The Nightstand @ Weightier Matters of the Law

Pick of the Week– Why Pay More? (Peter Singer, Project Syndicate)

Politics

Does immigration hurt support for the welfare state? (Dan Hopkins, Wonkblog)

How colleges are wooing the rich and sticking the poor with the bill (Dylan Mathews, Wonkblog)

The Gosnell case: Here’s what you need to know (Sarah Kliff, Wonkblog)

A new recipe for electoral reform (Trevor Potter and Bob Bauer, WaPo)

You’ve Got Sales Tax (Jeff Saginor, The American Prospect)

No, the Gang of Eight Immigration Bill Won’t Cost You $6.3 Trillion (Matthew Yglesias, Slate)

The Myth of Presidential Leadership (Norm Ornstein, National Journal)

Where have all the jobs gone? (Jared Bernstein, NYT)

Workers Claim Race Bias as Farms Rely on Immigrants (Ethan Bronner, NYT)

Start-Up Diplomacy (David Rohde, NYT)

Here’s How Conservatives Can Persuade Me They Care About Poor People’s Health (Matthew Yglesias, Slate)

How we broke the Senate without breaking any rules (Ezra Klein, Wonkblog)

Small donors may make politics event worse (Ezra Klein, Bloomberg View)

The Thin Red Line (Dexter Filkins, New Yorker)

Economy

Challenge to Dogma on Owning a Home (Floyd Norris, NYT)

How Low Can Part-Timers’ Hours Go? (Harold Meyerson, The American Prospect)

How oil travels around the world, in one map (Brad Plumer, Wonkblog)

How Social Networks Drive Black Unemployment (Nancy DiTomaso, NYT)

One hospital charges $8,000 — another, $38,000 (Sarah Kliff, Dan Keating, Wonkblog)

Mormonism

Mormons and the Politics of Mother’s Day (Taylor Petrey, Peculiar People)

Traditional Mormon Sexual Purity Lesson Contributed to Captivity, Elizabeth Smart Tells University Audience (Joanna Brooks, Religion Dispatches) and Did Mormon Morality Teachings Really Make it Harder for Elizabeth Smart to Run? (Joanna Brooks, Religion Dispatches)

Mormonism and McDonald’s (Saskia T, Juvenile Instructor)

Women are the root of all evil (nat kelly, Feminist Mormon Housewives)

International

In China, Power is Arrogant (Yu Hua, NYT)

Culture

I’m still here: back online after a year without the Internet (Paul Miller, The Verge)

Schooling Richwine (Diego A. Von Vacano, The American Prospect)

How to Spot a Weak Argument (Daniel Dennett, Medium)– Surely, you need to read this.

The Best Little Boy in the World- That’s Me (Adam Chandler, NYT)

Psychiatry’s Guide is Out of Touch with Science, Experts Say (Pan Belluck, Benedict Carey, NYT)

Doctor Who? Doctor Jew (Liel Liebovitz, Tablet) with Andrew Sullivan’s take here.

I have tried to recover a sense of humanity…” (Kelly Baker, Religion in American History blog)– Beautiful take on empathy and “evil” religion

Not Church v. State but State v. Nation (Ray Haberski, U.S. Intellectual History blog)

Pick of the Week– The Sacred Mormon Penis (Gina Colvin, Kiwi Mormon)– All the more profound for its profanity.

Politics

Here’s what the Oregon Medicaid study really said (Ezra Klein, Wonkblog)

Low Taxes, Low Services– a Texas success story (Erica Grieder, Dallas Morning News)– A far too sanguine take in my opinion.  Take away federal aid and federal requirements at midnight and Texas would be a failed state by noon.  The reason Texas has been doing so well (and I mean the state, not all Texans, which is certainly not the case) has more to do with one industry (energy) specifically and its size, meaning abundant cheap land.

Emotion and Reason and the Gun Debate (Paul Waldman, The American Prospect)

The Frankenstein Foreign-Policy Crisis (Steve Erickson, The American Prospect)

West Blast Obliterates Safety Lie (Leo Gerard, In These Times)

May Day: Should We All Become Marxists? (Matthew Yglesias, Slate)

It’s a 401(k) World and it Basically Sucks (Matthew Yglesias, Slate)

The Idled Young Americans (David Leonhardt, NYT)

International

Why Iceland (Bill Hayes, Virginia Quarterly Review)

A young Yemeni writer on the impact and morality of drone-bombing his country (Glenn Greenwald, The Guardian)

Culture

E-Books and Democracy (Anthony W. Marx, NYT)

Deep Inside Taco Bell’s Doritos Locos Taco (Austin Carr, Fast Company)– An engineering marvel.  I have to admit to being a little disappointed in the Cool Ranch variety, but the Nacho Cheese ones are just incredible.

Wikipedia’s Woman Problem (James Gleick, NYRB)

Mormonism

Who was the first LDS leader to pair priesthood and motherhood?  What else has changed about priesthood over the course of LDS history? (Joanna Brooks, Ask Mormon Girl)

A time of war, a time of peace (Patrick Mason, Peculiar People)

Divine Quiescence in the Last Dispensation (Morgan, By Common Consent)

Put Your Mormon Where Your Mouth Is (Melissa Inouye, Peculiar People)

Priesthood, Women and Non-Agency (jupiterschild, Faith-Promoting Rumor)

Pick of the Week–

Why is Boston ‘terrorism’ but not Aurora, Sandy Hook, Tucson and Columbine (Glenn Greenwald, The Guardian)

Politics

Immigrant Kids, Adrift (Marcelo and Carola Suarez-Orozco, NYT)

Air traffic control shouldn’t be a government responsibility (Joshua Schank, WaPo)– Color me still unconvinced about the argument that privatization will not hurt quality and safety.  It may have worked in the UK and Canada, but both have stronger traditions of regulated capitalism than the US.  If ATC went private, it would be a matter of time before the unions got busted and there was a race to the bottom.  For a different look at the same agency and the same privatization problem, but on a different issue see A Back Seat for Safety at the FAA (James E. Hall, NYT)

Only an Accident (Bruce Machart, NYT)

SEC is Asked to Require Disclosure of Donations (Nicholas Confessore, NYT)

Is Washington the Worst Place on Earth? (Paul Waldman, The American Prospect)

The Gun Lobby, the Israel Lobby and Double Standards (Andrew Sullivan, The Dish)

What is a Terrorist? (Fernando Teson, Bleeding Heart Libertarians)– Of course, as pointed out in the very first comment, the whole schema relies on a tendentious determination of what causes are “just.”

How Geography Explains the United States (Aaron David Miller, Foreign Policy)

Inside America’s Dirty Wars (Jeremy Scahill, The Nation)

State of fear (Editors, Socialist Worker)

What if the Tsarnaevs had been the ‘Boston shooters’? (John Cassidy, The New Yorker)

The Debt We Shouldn’t Pay (Robert Kuttner, NYRB)

Health Care

Under Obamacare program, doctor visits would become data points (Sarah Kliff, Wonkblog)

If this was a pill, you’d do anything to get it (Ezra Klein, Wonkblog)

Price of drugs for chronic myeloid leukemia (CML), reflection on unsustainable cancer drug prices: perspective of CML experts (Multiple experts, Blood)– Ignore the ridiculous and pretentious scientific journal title.  This group of physicians, including some with serious research agendas in cancer treatment as well as ties to industry, are speaking up about the high price of essential cancer medications.

Mormonism

The Mormon Reinvention of Emma Smith (Jana Riess, Flunking Sainthood)

Why Mormons should not be afraid of Mormon Studies (David Bokovoy, Worlds without End)

Is Mormon Studies Possible at a Mormon University? (Richard Livingston, Peculiar People)

What is priesthood? What is gender’s relationship to priesthood? (Joanna Brooks, Ask Mormon Girl)

Pay No Attention to that Man Behind the Curtain (Kate Kelly, Feminist Mormon Housewives)

‘Matt and Me (But Mostly Me)’: A Conversation of The Book of Mormon on Broadway (Matt Bowman and Christine Hutchison-Jones, Peculiar People)

Culture

Bradley Manning is off-limits at the SF Pride Parade, but corporate sleaze is embraced (Glenn Greenwald, The Guardian)

Brittney Griner and the Quiet Queering of Professional Sports (Wesley Morris, Grantland)

How the L.A. Times can stop the Kochs (Steve Pearlstein, Wonkblog)

The debt to pleasure (The Economist)

Cooked: a DIY Manifesto (Michael Pollan, Medium)– An excerpt from Pollan’s new book.

Learning from China, but What? (Yu Hua, NYT)

Even Violet Drug Cartels Fear God (Damien Cave, NYT)

Picks of the Week– I could not choose between the three, one for the quality and timeliness of the reporting, the second for the way the sheer profusion of profanity perfectly captures what was a truly awful week, and the third for the stunning and authentic voice of its author.  You’ll want to check out many of the other links below.  It was a good week for The Nightstand.

The Hell of American Day Care (Jonathan Cohn, The New Republic)– Especially for someone like myself with young children, terrifying and heartbreaking.  I hope that this is not read as an insistence that more women stay home to take care of their own children.  As elegant a solution as that may presume, and as much as I am grateful that my own wife is able to stay home with our three children, we cannot put the horse back in the barn now.  Women are going to work, and in ever-increasing numbers.  Some will work because they want to (either for financial or other personal reasons), but many will work because they have to.  I have yet to see anyone propose a legitimate and practical solution that will persuade one parent (either the husband or wife) to remain home with the children without throwing thousands of families into distress and poverty.

This Week (The Onion)– I wanted to post this to Facebook but it has more strong language than I know some of my friends would be comfortable with.

Gitmo is Killing Me (Samar Naji al Hasan Moqbel, NYT)

Science

The end of sleep? (Jessa Gamble, Aeon)– I like to think that if my healthy sleep was cut in half, I would read more books and write.  The truth is, I would probably play more video games.  However, it such intervention became widespread, capitalism would almost certainly coopt everyone’s extra free time for more work.

Feminism

Is it Time for Off-the-Shelf Birth Control Pills? (Elisabeth Rosenthal, NYT)

Five Lessons from the Gosnell Abortion-Clinic Controversy (Scott Lemieux, The American Prospect)

Legalize Polygamy (Jillian Keenan, Slate)

Why did women go to Kermit Gosnell instead of reputable abortion providers? (Amanda Marcotte, Slate)

Race

Hispanics, the New Italians (David Leonhardt, NYT)

When Our Kids Own America (NPR Code Switch)

Politics

Texas on Fire, Again and Again (Bill Minutaglio, NYT)

The Excel Depression (Paul Krugman, NYT)

If Companies Are People: A Fairer Corporate Tax (James Livingston, NYT)

How to Save Retirement (Steven Hill, In these Times)

A Senate in the Gun Lobby’s Grip (Gabby Giffords, NYT)– This is another one I could have picked for best article of the week, if there had not been so many other strong candidates.  The righteous indignation is palpable.

Education

Measuring College Prestige vs Cost of Enrollment (Paul Sullivan, NYT)

A Radical Anthropologist finds himself in Academic ‘Exile’ (Christopher Shea, Chronicle of Higher Education)– I’ve read Graeber’s Debt and it is a landmark piece of work.  A must read.  I am looking forward to his new book, The Democracy Project.

Two Cheers for Web U (AJ Jacobs, NYT)

Culture

More Cracks Undermine the Citadel of TV Profits (David Carr, NYT)

100 Places to Visit Before They Die (Joshua Hammer, NYT)

The Other Kind of Moneyball (Edward McClelland, Slate)

Boston Marathon Bombings

The Marathon (Charles P. Pierce, Grantland)– Best piece I’ve seen on the Marathon and the way it affects Boston and Bostonians.

What rights should Dzhokhar Tsarnaev get and why does it matter? (Glenn Greenwald, The Guardian)

The Tragedies of Other Places (Rafia Zakaria, Guernica)– Awesome essay.  Americans believe that their suffering merits special consideration.  But the suffering other places is so much more frequent and frequently, much worse.  Its a special kind of narcissism.

Mormonism

Different but Equal: Another Post on Gendered Priesthood (Brad Kramer, By Common Consent)

Rage against the Machine (Tracy M, Dandelion Mama)

Pick of the week - Margaret Thatcher and Misapplied Death Etiquette (Glenn Greenwald, The Guardian)– Greenwald is always strong when taking on sacred cows.

Education

Teachers: Will We Ever Learn? (Jal Mehta, NYT)

Texas Considers Backtracking on Testing (Motoko Rich, NYT)

Foreign Affairs

Barbara Boxer, AIPAC seek to codify Israel’s right to discriminate against Americans (Glenn Greenwald, The Guardian)

Child Migrants, Alone in Court (Sonia Nazario, NYT)– Since arriving at my new firm in September of last year, I have had the privilege of being involved as part of KIND in a couple of these cases, primarily as a Spanish translator.  This is the sort of stuff that people like me really went to law school to do, not to service the whims of multinational corporations (though the pay is gratifying and for those of us with families, somewhat necessary).  I am in total awe of those who devote their full careers to this type of work.

Margaret Thatcher left a dark legacy that has still not disappeared (Hugo Young, The Guardian)

The Iraq War: a cost-benefit analysis (Noah Smith, Noahpinion)– “What should matter is that we paid a lot, and we got not much.”

Mormonism

Attn (emeritus) President Dalton: Virtue cannot be Stolen (fmhLisa, Feminist Mormon Housewives)

Protecting Women (Julie Smith, Times & Seasons)

What is the Priesthood? Thoughts to Consider on the Issue of Ordaining Mormon Women from a Male Mormon Feminist (David Bokovoy, Worlds without End)

Economics

When Shareholder Democracy is Sham Democracy (James B. Stewart, NYT)

How the Location of Colleges Hurts the Economy (David Leonhardt, NYT)

Prosperity requires more than the rule of law (John Kay, Financial Times)

Roger Ebert as a Builder of an Empire (David Carr, NYT)

Politics

Why Paternalism is your Friend (Cass Sunstein, The New Republic)

North Carolina’s ‘Official Religion’: The Convoluted History of American States and Established Religion (Ben Park, Religion & Politics)

About the Children (Bill Keller, NYT)

The New Deal that Could Have Been (Rich Yeselson, The American Prospect)