Sunday Morning Reading: March 04, 2012

By Martie Hevia | Blue Beach Song™

One of my great pleasures is waking up early on a Sunday morning, sitting in my favorite big comfy chair, with a hot cup of café-con-leche (a.k.a., café-au-lait, latté, or plain old coffee with cream and sugar), and reading an eclectic collection of articles from all kinds of magazines and newspapers. (And if you can throw in some soft skies on a drizzly cool day, with a warm fire in the fireplace, I am in heaven.) Whatever your rituals may be, here is my Sunday morning’s reading list. I hope you find these articles informative, interesting or entertaining. Enjoy! -Martie

Sunday Morning Reading: March 04, 2012

(Click on the Article’s Title)

• “How Three Germans Are Cloning the Web” by Caroline Winter, Business Week, February 29, 2012 | Bamarang is the creation of a trio of German brothers who have a wildly successful business model: Find a promising Internet business, in the U.S., and clone it internationally.
• “The Secret Life of Bees” by Carl Zimmer, Smithsonian Magazine, March, 2012 | The world’s leading expert on bee behavior discovers the secrets of decision-making in a swarm.
• “Words from the Dictionary of American Regional English” by Abigail Tucker, Smithsonian Magazine, March, 2012 | After half a century of studying jib-jabbing, linguists have just finished the nation’s most ambitious dictionary of regional dialects.
• “I’m Being Followed: How Google—and 104 Other Companies—Are Tracking Me on the Web” by Alexis Madrigal, The Atlantic, February 29, 2012 | Who are these companies and what do they want from me? A voyage into the invisible business that funds the web.
• “Obama to Iran and Israel: ‘As President of the United States, I Don’t Bluff’” by Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic, March 2, 2012 | Dismissing a strategy of “containment,” the president tells me it’s “unacceptable” for the Islamic Republic to have a nuclear weapon.
• “Obama unveils Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights” by Elinor Mills, C|Net, February 22, 2012 | President promises privacy legislation and says Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL are committed to working with Do Not Track technology in browsers.
• “State budget cuts hit small-town Ohio” by Alana Semuels, Los Angeles Times, March 04, 2012 | After more than a century of existence, Uniopolis, Ohio, may be forced to dissolve because of budget cuts. Residents in Uniopolis wanted a balanced budget, and voted in Republican Gov. John Kasich to get the job done. But now the village is facing disincorporation because it can’t stay afloat.
• “Putin’s Pyrrhic Victory” by Leon Aron, Los Angeles Times, March 04, 2012 | His election as Russian president is assured. But make no mistake: There is a young, middle-class revolt underway in the country.
• “In a Flood Tide of Digital Data, an Ark Full of Books” by David Streitfeld, New York Times, March 03, 2012 | Mr. Kahle founded and runs the Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization devoted to preserving Web pages — 150 billion so far — and making texts more widely available. But even though he started his archiving in the digital realm, he now wants to save physical texts, too. “We must keep the past even as we’re inventing a new future,” he said. “If the Library of Alexandria had made a copy of every book and sent it to India or China, we’d have the other works of Aristotle, the other plays of Euripides. One copy in one institution is not good enough.”
• “Bearing Witness in Syria: A Correspondent’s Last Days” by Tyler Hicks, New York Times, March 3, 2012 | “He did not write his articles from our eventful week of reporting and shooting pictures in Syria; his notes, taken obsessively, are barely decipherable. But he would have wanted a record of this final trip, some hint of the questions we sought to answer: Who were these fighters, and did they have any chance of beating the Syrian government? How were they armed and organized? Was the conflict, as in Iraq, worsening sectarian tensions? Just who supported whom?”
• “The First-Ever Oral History of The Sopranos” by Vanity Fair Contributors, Vanity Fair, March 1, 2012 | “In the five long years since the screen went black and The Sopranos went off the air, on June 10, 2007, there has grown up a kind of omertà around the show,” writes Vanity Fair contributing editor Sam Kashner in the April 2012 issue, in which he speaks to David Chase, along with many of the actors, producers, directors, and writers who have never before spoken so candidly, about what it felt like to be part of this extraordinary cultural phenomenon.

Happy reading and I hope you enjoy the articles. -Martie

Martie Hevia © 2012 | All Rights Reserved