What We're Reading

Preeti Aroon

“An Earthquake That Shifted the World Around Us,” by Faiza Saleh Ambah in the Washington Post. The Saudi hip-hop group Dark2Men had never rapped in public before, due to their country’s social restrictions, until the recent MTV Arabia competition in Dubai. Check out this video of them rapping. As an FP article put it last year, it’s a hip-hop world.

Mike Boyer

"The Patton of Counterinsurgency," by Fredrick and Kimberly Kagan in The Weekly Standard. Gen. David Petraeus may have been the brains behind the successes of the "surge," but the task of turning theory into reality was largely left to Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno. Petraeus may be the headlines, but Odierno will "be remembered in military history as the man who redefined the operational art of counterinsurgency."

Blake Hounshell

"What Microloans Miss," by the incomparable James Surowiecki in the latest New Yorker. What the developing world truly needs most is investors willing to take risks, not more small-scale lenders.

Joshua Keating

"How a tiny West African country became the world's first narco state," by Ed Vuilliamy in The Observer. This article is a truly depressing profile of Guinea-Bissau, a failed state with no prisons and almost no police that is now completely dominated by the Colombian drug traffickers, who use it as a transfer point to ship cocaine into Europe. The value of the drug trade now exceeds the national income and dozens of gaudy mansions are being built in the world's fifth-poorest country. Worst of all, crack-cocaine addiction is spreading among the country's own citizens, who are often paid in kind for helping the traffickers.

Prerna Mankad

"Riots, Terrorism, etc" in the London Review of Books. LRB contributing editor John Lancaster brings into sharp relief the problems with British journalism today through his favorable review of Flat Earth News by Nick Davies. From sloppy fact checking (or none at all) to ubiquitous PR-generated stories, Davies -- and Lancaster -- fears that the illness of British media is terminal.