Each week, members of the WFPL News team spotlight interesting stories we've read and enjoyed, for your weekend reading pleasure:
Gabe Bullard: Jon Ronson has been behind some of my favorite This American Life stories. And his piece on psychopaths (in the show, Ira Glass and the TAL crew taking a test to see if they are, in fact, psychopaths—spoiler: no) got me into reading his books. I'm working my way backward, and just finished his debut, Them, which is all about extremists and conspiracy theorists. In this excerpt, he travels with a conspiracy theory newspaper writer to a meeting of the Bilderberg Group.Read The Secret Rulers of the World.Devin Katayama:I've begun the dark decent into Lolita. It's Vladimir Nabokov's prose and crafty writing I'm after more than the story itself. Although I've not read Nabokov, I have much respect for anyone who can write more beautifully than I can speak. Fifty-seven pages into this thing and Humbert Humbert just met his "nymphet" for whom the book is titled. On deck is another Nabokov book, Invitation to a Beheading. It'll be a dark rest of winter, with no light yet pointing to spring. But I've always loved winter. Find a copy of Lolita.Joseph Lord: Sometimes, a buzzword enters into the realm of education and it sounds so good that we barely think twice about it.One of them is "leadership." Why, of course we all want our children to be leaders, right? But what if that doesn't make sense? What if simple math tells us that not all young people can be leaders? The Atlantic explored the issue this week. Read Why Are American Colleges So Obsessed eith Leadership?
