The most powerful essay I read this year was David Grann’s “Trial by Fire” in The New Yorker. Grann investigated the case of Cameron Todd Willingham, who was executed in 2004 for murdering his three children by setting their house on fire.
Matt Labash of The Weekly Standard, just know how to write. His piece, “A Rake’s Progress” was a sympathetic and gripping profile of Marion Barry, the former Washington, D.C., mayor, crack-smoker and recent girlfriend-stalker.
S. Frederick Starr’s “Rediscovering Central Asia,” in The Wilson Quarterly, is an eye-opening look
Steven Brill’s essay, “The Rubber Room,” in The New Yorker generated a lot of discussion. It’s about the room where New York City schoolteachers who have been dismissed for incompetence sit for years on end and continue to collect their six-figure salaries for doing nothing.
Bethany Vaccaro’s piece, “Shock Waves,” in The American Scholar. Vaccaro’s brother Robert suffered a brain injury, caused by an I.E.D. explosion in Iraq in January 2007.
After the Israeli incursion into Gaza, the U.N. produced the Goldstone Report, a tendentious and simple-minded account of Israeli tactics. But the report at least produced a sophisticated response, “The Goldstone Illusion,” by Moshe Halbertal in The New Republic.
Josef Joffe has a bracing essay, “The Default Power,” in Foreign Affairs, puncturing the claims that America is in decline. William M. Chace wrote “The Decline of the English Department” in The American Scholar on why fewer and fewer college students major in the humanities.
Jim Manzi’s essay, “Keeping America’s Edge,” in National Affairs, explores two giant problems. First, widening inequality; second, economic stagnation, the fear that without rapid innovation, the U.S. will fall behind China and other rising powers.
In her Policy Review essay, “Is Food the New Sex?,” Mary Eberstadt notes that people in modern societies are freer to consume more food and sex than their ancestors.
Arts and Letters Daily is the center of high-toned linkage on the Web. The Browser is a trans-Atlantic site with a superb eye for the interesting and the profound. Book Forum has a more academic feel, but it is also worth a daily read.
Op-Ed Columnist - The Sidney Awards - NYTimes.com
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