Partial Readings: Gutenberg’s Paradise

What’s Good for the Body Is Good for the Purse
Ezra Klein interviews Christina Romer, chairwoman of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, on the CEA’s new report detailing the economic argument for health care reform. For those rusty on the finer points of the employer tax exclusion or the political proclivities of Senate Finance Committee members, see Klein’s eminently useful Health Reform for Beginners series.

Gutenberg’s Paradise
While print books may be in decline, argues Sign and Sight‘s Jurgen Neffe, literature is on the rise: “We will see bestsellers that never appear in print, mobile phone novels in installments…unprintable, multimedia, constantly updated, richly animated reference books, individual travel guides or encyclopaedias…networked works from networks of writers, rhizomatic stories which evolve before the eyes of their readers.” Ad Busters would prefer that you melt your Kindle.

Why Obama Needs Rahm Emanuel
Matt Bai on getting health care reform through congress: “To use a home-improvement metaphor, if welfare reform was like remodeling your kitchen, and if adding the prescription-drug benefit to Medicare was like building a sizable addition onto the back porch, then overhauling the health care system is more like ripping out all the walls of your house and completely reconfiguring the plumbing, the air ducts and the wiring all at once.”

The Weekly Standard Sees the Light
Says first-rate dialectician Andrew Stuttaford about 2008 election: “This [demographic] shift in voting patterns is more rational than it initially seems: more Lenin than lemming. Class conflict is inherent in all higher primate societies (even this one).”

The Naxalite Revolution
Steve Coll gives a one-sentence summary of The White Tiger, 2008 Man Booker prize winner: “Twenty years ago, as correspondents, Western and Indian alike, when we traveled to places like Dhanbad, the feudal agricultural and Mafia-run coal-mining region…we often joked that if we had been born in such a degraded setting, we hoped we would have had the guts to become Naxalite revolutionaries and take up arms against our landlords. Such is the novel’s premise.”

Homegrown Primitivism
In the wake of Dr. George Tiller’s murder, Jon A. Shields provides a short history of the anti-abortion movement in America and John B. Judis details the political climate that might have facilitated anti-abortion violence. “The Taliban does not have a monopoly on this kind of political primitivism,” writes Judis. “It can also be found in Wichita, Kansas.”