10 Sunday readings – the big picture

My sunday morning Look at the incompetence, corruption and policy failures:

• Neither Elon Musk nor anyone else will ever colonize Mars: Mars has no magnetosphere. Any discussion of humans ever settling the red planet can stop right there, but of course it never does. Do you have a low-cost plan to create a giant active dynamo at the dead core of Mars? Not? Okay. It’s good. I’m sure you have another viable and sustainable plan to protect the living inhabitants of Mars from deadly solar and cosmic radiation, forever. Not? Huh. Well, then let’s discuss something else equally realistic, like your plan to build an apartment complex in Middle Earth. (Deserter)

• How America Can Break Its Highway Addiction: In the 1980s, an unlikely alliance slowed the construction of nature-destroying dams. We might make it again. (Slate)

• Are professional meteorologists overconfident (lol)? The post-COVID years have not been kind to professional forecasters, whether in the private sector or policy institutions: their forecast errors for both output growth and inflation have increased dramatically from pre-COVID. (Liberty Street Economy)

• The Anatomy of a Trump Conspiracy Theory: It should come as no surprise that Trump, the nation’s leading election denier and a champion of the anti-Obama “birther” movement, is susceptible to conspiracy theories. But as Trump has aged, the potholes have grown deeper and more radical — a backdrop for his distrust of the media and his refusal to accept that he’s lost the 2020 election. The result — shown as he argued bogus that immigrants are eating people’s pets in Springfield, Ohio — is a candidate who has become a liability for his own campaign. (Axios)

• Did Matthew Perry’s assistant have a choice? Hollywood veterans aren’t so sure. Shooting up your boss with ketamine may be extreme, but refusing orders means “you risk losing your job, your health insurance, your house, everything.” (Vanity Fair)

• How a naked man on a tropical island created our current political madness: If reality television began as a crude simulacrum of real life, today the opposite may be true – that real life is approaching reality television, and we’ve all been recruited as cast members. (New York Times)

• When is “recyclable” not really recyclable? When the plastics industry gets to define what the word means. Companies whose futures depend on plastic production are trying to convince the federal government to allow them to label plastic bags and other items virtually guaranteed to end up in landfills and incinerators. (ProPublica)

• 9/11 responses suffer from dementia. They want to help the government. Research shows that cognitive impairment affects World Trade Center responders at higher rates than the general population. (Washington Post)

• Major outlets change hacked email standards, protect Trump: For weeks, major US media organizations – including The Washington Post, Politico and the New York Times – have had internal Trump campaign documents. What do these documents say? We don’t know, as all three outlets have refused to publish the documents — or extract a single sentence. That’s a far different approach than the Washington Post took after hackers connected to the Russian government leaked internal emails from Clinton campaign officials and the Democratic National Committee (DNC). The Washington Post published dozens of stories based on these leaked emails. The constant barrage of mostly unflattering articles was a big part of the election narrative in the days and weeks leading up to Election Day. (Popular Information)

• Why is Yellowstone National Park turning us all into maniacs? Petting bison, cooking food in geysers. Travel with our writer on a wild trip to our nation’s most iconic national park in peak tourist season to see all the bad behavior. (Exterior)

Be sure to check out our Master of Business this week with David M. Rubenstein, co-founder and co-chairman of The Carlyle Group. The firm manages more than $430 billion. his new book”The Highest Calling: Conversations About the American Presidency” comes out this week.

September is the cruelest month

Source: Marquette Associates

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To find out how these readings are assembled each day, please see this.