Weekend reads.

Geopolitics

 
Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who quit this week as managing director of the IMF after sexual assault charges were brought against him. (AP)

How to topple Gadhafi. (Barak Barfi, New Republic) Turn Libya's tribes against him.

How DSK's sex-assault charges will shipwreck U.S.-French relations. (Paul Berman, New Republic)

Political circus

 
TSA officer at Sea-Tac (Seattle Tacoma International Airport). (AP)

My sex life with the TSA. (Naomi Klein, Reader Supported News)

Dubya has trousered $15 million in speaking fees since politcal exit. (Erik Hayden, National Journal) Dubya made one state visit to Canuckistan as president, two in his first post-presidential year alone for speaking gigs in Calgary and Toronto. In which his most memorable utterance was..."Hi y'all."

Why the GOP is committing fracticide. (Ben Adler, Reuters)

The demo the GOP lost in NY-26 that should terrify Republicans. (Jonathan Chait, New Republic)

 
Elizabeth Warren. So vexed is the GOP with Obama's pick to run the new Consumer Financial Protection Agency that they plan to prevent even a recess appointment.

The cult of Elizabeth Warren. (Tiffany Stanley, New Republic)

More solid proof that Obamacare is working. (Rick Ungar, Forbes) Millions of young people, least costly to the system, are buying insurance for the first time and bolstering premium income.

Detroit auto rebound is a 2012 asset Obama should exploit. (Jonathan Cohn, New Republic)

Obama's no intellectual. Good. (David Greenberg, New Republic)

 
Wreckage from tornados of record number and strength sweeping across the U.S. Southeast this year. (AP)

Has Obama restored FEMA's good reputation under Clinton? (Bradford Plumer, New Republic)

Obama denialist Shelby Steele keeps getting more pathetic. (Jonathan Chait, New Republic) Unapologetic about his pre-2008 tome that Obama was unelectable, Steele now comically lays into the president's foreign policy.

Annals of commerce

Red Bull's billionaire maniac. (Duff McDonald, Bloomberg BusinessWeek)  

The dismal science

America can slip free of its fiscal crisis by embracing the shock therapy by which Canada became the healthiest major economy of our times. (David Rosenberg, Globe and Mail) Rosenberg is former New York-based N.A. markets chief analyst for Merrill Lynch.

Untold good-news story: U.S. Midwest job growth is outpacing the nation on rebound in manufacturing jobs. (Barry Ritholtz, Big Picture)

U.S. is still a manufacturing superpower, it's the jobs that have been hollowed out. (Paul Krugman, NYT) 

 
Courtesy IMDB (Internet Movie Database).

Arnold's true love child is California's deficit crisis. (Kevin Drum, Mother Jones)

Income inequality worldwide is a failure of capitalism. (Kentaro Toyama, Atlantic)

Crime & non-punishment

Banker criminality demands prosecution. (Barry Ritholtz, Big Picture)

The People vs. Goldman Sachs. (Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone)

Fun couple

 
Bibi and Barry. (Reuters)

Obama to Bibi: It's not me you need to convince, it's the Palestinians. (Tony Karon, Time)

What Bibi gains by misrepresenting Obama's Mideast policy. (Joe Klein, Time)

Netanyahu continues to needlessly alienate Israel's few friends. (Jeffrey Goldberg, Atlantic)

Don't be fooled, Bibi, by the scores of standing ovations in your speech to the joint session of Congress. (Jane Eisner, Guardian) Republicans in the audience cynically want to separate Dems from traditionally Dem Jewish donors. Meanwhile, American Jews are wearying of Netanyahu's intransigence.

Urban affairs

 
In a province almost entirely covered with mountains, the Lower Mainland accounts for much of what little arable land B.C. possesses. Protecting it from development is essential but pushes up land - and housing - costs. (CP)

Vancouver's now the priciest housing market in N.A., third dearest in the world, after Hong Kong and Sydney. (Steve Ladurantaye, Globe and Mail) Hemmed in by mountains and Fraser Valley farmland, Vancouver's running out of room to grow. (Jeff Lee and Kelly Sinoski, Vancouver Sun)

America's greatest mayor? (John Avlon, Daily Beast) How Rick Baker, against long odds, rehabilitated St. Petersburg.

A&E

How Roger Ailes (show right), erstwhile Nixon confidante, built the Fox News fear factory. (Tom Dickinson, Rolling Stone)

The Stockholm Syndrome theory of why we endure - and do benefit from - impossibly long novels. (Mark O'Connell, The Millions)

Why we lie about getting through our only partially read War and Peace and Middlemarch. (Elizabeth Minkel, New Yorker)

In defense of Wikipedia; McLuhan as father of the Internet; and the long-overdue death of the "expert" priesthood. (Maria Bustillos, The Awl)

Tina Brown's Newsweek/Daily Beast strategy: More celebrity bylines! (Rachel Morris, New Republic) Um, isn't that what Tina did at Tattler, Vanity Fair, New Yorker and Talk! Most of which lost money under her stewardship?

George Will's strangely selective pedantry. (James Downie, New Republic) Nothing surprises me about a pundit who predicted the durability of the Soviet Union in a Nov. 9, 1989 WaPo column, which hit the streets just as the Berlin Wall started coming down.

Social studies

Our irrational fear of forgetting. (Margaret Morganroth Gullette, NYT)

 
Can 550 million users be wrong? Just remember, every word and image you post can be viewed by millions, among them folks who don't mean you well - reporters, police and disgruntled ex's. (Reuters)

Facebook is not your friend. (Allie Townsend, Techland/Time)

The secrets of thin people. (Lorie Parch, RealSimple) For starters, they buy food in bulk - none of those highly processed meals-to-go for them.

 

Comments

[Darwin O'Connor]

Thanks to a suggestion I read Elizabeth Warren's The Two Income Trap. It is mostly about the spiral of debt that happens when one income is lost in a two income family. It was easy to follow and well supported with evidence.

As bad of a picture the book painted of the situation in the United States, almost every factor it lists has gotten dramatically worse since the book was published in 2003.