My books to read list already numbers 15 plus an inventory of 4 more already in some stage of process. Now today's book review adds 4 more to that list of desire. How am I supposed to keep up with the news, global markets, and the idiots in Washington and make rapid progress on this reading list?
Maybe that's why the book about Marco Polo has been on the list for 3 or 4 years. Neither relevant to understanding the world today, nor time sensitive. I should buy the book at least.
I was struck today by a story about how 3 writers for gun magazines who each wrote that some common sense regulations on guns was in the best interest of society and how each was fired from their jobs and banished from the industry. Apparently, the supporters of free speech and continued employment by the Duck Dynasty guy do not support the free speech and continued employment by anyone who dares entertain the notion that some gun regulation might be prudent.
I guess if you believe in literal interpretation of the 2nd Amendment of the Constitution, you don't believe in literal interpretation for people practicing their rights under the 1st Amendment of the Constitution. This does not auger well for Thomas Friedman's plea for compromise in 2014 on a Grand Bargain medium term budget plan.
I agree with Ross Douthat's view that there is little Mayor De Blasio's can do about income inequality in NYC. It can only be influenced by Washington policy and even then, it can only be addressed with small things in the near term (minimum wage) and the large things that will help take decades to work; and they work only at the individual level, and are an interaction between things US policy can affect (education) and things that are the result of globalization and therefore out of control of US policy (equalization of global productivity and wages).
Gail Collins and David Brooks wrote an nice interactive conversation on the state of US politics.
And last, and most difficult to read, is the miraculous survival of a fisherman who fell into the Atlantic 40 miles offshore from Montauk. This is hard for me because I have no greater primal fear than that of drowning after David S. could not overcome my play struggle in Boy Scout life saving class but eventually my real struggle to get air broke me free of his grip and I got my air.
Links to columns below;
Purity on 2nd Amendment Required for employment
Friedman
Douthat
Brooks & Collins
A Speck in the Sea
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