Current Atlantic is a must-read.
I'm about through reading the current issue
of Atlantic (my first to-read – and often only – monthly rag), and though
they're all good, this one's got some articles I have to mention, and I
hope you read.
The whole issue is terrific, but If
nothing else, read my friend Jim Fallows' “Success
Without Victory”, which
is also online, if you're a subscriber (please do subscribe – I'd sure
like to know more and more people are getting tapped into that pipe). Stunning,
in every sense. I have to profess to knowing just enough about politics
to figure I'll never know what the hell is really going on until twenty
years later anyway, so I often just cop out of the responsibility of staying
informed. Thanks to Jim and others at the Atlantic, I feel like I'm at
least partially tapped into some objective analysis in current time. And
I'm afraid Jim's article this month just validates the gap between intelligence
and policy.
And if that's not enough, try William Langewiesche's article in the same
issue, “Letter
from Baghdad,” for
a gigantic taste of reality vs headlines.
And with just enough similarities to my own college-age experiences, Walter
Kirn, in one of the most well-written stories I've read in a long time,
“Lost
in the Meritocracy,” rattled
my cage with a brutally honest and vulnerable expression of the angst of
being cleverly bright, ambitious, and with a desire to escape the
lower middle class to “be somebody” in the vague world of the
intelligent elite…. brrrr….
[David Allen]