"Summer Tale" by Eleonore Weil


Like I do every year, inshallah, I am taking the month of August off: this year I am retiring to my dacha/hill-station in the mountains outside Madrid.  As always, I leave with the firm proposal to do nothing at all except read, sleep and walk.. but reality will interpose itself in the form of a front porch that needs to be stripped, sanded and repainted. Oh well.

Every year, when I go off, I try to leave something for my regular readers to enjoy, a treasure trove of goodies, so that they will not have forgotten me (sniff) by September.

This August I've decided to leave a long list of links to articles I have collected over the last few months in the course of my work, a few random things  that I enjoyed when I found them and that I hope my readers may find interesting. I confess that I am too lazy to sort them out as to subject matter or even importance, but you'll find them in roughly chronological order, with the most recent first. I have taken the trouble to re-test the links before pasting them in, but I can't guarantee how long they'll work. Enjoy!

NOTE: THINGS ONLY STAY UP FOR 24 HOURS HERE AT TPM, SO IF YOU'D LIKE TO READ YOUR WAY THROUGH ALL OF THIS WITH MORE LEISURE, YOU'LL ALSO FIND THE LIST HERE

List of Articles
Robert Skidelsky: Consolidators versus Stimulators - Project-Syndicate
Gideon Rachman: Lunch with the FT: Oleg Deripaska

Mexico: Downward drift - Financial Times

Escape from Mexico - The National Interest  

Why 2011 Will Be A Bummer - Huffington Post 

In Ireland, a Picture of the High Cost of Austerity - New York Times 

James Surowiecki: The dangers of financial illiteracy in America - New Yorker 

Worst retreat of Arctic sea ice in thousands of years: study - The Montreal Gazette 

Is it OK to Cheat in Football? - Project Syndicate 

What If He's Right? - Clusterfuck Nation

William Pfaff: America's Record of Lost Wars and Failed Interventions 

Martin Hutchinson: Back to the Kaiser's World - Prudent Bear

Hackers Aren't Only Threat to Privacy - Wall Street Journal

The Slow Fade of Meatspace -Reason.com

The Anosognosic's Dilemma: Something's Wrong but You'll Never Know What It Is  - NYT
The Anosognosic's Dilemma: Something's Wrong but You'll Never Know What It Is (Part 3) - NYT

The internet: Everything you ever need to know - The Observer 

Daniel and Tony Judt: Generations in the Balance - New York Times

Gary Becker: Will Africa finally take off?

Raghuram Rajan: Jobless Recoveries and Manic Policies - Project Syndicate

Martin Hutchinson: The Asian Inflation Bug - Prudent Bear

Tom Engelhardt: Entering the Soviet Era in America  

Checkmate - Club Orlov

Immanuel Wallerstein: Impossible Choices in a World Depression

For Analysts, Things Are Always Looking Up - Businessweek

Education Does Not Guarantee Economic Achievement - Forbes

Turkey, Stealth Superpower - Asia Times

Jürgen Habermas: Germany and the Euro-Crisis - The Nation

The increasing 'humanisation' of our pets - Financial Times 

Seeking Power: Europe's Extreme Right - Center for Security Studies, Switzerland 

Your toilet paper and the recovery - MSN Money

Music industry on verge of collapse - Celebrity Buzz 

The U.S. Is Not Too Big To Fail - The New Republic

Surging costs hit food security in poorer nations - Businessweek

Bernie Madoff, Free at Last - New York Magazine

Higher education's bubble is about to burst - The Examiner

Cow manure powers computers down on the data farm - The Times 

Calling out Bernard Madoff but falling on deaf ears - Washington Post

At the Heart of the Crash - New York Review of Books

Why I'd rather be punched in the testicles than call customer service - The Oatmeal

Wiki Leaks: No Secrets - New Yorker 

The new poor: Blacks Lose Decades of Economic Gains - New York Times

Will Europeans accept a generation of 'austerity'?  - BBC News

Easy Money, Hard Truths - New York Times
The Machines That Ate the Market - Businessweek
Austerity Does Not Produce Prosperity - Huffington Post
Legendary Investor Is More Worried Than Ever  - Wall Street Journal
The short sale of American icons - MarketWatch
How U.S. drug policy is making Mexican cartels more deadly - Foreign Policy
The history of the toilet - Guardian 
An American Chernobyl - ClubOrlov
The New Poor: In Job Market Shift, Some Workers Are Left Behind - New York Times 
Thieves Flood Victim's Phone With Calls to Loot Bank Accounts - Wired
Detroit Saved from Detroit by Marijuana - BlackBook 
Martin Hutchinson: Thatcher, Papandreou or Adenauer? - The Prudent Bear 
A Sampling of Chinglish - New York Times
Woody Allen: Will the real Avatar please stand up - New Yorker
Chinese leaders revive Marxist orthodoxy - Asia Times
Google Delivers Foreign Tongues at the Press of a Button - Der Spiegel
Amartya Sen: The economist manifesto - The New Statesman
Powerful People Are Better Liars - Harvard Business Review
Seeing Tongue, Spray-On Skin, Transplanted Hand: Military's Extreme Medicine Wing - Wired
The Exotic in the Eyes of African Beholders - New York Times
Iqbal Z. Quadir: The economics of social progress - McKinsey 
Tony Judt: Ill Fares the Land - New York Review of Books
It's Impossible To "Get By" In The US - Zero Hedge
Tony Judt: What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy? - New York Review of Books
Gideon Rachman: Cameron's Tories point to isolation - Financial Times
Super-sizing the "Last Supper" - Reuters
Why writing software is not like engineering - University of San Francisco   
The History of the Honey Trap - Foreign Policy 
How I Got the Goods on Madoff, and Why No One Would Listen - Businessweek 
Porn: Good for us? - The Scientist