An excellent book review in this week’s New Yorker, about a topic we write on and link to from time to time:

Last year, in an effort to save the Atlantic bluefin from annihilation, Monaco proposed that the fish join animals like the giant panda and the Asian elephant on a list of creatures that cannot be traded—either alive or cut up for parts—across international borders. When the proposal came up for a vote at a U.N. meeting in Doha this past March, the U.S. voted in favor of it. “The science is compelling,” Tom Strickland, the Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Fish, Wildlife, and Parks, told the Times. “That species is in spectacular decline.” Nevertheless, the measure was defeated.