The Week’s Best Longreads: The Daily Beast Picks for June 23, 2012

The Fall of the Creative Class
Frank Bures, Thirty Two

The theory that hip, “creative class” residents drive economic growth has become an article of faith among urban planners. Frank Bures believed it until he moved to Madison, Wisconsin, and started finding cracks in the gospel.

Death By Degrees
The Editors, n+1

What if college degrees have nothing to do with education, and everything to do with keeping a privileged class in power?

Why Iran Should Get the Bomb
Kenneth N. Waltz, Foreign Affairs

Contrary to the claims of American and Israeli officials, a nuclear Iran would create more stability in the Middle East, not less.

Why Women Still Can’t Have It All
Anne-Marie Slaughter, The Atlantic

A Princeton professor and former Obama adviser provoked an explosive debate with this essay arguing that, absent a significant rearrangement of the American workplace, it will remain impossible for women to have high-powered careers and successfully raise children at the same time. Plus, read responses from Rebecca Traister, E.J. Graff, Hanna Rosin, Lauren Sandler and Lindsay Beyerstein.

Follow the Dark Money
Andy Kroll, Mother Jones

The down and dirty history of secret spending, PACs gone wild, and the epic four-decade fight over the only kind of political capital that matters.

Vanishing Languages
Russ Rymer, National Geographic

By the next century nearly half of the roughly 7,000 languages spoken on Earth will likely disappear, as communities abandon native tongues in favor of English, Mandarin, or Spanish. What is lost when a language goes silent?

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