The New Republic

This has led some to call the bombing “blowback” for American intervention in the Middle East and South Asia. Michael Lind argues that the Tsarnaevs might best be understood as “sincere Islamist revolutionaries, like the thousands of others who have ...

In 1996, the world learned a Japanese firm had cornered the copper market. The company, Sumitomo, was fined $125 million for squeezing copper supplies and artificially inflating prices--at that point the largest penalty ever levied by a U.S. government agency. The Commodities Futures Trading Commission called the scheme “one of the most serious worldwide manipulations” of a commodity in decades. Last Monday, the Securities and Exchange Commission posted a decision that could effectively lead to a repeat of the Sumitomo corner, with one key difference: hoarding copper will now be legal.

Recently, my mother unearthed my birth certificate and sent it to me. There, typed on a manual typewriter, were my name, the date and time of birth, the name of the hospital, and the names and race of both my parents. According to the certificate, I was not a twin or triplet, did not have siblings who died or were stillborn, had one sibling living. My mother did not live on a farm. In the section for “Father of Child,” there was a box for my dad’s occupation (“law student”) and another for his “kind of business or industry” (“University of Virginia”).

“If the goal is to have ubiquitous mobile broadband at affordable prices, the carriers will never be able to meet that demand with more exclusively licensed spectrum,” says Michael Calabrese, who heads up the New America Foundation’s Wireless Future Project and helped compile the report. “One small junk band of spectrum that’s used for Wi-Fi is now carrying more data than al the wired broadband and commercial mobile broadband together.”

TYPICALLY AT this point on the political calendar, a sitting vice president scrupulously downplays his interest in ascending to the top job. The thought of course consumes him, but actually discussing it strikes him as breathtakingly gauche. Vice presidents as varied as Walter Mondale, George H.W. Bush, and Al Gore all gamely hewed to this script.

BEFORE HE EARNED his reputation as one of the best ad men in politics, before he wrote for several major television shows, and long before he became Mitt Romney’s top campaign strategist, Stuart Stevens found himself in Cameroon, face to face with a machine-gun-wielding soldier looking to shake him down. It was 1988, and a few weeks earlier, Stevens had deposited himself in the nearby Central African Republic to pick up a friend’s Land Rover and drive it back to France. But the trip was a disaster from the get-go. Local officials confiscated the car and refused to release it.

Hybrid Reality: Thriving in the Emerging Human-Technology Civilization
By Parag Khanna and Ayesha Khanna
(TED Books, $2.99)

The Demise of Guys: Why Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It
By Philip Zimbardo and Nikita Duncan
(TED Books, $2.99)

Smile: The Astonishing Powers of a Simple Act
By Ron Gutman
(TED Books, $2.99)

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We've just witnessed an episode of political strategy of such creativity and nerve that journalists and political consultants may well be talking about it decades from now: Barack Obama's reelection campaign recast Mitt Romney's most formidable asset, his business career, from an image of a successful investor in startup businesses, to that of a trimmer, manipulator, tax-evader, and destroyer of value.