5 smart reads for the weekend

"This Administration has viewed Congress as an appendage, a nuisance," Hagel told me. "Clinton was just the opposite. Reagan was the opposite. Bush’s father was the opposite. They understood the value of making Congress their ally." He said that Vice-President Cheney nearly always attended the weekly lunch held by the Senate Republican Caucus, at which major issues—including the war in Iraq—are discussed. Often, someone asked Cheney whether he’d like to say something. "Almost always, he’d say, ‘No, no,’ " Hagel said. "It always said to me, by his very lack of engagement or even giving us the courtesy of saying something, that they could care less about us. Except when he wanted us to do something: ‘Vote this way.’ "

Jones has been yelling into microphones and bullhorns more or less continuously, and often at violent volumes, for the past 16 years. Since launching his broadcast career, he has become a multiplatform prophet of paranoia who sees diabolical plots in every turn of the news cycle. In his Manichaean melodrama, nodes of private and state power share an ugly face and a demonic brain intent on a single, shared goal: creating the New World Order. To Jones, the New World Order is a blanketing presence, a wicked beast for which he has endless pet names: the "demonic high-tech tyranny" or the "absurdist 1984 regime of control-freak sadists." Jones, who loves to draw analogies to sci-fi classics like Dune and Star Wars, sees the 21st century as a kind of fanboy-fantasy landscape populated by three groups: a rebel alliance of liberty-loving patriots (his fans); masses of consumerist sheep (those who ignore him); and a sadistic elite (global bankers and their agents), forever tightening the screws on the imperiled remnants of human freedom.

Although influenza deaths are relatively rare among those who aren’t otherwise ill, since the 1950s experts have periodically warned that a 1918-like pandemic could recur. They became especially alarmed in 1997, when eighteen people in Hong Kong contracted a new influenza virus known as H5N1 from chickens, and six died. This "avian flu" virus didn’t spread from person to person, but since it was a thousand times more lethal than ordinary influenza, some experts feared that if it mutated into a virus that could spread more easily, it would kill millions in a very short time. In 1999, the WHO launched a program to help governments prepare for this terrifying, if unlikely, possibility. The agency produced a document urging governments to draw up plans to alert the public and set up mass vaccination programs in the event that a new "pandemic" virus was found to be spreading. Because such a virus would have been previously unknown, it would take around six months for sufficient quantities of vaccine to be produced.

There is a reason why they call the run-up period to the Academy Awards the "Oscar campaign." It is, to use a familiar analogy, like an election, with an electorate of 5,777 people (the size of McKenzie County, North Dakota), unwilling to be influenced by anything but their own opinions, yet still, perhaps, more swayable than they’d like to admit. There is no war room, per se, but there are early front-runners that fade, grassroots insurgencies, even primaries. Ultimately, most of the nominees emerge from a combination of good planning, good movies, and good luck: Crazy Heart’s distributor, Fox Searchlight, had the smarts first to acquire the film in July, and then, when it sensed an opening in this year’s Best Actor field, to accelerate its release from the spring of 2010 to December. The gambit was shrewd; writer-director Scott Cooper’s small-scale debut, in which Bridges plays a country singer seeking redemption, opened to strong reviews just as some of Bridges’s potential competitors (Nine's Daniel Day-Lewis and The Lovely Bones' Mark Wahlberg) were cratering with critics.

The fullest guide through this territory, as it happens, avoids pointedly prescriptive claims. In "Twentysomething: Why Do Young Adults Seem Stuck?" (Hudson Street), Robin Marantz Henig and Samantha Henig provide a densely researched report on the state of middle-class young people today, drawn from several data sources and filtered through a comparative lens. Robin Marantz Henig is a baby boomer and a veteran magazine journalist focussing on science. Samantha Henig, her daughter, is in her late twenties, with a twenty-first-century version of the same career. (She has worked as a Web editor and writer at several publications, including this one, and is now the online editor of the New York Times Magazine.) Together, trading the writing in tag-team fashion, they assess the key departments of twentysomething life—school, careers, dating, family-making, and so forth—and try to discern how much has actually changed. They are interested not so much in the Mark Zuckerbergs of the demographic as in the parental-basement dwellers; they believe that people in their twenties have been getting a bad rap and want to know whether concern is justified. Their answer, which should not come as a surprise, is: it depends.