai-Lhasa railroad on the country’s economy and environment, and Newsweek’s profile of the Karmapa Lama.

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