Weekend Reading List
Happy New Year! For this, our first weekend reading list of 2011, we have essays on the impracticality of libertarianism, the end of Kodachrome, the vast surveillance network that is gathering information on Americans, the vanishing glaciers, and the challenges faced by the White House.
If you’d like to share your thoughts about any of the following, or recommend something for next weekend’s reading list, send us an email.
The Trouble With Liberty – An essay by Christopher Beam in New York Magazine of libertarianism and how it would not work in the real world. Includes this classic paragraph about what would happen if we tried to put libertarian principles into action:
The result wouldn’t be a city on a hill. It would be a port town in Somalia. In a world of scarce resources, everyone pursuing their own self-interest would yield not Atlas Shrugged but Lord of the Flies. And even if you did somehow achieve Libertopia, you’d be surrounded by assholes.
For Kodachrome Fans, Road Ends at Photo Lab in Kansas – New York Times article about the final days of the last processors of Kodachrome, which was the first successful color film that started seventy five years ago.
Monitoring America – A disturbing look in the Washington Post at the vast surveillance and information gathering network that has been built since 9/11 to compile informati0n on Americans. This is part of the Post’s investigative series about the expansion of the national security state entitled Top Secret America.
The Vanishing Ice Sheets – An article in Rolling Stone magazine by Ben Wallace-Wells about the how rapidly glaciers are melting because of climate change, and what that could mean for sea levels.
Washington, We Have a Problem – an inside view from Todd Purdum at Vanity Fair of the media, lobbyist, congressional paralysis, and bureaucratic challenges faced by the White House.
Tags: civil liberties, climate change, Congress, Kodachrome, libertarianism, media, national security, Reading list, White House
