Happy New Year!

I’m wading through The Tragedy of the American Military by James Fallows for The Atlantic’s current issue. I expect Mr. Fallows’ thorough review of the sorry state of our interface with those we have hired to fight our battles will matter in the near future. I also expect it won’t matter nearly enough!

Mario Cuomo died on January 1, 2015. Here from the New York Times is Adam Nagourney’s excellent obituary. The other piece I read that really resonated was The legacy of Mario Cuomo’s 1984 ‘Tale of Two Cities’ speech by Andrei Cherny for Yahoo News.

We live in a world that no longer appreciates great men and women, unless they have been presidents, rock

The Curator bids 2014 a friendly adieu by bringing you a “Best of …” edition. Best lists from the world around us abound; here are just a few:

Tidings of Comfort, written Nobel Prize awardee Paul Krugman for the December 25 New York Times, notes four major accomplishments which call into question the notion that Revelations is upon us. Smart, clear thinking here and, by the way, did I mention the fact that Paul Krugman, who gets pilloried hourly, has been awarded a Nobel Prize for Economics? Just sayin’! (If I missed any Nobel Prizes awarded to Rush Limbaugh et al., please advise.)

From Longform.org, here’s the Longform Best of 2014 long-form journalism pieces. Heard about

The Irony and the Ecstasy by Michael Kinsley appears in the January 2015 issue of Vanity Fair. The essay addresses Ronald Reagan, as a real person and as a symbol. It’s short on words—less than 1500—and long on truth. Yes, this man made people feel better, and his sunny side was certainly beneficial in the early part of his term. But, Oh My G-d, there’s such a gap between the hagiography and reality. Read the piece, please! (By the way, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) noted many times that we can all have our own opinions, but not our own facts.)

From Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire on December 19, here’s Lawmaker Would Require Men to Approve Abortions.

Gosh golly, only two more Wednesday Curator posts in 2014, and they fall on Christmas and New Year’s Eve.

I re-read this article, Paul Ryan’s Obsolete Thinking About Poverty, a few days ago. David Frum wrote it for The Atlantic back in late July. It was worth reading then, and again after the November elections. For all of the problems Mr. Frum—a pretty conservative fellow—finds in a decent first draft of a poverty program written by a group of people who think family and charity are enough to help anyone, the rhetoric is much worse now. Doing away with the food stamps program comes to mind immediately, and we can expect that and worse when the new Congress convenes.

Two weeks have passed since the election. Notions about new dynamics seem quaint already, what with talk about an impending government shutdown, impeachment, etc. One piece really resonated with me on this topic generally; it’s Elbert Ventura’s October 31 review of The Stranger:  Barack Obama in the White House by Chuck Todd—yes, the Meet the Press guy—in the Columbia Journalism Review. Money quote, from the review? “’Obama’s logic had no place in an age of ferocious unreasonableness,’ Todd writes, a pithy diagnosis of his—and our—predicament.” I don’t know the political scientist who has yet written the case study about what should happen where the president is serious and logical, when all around him so few others are! (By

Been in Sears lately? If you say yes, I’m sorry, and if you say no, you’ve missed nothing more than a viewing of a sad carcass. Here’s Ayn Rand-Loving CEO Destroys His Empire, written by Lynn Parramore for Salon last December. The Ayn Rand lover is Eddie Lampert, and he was certainly working in a tough environment for retail, but his actions are shameful and disheartening. (For an uplifting story about Sears, read Julius Rosenwald: The Man Who Built Sears, Roebuck and Advanced the Cause of Black Education in the American South by Peter Ascoli. It’s the story of one of the Sears founders, and about the schools he built in the still-segregated South.)

I heard Harry Shearer on

The 2014 election cycle is wrapping up as I curate for November 5. No comments on the elections, directly, but most of this week’s issue focuses on politics at the edges—and, in the final selection—the missing center.

Courtesy of my friend Tony Canton, here’s some provocative thinking from David Schanzer and Jay Sullivan, writing for the New York Times on November 2:  Cancel the Midterms. Borrowing from my life in nonprofits—and with the recognition that government can no more be run like a charity than it should be run like a business—it may be time to look at our governance model. The conceit that what worked in 1787 should work now, even with the several amendments to the