Illegal Immigration:
Undocumented Dreams
Boston Globe Opinion
April 28, 2010
By Steve Almond
Most of all, I’d suggest to those who trumpet the alleged evils of undocumented workers to spend some time in cities like El Paso and Juarez. What they’d discover is an ancient and enduring truth: immigration is not about spreading evil. It’s about poor people seeking to become less poor. It is about the very human beings whose honest labors built our nation, and whose dreams honor its most sacred tenets.
Crime and Punishment:
Norway Builds World's Most Humane Prison
Time
May 10, 2010
By William Lee Adams
It embodies the guiding principles of the country's penal system: that repressive prisons do not work and that treating prisoners humanely boosts their chances of reintegrating into society.
Obama Rules:
Obama Q&A with House Republicans. Awesome.
January 29, 2010
First two minutes are muffled. Def worth watching.
Manners:
The death of the RSVP
New York Times Opinion
March 14, 2010
By Rand Richards Cooper
What’s clear is how hard the R.S.V.P. rubs against the grain of contemporary life. In requesting people to anchor a plan in the distant future of a month hence, you are demanding a kind of navigation that Americans increasingly do not practice. We prefer to remain flexy, solidifying our plans incrementally as the date approaches. Let’s talk tomorrow. I’ll call you when I’m on the road. Cellphones in hand, we microadjust our schedules as they unfold around us. We’re like the air traffic controllers of our own lives.
Founding Fathers:
Immaculate misconception and the Supreme Court
Washington Post Opinion
May 7, 2010
By Joseph J. Ellis
the constitutional doctrine of original intent has always struck most historians of the founding era as rather bizarre. For they, more than most, know that the original framers of the Constitution harbored deep disagreements over the document's core provisions, that the debates in the state ratifying conventions further exposed the divisions of opinion on such seminal issues as federal vs. state jurisdiction, the powers of the executive branch, even whether there was -- or should be -- an ultimate arbiter of the purposefully ambiguous language of the document. Moreover, several of the most prominent Founders changed their minds in the ensuing years.
Stevens's Real Legacy: Why Empathy Matters
Newsweek
April 9, 2010
By Dahlia Lithwick
If John Paul Stevens's career stood for anything, it's the proposition that walking a few miles in the other guy's moccasins will always make you a better judge. As Americans now begin the ritual clamor for a court that looks more like them—for more racial, gender, and ethnic diversity at the court—it's worth taking a moment to recognize that often more than anyone else at the court, it was an 89-year-old white Protestant guy who devoted his judicial career to standing in the shoes of teenage schoolgirls, pregnant women, gay Boy Scout leaders, and poor African-Americans.
Citizens United: What is the First Amendment For?
New York Times Opinion
February 1, 2010
By Stanley Fish
The Majority believe that free trade in ideas with as many trading partners as wish to join in will inevitability produce benign results for a democratic society. And since their confidence in these results is a matter of theoretical faith and not of empirical or historical observation — free speech is for them a religion with long-term rewards awaiting us down the road — they feel no obligation to concern themselves with short-term calculations and predictions. Stevens also values robust intellectual commerce, but he believes that allowing corporate voices to have their full and unregulated say “can distort the ‘free trade in ideas’ crucial to candidate elections.” In his view free trade doesn’t take care of itself, but must be engineered by the kind of restrictions the majority strikes down. The marketplace of ideas can become congealed and frozen; the free flow can be impeded, and when that happens the only way to preserve free speech values is to curtail or restrict some forms of speech, just as you might remove noxious weeds so that your garden can begin to grow again. Prohibitions on speech, Stevens says, can operate “to facilitate First Amendment values.”
Economics:
Why the Obama Economic Plan is Working
Business Week
April 8, 2010
Michael Dorning
Little more than a year ago, financial markets were in turmoil, major auto companies were on the verge of collapse and economists such as Paul Krugman were worried about the U.S. slumbering through a Japan-like Lost Decade. While no one would claim that all the pain is past or the danger gone, the economy is growing again, jumping to a 5.6% annualized growth rate in the fourth quarter of 2009 as businesses finally restocked their inventories. The consensus view now calls for 3% growth this year, significantly higher than the 2.1 % estimate for 2010 that economists surveyed by Bloomberg News saw coming when Obama first moved into the Oval Office. The U.S. manufacturing sector has expanded for eight straight months, the Business Roundtable's measure of CEO optimism reached its highest level since early 2006, and in March the economy added 162,000 jobs—more than it had during any month in the past three years. "There is more business confidence out there," says Boeing CEO Jim McNerney. "This Administration deserves significant credit."
Pursuit of Happiness:
What Makes Us Happy?
The Atlantic
June 2009
By Joshua Wolf Shenk
Last fall, I spent about a month in the file room of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, hoping to learn the secrets of the good life. The project is one of the longest-running—and probably the most exhaustive—longitudinal studies of mental and physical well-being in history. Begun in 1937 as a study of healthy, well-adjusted Harvard sophomores (all male), it has followed its subjects for more than 70 years.
