Politics:
A US court recently ruled that the collection of metadata by the NSA was unlawful, relying heavily on material that was obtained by and released with the help of Edward Snowden (and here's a revelation that the US government has a Skynet programme - one of that name that does not resemble actual Skynet, and one of a different name that does).
What Republicans can learn from British Conservatives, who (surprisingly or not) just won the UK election.
CSIS on the complicated Russia-China gas trade deal.
And the NY Times on what the Trans-Pacific Partnership Trade Deal would mean.
Pop Culture:
A 2002 interview with writer Richard Powers in the Paris Review: "I think that quote sums up nicely the sort of paradoxical relationship that the fiction writer takes toward the world. You remove yourself from the world in order to have control over the ways of depicting it. And the crisis of representation is exactly that. Are you killing the thing by freezing it in the representation?"
A 2015 Q&A with William Gibson in the Guardian: "I suspect that my happiest moments are about finding myself able to more deeply enjoy existence."
And the Guardian on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: "Breaking silences, Adichie added, is not always easy. “I have often been told that I cannot speak on certain issues because I am young, and female, or, to use the disparaging Nigerian speak, because I am a ‘small girl’ … I have also been told that I should not speak because I am a fiction writer ... But I am as much a citizen as I am a writer,” she said."
