In “The Global Budget Race” (Autumn ’10), Douglas Besharov and Douglas Call make the case that America’s “accruing national debts are truly staggering,” and that countries that manage to balance revenues and spending “will have a competitive advantage in the global economy.” 

I’ve spent the past month enmeshed in other people’s intimate personal stories. Nicole Krauss’s new novel, Great House,a loosely connected mosaic of haunting human portraits, had me from the first page. (See my review on Barnes & Noble Review, an excellent publication tucked away on the bookseller’s website that deserves a wide audience.) 

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In “The Web’s Random Logic,” in the current issue of the WQ, Jeff Porter takes as his starting point a Google search for blues performer Leon Redbone and spins an engrossing narrative of where that initial query takes him—from a nature video broadcast on YouTube to the Pan-American Exposition of 1901 to the fate of Radium Girls who suffered radiation poisoning during their stints in a factory that manufactured glow-in-the-dark watches during and after World War I. Porter’s essay is, above all, about the human need for stories. We asked Jeff a few questions about the genesis of his piece and what its implications are for our wired world.