The Wednesday Curator – 4/9/14

April 8, 2014

Boy howdy, does Wednesday roll around quickly. (I saw CBS coverage of the Masters in a restaurant yesterday, and realized just how far into 2014 we are!) Anyway, here’re some of the web posts that have caught my eye recently.

Those who know me well know guns are not on “favorite things” list. I have avoided the subject pretty assiduously because it raises strong, strong feelings. (I have a piece mostly written that I’ve not yet finalized for that reason.) Still, I thought The Gun Is Never the Problem:  A Guide to Right-Wing Responses to Mass Shootings, from Media Matters for America, addressed clearly how one media sector reports on mass shootings. I don’t have answers here, but

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The Wednesday Curator – 4/2/14

April 1, 2014

Wednesday has arrived; here’s the best of what the Wednesday Curator has read this week. Enjoy!

I haven’t ventured into Arizona politics much—at all?—here, and that is no accident. I did, however, find How the Right Hijacked Arizona, written by James Oliphant and published in National Journal Online on March 31, very interesting and worth my time.

He Remade Our World is the fifth installment in Mark Danner’s New York Review of Books series on, so far, Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney. Here are links to Rumsfeld’s War and Its Consequences Now (No. 1) and In the Darkness of Dick Cheney (No. 4). (Donald Rumsfeld Revealed (No. 2) and Rumsfeld:  Why We Live

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The Wednesday Curator – 3/26/14

March 25, 2014

Wednesday’s here! I like so much the fact that I get to curate the writing of others for Wednesdays, for it’s really a joy to read great writing. Here goes:

Up first is a piece by George Packer, dated March 25 and posted on the New Yorker website. It’s titled The Right’s New “Welfare Queens”:  The Middle Class. Mr. Packer reports on what Larry Lindsey—the guy who sold Congress on tax cuts as a panacea for whatever ails us in 2001 and 2003—told a Congressional committee about inequality. Mr. Packer is one of my favorite writers!

John Cassidy (great writer too) has written a long-form review of Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, also posted at

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The Wednesday Curator – 3/19/14

March 18, 2014

Lots of interesting reading this week. So much, in fact, that I saved up for next week. Enjoy!

Controversy in 10,000 hour land! Maybe the most famous part of Malcolm Gladwell’s The Outliers relates to the notion that if you practice for 10,000 hours—at two hours per day, every day, that is almost 14 years—you can be world-class anything. Not so fast, says Are Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 Hours of Practice Realy All You Need?, written by Dan Vergano for National Geographic Daily News on March 10. Actually, I think Malcolm Gladwell claimed the practice was necessary but not sufficient. (He expands on the subject in Complexity and the Ten-Thousand-Hour Rule, a New Yorker blog post from August 2013.)

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The Wednesday Curator – 3/12/14

March 11, 2014

It’s Wednesday, and here’s some cool stuff I’ve read:

How the Time in the Sky Differs From the Time on the Clock, written by Robinson Meyer and posted at The Atlantic’s blog a week ago, provides some interesting thoughts about time zones. By the way, www.theatlantic.com provides some of the best, most interesting writing on the Internet.

Why the Ugly Rhetoric against Gay Marriage Is Familiar to this Historian of Miscegenation appears at History News Network and was written by Peggy Pascoe, a history professor at the University of Oregon. Amazing—and unsurprising—parallels!

Here are two pieces on Ukraine. The first, Who’s the Villain Here?, appeared in last Wednesday’s New York Times and was written by Nicholas Kristof. The

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The Wednesday Curator – 3/5/14

March 4, 2014

A few tidbits to keep you sustained:

Philip Longman wrote Oops:  The Texas Miracle That Isn’t, published in the new issue of Washington Monthly. Long and loaded with information, it explains well just what Texas brags about and why there’s not a lot of there there!

For satire about a nothing funny subject, read When May I Shoot a Student?, written for the New York Times op-ed page by Greg Hampikian, biology and criminal justice professor at Boise State University.

David Schleicher wrote States’ Wrongs—a play on state’s rights—for Slate.com. The headline? Conservatives’ Illogical, Inconsistent Effort to Repeal the 17th Amendment. Especially noteworthy is the lack of evident appreciation for how state legislature’s existed when

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The Wednesday Curator – 2/26/14

February 25, 2014

So my friend Gary Stuart, great attorney and author, gave me a working over about the curator thing. Said I’m a curator. Not going to argue. Look for The Wednesday Curator for the foreseeable future. On Wednesdays.

Here’s what I’ve read this week that has stuck with me:

The Case for Blunders, a review of Brilliant Blunders:  From Darwin to Einstein—Colossal Mistakes by Great Scientists That Changed Our Understanding of Life and the Universe by Mario Livio. The review by Freeman Dyson, really smart scientist (and very charming writer), appears in the March 6 issue of The New York Review of Books. (I love reading reviews of books about science; I almost think I understand the stuff!)

Symposium:

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I’m Not A Curator!

February 18, 2014

A curator is a keeper or custodian of a museum or other collection. In modern times the term also describes someone who collects material for others to read, view, buy, etc. As the Mark Rubin Writes schedule develops and I gain an appreciation for the balance between the arid world of legal concepts and the pleasures attendant to restaurant reviews and other finer things, I thought Wednesday would be my day to play curator, finding great pieces from here and there for your mid-week pleasure. Alas, the New York Times busted my a*s, big-time, with this totally uncivil piece, On the Tip of Creative Tongues, about the pomposity attendant to “curating.” (Click and read. It’s actually pretty funny!)

So,

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