Today there is no shortage of writing about literature or of literature about writing. But there used to be writing that was about both.
Books
Read reviews of nonfiction books on policy, politics and power
Posted inBooks
The Shaming Sham
Conservatives, and even a few liberals, insist that moral shaming isn’t as bad as government censorship. Don’t believe them, warns a conservative writer.
Posted inBooks
Storylines: Scandals for Dummies
O n the first Sunday in March, the Washington Post published an investigative piece highlighting Vice President Al Gore’s central role in the Democratic Party fundraising operation. The article, by Bob Woodward, chronicled how Gore called donors one by one, hitting them up for money in a manner so direct even one veteran fundraiser called […]
Posted inBooks
State of the Debate: The Chicago Acid Bath
A skeptical inquiry into the work of Richard Epstein and Richard Posner.
Posted inBooks
Essay: Age of Irony
Taking irony seriously may seem like missing the point. Today’s ironic sensibility is never serious. But the old masters of irony had serious fun cutting through cant and pretension.
Posted inBooks
Naked in the Valley
Po Bronson’s The Nudist on the Late Shift and Other True Tales of Silicon Valley 12.02.99 | reviewed by Nicholas Confessore ‘Tis the season for mainstream magazines-Time, Newsweek, BusinessWeek-to finally run cover stories on that newest of old trends, e-commerce. Skip them. You are unlikely to find a more vivid or readable tour of Silicon […]
Posted inBooks
The Money Artist
Lawrence Weschler’s Boggs: A Comedy Of Values 12.02.99 | reviewed by James K. Galbraith Modern economists make bad historians, as a rule. The problem is that a simple-minded metaphor-supply and demand-with its deep yet subtle political commitment to laissez-faire, controls their thought. The market is supposed to rule. Therefore it does. Whatever happened, the market […]
Posted inBooks
Workers United
Robert Bruno’s Steelworker Alley: How Class Works in Youngstown 12.02.99 | reviewed by Lisa Burrell Black spots on his father’s lungs convinced Robert Bruno it was time to reconnect with his family and his working-class roots. The result of his journey home is Steelworker Alley: How Class Works in Youngstown, a well- researched argument that […]
Posted inBooks
Citizen Keynes
Skidelsky’s dazzling biography gets Keynes the man just right, and his economics somewhat wrong.
Posted inBooks
Can Economists Save Economics?
Economics is what economists do. –Jacob Viner T he trouble with Professor Viner’s delicate evasion is that economists no longer agree about what they do, or even whether it is all worth doing. Critics outside the profession long faulted economists for a host of sins: their deductive method, their formalism, their over-reliance on arcane algebra, […]
