An Impossible Country

If you read just one thing this week -- after you're done reading this blog, everything at The Second Pass, and any e-mails I may have sent you -- I strongly recommend making it Philip Gourevitch's long piece in The New Yorker about Rwanda. It's only available to subscribers online, but I imagine many of you subscribe; and for those of you who don't (you should), it's worth the cost of the issue.

Gourevitch wrote a great book about the country's 1994 genocide. Fifteen years later, he goes back to find out how the country could possibly be the safest and most orderly in Africa, especially given that "Rwanda is the only nation where hundreds of thousands of people who took part in mass murder live intermingled at every level of society with the families of their victims." As you can imagine, this is not a simple situation. Or a simple piece. But one worth reading.