Must Read/Listen

• Alyssa Battistoni, Alive in the Sunshine
• On the Media, Secrecy at the Border

Should Read

• Trip Gabriel (NY Times), Ash Spill Shows How Watchdog Was Defanged
• Judith Resnick (NY Times), Renting Judges for Secret Rulings
• John Robertson and Ellyn Terry (Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta), The Pattern of Job Creation and Destruction by Firm Age and Size
• Jeffrey Frankel, The Obama Stimulus and the 5-Year Anniversary of Market Turnaround

Guns

• Firmin DeBrabander, Locke and Load: The Fatal Error of the ‘Stand Your Ground’ Philosophy
• Charlie Pierce, Today in Responsible Gun Ownership
• Lt. Col. Robert Bateman, What happened to the NRA’s education efforts?
• Prof. George Hampikian, When May I Shoot a Student?

Military and Veterans’ Issues

• David Cenciotti (Business Insider), All of China’s Modern Fighter Jets, In One Photo
• Charlie Pierce, Senate Republicans Kill Bill to Expand Veterans’ Benefits
• Mark E Anderson, Troops face devastating one-two punch

Climate and Climate Change

• Blue Girl, What’s the Worst That Could Happen?
• RealClimate.org, Going with the wind

Economics

• Dave Johnson, “Buy America” Helps Jobs, Economy; Giant Tax Dodgers Want it Gone
• Jonathan Ostry and Andrew Berg, Treating Inequality with Redistribution: Is the Cure Worse than the Disease?
• NY Times, Engineers Allege Hiring Collusion in Silicon Valley  [See also Mike Konczal’s article in The New Republic]

Politics

• NY Times, Most Democrats Want Clinton to Run in 2016 [One of the few, the dispairing, the 20 percent.]
• George Scialabba, Now What, Left Wing? [Rejoinder to Adolph Reed’s article in Harper’s, Nothing Left]
• NY Times, De Blasio Picks More Liberal Activists Than Managers for City Posts [I hope this works out.  It doesn’t matter how well-intentioned those in charge are if government doesn’t work.]

Taxes and Tax Reform

• Jared Bernstein, Throwing the EITC on the Camp-fire
• Jared Bernstein, The Promise and Pitfalls in a Tax Reform Plan
• Reihan Salam, So What’s Not to Like in Dave Camp’s Tax Reform?
• Dean Baker, Camp Bank Tax
• Robert Greenstein, Camp Plan Hits Many Working Poor Families Hard, Taking $2,000 From Minimum Wage Mother

Gardening

• Dave Epstein, Hamamelis, the perfect plant for late winter flowers

Miscellany

• Lawrence Eagle-Tribune, Let there be light:

“A beacon for the Merrimack Valley recently received a bit of a makeover. The Ayer Mill Clock — the largest mill clock in the world, with a face just a foot smaller than Big Ben’s in London — now boasts new, brighter, energy-efficient lighting to make it visible far and wide.”

• NY Times, Matters of Taste:

Growing up in the African country of Togo, Mansour Ourasanah knew what it was like to be hungry. But he assumed that limited food was a universal misfortune, like a head cold or a broken heart. Eventually he discovered that plenty of food was available for people with money; it was just that his family was poor.

Now 28 and an industrial designer in Chicago, Mr. Ourasanah has tried to startle others into new ways of thinking about food. Last month he won a $35,000 Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise for Lepsis, his handsome prototype for a system that breeds grasshoppers to eat.

• Buzzfeed, Cheap Beer Reviewed By A Wine Expert