Francis Spufford’s sprawling mosaic of the Soviet Union in the 1960s at first reminds one of Vasily Grossman’s account of Stalinism and the Second World War in Life and Fate. Both use a v...
From the Washingtonian article on the battle for control over Cato. Meanwhile, in the 1990s, the Koch-funded Institute for Humane Studies, in Arlington—which offers seminars and scholarships fo...
Attention conservation notice: Over 7800 words about optimal planning for a socialist economy and its intersection with computational complexity theory. This is about as relevant to the world around ...
The tedious thing about being a book reviewer is your obligation to be fair, thorough, and concise. You’re supposed to keep in mind that, quite possibly, all your readers will ever know about t...
Despite being modestly defined as a Russian fairytale by its author, Francis Spufford’s Red Plenty combines, in an original way, Russian style fiction and social science. Its originality lies i...
“I loved Francis Spufford’s Red Plenty, which is a very beautiful novel. There seems to be some unnecessary confusion as to its form or genre. You can see that in the front matter of the ...
As promised, the seminar on Francis Spufford’s wonderful novel of the socialist calculation debate, Red Plenty (Powells, Barnes and Noble Amazon). Over the next few days, interspersed with regu...
What’s wrong with an employer saying to an employee (who needs the job, has bills to pay and kids to feed): “If you want to keep your job, you’d better let me fuck you”? Rathe...
Andrew Sullivan links to a Ross Douthat-Julian Sanchez exchange (that started as a Douthat-Saletan exchange, and concerning which Karl Smith and Noah Millman get words in edgewise, if you care to fol...
Back in 2005, I wrote about the common experience of dealing with “ people who’ve shifted, politically, from positions well to my left to positions well to my right” (taking as an e...
A few months ago, I posted a draft article on Politics and the Internet that was forthcoming in the Annual Review of Political Science. The final version is now out, and available (via a paywall pass...
Over the last couple of years, Cosma Shalizi and I have been working together on various things, including, inter alia, the relationship between complex systems, democracy and the Internet. These are...
In case you are bored with libertarianism … I see that Invasion – The Complete Series is marked down 90% to only $7 [amazon]. Do you think that means I should buy it? Let me give you some...
Henry’s reading seems quite straightforward and I’m really not seeing why Vallier isn’t seeing it. Let’s take it slow and straighten the curves as we go. Hayek: This means, am...
Over the last few months, a string of seemingly solid pillars of the rightwing ideological establishment have crashed, or at least wobbled. The typical case has been one of over-reach followed by pub...
In lieu, I presume, of a reply to my previous posts disagreeing with him on Hayek and Judt, Tyler Cowen links to this post by Kevin Vallier on Bleeding Heart Libertarians which frames the debate thus...
My books-for-kids threads have been good conversation starters so let’s keep it up. Zoe (age 10) and I have been listening to Madeleine L’Engle on audiobook. Listening to an audiobook whi...
From Curtis White’s article on philanthropy in the current issue of Jacobin: In the United States, everyone may enjoy freedom of speech so long as it doesn’t matter. For those who would l...
Gizmodo has a piece proclaiming the death of Flickr at the hands of the hateful and incompetent Yahoo. In many ways, Flickr has been the most important site on the internet to me (after CT of course)...
Pretender, in the non-pejorative sense (and à propos of nothing in particular). Wikpedia’s definition will do: “A pretender is one who claims entitlement to an unavailable position o...
A tech question for the CT commentariat. I’m a mac user, still using Snow Leopard but being pressured by Apple to upgrade to Lion – because I use MobileMe, which has become iCloud, which ...
Two references worth reading in light of the last post. First, via Barkley Rosser, this firewalled article by Andrew Farrant and Edward McPhail on Caldwell’s recent edition of The Road to Serfd...
A few months ago, Tyler Cowen argued that Tony Judt had been unfair to Hayek in his final book. it doesn’t show Judt in such an overwhelmingly favorable light. He is cranky, unfair to his intel...
A few weeks ago, I got an email from a publicist at Penguin Books: In 2008, columnist Jonah Goldberg triggered a firestorm of controversy with his first book, LIBERAL FASCISM, a #1 New York Times bes...
My old poker buddy Eric Schwitzgebel needs a new, snappier title for this post because obviously what we have here is a straightforward application of what physicists refer to as the ‘misanthro...
The Baffler, one of the great little magazines, is back again in a new print incarnation. And, for the first time (I think), it has a proper website. The US Intellectual History blog has run a short ...
NYT article here
All going well, our seminar on Francis Spufford’s Red Plenty will be ready in the next few weeks. However, there’s still time to read it if you want to be able to participate fully in the...
An American friend asked me recently whether Dutch universities have a practice of accommodating spouses when they offer an academic a job. Spousal accommodation could take many forms – either ...
The Australian edition of Zombie Economics, updated and with an additional chapter on Economic Rationalism, is about to go on sale. I’ll be appearing at a launch event at Gleebooks in Sydney on...
You are no longer following . Undo?
English
Suomi
Svenska