This week’s articles of note
“How to restore the American Dream,” Time, by Fareed Zakaria
“Handoff, or fumble: how consumer psychology will determine the fate of our economic recovery,” The New Republic, by Noam Scheiber
“Desert storm,” The New Yorker, by Nicholas Lemann [on Harry Reid’s battle to retain his Senate seat]
“The empathy ...
Excessive credit leads to crash… so expand credit again?
Martin Wolf in today’s Financial Times puts the Federal Reserve’s “quantitative easing”, as well as other countries’ monetary expansions, into perspective:
Monetary policy has worked, in practice, via credit expansion. It is, as a result, at least partly responsible for the debt crisis of today. Who can now confidently state that ...
The rent is too damn high
At a seven-candidate debate for governor of New York, Jimmy McMillan of the Rent Is Too Damn High Party stole the show. Here is a video clip of ...
Free speech not allowed on campus
Campus speech codes have not gone away, says George Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), in this video interview with Reason.tv.
Lukianoff says that ...
Obama blames “scared” voters
Mickey Kaus says that Obama has returned to blaming voters for not agreeing with him, just like when he spoke of people in Pennsylvania that “cling to guns and God” during the 2008 election campaign.
At a recent fund-raising event in Massachusetts, Obama said: “Part of the reason that our politics seems ...
This week’s articles of note
“The education of a President,” The New York Times Magazine, by Peter Baker
“Confounding fathers: the Tea Party’s Cold War roots,” The New Yorker, by Sean Wilentz
“Think again: global aging,” Foreign Policy, by Phillip Longman
“No more arcs: is the West officially over?” The New Republic, by Rochelle ...
The truth about the Currency Wars
America should get its own economic house in order rather than blame the slump on China’s currency antics.
Read my spiked article in full here.
The battle to define the “21st Century Enlightenment”
Here is an animated video of a recent speech by Matthew Taylor, director of the Royal Society of the Arts, on the “21st Century ...
Focus on the Tea Party, miss what’s going on
Two op-ed pieces today provide some badly-needed perspective on the Tea Party and party politics generally.
First, the Financial Times’ Gideon Rachman is in America, and he has a very sensible opinion piece on the Tea Party in today’s edition. As Rachman rightly points out, the Tea Party “is not as ‘mad’ ...
Currency wars on hold for now
Over the past few weeks we’ve heard lots of discussion about so-called “currency wars”. The US, in particular, has ratched up its rhetoric of complaint against the Chinese for not allowing the value of its currency, the yuan, to appreciate. Japan, Brazil and South Korea have also devalued their currencies in recent ...
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.
