Daily Reads: July 11, 2012

Today's best from around the web.

The Peacemakers. 

Today's Must Read


Ta Nehisi Coates discusses his son's education (and his own) in two beautiful, insightful pieces of cultural commentary:

I was telling Kenyatta last night that I don't actually want Samori in a school that's preparing him for college--especially not in middle school. I want him in a school that's preparing him to question the world, that nurtures his formidable curiosity, and at the same time, reinforces the kind of work ethic that we're trying imbue him with at home.

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Andrew Sullivan brings some nuance to the drone strike discussion:

So Obama has waged the war he promised (against al Qaeda) with minimalist but lethal means (drones). He has been far more successful in killing Jihadists before they kill us than Bush, with Osama the most conspicuous example. He has ended torture; he has withdrawn every soldier from Iraq; and is winding down the Afghanistan campaign. If you are a utopian liberal who projected onto Obama peacenik pretensions he never claimed himself, you can, I guess, be outraged. And the danger of precedent and blowback is real and deserves airing. But the idea that a more moral, more lethal and less casualty-laden fight against al Qaeda is some kind of betrayal of Obama's promise just baffles me. It is not a betrayal. It is a promise kept.

Alexis Madrgial explains why we wear pants.


At n+1 (and via Arts and Letters Daily), David Auerbach on how computers are stupid (long but good):

But we will not see computers acquire minds anytime soon, and in the meantime we will end up accommodating the formalist methodologies of computer algorithms. The problem is one of ambiguity as much as nonneutrality. A reductive ontology of the world emerges, containing aspects both obvious and dubious. Search engines crawl Wikipedia and Amazon, Facebook tries to create their own set of inferred metadata, the categories propagate, and so more of the world is shoehorned into an ontology reflecting ad hoc biases and received ideas, much as the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica just happens to have become one of the most-read sources on the planet in the past decade. These problems do not arise from malicious intent, but from expediency and happenstance.

Ezra Klein thinks Romney shouldn't go for an all boring white guy ticket.  


I'll let Jonathan Bernstein's title speak for itself:  Republicans vote to repeal Medicare cuts they voted for and are campaigning against.