1. Rural America’s Own Private Flint: Polluted Water Too Dangerous to Drink
“In Wisconsin, a state report recently found that as many as 42,000 of the state’s 676,000 private wells, or 6 percent, were likely to exceed the federal health standards for nitrates, which can come from fertilizer use and manure spreading.”
2. The Case Against Running With Headphones
“If I don’t leave my headphones behind when I run, I wouldn’t spend a single minute of my waking life free from input.”
3. How the Economic Lives of the Middle Class Have Changed Since 2016
“Debtors — and the average middle-class American fits that description — are paying a price for the surging economy even as they enjoy the benefits of higher pay and low inflation.”
4. Preserving the Wealth That Conservation Built
“Let us not forget the important situations where government can prevent market failures and unlock value.”
“The Democrats have impulses, they have beliefs, they even have principles. But they don’t have a story to challenge the supply-side story and tell people about how the economy grows and helps everyone.”
6. 6 Tips for Getting Your Solo Play to Broadway
“I’d say, ‘There was no single step.’ It was a series of steps over years. And, even then on top of that, it’s luck. It’s your 10,000 hours of preparation meeting 12 other people’s 10,000 hours of preparation meeting $3 million laundered through the Cayman Islands … meeting luck.”
7. Andy Warhol Inc.: How He Made Business His Art + Think You Know Andy Warhol? Here Are Five Truths That May Surprise
“The heart of Warhol’s idea — that by playing the role of businessman, an artist could turn himself into the latest, living example of a commodification he believed none of us can avoid — was perhaps as revolutionary in its time as Marcel Duchamp presenting a humble urinal as sculpture had been in 1917. Duchamp’s gesture declared that artists alone get to define what is art; five decades later, Warhol took that as permission to treat the spreadsheet, press release and launch party as creative endeavors. This set an example for some of his most notable heirs in our current century.”
8. This Library Has New Books by Major Authors, but They Can’t Be Read Until 2114
“In 96 years, when the seedlings become trees and the trees are sacrificed to the written word, it is impossible to know whose reality they will touch.”
9. Alan Greenspan’s Ode to Creative Destruction
“Capitalism in America, in both its interpretation of economic history and its recipe for revival, is likely to offend the dominant Trump wing of the Republican Party and the resurgent left among Democrats.”
10. The Founders Look at Modern America
“Our civic dialogue has broken down, Ellis observes, and our ‘divided America,’ contentious in all the wrong ways, is ‘currently incapable of sustained argument’ on any subject — the kind of argument that goes somewhere other than round and round, the kind that yields understanding and possibly, over time, solutions.”
11. What Isaac Asimov Taught Us About Predicting the Future
“The notion was framed as a science that could predict events centuries in advance, but it was driven by a desire to know what would happen in the war over the next few months — a form of wishful thinking that is all but inevitable at times of profound uncertainty.”
12. Race and Class and Youth Football in Brownsville, Brooklyn
“Does a game like football offer lifesaving discipline, fatherly coaches and means to a scholarship? Or is it just a cruel chimera, holding out the allure of an elusive pro career? And, to add a very current concern, is the risk of a head injury at a tender age worth the potential rewards of stardom?”
13. Thinking Clearly About Immigration
“What immigration policies would best inch us toward the elusive goal of a fair and just society?”
“Reddit was created by millions of Americans with a taste for darkness.”
15. Nothing Proves You Right Like Getting It on ‘Tape’
“The tape is an attempt to circumvent the politics-addled brain and access a purer, more visceral response. Maybe even a spiritual one.”
16. How to Write a Condolence Letter
“Death is part of the connective tissue that binds humans across time and culture and place.”
Submitted For Your Perusal 