The Wednesday Curator cannot let the passage of 150 years since Abraham Lincoln’s passing go unnoticed. Godspeed, Mr. Lincoln. You were more, far more, than we deserved, and I can think of no American whose life has had a bigger impact on more people.
In honor of Tax Day we’re leading with Kansas’s Failed Experiment (Russell Berman wrote the piece for The Atlantic on April 9) and Arthur Laffer has a never-ending supply of supply-side plans for GOP by Jim Tankersley of the Washington Post, also on April 9. Mr. Laffer drew the infamous curve that just might be the modern-day version of Original Sin. (Mr. Laffer’s curve, per Mr. Laffer, shows the virtue of tax cuts, forever and ever more.) Disaster after disaster, it hath wrought! Mr. Berman reports on the standoffishness of Republican governors after Kansas (good), while Mr. Tankersley shares the Laffer-love among R’s who want to be our next president.
Andy Kroll and Patrick Caldwell wrote Robby Mook Just Took the Hardest Job in Politics: Saving the Clintons from Themselves for Mother Jones on April 9. We’ll all be watching Mr. Mook!
I ran across this piece, Anti-Intellectualism and the “Dumbing Down” of America by Ray Williams for Psychology Today, a week or so ago. (It was posted on July 7, 2014.) Not so good, what we’re doing with the whole dumbing down thing!
Reader Laura Penny—yes, that one, and the same one who will be honored by the Women’s Foundation of Southern Arizona on April 22, 2015—shared Compensating for Mass Murder, written by Julia Hutton on April 2 for The Atlantic. The subtitle is What happens to the millions of dollars donated to help victims? The article discusses Newtown, Aurora, Oklahoma City, and a few other places, but it focuses in on what happened after January 8, 2011 in Tucson. And the news? Tucson shined, handling the aftermath of a horrible tragedy very well!
Regarding food, from Tamar Adler for the New York Times magazine on March 15—on line on March 11—here’s A Manners Manifesto. A delightful little read! And from SeriousEats.com here’s The Best Chocolate Babka in NYC, 2015 Edition by Niko Triantafillou. Babka has a storied history in my family, and while certain people no longer enjoy eating it—gluten and sugar stuff factor into the equation—the pictures, and the writing, gave certain people lots of pleasure. Here’s one picture, for the non-clickers: