On Fridays I suggest worthwhile weekend reading that’s guaranteed to improve your posture, your online dating prospects, and make you an all around better person. Read a dozen articles, lose five pounds.
Note to subscribers: I’ve been traveling again this week so today’s weekend reading is a little shorter than usual. My apologies. We’ll have a full week in review tomorrow, a European edition.
First, our weekly photo quiz. Here are two photos, one in the country’s biggest city, the other on it’s border near Europe’s highest mountain. Can you name the country? The city?
The answer is at the end of this post.
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Now, a few suggestions for your weekend reading:
First, a frightening article from an American former defense attaché to Moscow, a military man who says all the signs suggest Russia has made up its mind. Why Putin will use nuclear weapons.
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Russian-born photography fan Anton Orlov couldn't believe his luck when he was allowed to rummage through a number of old storage chests in the basement of a house in northern California in 2005. Inside, he found hand-colored glass slides taken during the Russian Revolution in 1917. Fascinating Photographs Of Russian Revolution Revealed.
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That mysterious social phenomenon that everyone can feel but nobody can explain. The Secret History And Strange Future Of Charisma
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No less interesting for being a perennial, a survey of the question, is free will a phantom of brain chemistry, or are we truly in control of our lives? A question debated by great minds for millenia. Do we have free will?
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Not cool: What kind of a person looks upon the world's largest land animal—a beast that mourns its dead and lives to retirement age and can distinguish the voice of its enemies—and instead of saying “Wow!” says something like “Where's my gun?”
Well, she’s a competitive bodybuilder and does those tractor-tire and sledgehammer workouts. In her audition video for a reality-television show called Ammo & Attitude, she described herself as a stay-at-home mom whose “typical Friday-night date with [her] husband is going to the shooting range, burning through some ammo, smelling the gunpowder, going out for a rib-eye steak, and calling it a night.” Who Wants to Shoot an Elephant?
And related, using animals to save animals. An innovative use of vultures to track wildlife poisoning. Vulture surveillance system alerts Zambian park to poisonings
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That a song is never finished business, that it should change—take stock of its surroundings, move in and out of a place like the weather, respond to the styles and inclinations of the performing musicians—has been the central principle animating Ry Cooder’s music. A nice, long look at the life and works of Ryland Peter Cooder. Available Space The sonic environments of Ry Cooder.
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In its World Economic Outlook, the IMF readily admits that austerity is—on average—unhelpful. Economic growth is a better engine for shrinking debt burdens. But given the grim growth outlook, the IMF has another prescription: do austerity again, just do it better. The Gigantic Austerity Drive Underway
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The broadly neoliberal vision that dominated the political scene from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama—the vision of an individualistic society with a fairly small safety net, in which individuals are more or less free to do and say as they please and reap the economic and social consequences—has lost its appeal. More and more Americans want to replace that rough-and-tumble social contract with something with a lot more protections. Why Young Americans Are Rejecting the Social Contract
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Tourism in Iceland, with the first lady. Iceland Is a Magnet for Tourists
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Matt Stoller, who also writes on Substack, is Research Director for the American Economic Liberties Project, and one of my heroes. Here he writes that, “The merger or alliance between the PGA and the Saudi's LIV Golf is comically illegal, and it will not happen in its current form.”
To ward off its new competition, the strategy of the PGA was to denigrate LIV Golf as funded by murderous thugs. Because of the Saudi government’s bad track record on human rights, a lot of players refused to play in the new league. So this merger shocked everyone who believed the PGA’s human rights rhetoric. The Saudi-PGA Golf Deal Isn't Going to Happen.
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In 2021, more than 16,000 people were killed in nearly 18,000 rail accidents across India. Why does India have so many train crashes?
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The answer to this week’s photo quiz? It’s the Republic of Georgia, capital Tbilisi, and that’s the 14th century Trinity Church (Tsminda Sameba) near Mt. Kazbek, in the Caucasus mountains near the border with Russia. Nearby is Mount Elbrus, at 5,642 feet, the highest peak in the Caucasus Mountains and Europe.
There are a few more photos in the Georgia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.
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I’m in Europe this week, so that’s where we’ll focus tomorrow on our week in review, called What Just Happened? #16. See you here, tomorrow.
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