I’ve been on vacation for the past week so this week’s Digest is a short list of Must-Reads for the year.   I almost certainly missed some but the list below has the ones that made my initial cut.   The ones to read if you’re only going to read a few:

• James Fallows, The Tragedy of the American Military
• Henry Farrell, A Brief Theory of ‘Very Serious People’
• Lance Mannion, When I was your age, there used to be conservatives who were actually conservative
• Jim Walsh, Cautious Optimism: An Insider Sizes Up The Iran Nuclear Deal
• Maciej Ceglowski, Web Design: The First 100 Years
• John Richardson, When the End of Human Civilization Is Your Day Job: Among many climate scientists, gloom has set in. Things are worse than we think, but they can’t really talk about it.
• But some things make me smile:

Others which have held up well –

Politics

• Peter Dreier, Is Bernie Sanders Too Radical for America?
• Juan Cole, How Mainstream is Bernie Sanders?
• Charlie Pierce, The Warren Effect: Here Is A Bluff That Needs To Be Called
• Paul Krugman (NYT), Fraternity of Failure
• Paul Krugman (NYT), The Donald and the Delusional
• Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, No Cost for Extremism
• Rick Perlstein, The New Holy Grail of GOP Primaries
• Larry Mishel, The Opportunity Dodge
• Alan Westin, The John Birch Society [Ed.:  From 1961.  Still relevant today.]
• Robert Kuttner, The Libertarian Delusion  [Ed.:  See also Brad DeLong’s “Wisdom and Liberty” for a complementary commentary on their political delusions.]
• Robert Kuttner, Can Liberal Democracy Survive?

Economics and Economic Policy

• Robert Reich, The Worst Trade Deal You’ve Never Heard Of
• Beth Macy (NYT), Who’s Speaking Up for the American Worker
• Josh Bivens, More Notes on the Gains From Trade and Who Gets Them
• Ron Hira, Congress and President Obama Cannot Sit Idly By While Companies Use H-1B Guestworkers to Replace American Workers
• Paul Krugman (NYT), Trillion Dollar Fraudsters
• Jared Bernstein, One of the more outrageous things ever said re fiscal policy…and that’s a high bar.
• Brad DeLong, What We Got Here Is a Failure to Do the Government Debt Amortization Arithmetic…

The Glories of Capitalism

• J.W. Mason, Disgorge the Cash

Good Government and Lack Thereof

• Paul Starr, Cultures of Impunity
• Christopher Ketcham, The Great Republican Land Heist:  Cliven Bundy and the politicians who are plundering the West

Foreign Policy

• James Fallows, Why Did We Invade Iraq?
• James Fallows, One of Our Major Newspapers Says: What the Hell, Why Not Start Another Unwinnable War?
• Andrew Higgins (NYT), Beating Russia at Its Own Long Game
• FrontLine, Putin’s Way

Environment and Environmental Policy

• Pope Francis, Laudato Si’
• Andy Lacis on what we actually know about global warming and why we know it
• Jonathan Franzen, Carbon Capture:  Has climate change made it harder for people to care about conservation?
• Natasha Geiling, California’s Drought Could Upend America’s Entire Food System

Science

• Daniel Little, Science and Decision

Education

• Mike Konczal, What’s Left After Higher Education Is Dismantled [Ed.:  Related reading.]

Civilized Society

• Mark Puente, Undue Force