Recommended Articles

I'm really excited that the US Open started yesterday, since I pretty much only watch tennis and HBO and almost every HBO show is on hiatus, including John Oliver and Bill Maher. I've also been mulling over a few options for a long weekend trip this fall, these 5-day workweeks can be brutal. Has anything caught your interest lately?

1. Mah, Ann. "Searching for ‘Anne of Green Gables’ on Prince Edward Island." The New York Times 12 Aug. 2014

I turned off one highway, down a clay road edged by towering spruce trees, stopping at the edge of a field “starred with hundreds of dandelions,” as the author wrote in her journals. For as far as my eye could see, there was only farmland, interlocking patches of red plowed fields and green meadows dotted with solitary farmhouses, a view that could have been lifted straight from the books. Indeed, as I explored the area west of Cavendish — small communities like French River, Park Corner and North Granville — I realized I needed only a bit of imagination to picture Anne beside me. Any of these dirt roads could be “Lovers’ Lane,” the secluded cow path where Anne liked to “think out loud”; any of the farmhouses her Green Gables; any of the sun-splashed ponds her “Lake of Shining Waters.”

2. Ross, Terrance. "How John Oliver Beats Apathy." The Atlantic 14 Aug. 2014

Yet for all of his strong opinionating, the show’s nowhere near as polarizing as you might expect. Though he does lean left socially, Oliver, who’s English, still approaches his topics from the viewpoint of an outsider sneakily peering over the hill (in this case across the pond) with his binoculars. It’s refreshing in this partisan age to hear from a commentator with a point of view, but not a political agenda.
For example, Oliver’s rant about wealth inequality was equal parts praising and criticizing. His ultimate point revolved around American optimism, “one of the things that I love the most about this country.” That's in contrast to his home nation, where, he says, “We’re raised in a rigid class system where we have all hope beaten out of us." Yet he turns the idea around, showing the dark side of the American dream: “Your optimism is overwhelming positive except when it leads you to act against your own best interest.”

3. Gay, Jason "The Revival of Roger Federer." The Wall Street Journal 24 Aug. 2014

Remember those dark clouds of last summer? The Inevitable Decline of Roger Federer was an open, awkward discussion. Now a familiar confidence has returned to the game's most recognizable player. There's a new coach, Stefan Edberg; a new, larger racket; and most important, improved health. Federer has been wearing a Nike T-shirt that says BETTERER, which seems to wink at his resurgence, and among his international legion of fans—the rapt Federer-verse—there's a happy rush on optimism. Suddenly, a sixth U.S. Open title for Federer doesn't sound so crazy.

4. Sopher, Philip "Where the Five-Day Workweek Came From." The Atlantic 21 Aug. 2014

Nearly a century later, mills have been overtaken by more advanced technologies, yet the five-day workweek remains the fundamental organizing concept behind when work is done. Its obsolescence has been foretold for quite a while now: A 1965 Senate subcommittee predicted Americans would work 14-hour weeks by the year 2000, and before that, back in 1928, John Maynard Keynes wrote that technological advancement would bring the workweek down to 15 hours within 100 years.