From Slate, the Torture Two-Step: Phillip Carter on Bush's new torture order and its loopholes. War Crimes and the White House: The dishonor in a tortured new "interpretation" of the Geneva Conventions. The erotic undertones of the administration's words on enhanced interrogations: Why is it the more the White House refines the rules, the pervier things get? Long before Abu Ghraib, Pfc. Lynndie England posed for photographs for her then-boyfriend Charles Graner and violated military rules: An excerpt from Monstering: Inside America's Policy of Secret Interrogations and Torture in the Terror War.
An interview with sociologist Katherine Newman, author of The Missing Class, on the "near poor," that vast pool of workers who are neither officially destitute nor comfortably working-class. Richie Rich 101: More and more camps are teaching trust-fund kids to handle the wealth headed their way. Little millionaires who want for nothing, except maybe more time with Mum and Dad: An excerpt from Richistan: A Journey Through the 21st Century Wealth Boom and the Lives of the New Rich by Robert Frank. A review of The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Freres & Co. by William D. Cohan.
Can Gates, Soros and Branson create a better world? Saving the planet used to be a hobby practiced by treehuggers and other romantics. Now it has become the business of executives and billionaires. Pragmatists like Bill Gates, George Soros and Richard Branson are outdoing themselves in a bid to save the planet by applying a good dose of entrepreneurial spirit. Worried About the Weather, and the Land: Four writers report on how the environment is faring in their parts of the globe. Here are their dispatches. A review of Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and The Battle Over Global Warming by Chris Mooney. More on The World Without Us by Alan Weisman (and more and more).
From TNR, a review of Overdose: How Excessive Government Regulation Stifles Pharmaceutical Innovation by Richard A. Epstein. Dying for Lifesaving Drugs: Will desperate patients destroy the pharmaceutical system that produces tomorrow's treatments? Does Europe have higher-tech health care than the US? Jonathan Cohn investigates. Sending Back the Doctor’s Bill: Fixing the health care system may require a difficult conversation. System failure: Healthcare has no shortage of convenient bad guys. But it's the system itself — not those who exploit it — that's ultimately to blame for our healthcare crisis. A review of Citizen Moore: the Making of an American Iconoclast by Roger Rapoport.
