- Prime Minister Abbott's remarks in Tarin Kot marking the end of Australia's Uruzgan province deployment.
- Germany joining the 'Five Eyes' intelligence-sharing club? Now that would be an unexpected outcome from the Snowden/Spiegel leaks.
- GQ interviews a former US drone pilot about his daily work.
- The World Economic Forum has released its annual Global Gender Gap report. Australia comes a pretty poor 24th in the world rankings. And who knew the Philippines was doing so well?
- Fred Kaplan argues that Saudi Arabia matters less to US interests than it used to.
- China keeps defying the economic pessimists.
- If Marx was wrong to say that religion is the opium of the people, then what is? The internet? Our children?
- Lovely Adam Gopnik essay on the Kennedy assassination:
Oswald acted alone, but the hidden country acted through Oswald. This is the perpetual film-noir moral lesson: that the American hierarchy is far more unstable than it seems, and that the small-time crook in his garret and the big-time social leader in his mansion are intimately linked. When Kennedy died, and the mystery of his murder began, we took for granted that the patrician in tails with the perfect family and the sordid Oswald belonged to different worlds, just as Ruby’s Carousel Club and the White House seemed light-years apart. When Kennedy was shot, the dignified hierarchy seemed plausible. Afterward, it no longer did.