For decades Detroit was North America’s poster child for brutal crime, urban decay and corruption. But as Aaron Renn reveals in Commonplace, the Michigan municipality has been rebuilding and even beautifying. Detroit’s crawl back towards proud city-hood began after officials declared bankruptcy in 2013, enabling risk-taking business leaders to resolve the financial crisis, demolish 45,000 vacant eyesore houses and begin anew.
Toppling a Communist Empire for $2.7 Million
Though widely thought of as focused on waterboarding terrorists or poisoning foreign potentates, it was by smuggling paper that the CIA achieved its most monumental triumph. R.M. Gerecht in a book review for The Washington Free Beacon charts how the late Cold War-era operation to flood Poland with Western books, magazines, printing supplies and audio recordings fatally weakened the country’s Communist dictatorship, setting the stage for the downfall of the entire Soviet empire. Total cost: US$2.7 million.