Baghdad’s beautiful, enduring street of books.

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Why bachelor pads changed American culture forever, and why no one actually has one.

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The Twitter account that won a Pulitzer Prize.

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How to get a price tag to tell the full story.

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A veteran climate activist throws in the towel. 

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Why that shiny new iPad isn’t as clean as you may think.

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Why tax day can be downright dangerous for drivers.

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Was Ben Franklin secretly a serial killer? Probably not, but his friend liked to rob graves.    

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How to take a bike from a perfect stranger (and eventually give it back).

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What the Affordable Care Act looks like as a map.

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Manmade earthquakes? In the Midwest, a recent uptick in seismic activity has geologists stumped, but new data from the USGS suggests that fracking may have something to do with it. The same is true of underground wastewater disposal, a much more common practice that usually accompanies the fracking process. Yet another reason why fracking is a totally awesome and sensible idea.  

Image by Tom Murphy VII, licensed under Creative Commons. 
 

It was six years ago this month that the first American missiles—of this war at least—fell from the sky over Baghdad. You know the rest. For all the questions we've asked of the people who led us into this blood-blunder of a war, we've not often stopped to ask ourselves why we were so damn easily led. I stumbled across war correspondent Robert Fisk's most recent book, The Age of the Warrior, in the Utne library this week. The first words of his 498-page collection of articles and essays are, in typical Fisk fashion, words of damnation and profound questioning well suited for this solemn anniversary:

"Iraq, I suspect, will come to define the world we live in, even for those of us who have never been within a thousand miles of its borders. The war's colossal loss in human life—primarily Iraqi, of course—and the lies that formed a bodyguard for our invasion troops in 2003 should inform our understanding of conflict for years to come. Weapons of mass destruction. Links to al-Qaeda and the crimes against humanity of 11 September 2001. We were fooled. Yet I sometimes believe that we wanted to be fooled—that we wish to be led to the slaughter by our masters, to race for the cliff-edge with the desperate enthusiasm of the suicide bomber, our instincts awakened by something that should have been buried at Hastings or Waterloo or Anietam or Berlin or even Da Nang. Do we need war? Do we need it the way we need air and love and children and safety? I wonder."

When British author and journalist Robert Fisk received a copy of Saddam Hussein’s biography in the mail from a friend in Egypt, one thing struck him as strange. He was listed as the author, but he had never written the book. In an article in the Independent, Fisk tells the story of his search for the true identity of the author of the ersatz book. His search for the Forger of Cairo takes him through government archives and back-alley bookstores as he navigates the seedy underworld of Egypt’s lit-forgery market.

—Morgan Winters