Many of you are kind enough to shoot me emails when you come across interesting stories I should see. I’m not always able to post about them, but I always read them. So I figured, everyone should have access to your suggestions. So, from time to time, I’ll post them here. Check out the first batch:

From big thinker with a wide world view, long time reader and friend JP:

Gold and Blood at Record Highs, from Wall Street to the Congo (11/3) Excerpt:
The soaring price of gold and the plummeting price of human life are converging this week. Is that good or bad news?

That’s got to be great news for the Democratic Republic of Congo, which sits atop the world’s most concentrated collection of untapped gold and other precious metals. Latest news on the Street shows that mining company Randgold advanced 6 percent after saying it’s boosting its stake in the DRC’s lucrative Moto gold deposit. Source: Gold and Blood at Record Highs, from Wall Street to the Congo, The Smart Asset

From long time reader and insightful commenter Jim Johnson comes an introduction to author Edward P. Jones:

The Known World of Edward P. Jones (11/15) Excerpt:
Edward Paul Jones is sitting at a table in Guapo’s restaurant in Tenleytown early on a midsummer evening, looking down into a glass of red wine. Nobody in the place recognizes him, although he’s arguably the greatest fiction writer the nation’s capital has ever produced.

His three books, two of them collections of short stories set in black Washington, have been hailed as masterpieces. He’s won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critic’s Circle award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, a MacArthur “genius grant,” the Lannan Literary Award, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and a bunch of (by comparison) trifling stuff. He’s won nearly $1 million in literary awards alone, never mind earning hundreds of thousands of dollars in royalties. Source: The Known World of Edward P. Jones
The Pulitzer-Prize-winning author may be the most celebrated writer Washington has ever produced. He also may be the most enigmatic. Washington Post

And new reader Joanna Ng sent along an article from the Oxford University Press on the former Louisiana Justice of the Peace Keith Bardwell.(11/3) Here’s an excerpt:
Yet it would be a mistake to assume that attitudes like Bardwell’s can be safely consigned to the past. A significant segment of several state populations still refuses to recognize that interracial marriage is a legal right. In 1999 and 2000, when South Carolina and Alabama finally got around to removing bans on interracial marriage from their state constitutions, the public vote was roughly 60 percent for removing the bans and 40 percent for leaving them in the state constitutions. Source: Keith Bardwell: Wrong But Not Alone, OUP Blog

Enjoy and please share your thoughts. The article on Congo is maddening.