I promised myself that I would not do this again, but I am combining multiple weeks' worth of posts into one. I have had a couple of weeks' vacation and did not spend that extra free time reading. Time to play catch-up. Again, stars mean they are the top 10.
Election 2012-- "Good heavens, Mitt Romney is terrible" edition
Extremism in defense of Gilded Age privilege (Katrina vanden Heuvel, WaPo)
***Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital (Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone)-- I love the way that Taibbi pulls no punches. I am really surprised that the precise dynamics of how Mitt acquired his fortune have not become a bigger issue. Probably too complicated for the average voter.
Ghosts of Ballots Past (Rick Valelly, The American Prospect)
Voting Wrongs (Elizabeth Drew, NYRB)
Election 2012 and the media: a vast right-wing conspiracy of stupid (Glenn Greenwald, The Guardian)
Romney's theory of the "taker class" and why it matters (Ezra Klein, Wonkblog)
Mitt Romney is NOT the Face of Mormonism (Greg Prince, Huffington Post)
***The Political Education of Elizabeth Warren (Monica Potts, The American Prospect)-- Elizabeth Warran, along with Julian Castro (from my own state of Texas) are the two up-and-coming Democrats that I am most excited about.
***The Projection Party (Paul Waldman, The American Prospect)
Mitt Romney's Fair Share (Joseph Stiglitz, Project Syndicate)
***Mitt Romney's Best-Known Mormon Critic Tells It All. One Last Time (Joanna Brooks, Religion Dispatches)-- Really important interview with Judith Dushku.
How Not to Govern (Jared Bernstein, On The Economy)
A Good Ole Boys' Family Feud (Theo Anderson, In These Times)
Praying for the White House (Paul Waldman, The American Prospect)
The Election and the Future (Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, Democracy Journal)
The Crying Game (Charles Simic, NYRB)
Revolt of the Rich (Mike Lofgren, The American Conservative)
In the Twilight of Empire (Jeff Faux, In These Times)
The System That Wasn't There; Ayn Rand's Failed Philosophy (and why it matters) (Nicholas McGinnis, Engaging Science)
Mormons-- "60 days till the Mormon Moment is over" edition
***Why I Love Mormonism (Simon Critcheley, NYT)
***Why Mormon Men Love 'Church Ball' and are Scared of Homosexuality (Kristine Haglund, Religion & Politics)
And now for something completely different...nonviolence (christopherpdavey, The Mormon Worker)
Holy Rollers (Clare Malone, The American Prospect)-- And for a Mormon reflection on the same, see Joanna Brooks at Religion Dispatches.
Women's issues
A Never-Ending Story (Linda Greenhouse, NYT)
***The Legitimate Children of Rape (Andrew Solomon, The New Yorker)-- Just heartbreaking.
***To the Religious Right, I Am No Longer a Woman (Robin Marty, RH Reality Check)
Health care
Public Health versus Private Freedom (Peter Singer, Project Syndicate)
America's Health Worker Mismatch (Kate Tulenko, NYT)
The Fraying Hospital Safety Net (Pauline W. Chen, M.D., NYT)
How Much Health-Care Spending is Wasted? Lots. (Peter Orzsag, Bloomberg View)
Economics
Our alternative to the madness of the market (Eric Ruder, Socialist Worker)
***Is poverty a kind of robbery? (Thomas B. Edsall, NYT)
Wall Street's War on the Cities (Michael Hudson, CounterPunch)
The great transformation in the global labour market (Philip Brown, Hugh Lauder, Eurozine)
Capitalism and Government Are Friends After All (Alex Marshall, Bloomberg View)
***We're Winning the War on Poverty (Matthew Yglesias, Slate)
If Labor Dies, What's Next? (Harold Meyerson, The American Prospect)
Other
Everything You Think You Know About China is Wrong (Minxin Pei, Foreign Policy)
Our Romance with Guns (David Cole, NYRB)
Learning as Freedom (Michael S. Roth, NYT)
The Throwaways (Sarah Stillman, The New Yorker)
An orgy of cynicism (Hussein Ibish, Now Lebanon!)
The drugs don't work: a modern medical scandal (Ben Goldacre, The Guardian)
Film is Dead? Long Live Movies (A.O. Scott, Manohla Dargis, NYT)
Where is Cuba Going (John Jeremiah Sullivan, NYT)
The Siege of Academe (Kevin Carey, Washington Monthly)-- It still feels like the missing piece of the puzzle here is the credentialing aspect. You may know a ton, but how do you prove it? Degrees from fancy universities have a signaling function and it seems that like will be the biggest hurdle for online education.
