1)This Washington Post article describes how the rise in global food prices affects people at the lower end of the world "food-chain." It focuses on the story of one woman's family from Burkino Faso and the tribulations she is forced to go through to put food on the table and to sustain herself in that strongly sexist society.
2)This Washington Post article describes the transformation that has occurred in Medellin thanks partially to US free trade allowances. The city has gone from having the murder rate of a war zone to a murder rate less than DC. The free trade allowances have been put into a treaty which is currently the subject of debate as its ratification vote approaches in the Senate.
3)This is actually an older Washington Post article from 2006, but it still has extreme relevance today. It describes the failure of the farm subsidy program in the United States to accomplish the goals for which it had supposedly been created. This quote from the article sums it up well-"The farm payments have also altered the landscape and culture of the Farm Belt, pushing up land prices and favoring large, wealthy operators. The system pays farmers a subsidy to protect against low prices even when they sell their crops at higher prices. It makes "emergency disaster payments" for crops that fail even as it provides subsidized insurance to protect against those failures. And it pays people such as Matthews for merely owning land that was once farmed."
4) Another article from the New York Times series on the Public Writers Project of the 1940s. It describes the movement to create the new state of Absaroka out of parts of parts of Wyoming, Montana and South Dakota.
5) An article from the Washington Post describing the blog Kaboom, by a young army lieutenant serving in Iraq. The army forced the lieutenant to take down the blog after he wrote an entry criticizing a superior officer, but the archive of the blog remains online and is extremely engrossing.
6)A Wall Street Journal article about the Primal Quest, a 500+ mile wilderness race in Montana told through the eyes of a mother and daughter team. This quote sums up well what the competitors go through:
"Those who continue battle hallucinations and blackouts from sleep deprivation. Paul Meade, a pharmaceutical sales representative from Seattle, saw a new house for sale. A moment later, it was gone. Others saw grizzly bears morph into tree stumps. During a 45-mile overnight hike, Julie Ardoin, a New Orleans lawyer, saw Elvis Presley and then wandered off the trail. Her teammate tied a nylon rope to her waist and towed her until daybreak. Blain Reeves and his team held fifth place for the first half of the race, but they quit after a teammate fell ill. "It's so hard to walk away," says Mr. Reeves, a 43-year-old lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army's southern command."
7) Very interesting New Yorker article on how the youth in China are Westernized, but also becoming intensely patriotic and turning away from the democracy movements of the early 1990s towards a powerful strain of nationalism.
8)Brezezinski warns in a Financial Times editorial against excessive US involvement in Afghanistan, fearing that we will follow in the footsteps of the Soviets. There are many striking parallels-believing in a small communist elite v. believing in a small democratic elite-escalating military presence-similar types of insurgencies, with even some of the same players
9) Frank Rich editorial about how Obama has stepped into the leadership vacuum left by Bush. He claims that events are starting to conform to Obama's vision of the world.
10) New York Times article on the debate over the value of internet reading. Is it a useful skill and should we be worried that it is replacing reading of hard print books?
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