Wait. Are United States troops going to war in Iraq again? Fred Kaplan looks at this week’s announcement that our ongoing involvement in the effort against ISIS will now include Americans fighting along with Iraqi soldiers on the front lines of the effort to liberate Mosul and argues that we are getting there. “The United States will be directly involved in the fighting and quite possibly the dying,” Kaplan writes. “And although [Secretary of Defense Ash] Carter and other senior officials say the U.S.’s mission isn’t changing it’s clear that, by any reasonable definition of ‘mission’ and ‘changing,’ it is.”
Former Sen. Joe Lieberman and former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman have a centrist advocacy group called “No Labels,” which released a “policy playbook” on Thursday. Jim Newell finds the group conceptually ridiculous, in light of the driving concerns of voters in this election. “For today’s discontented voters,” Newell argues, “the sort of ballroom-luncheon centrism practiced for so long by the likes of Lieberman is more the target than the solution.”
On Earth Day 2016, read an excerpt from scientist Hope Jahren’s recent book, which will convince you that planting a tree is obviously what you’ll be doing this weekend. Or, watch a video that will teach you when you should help a baby bird that’s fallen out of its nest, and when you should leave it alone.
More Prince. Never enough Prince!
Carl Wilson glows with appreciation for a man who—Wilson writes—was complex and sometimes undependable: “To love Prince was to feel betrayed by Prince somewhere along the line, whether because of his willful caprices or due to his own frequent attempts to defend himself against betrayal.” He contained multitudes; multitudes can be hard to grasp.
Prince was a friend to women in the music industry. If, as Jesse Dorris writes, he “tarted up, gifted a song or two to, and then promptly abandoned” a few of his female collaborators, he helped many others into the spotlight. And behind the scenes, his collaboration with studio engineer Susan Rogers was fruitful and long-lasting.
Then-super-white Minneapolis was, in the 1980s, an unlikely place of origin for Prince, observes Dylan Hicks, but the city and the artist grew to love each other. “In the end, Prince spent the bulk of his life and did most of his work not terribly far from where he was born,” Hicks writes. “Minnesotans are intensely proud of our native sons and daughters, even those who could not leave town fast enough and never returned. Prince’s loyalty was a constant vote of confidence.”
For fun: Katy Waldman appreciates Prince’s surreal and beautiful writing. “He was our Dionysus, and his lyrics were full of beasts,” Waldman writes. “He saw in color: red corvettes, pink cashmere, purple rain, purple everything.”
All-purple everything,
Rebecca
