Web Reads: Falling up, disease comebacks

Business journalist Megan McArdle explains why failure is a key to success.

An interactive map shows the spread of childhood diseases across the globe as people fail to immunize their children. Measles, mumps, and whooping cough are making a comeback—especially in England, but also in the United States.

New Yorker writer Roger Angell is 93 and still writing elegant essays. Here he writes a funny and poignant essay about growing old and outliving your friends and family. Readers won’t learn from Angell about trusting in Christ, but they will have fresh understanding about the way the world looks through the eyes of one who has attained a great age.

Michael Wear worked on faith outreach in the Obama administration. Here he takes on the future of evangelical politics, noting that “neither women nor men, gay people or straight, black, white, Latino, native, nor any other ethnicity or race, religious nor atheist … are going away. We need leaders, and people to support them, who recognize that the question for this century is not ‘how do I win?’ but ‘how can we live together?’ For Christians and for all Americans, answering this question should be the central political project for 2014 and beyond.”