I've enjoyed Malcolm Gladwell's work, alluding previously to his The Tipping Point whilst offering reviews of Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking and of Outliers: The Story of Success.  Thus, when his Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering turned up at a railway station bookstore on ( Read more... )

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Do we understand freedom as individual agency leading to an emergent social order, or does the social order provide the material conditions and impose the constraints within which individuals exercise their agency?  That's one of the more contested topics in political philosophy, and Victor Hanson, in The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, ( Read more... )

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I read this book some time ago, but didn't produce the most comprehensive review:


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I had Roger Koppl's Expert Failure along for reading the evening the DeKalb Municipal Band played a tune inspired by the Omaha Nation dividing itself into two sub-tribes, one responsible for the defense of the nation, the other with the spiritual health of the people.  (There might have been something similar among the Tribes of Israel, but I'm not ( Read more... )

Francis Spufford opens his Red Plenty with "This is not a novel.   It has too much to explain, to be one of those.  But it is not a history either, for it does its explaining in the form of a story ... The idea is the hero. ... Best to call this a fairytale, then - though it really happened, or something like it."  A blurb on the cover of my ( Read more... )

I purchased Donald Shoup's The High Cost of Free Parking in order to get a better understanding of the effect of parking requirements on land rents.  Four years ago, I conjectured, "Parking requirements, which constrain land use to include parking spaces to go with the eateries, dwellings, offices, and server farms, raise the effective rent on the ( Read more... )

Here it is, the end of April, and now comes Book Review No. 1, George Will's The Conservative Sensibility.  It's another book I engaged with extensively, as my end-notes and underlinings indicate.  The book might better be understood as The Libertarian Sensibility, at least that's the impression I got.  The preface spells out where Mr Will intends ( Read more... )

In United States history, the decades between the end of the War Between the States and World War I, or possibly between the end of Reconstruction and the creation of the independent regulatory agencies that sail under the rubric of the Progressive Era, drop into a kind of limbo of indistinguishable bewhiskered presidents, or perhaps of a ( Read more... )