The Short List

One of my friends recently suggested to me Neil Shea’s Dispatches series over at The American Scholar, where the final installment was published about two weeks ago. Written over a period of two years while Shea was on assignment in Afghanistan freelancing for a number of different publications, including Stars and Stripes and The American Scholar, the stories … Read more

In the midst of all the media coverage of North Korea, it may seem that there would be little more room for a clash between the press and the Democratic People’s Republic. Yet it was recently revealed that three BBC reporters joined a group of 10 students from the London School of Economics without the … Read more

In case you missed it, Justin Bieber stopped by the Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam on his Eurotour and wrote the following message in the guest book: “Truly inspiring to be able to come here. Anne was a great girl. Hopefully she would have been a belieber.” First reactions to this note can be summed … Read more

Swedish cognitive scientist Lars Hall has discovered that telling voters that they are classified as a different party according to a survey causes them to change their minds, sometimes drastically. The study results, published in PLoS ONE and mentioned in Nature, indicate that political “loyalty was malleable: nearly half of all voters [in the 2010 … Read more

Breaking news from The New York Times: As if President François Hollande of France did not have enough trouble with a stagnant economy and a scandal over his former budget minister’s secret overseas bank accounts, now his camel has been eaten. The camel was a gift to Hollande from Mali. He left it in the care of a family in Timbuktu … Read more

Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) gave a speech at Howard University today where he sought to rebrand the Republican Party to the largely black student body in a curious way—by talking about the GOP’s past. This approach may appropriately strike some as strange, given the GOP’s struggles in recent years with minority and young voters. What … Read more

Over at The Daily Beast, Tricia Romano isn’t happy with Harvard. Here’s the teaser that appears just above her piece, “Harvard’s Disgusting Rape Rapper Outrage”: Despite protests, Tyga will be headlining this year’s Yardfest. Harvard apparently isn’t offended by songs like ‘Bitches Ain’t Shit.’ So much for an Ivy League education, says Tricia Romano. Read … Read more

        It’s rare that my Facebook News Feed yields anything too out of the ordinary, but last night, a click on a friend’s link eventually led me to this NPR article on a curious pattern in Russia. When the Communists took over in Russia in 1917, the first leader, Vladimir Lenin, was … Read more