Crikey

The Race To Stop Iran Getting The Bomb Is What Counts - The scenes from Tehran have been inspiring and show that democracy is changing the shape of the Middle East, says James Forsyth in The Spectator. But the immediate decision facing President Obama is what to do about Iran’s fast-moving nuclear programme

Book reviews: A choice of crime novels - Andrew Taylor in The Spectator says Dublin has a special relationship with fiction, which in recent years has inspired some excellent crime novels. Reviews include the latest of Declan Hughes’s Ed Loy series, which gives a distinctively Irish twist to the flawed private investigator of American pulp fiction.

Thoughts on morality - It’s not often that by chance you tune in to one of the annual Reith Lectures (Radio Four) and find what you’re hearing so gripping that you actually stay with it but it happened to Kate Chisholm who writes about it in The Spectator. You will find a recording of the four lectures by Professor Michael Sandel about the prospects of a new politics of the common good on the BBC site here.

The Obama Effect - A different push for change in the Middle East.
by Hendrik Hertzberg -The New Yorker

The Secret History: Can Leon Panetta move the C.I.A. forward without confronting its past? Jane Mayer discusses in the New Yorker

Grassoline: Biofuels Beyond Corn - George W. Huber and Bruce E. Dale describe how scientists are turning agricultural leftovers, wood and fast-growing grasses into a huge variety of biofuels-even jet fuel. But before these next-generation biofuels go mainstream, they have to compete with oil at $60 a barrel - July edition of Scientific American

The Science of Economic Bubbles and Busts - in July Scientific American Gary Stix looks at how a high-tech fusing of neuroimaging with behavioral psychology and economics has begun to provide clues to how individuals, and, aggregated on a larger scale, whole economies may run off track. Together these disciplines attempt to discover why an economic system, built with nominal safeguards against collapse, can experience near-catastrophic breakdowns.

True to type: Katharine Weymouth - A newspaper heiress battles to save her family’s legacy - the Washington Post. “True to Type” has been edited for Style.com; the complete story appears in the July 2009 issue of Vogue USA.

Interview: David Hockney - After decades in California, the painter has returned to his native Yorkshire. He invites the New Statesman exclusively into his studio. The interview with Fisun Güner

How Iran went nuclear - David Patrikarakos in the New Statesman tells the remarkable story of the Islamic Republic’s nuclear programme, which began as an expression of western modernity but has now hardened into a statement of reaction, isolation and rage.