.

Hanna Rosin offers some paradigm shaking evidence in this piece from The Atlantic.

The Economist’s nuanced view of modern progress

Michael Pollan’s Out of the Kitchen in The New York Times Magazine explores America’s obsession with cooking as a spectator sport — and why the rise of cooking shows has coincided with the rise of fast food and prepackaged meals.

As Pollan points out, the time it takes the average American to prepare dinner has dropped to less than half the amount of time it takes to watch an episode of Top Chef.

It’s a terrible mistake to confuse the momentary solvency of the financial sector and the long-term health of our economy.

While we have addressed the credit collapse, we have not begun to tackle the far more daunting, and more significant, structural problems in the economy. Instead of focusing on the green shoots, let’s examine the macro data that will determine our national prosperity in the next generation. These data are terrifying.

Be scared by Spitzer

More form Junod at Esquire

At least that’s what a lot of them will think they’re doing. They’ll be wrong, of course–dozens of people have gone on to live happy and healthy lives after bombing the SAT–but they won’t know it because an oddly large number of powerful forces in American society have combined to elevate the SAT to unlikely heights of influence and to impute to it unimaginable powers. You’ll hear the SAT can wreck a person’s future, even if only temporarily, or salvage a new future from a misspent past. The SAT can enforce class hierarchies or break them open; it unfairly allocates society’s spoils and sorts the population into haves and have-nots, or it can unearth intellectual gifts that our nation’s atrocious high schools have managed to keep buried. It is a tool of understanding, a cynical hoax, a triumph of social science, a jackboot on the neck of the disadvantaged. But rarely is it just a test.

Read this brilliant history of the evolution of the SAT and how we view it

A superb editorial from Harper’s

I was surprised, therefore, when I went to one of the meetings in July and found a hundred or so people stuffed into a stately conference room. Everyone had a notebook, but no one had the bored look of a political reporter. These were activists, young and mostly black or Hispanic. Conyers, along with several guest speakers, sat behind balusters on a low platform that crossed the width of the room. At the other end, near the door, someone had arranged a banquet table potluck style, with tins of homemade brownies and cupcakes. I pushed my way to one of the few remaining chairs in the back as Conyers, now at the lectern and speaking softly into a microphone, asked whether anyone would like to address the gathering.

A fine analysis from Harper’s

Read on from Rolling Stone

Read responses

Gladwell from the New Yorker

Read this brilliant piece from the Atlantic

The reaction to the Abu Ghraib scandal was swift and bipartisan. Within days, President George W. Bush had offered a public apology for “the terrible and horrible acts,” and his secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, took “full responsibility” for the scandal, promising that the offenders would be brought to justice, because the victims “are human beings. They were in U.S. custody. Our country had an obligation to treat them right. We didn’t do that.” With the exception of a handful of outliers—Rush Limbaugh said the abuse was “no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation,” and Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., claimed to be “more outraged by the outrage than … by the treatment”—Americans reacted with almost universal surprise and revulsion.

Read On

Well, the parties have since reached a settlement, putting Google in a position to be a modern Library of Alexandria with full texts of millions of titles online. And libraries are free, right? Um, not this one.

Robert Darnton is director of the bricks and mortar Harvard University Library, and he worries about the cost of subscribing to Google Book Search.

Read or listen to this interview from On the Media

Awarded to David Barstow of The New York Times for his tenacious reporting that revealed how some retired generals, working as radio and television analysts, had been co-opted by the Pentagon to make its case for the war in Iraq, and how many of them also had undisclosed ties to companies that benefited from policies they defended.

Read on from Salon

Chris Abani tells stories of people: People standing up to soldiers. People being compassionate. People being human and reclaiming their humanity. It’s “ubuntu,” he says: the only way for me to be human is for you to reflect my humanity back at me.

His Ted Talk remains among the best I’ve seen