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Shortly after President Obama announced the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan last June, government auditors released the latest in a series of reports describing the theft and diversion of billions of dollars in U.S. aid and contract payments. What’s worse, the report noted that some of the funds were trickling down into the hands of the Taliban and other insurgents. Aid that was meant to boost Afghan incomes and promote peace were being turned on U.S. forces themselves, and making it all the more likely that America’s good intentions would leave violence and conflict in their wake.

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Last Thursday, a bus pulled up outside an Orlando office plaza and disgorged 30 Texas technologists reporting for duty at Newt Gingrich’s Central Florida headquarters. Their leader, a 32-year old online marketer named Michael Hendrix, had contacted Gingrich’s campaign before he left Dallas to tell them about his project. No one on the campaign ever responded to his message, but Hendrix headed to Florida with his entourage anyway.  When they arrived at the office, Hendrix introduced himself to Ron Janssen, a longtime Republican Party official working as Gingrich’s Orange County co-chair. Janssen was busy printing out walk lists—rosters of targeted voters and addresses— that could be given to the canvassers being dispatched to dense Republican precincts, and he didn’t have much time to hear about Hendrix’s work.  So Hendrix introduced himself to some of the volunteers and started telling them about it.

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Reviewing books is often a good way to feel like a puppy-kicking sonuvabitch. And sometimes, when you find yourself the lone grump before a buzz juggernaut, you can feel like a crazy, puppy-kicking sonuvabitch. That’s about where I sit after finishing Eowyn Ivey’s debut novel, The Snow Child (Reagan Arthur Books), a novel already popular in Europe, a novel the Christian Science Monitor and Oprah tellme to watch for in 2012, and a novel of which one enthusiastic blurber was moved to say: "If Willa Cather and Gabriel García Márquez had collaborated on a book, The Snow Child would be it."

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Click the arrow on the audio player to hear Erin Belieu read this poem. You can also download the recording or subscribe to Slate’s Poetry Podcast on iTunes.

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Last August, 16-year-old Lori Brownell passed out while head-banging at a concert. A month later, she lost consciousness again at her school’s homecoming dance in upstate Corinth, N.Y. Brownell says her doctors put her on Celexa, but she only developed more symptoms, including involuntary twitching and clapping. In videos she posted to YouTube, Brownell flutters her fingers, touches her hair, snorts through her nose and throat, and shouts “Hey, hey, hey,” seemingly without control. On Christmas Eve, doctors diagnosed her with Tourette’s Syndrome. Now, however, her symptoms have another name: conversion disorder, or mass hysteria.

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Money troubles are a huge strain on marriage, so you’d expect that divorce would surge after a massive recession and years-long period of weak growth. Yes, as far as we can tell, the national divorce rate has been falling throughout the Great Recession. There are lags in the federal government’s data, but the feds say the United States fell from 3.6 divorces per 1,000 Americans in 2007 to 3.5 divorces per 1,000 in 2008 to 3.4 divorces per 1,000 Americans in 2009. What’s more, there’s reason to believe that this is no coincidence. The bad economy is actually keeping people’s marriages together—divorce is expensive.

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At the end of 2011, the remarkable innovator Donald Berwick was forced to resign as the recess-appointed head of Medicare and Medicaid, a casualty of Republican-led opposition to his confirmation. An outspoken fan of the United Kingdom’s single-payer system, Berwick was portrayed by critics as a socialist who once commented that “excellent health care is by definition redistributional.” In 2010, for example, Republican leaders of the Senate Finance Committee grilled him about whether he “still distrusted the free market” and made it his goal to “make health care rationing the new normal.”

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Boar’s Head, the deli meat, has become an inevitable part of the American sandwich. Just look where Boar’s Head is selling in New York City. It’s at Penn Station. At Yankee Stadium. In Terminal 5 at JFK. You find Boar’s Head meats at Zabar’s on the Upper West Side, next to $28-per-pound Chilean sea bass. You find it at my corner Brooklyn bodega, next to a mound of thickening macaroni salad. Alongside those bologna and salami oblongs, signs shout the Boar’s Head slogan: “Compromise elsewhere.”

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This week, Farhad Manjoo and Emily Yoffe debate the question: Are couples obligated to interact via social media, or is face-to-face contact more than enough? In this week’s podcast, the letter writer’s fiancée is dissatisfied with the level of attention he shows her online.

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Fellow mourners,

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