Get that cash: Economist Ray Fisman looks at the example of former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi to explore how Donald Trump could profit from the presidency. The methods, Fisman finds, will most likely be indirect, and quite difficult to nail down.
Good versus evil: Donald Trump’s pick for director of the CIA, Mike Pompeo, is a religious “extremist,” Michelle Goldberg writes, and he’s dangerous. For one thing, he believes that “radical Islam” can be found in organizations that have infiltrated “small towns all throughout America.”
This might take a while: Panicking over Wednesday night’s first step toward the repeal over Obamacare may be premature, Jordan Weissmann writes. We have a good ways to go before the law is totally repealed, and so far, the GOP doesn’t seem to have settled on a way to make it happen.
The pope, but: HBO’s The Young Pope makes a much better meme than it does a television show, Willa Paskin finds. Viewers looking to find only camp may rebel at the show’s sincere “earnest streak.”
For fun: The wonderful life of Margaret Wise Brown.
That closing anecdote killed me,
Rebecca
