https://youtu.be/FGRNkrvh1Dg I haven’t read USA Today since, well, since never, but if I had I’m sure I would have seen an article headed “We Like Wood” because we do. I first noticed America’s wood fetish while watching one of my favorite TV shows, Monk, in which I noticed a common theme—no matter what the crime,…
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Paul Ryan, The Policy Wonk That Wasn’t
Unless you’ve been living under a blanket, or have a life, you’re well aware that House Speaker Paul Ryan just had a meeting with Republican presidential nominee to be Donald Trump. Virtually everything about the Republican Party is a joke these days—most of them, of course, very unfunny. The biggest, and least funny is the…
What Hath Trump Wrought?
Which is more decadent, Donald Trump or the Annual Gala of the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York? Okay, trick question, because there is no wrong answer. But putting the Donald in perspective does take some work. Yet the sources of the Donald aren’t hard to find: the stumblings and…
Neoliberalism and its discontents
Almost exactly one year ago, I wrote a contemptuous take down of Thomas Piketty’s then notorious book, Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century. If anyone has been citing Piketty’s arguments in the current presidential primary season, I’ve yet to hear it, but that hardly matters, because global capitalism is taking a pounding from all quarters, a…
Donald and the Bern: What’s a billionaire to do?
The big surprise Tuesday night was not Donald Trump’s wins. “Trump losing momentum” stories have been written so often that when we see one we automatically rewrite it to read “Trump on a roll!” No, the big story was Bernie Sanders’ big, big win over Hillary Clinton, a victory won almost entirely on the basis…
Kevin D. Williamson, last seen frothing and lying, wildly
Poor Kevin D. Williamson, the National Review’s “roving correspondent”! He tries to do good, but he just can’t help lying his damn ass off whenever he comes near a Democrat. Kevie D. has a post up at the NR, telling Ted Cruz that a lot of decent folks live in New York City, and maybe…
Yo, Larry! Is this what you mean?
Larry Summers is, I think, not the only Ivy League economist to moan about the condition of American airports, most specifically those in the neighborhood of New York, New York. In a review mostly devoted to an excellent put-down of the pretensions of Thomas Piketty, Larry let out with the following cri de cœur: “Look…
Jawohl, Herr Doktor Professor!
Over at Politico, Klaus Larres (German) and Peter Eltsov (Russian) have a quasi-hagiographical take on German chancellor Angela Merkel, who is in fact an impressive figure.1 Unfortunately, Klaus and Peter aren’t always so impressive themselves, swallowing whole Merkel’s “no nonsense” approach to the financial crisis in Greece, groaning that “some well-meaning but perhaps not very…
Alan Vanneman visits the world’s most notorious jazz club
That should be “visited 45 years ago,” because that’s when it happened. I recently came across an article in Jazz Times that revisited the memory of Slugs, a club on the lower East Side that was, according to James Gavin, “jazz’s most notorious nightclub, the gates of the underworld.” “[N]ight fell, and the unlit streets…
Freeman Dyson and the continuing myth of the international freemasonry of science
Freeman Dyson has an interesting—alas, far too interesting—review of Frank Close’s new book, Half-Life: The Divided Life of Bruno Pontecorvo, Physicist or Spy, which I guess should be titled “Physicist and Spy,” although Dyson pretends he isn’t sure if Pontecorvo, a brilliant experimental physicist who worked with the legendary Enrico Fermi, actually was a spy,…