Archive for the ‘ICYMI’ Category

Catching you up on what you might have missed during the past week:

• Steve Jobs’ resignation as chief executive Apple provoked a host of reactions. Here are two: the ways he and Apple have changed the way we live, and why he “failed better than anyone else in Silicon Valley,  maybe better than anyone in corporate America.”
• Only Joe Biden would describe China’s one-child policy as “repugnant” to him by saying he “fully understand[s]“ it.
• Speaking of China, a long but interesting piece about the “Sinosphere.”
• Twenty years after the fall of the Soviet Union, a look back — and explanation of why today’s Russia isn’t as democratic as hoped.
• With all the talk about Rick Perry’s grades, this score from his time as governor will have much more to do with the way he’s judged.
• All the details about Georgia’s new legislative maps.
• Put a blue light and siren atop the car he uses to check limousine registrations, and Tim Echols’ transformation into John Oxendine will be complete.
• Why the …

Continue reading ICYMI: Steve Jobs’ legacy, Biden in China, Echols as Oxendine and Super Marco (Rubio) »

Catching you up on what you might have missed during the past week:

• The 9/11 tenth anniversary is approaching, with reflections and remembrances coming more and more frequently. Here are two very good ones on very different topics: First, what we got right in the war on terror; and second, why art — novels, movies, musicians — failed us after the attacks.
• An explanation for why the 11th Circuit’s carefully researched and thoroughly argued ruling last week, striking down the individual mandate in Obamacare but leaving the rest of the law intact, makes this case the most important of those which could reach the U.S. Supreme Court.
• A pair of pieces explaining why Richard Nixon’s wage and price controls, introduced 40 years ago this week, were bad policy that still echo today.
• A review of a book that argues there’s little scientific basis for “the damaging cult of pristine wilderness and the false ideology of the balance of nature.”
• Two pieces taking on common criticisms of the …

Continue reading ICYMI: What we got right and wrong after 9/11, a big blow to Obamacare, real Texas growth and fake public spending »

Your weekly list of good reads and information not to be missed:

• A new meme emerging on the left and on the right: President Obama’s problem is that he hasn’t been willing to consider whether he’s been wrong about some things. Well, except perhaps for his belief that we should be more civil in our political discourse.
• Al Gore for what??? Also, this (language warning with the second link).
• While London burns (and the authorities mostly watch), some big American cities are dealing with a new kind of flash mob (the Atlanta dateline in this story seems to be incidental).
• Newt Gingrich’s presidential campaign may have fizzled, but expect him to keep up efforts like this one to engage the public on big conservative ideas.
• I wrote earlier this week that Standard & Poor’s used faulty reasoning and played politics in explaining its downgrade of the U.S. government’s credit rating. Here’s a strong dissenting view.
• From economist Greg Mankiw, a graph displaying almost four decades of …

Continue reading ICYMI: Obama’s second thoughts, China’s economic danger, best man-on-street quote ever, and Gore for president? »

Your (rapidly becoming weekly) rundown of articles, essays, graphs, etc. from the past several days that are worth a read:

• A long (almost 8,500 words) but captivating and detailed account of the mission that ended with the killing of Osama bin Laden.
• Facebook adds a new option for listing family members on your profile: Your “expected child” still in the womb.
• A squirrel-themed video called “The Spending Is Nuts” won the $100,000 first prize in Power Line’s competition for the creative project that “most effectively and creatively dramatize[s] the significance of the federal debt crisis.”
• The Economist’s man in Atlanta, a D.C. native named Jon Fasman, writes that living here has been a “happy surprise.”
• The head of the Technology Association of Georgia writes that, while “our prowess in technology is still, unfortunately, one of Georgia’s best kept secrets” and that the state still lacks “a plan…to attract and build investment firms” and bring much needed venture capital …

Continue reading ICYMI: Fetuses on Facebook, ‘The Spending Is Nuts,’ the Volt and dollar struggle mightily, and…an infield triple? »

Response to this feature last week was pretty good, so I’m trying it again today: a rundown of articles, essays, graphs, etc. from this week that are interesting but haven’t made it to my blog until now.

• Polls from so-called battleground states suggest President Obama’s re-election chances are worse than the national surveys would indicate.
• All the talk about spending cuts in the debt-ceiling debate ignores the fact that neither side is talking about anything more than slowing the growth rate of spending. And here’s a useful graph comparing the two plans by Speaker John Boehner and the one by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.
• An astonishing chart showing the price of the average U.S. house in ounces of gold. It’s enough to make one consider selling gold and buying real estate — so long as you do it before banks reduce a lot of the housing stock by tearing down unwanted, foreclosed homes.
• Someone else argues the higher tax rates of yesteryear won’t solve Washington’s budget …

Continue reading ICYMI: Purple states, razing homes and the UAW heads south »

On this blog, I try to share my own opinions as well as highlight and comment upon (and link to) the work of other journalists and commentators. I think that’s one of the strengths of the blog format.

That said, in any given week there are a lot of good articles I don’t get around to passing along to y’all. I’m not considering a daily set of links like a lot of blogs do, but I am toying with the idea of doing an occasional or maybe even weekly ICYMI-type roundup of these otherwise unmentioned articles.

I’m going to experiment with it today. Feel free to let me know whether you think this is useful, enjoyable, or if there’s a way to improve it.

And away we go:

• Noemie Emery says universal social programs were bound to fail because people came to view goods and services as rights.
• USA Today reports that the federal government fired or laid off just 0.55 percent of its workers in the last budget year.
• Another executive, this time Atlanta’s Bernie Marcus, says the Obama …

Continue reading Some good stories I haven’t gotten around to sharing »