Sunday Morning Reading: March 18, 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 18, 2012

(Click on the Article’s Title)

• “The Power of Good Intentions” by Neil Wagner, The Atlantic, March 17, 2012 | A host of new experiments show how good intentions can add to life: Food tastes better, pain hurts less, and pleasure is more pleasant when we see people as benevolent.
• “In Focus: A World Without People (Photo Essay)” by Alan Taylor, The Atlantic, March 15, 2012 | For a number of reasons, natural and human, people have recently evacuated or otherwise abandoned a number of places around the world — large and small, old and new. Gathering images of deserted areas into a single photo essay, one can get a sense of what the world might look like if humans were to vanish from the planet altogether. Collected here are recent scenes from nuclear-exclusion zones, blighted urban neighborhoods, towns where residents left to escape violence, unsold developments built during the real estate boom, ghost towns, and more.
• “The World Economy: Can it be the recovery?” by Unattributed, The Economist, March 17, 2012 | The outlook for the world economy is better than it was, but there are still big risks out there.
• “Editorial: The Banks Win, Again” by Editor, The New York Times, March 17, 2012 | The foreclosure settlement and stress tests reveal more “banks first” favoritism. So homeowners are still bearing the brunt of the mortgage debacle.
• “Journeys: In Havana, Family-Run Dining Goes Upscale” by Victoria Burnett, The New York Times, March 16, 2012 | “…a new crop of privately owned restaurants, known here as paladares, is bringing a dash of style — not to mention enticing food — to Havana’s normally lackluster dining scene.”
• “Occupy Movement To Launch Online News Site, ‘Occupy.com’” by Shepherd Bliss, The Huffington Post, March 17, 2012 | “After a winter of extensive planning, the Occupy movement will launch its own online news site later this month. Occupy.com… ‘The main thing that Occupy.com will do is crystalize the Occupy message–make it plain, clear, and simple. We will seek to engage people and give them many options for how to get involved. We need ways for members of the 99% to participate and thus grow the movement,’ Levitin explained.”
• “Women in the World Summit: Most Memorable Quotes” by Jesse Ellison, The Daily Beast, March 16, 2012 | Fierce, fiery, and funny: Read rousing quotes from Newsweek and The Daily Beast’s global summit on women.
• “The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)” by James Bamford, Wired, March 15, 2012 | “…the NSA has turned its surveillance apparatus on the US and its citizens. It has established listening posts throughout the nation to collect and sift through billions of email messages and phone calls, whether they originate within the country or overseas. It has created a supercomputer of almost unimaginable speed to look for patterns and unscramble codes. Finally, the agency has begun building a place to store all the trillions of words and thoughts and whispers captured in its electronic net. And, of course, it’s all being done in secret.”
• “Get Kony” by Ian Urbina, Vanity Fair, (originally published: April 27, 2010) | As the Internet turns its attention to the atrocities perpetrated by Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony, read Ian Urbina’s 2010 profile of a man who has been hunting the elusive mass murderer since 1998.
• “State of the Taliban 2012: The Secret Report” by Matthieu Aikins, GQ, March 9, 2012 | In an in-depth look at a confidential NATO report, GQ examines the state of the Taliban and the future of Afghanistan.
• “The Patriot Act You Don’t Know About” by George Zornick, The Nation, March 16, 2012 | “…Senators Mark Udall and Ron Wyden of the Senate Intelligence Committee—have consistently sounded alarms about what FISA is allowing under Section 215. While unable to reveal specifically what they have learned, the two Senators have repeatedly said that the public would be shocked if it knew what information was being collected with the help of FISA and the Patriot Act.”
• “25 People to Blame for the Financial Crisis” by George Zornick, TIME Magazine, March 16, 2012 | The good intentions, bad managers and greed behind the meltdown.

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

Martie Hevia © 2012 | All Rights Reserved