Mid-Week Reads - The Best of Politics, Economics, & Ideas

You must have heard of the Jewish Diaspora. The Economist has an insightful graphic on the geographic spread of Jews. 

The map and chart above show where the biggest Jewish populations live and how this has changed over the past century. In 1939, Jews numbered 16.5m people, up from 10.6m in 1900. By the end of the second world war, the Nazis had wiped out one-third of them, sweeping away a thousand years of Jewish civilisation in central and eastern Europe. The death toll might have been even higher, but a flurry of pogroms that started 60 years earlier across the then-tsarist empire had sent waves of Jewish emigrants westward. By the time Hitler struck, some 6m Jews were safe in North and South America and in Britain, with 3m more living in the Soviet Union. From 1948, most of the Jews of north Africa and the Levant emigrated. The break-up of the Soviet Union brought the latest big wave of Jewish migration to Israel in the early 1990s. (Source for text & graphic: The Economist)

• Why all men are not created equal. (BBC Future)

• A big question for Marissa Mayer: What is Yahoo? (NYT)

• Obama: The Underachiever. (Outlook) I think the guys at Outlook wanted to pay back to TIME magazine guys for carrying a cover feature on the Indian Prime Minister titled, 'The Underachiever'.

• Terrorists like Ajmal Kasab and Afzal Guru have been sentenced to the gallows. But vote bank politics override national interest. Here's an edit that says that India's new president should dispose clemency pleas without fear or favour. (The New Indian Express)