Today's homework

If you work in international relations, development or health, you probably have written up some glossy report you are convinced no one will ever read. Today, I will dive into that murky world of readerless reports. On the list:

• Asset-Based Approaches to Poverty Reduction in a Global Context (Brookings)
• The Future of Globalization (CG Researcher)
• The Final Report of the International Commission on Education for Sustainable Development Practice (The Earth Institute/MacArthur Foundation)
• Cuba's Future (CQ Press)
• Ready to Lead? Next Generation Leaders Speak Out (The Annie E. Casey Foundation)
• The United States and Mexico: Towards a Strategic Partnership (The Wilson Center)

Also on the list: catching up on my brother's blog and finishing Vonnegut's The Sirens of Titan. Not a bad day, I tell you what.

Car conversations

I'm not much for talking on phones. As such, being in Ecuador was a pleasant break from phone conversations. When you pay per-minute, you have lots of had-a-baby-it's-a-boy exchanges.

So I save my phone conversations for the road, and generally very much enjoy catching up with folks while I drive. Some of yesterday's New Orleans-to-Shreveport conversation topics:

• The parable of The Grand Inquisitor in Dostoevsky's The Brother's Karamazov, which wrestles with the theological problem of evil
  
• U2's new concert tour, which apparently has a fancy rotating stage
• How to Command a Room Like a Man
  
• Graduate programs at the London School of Economics
• The Hound of Rowan, a teen book about a boy whose mirror allows him to access alternate dimensions
• David Vitter's chances of winning the 2010 "Most Miserable Human Being on the Planet" contest. See this morning's Shreveport Times article for a recent example, completely unrelated to the very serious sin of this man "fighting for families in Louisiana"
• The Texas border wall, and the efforts of UT's Rapoport Center to combat it

Dallas, here I come!

Things I like

• Honey Bunches of Oats. Are they the perfect cereal, or is my perception skewed from two years of off-brand corn flakes?

• That my niece Genevieve says "no way!" when she feels particularly strong about something.

• My niece Genevieve, even when she's sick.

• My brother's Michigander friends. "I was in Ecuador once on a missions trip," says one. "They said we could either dig ditches or organize books. I said, 'Heck yeah! I'm going to go catalogue, baby.'" He now works in the Calvin College Bookstore.

• Rhianna's "Hate How Much I Love You," the version with Spanish d.b. Davíd Bisbal. Yes, it's true. More about my lifelong love-hate relationship with very, very bad music, coming soon.

• Grand Rapids' best coffee at its coolest coffeeshop, The Sparrows. Please ignore that the link is to a myspace page; sometimes greatness and early adoption of technology don't coincide.

• Bulkagov's The Master and Margarita, which I finally found at a used bookstore in Grand Rapids. I have an inkling that this book is newly popular for some reason or another. Anybody else besides Seth, Dunc and Chris read it recently?

Finished!

After three months a handful of stops and starts, I've finally finished Sean Wilentz's The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln. It is a beast - a beast - of a book, and I'm quite proud of myself for getting through it, however well-written it is.

My dad always says that when you study something in enough detail, then you end up studying everything. That happened a bit in this book - now everywhere I look I see founding fathers and divisive aristorats and democratic rabble-rousers. two examples from today's news. First, Congress's refusal to pass the $700 billion Wall Street bailout (700,000,000,000? What does that number even mean?) harkens straight back to Andrew Jackson's anti-banking instincts, and all the populist rhetoric that it rode on. Second, watching Ecuador fight over and pass its new constitution - a 444-article tome, and Ecuador's twentieth in 200 years - makes me marvel at how sturdy our own little constitution has proven, despite the hardly guaranteed development of democracy in the first half of the 19th century. It was a rough ride, no doubt about it.