Aditya Chakrabortty | Guardian | 2 November 2012 What a slump looks like. "The local council's cash used to come from property and sales taxes; when those dried up, it rammed through cuts. Finally, this summer, officials ran out of services to shut, and declared the city bust" Comments Julia Ioffe | New Republic | 31 October 2012 Returnee from Moscow sees Superstorm Sandy bringing out best in American government: working to inform, help, protect public. In Russia crises bring out worst in bureaucracy which is lazy, selfish, corrupt at the best of times Comments Patrick Doyle | Boston | 30 October 2012 Portrait of Roman Catholic church in Boston from perspective of young man joining priesthood. Child-abuse scandal almost destroyed the church. Now the worst is over. The seminaries are filling up again. Respect is returning Comments Jason Pontin | MIT Technology Review | 24 October 2012 The public has lost its appetite for high-risk, big-ticket projects. Governments have lost their nerve. Silicon Valley has "ceased to be the funder of the future, and instead become a funder of features, widgets, irrelevances". Comments Steven Shapin | London Review Of Books | 30 October 2012 How Immanuel Velikovsky won millions of followers in the 1950s for his nutty theories mixing comets, religion and ancient history. He perfected "pseudoscience": All of the language and rituals of real science, none of the content Comments Simon Hattenstone | Guardian | 2 November 2012 Interview with Tour de France winner. Typically down to earth, occasionally profane, thoroughly admirable. And a nice line in why he'd rather stay in Wigan than move to somewhere like Monaco. Arise, Sir Wiggo! Surely Comments |