5 smart reads for the weekend

[Susan Rice] had not wanted to be U.N. ambassador. She had taken a huge risk with a promising career when she decided in 2007 to support Obama over his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton. Rice had served all eight years of Bill Clinton's presidency, first on the National Security Council staff and then as assistant secretary of state for African affairs. But when Obama decided to seek the presidency, Rice threw in her lot with him because, unlike Hillary Clinton, he had opposed the war in Iraq. What's more, as she told me at the time, she thought that Obama (and not Clinton) had a "21st-century view of the world." Rice became a leader of Obama's foreign-policy team and his most important surrogate on foreign affairs; early in the campaign, they emailed and spoke constantly. When Obama won, Rice hoped to be national security advisor, or at least deputy. But Obama was a young black man with no foreign-policy experience; in Gen. James Jones, his first national security advisor, he chose an older, tall, and craggy white man with many stars on his shoulders. Rice got the United Nations.

Rihanna may have forgiven Brown, but most of the rest of us haven't. We don't know her personally (even though we sing along to "Diamonds" like five times a day), yet after watching the drama unfold for years, we're collectively starting to play the role of the friend-of-the-abused, a role that carries its own emotional baggage. While it's by no means the same thing as being in an abusive relationship, we're confused, unsure of whether listening to "Nobody's Business" is a betrayal or support. We nod supportively when she says he's no longer hurting her, but we scan her face for signs of trouble. We're still furious with him, even if she's not. Earlier this week, Brown stomped away from Twitter after a nasty back-and-forth with writer Jenny Johnson, who called him a "worthless piece of shit." Many Rihanna fans cheered. But this is just about the worst way to try to support her, says Katie Ray-Jones, president of the National Domestic Violence Hotline. "Oftentimes, the survivor is not ready to leave, not sure what to do, confused," she says, "so the worst thing that someone can do is bad-mouth the abuser, because she's probably going to go back home to him. The average survivor leaves seven times before she leaves for good."

Tyler was terse, even rude, but Bush was solicitous. Rather than being thrown by Tyler's idiosyncrasies, he rolled with them, exactly as he had in the Oval Office nine years earlier. He responded to every clipped answer with another probing question. Bush, a man who famously doesn't suffer fools or breaches of propriety, gave my son the benefit of the doubt. I was beginning to think that people are more perceptive and less judgmental toward Tyler than his own father is. Bush certainly was.

Games today are bigger than the global film industry, which had a 60-year head start. Pong is the reason that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 can make more than three times as much in its first five days on sale as The Avengers can in its first five days in theaters. But while today's blockbuster games are largely created by hundred-strong teams at bankrolled developers, the men who created and crafted Pong embodied the bootstrap start-up culture that typifies the most exciting edges of today's tech landscape. They were knocked back by old men in drab suits who said games weren't going to be big business. But games were going to be big business, even those started in assuming surroundings. And nothing was going to stop them.

Work is what fills most people's days, and it provides the context in which they interact with others. A life of worklessness, however financially comfortable, can easily become one of aimlessness, of estrangement from the world. The fact that most people imagine it would be paradise to never have to work does not make the experience any more pleasant in practice. Career advancement is the standard yardstick by which most people measure success, and without that yardstick, it's not easy to assess whether one's time is well spent.