Here's a cover shot of the current TNI winging its way to mailboxes. Click here to take a peek at the table of contents. (The contents will be posted after subscribers receive the issue.)

The design of the new TNI web home is complete and the programming is underway. I'll post some sneak peeks of that next week.

We received overwhelmingly positive reactions to the re-conception and redesign of TNI. You'll be a able to read some of those responses in the "Letters" column of this issue.

An excerpt: From Roger Donway's review of Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers:

"Obviously, Gladwell is not interested in the statistical phenomenon of outliers. He is interested in what workaday journalists would call 'stars and superstars.' But designating 'stars and superstars' with the seemingly scientific term 'outliers' is the sort of trick that makes Gladwell a, well, superstar among journalists—and probably an outlier where salary is concerned, too."

From David Kelley's "Obama's Era of Responsibility":

"The welfare state that liberals built in the 20th century removed major areas of life from individual control and responsibility. The state will educate our children, so we are not responsible for paying tuition or for deciding what curriculum our children need. The state will give us a pension and health care when we retire, so we are not fully responsible for saving. The state will screen the food and drugs we buy, so we are not fully responsible for deciding what to consume. Although communitarian sentiments were always one strand in the liberal case for the welfare state, liberals tended to put more emphasis on enabling individual autonomy by ensuring the conditions for individual self-actualization. In Obama’s quest to expand the welfare state, and the role of government in general, this quasi-individualist strand plays a much smaller role; the claims of community as an end in itself loom much larger."