I whine about the cliched social liberalism of the NYT Magazine, but it really does some things very, very well. This, for example, is great explanatory journalism, from the NPR Planet Money team, which writes (or at least Adam Davidson does) regularly for the Magazine. It tells you the basics of why Europe is in big trouble, in language we can all understand. Excerpt:

Europe’s problems are a lot like ours, only worse. Like Wall Street, Germany is where the money is. Italy, like California, has let bad governance squander great natural resources. Greece is like a much older version of Mississippi — forever poor and living a bit too much off its richer neighbors. Slovenia, Slovakia and Estonia are like the heartland states that learned the hard way how entwined so-called Main Street is with Wall Street. Now remember that these countries share neither a government nor a language. Nor a realistic bailout plan, either.

Lack of fluency in financialese shouldn’t preclude anyone from understanding what is going on in Europe or what may yet happen. So we’ve answered some of the most pressing questions in a language everyone can comprehend. Though the word for “Lehman” in virtually any language is still “Lehman.”