Do not give up on politics

Joshua Rothman, writing for The New Yorker, on Charles Taylor, the Canadian philosopher, includes this beautiful line: “Democracy is teleological,” Taylor said. “It’s a collective effort with a noble goal: inclusion.” He also said (Taylor, not Rothman) that democracy is a “fiction that we’re trying to realize.” The piece also included this: “Try to listen; find out …

The New Yorker: Fear and the gun trade

Just read this, from Evan Osnos.

Hats off for DonorsChoose.org.

I read this in the New Yorker magazine and thought of how much fun it was to donate. Here’s more on DonorsChoose.

The importance of high-resource neighborhoods

The Dean of Literary Journalism, Malcolm Gladwell, has a piece in the latest New Yorker, Starting Over, that explores what happened to families and individuals who were forced to leave New Orleans after Katrina. We just observed the tenth anniversary of that awful storm, and the story contains some surprising observations. This is some of …

This is what poverty looks like on a child.

In the last decade or so, researchers have started looking at the effect poverty has on a child. The New Yorker has one of the best things I’ve read lately on the topic, right here. The author,  Madeline Ostrander, writes about the neurotoxin, poverty: As it turns out, the conditions that attend poverty—what a National …

Revisiting a really bad Supreme Court decision

(This one’s from 1857, the Dred Scott decision.) You can read more here.