Preeti Aroon: “All the King’s Men,” by Eleanor Herman in the Washington Post Magazine. Peggielene Bartels was working as a secretary in the Ghanaian Embassy in Washington when she was unexpectedly selected to be king of a village in her native country of Ghana. Now she’s working to end the corruption that is keeping the village from prospering, telling the elders who have been pocketing village revenue, “I have come from America to bring change to [this village]! I am the Obama of this place!"
Elizabeth Dickinson: I am following a little-noticed financial story this weekend that saw Moody's, a credit rating agency, warn the United States and Britain that they could lose their gold-plated AAA rating. While the warning is nowhere close becoming a reality, it does say something about the limits of Washington's ability to borrow indefinitely from abroad. Ironically, however, following the warning on long-term U.S. prospects, investors retreated to the safety of ... the U.S. dollar.
Joshua Keating: I found Russian novelist Vladimir Sorokin's account in the International Herald Tribune of how he "spontaneously became a dissident" on the afternoon in 1972 when a friend first played in Led Zeppelin's "Whole Lotta Love" and how he will "never forgive the senile Soviet power for not allowing a single Western mega-rock-group into Moscow in the '70s" really touching. It also reminded me a lot of the ageing Velvet Revolution vets I saw headbanging at a Mothers of Invention reunion in Prague while reporting this piece a few years back.
Britt Peterson: I'm reading David Grann's guest-blogging on the New Yorker's excellent books blog, The Book Bench. Grann might be my favorite New Yorker writer; I've never been bored by anything he's written. He somehow manages to pick story ideas that seem minor and parochial at first but explode out into narrative masterworks, like my personal favorite, his piece couple of years ago on a postmodern murder suspect in Poland that was a witty jigsaw puzzle of an article. Not sure how this will convey on a blog, but I'm looking forward to it anyway.
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