TNR’s “Overlooked Stories”

The editors of The New Republic have produced their list of the most under-covered stories of 2011. Here’s the list:

• Lawrence Kaplan: America’s Silent Withdrawal From Iraq
• Tim Noah: Declining Illegal Immigration
• Walter Shapiro: Obama’s Failed Fireside Chat
• Noam Scheiber: The False Start Recovery
• David Greenberg: The Decline of Turkish Democracy
• Alec MacGillis: The Higher Ed Bubble and The Survival of Germany’s Welfare State
• William Galston: Obama’s Ambiguous Endgame For Iran
• John Judis: The Subversion of the Do Not Call Registry
• Isaac Chotiner: The Return of Blood Diamonds
• Ed Kilgore: The Conservative Assault On the Constitution
• John McWhorter: The Debunking of the Obesity Epidemic
• Jon Cohn: Budget Slashing On the State Level

I think the list is kind of a mixed bag. Some of the items on the list, e.g. the higher ed bubble, U. S. withdrawal from Iraq, can only be considered overlooked if you don’t read blogs. There are byways in the political blogosphere that have covered both of those stories obsessively.

Some of them, e.g. the decline in migration from Mexico, I’ve mentioned here.

Some of them are interesting, e.g. I really don’t know why the return of blood diamonds and Turkey’s slide away from the secularism that has dominated its politics for the last century have received so little attention. Other than that by and large Americans are completely uninterested in foreign affairs.

And, yes, I get calls from “Cardholder Services” incessantly, too. Maybe three or four a day.