The Best Stuff You May Have Missed Last Week:
A Coldplay-obsessed, Bieber-bodyguard-befriending, Vin Diesel-quoting, jet-setting American businessman is one of the only people that North Korea follows on Twitter. But why, asked Mother Jones?
Vulture popped a quiz to see if you can tell the difference between Jay-Z lyrics and Great Gatsby prose.
Zocalo Public Square recalled how support from a single big-city daily newspaper was once enough to send a gawky no-name with too-large feet on his way to the American presidency.
The Atlantic revised history: President Kennedy’s self-regard for his own credibility was almost certainly the main reason he issued an ultimatum to the Soviet Union during the Cuban Missile Crisis–and risked nuclear war over a negligible threat to national security.
Popular Science shared a handy graphic guide to expressing complex emotions in other languages when English just doesn’t cut it.
The office of a Republican senator influential on foreign policy is waging a quiet email campaign against Chuck Hagel’s Cabinet appointment. Curiously, only one journalist (of Roll Call) whom received the emails deemed this newsworthy.
Grassroots conservative standard-bearer and RedState.com co-founder Erick Erickson said race has a lot to do with the gun crisis in America, citing high rates of gun homicides among young black males. But that’s just the tip of iceberg. Let’s remind ourselves how (and why) the Ku Klux Klan, Ronald Reagan, and, for most of its history, the NRA all worked to control guns.
Newsweek noted why the future for human exploration of the deepest depths of the ocean looks bleak.