So as you might have noticed, I haven't really been feeling LiveJournal for a while. Not sure why, but I found the writing bug attacking me tonight. So I've temporarily migrated elsewhere. For all three people who still read this religiously, feel free to wander over. Oh, and click on the ads. Preferably like ten times ( Read more... )

The jacket cover calls this "revisionist history in the best sense": Shlaes attempts to tell the history of the Great Depression from a pro free-market perspective. The title comes from an excerpt of William Graham Sumner essay:

The type and formula of most schemes of philanthropy or humanitarianism is this: A and B put their heads together to ( Read more... )

I picked this book up because of recent commentary about Obama's alleged emulation of Lincoln's "team of rivals' strategy. I'm not sure that I actually picked up any additional insight into the coming Obama administration. Still, as narrative history, this volume was consistently engaging. Highly recommended.

In a nutshell, Elaine Benes was right.

Relatedly, why is that clip not on Youtube?

As per the title, Gladwell aims to describe the cognitive processes that occur in a "blink" -- the split-second judgments that we make about people or objects within the flash of an eye. He opens with an account of the Getty Museum's acquisition of an ancient Greek marble kouros in the 1980s. Every art historian who saw it got a cold, clammy ( Read more... )

A friend loaned me this book after we went down to the Mason estate -- the lovely Gunston Hall, -- which actually isn't too far away from downtown D.C. and has lovely gardens as well ( Read more... )

I'd read this before, in high school, but it had been years since I'd picked this up ( Read more... )

So, moving downward through yesterday's dreadful City Journal column:

According to a “Recovering Nice Guy” writing on Craigslist, the female preference for jerks and “assholes,” as they’re also widely known, lies behind women’s age-old lament, “What happened to all the nice guys?” His answer: “You did. You ignored the nice guy. You used him for ( Read more... )

So Kay Hymnowitz has written a particularly bad City Journal column partially devoted to deploring the plight of the "nice guy," that old blogospheric standard. Since I've seen too many of these pieces before - and since I fear being stuck for the next couple decades in an intellectual movement in which nobody except possibly Kerry Howley has ( Read more... )

The titular "problem from hell" is genocide. Power recounts the invention of the term in the late 1940s -- by a Ukrainian refugee lawyer, nonetheless -- and chronicles U.S. governmental responses to the problem over the last 50 years. I love reading about how words evolve and languages develop, so I found just learning about the invention of the ( Read more... )