In addition to the heart-tugging cover image (Jack Hunter’s “Moment of Joy”), lots of substance:
* Patrick Radden Keefe’s Reporter at Large piece on mining and corruption in Guinea, focusing on an Israeli billionaire named Beny Steinmetz;
* Jeffrey Bartholet’s Letter from Dharamsala contemplating the legacy and spreading of Tibet’s self-immolation protests;
* “The Prodigal Daughter,” a beautifully written piece by Jill Lepore about her life as a writer, her mother’s aspirations for her, and the life of Benjamin Franklin’s sister, Jane;
* Louis Menand’s vividly detailed summary of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — how it evolved, its importance, what the Supreme Court’s ruling last week means; and
* an Annals of Technology piece by Nicholson Baker, who memorably described the iPad as a “slip-sliding rectangle of joy” and in this article travels to Korea on a pilgrimage to the world’s center of manufacturing liquid-crystal display (LCD) products, another beautifully written piece. Sample: “In a Best Buy one Sunday afternoon, standing in front of the wall of TVs in the back, I thought, Just look at all these incredible screens. We take for granted that we can drive to a nearby chain store and buy a thin, luminous, elegant, unflickering dispenser of imagery that will make the world seem newly hosed clean and polyurethaned, that will melt the finely fringed nerve endings of our pleasure centers, all for several hundred dollars.”
another eye opens 
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