This week’s articles of note
“A house that Murdoch bought,” The National Interest, by Conrad Black [Review of three books on the newspaper industry]
“What good is Wall Street?” The New Yorker, by John Cassidy
“Chomsky: ‘The business elites… are instinctive Marxists,’” truthout, by Keane Bhatt
“The answer is no,” New York Magazine, by ...
A liberal contempt for the land of the free
For all the praise heaped on Jonathan Franzen’s latest novel Freedom, it actually reveals the people-hating, anti-freedom essence of the modern liberal mindset.
Read my review, in the spiked review of books, here.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Enjoy your feasting! (And to my non-American friends: why don’t you indulge too?)
More on airport screening
As I noted last week, I believe the airport security routine is excessive and ultimately irrational. And so, of course, I oppose the latest stepping-up in intrusiveness – the new imagining scanners, and the mandatory pat-downs for those who choose to avoid the scanner.
But before getting too carried away with the ...
Fate of the World game: “Malthus on a computer chip”
Norm Benson at Timberati has a great post about a new video game, Fate of the World. He writes:
The scenario for Fate of the World (FotW) starts in the year 2020 when climate change induced disasters strike. Then the “World Environment Organization,” (a turbo-charged United Nations), ...
GM’s IPO: not a return to former glory
General Motors went public again last week, raising $23 billion in its initial public offering (IPO) - the country’s largest ever. The US government’s ownership stake was halved as a result.
The successful offering appeared to vindicate the Obama administration’s decision to bail ...
Visualizing the shadow banking system
This chart is a roadmap of “The Shadow Banking System”. It was created by economists at the New York Federal Reserve, and I learned about it from an article by Gillian Tett in the Financial Times.
My picture of ...
This week’s articles of note
“The future of free speech,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, by Tim Wu
“What sparked the Tea Party movement,” National Journal, by Michael Hirsh
“The Palin network,” The New York Times Magazine, by Robert Draper
“Start-up city,” City Journal, by Edward L. Glaeser
“Neuroeconomics: in Oxytocin we trust,” Big ...
China’s high-speed rail expansion leaves US behind
There was an interesting item on National Public Radio this morning about the amazing expansion of China’s high-speed rail network.
In two years’ time, China will have about 8,000 miles of high-speed rail tracks - which means it will have more than all of the rest of the world combined. NPR notes:
Soon, almost all ...
Brooks’ “liberals hard, conservatives soft”: a false dichotomy
In today’s New York Times, David Brooks writes about “the two cultures” he observes:
Most of the psychologists, artists and moral philosophers I know are liberal, so it seems strange that American liberalism should adopt an economic philosophy that excludes psychology, emotion and morality.
Yet that is what has happened. The ...
