Are Wikileaks and its media mouthpieces being played?
I was not impressed with the earlier Wikileaks revelations (as I wrote about in spiked here), and the latest batch haven’t led me to change my mind.
As before, this is a big dump. This time it mostly consists of mundane proceedings, embarrassing personal remarks and confirmations about things we already knew. As Frank Furedi argues in today’s spiked, ...
Sing, Sing, Sing (With a Swing)
This is a live recording from Benny Goodman’s famous, triumphant concert at Carnegie Hall in 1938. Goodman was the first jazz musician to perform at Carnegie Hall. And this one ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
ABOUT SEAN COLLINS
I write about American current affairs for Spiked, the online magazine. I am a native New Yorker, and I divide my time between New York City and upstate New York.
In addition to articles for Spiked, The Australian and other publications, I contributed an essay, "BDS: Demonizing Israel, Destroying Free Speech," for the book Unsafe Space: The Crisis of Free Speech on Campus (2016). I also wrote a chapter on New York City's economy for the book London After Recession: A Fictitious Capital? (2012).
My writings have been cited in American Conservative, Arts & Letters Daily, the Financial Times, Fox News, the Huffington Post, the New York Daily News, the New York Post, the New York Times, Real Clear Politics, and the Times of London, among other media.
For more about The American Situation site, go here.
