Work: “The Big Red Son” by David Foster Wallace Intro: Wallace goes slumming it with porn stars at the 1998 Adult Video Awards ceremony. Here he describes the pornography of Las Vegas. As you know if you’ve seen Casino, Showgirls, Bugsy, etc., there are really three Las Vegases. Binion’s, where the World Series of Poker is always played, exemplifies the “Old ... Read More
David Brook’s column on Wikileaks is a pretty good example of how the mainstream press has misread the organization’s intentions. Brooks concludes that Wikileaks will “damage the global conversation” of diplomats: The WikiLeaks dump will probably damage the global conversation. Nations will be less likely to share with the United States. Agencies will be tempted to return to the pre-9/11 ... Read More
Bob Dylan is coming to Lowell, MA tomorrow for a concert. Excited yet? Frankly, there’s a lot that excites me more than the prospect of seeing Dylan live in concert. As everyone knows, Dylan likes to mess with his music; he sings every line too fast, and he mangles the old melodies, and at the moments of high lyrical beauty, he ... Read More
Paul doesn’t know what I’m talking about: I’m a little bit unclear what you mean by public-wealth. Are you defining private-wealth as rich people and public-wealth as everybody else? Or are you defining private-wealth as the wealth of citizens and corporations and public-wealth as that of the government? So let me clarify. I’ll start with definitions. Private wealth, to my ... Read More
America is the richest country in the world. Karl Smith suggests three reasons why: I am going to go pretty conventional on this one and say a combination of three big factors 1. The Common Law 2. Massive Immigration 3. The Great Scientific Exodus during WWII You’ll notice that four of the top five countries in the Human Development Indexhave the Common ... Read More
Paul Schied and I discuss Jon Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity and whether Harvard students can be Tea Party members. Harvard Blogging Heads: Paul Schied and Max Novendstern from Max Novendstern on Vimeo. (Paul is great; I’m a bit boring. They will get better! If anyone watching this is interested in doing a Harvard Blogging Heads with me (or with ... Read More
In my last post, I chided Harvard writers for the way they tend to write about the Tea Party. I said that our focus was too small. But that raises the question: What are my counterexamples? For this post, I thought I’d highlight some excellent writing on the Tea Party done by some of the most interesting intellectuals in America. This ... Read More
I’d like to believe that there’s a place in our politics between caricature and indifference — between judgement (ie, praise, censure, etc), on the one hand, and dismissal, flat out rejection, on the other. As an editor of this magazine and as a student, I cherish the writing that avoids these fates: the writers that write about politics without playing politics; the ... Read More
Harvard University is a private institution with a private set of needs, among them financial needs and the ever-present need to remain true to its institutional identity. If you’re interested in the question of whether the Social Studies Degree Committee should create a research grant in Marty Peretz’s honor, then that’s where you have to start, with the fact that all actions ... Read More
Dylan Matthews* has a post up on his blog called “How Not To Write About Policy” — it’s a takedown of an essay by Mark Greif entitled Gut-Level Legislation, or, Redistribution, and a sort of mini-lecture on how to write like a wonk. It’s a pretty entertaining post. But it’s also, in my estimate, pretty far off the mark — not just in ... Read More
Here’s Bill Gates from a Wired magazine interview about the state of computer hacking: If he were a teenager today, he says, he’d be hacking biology. “Creating artificial life with DNA synthesis. That’s sort of the equivalent of machine-language programming,” says Gates, whose work for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has led him to develop his own expertise in disease ... Read More
Here’s Teddy Roosevelt talking to some undergrads at the University of Paris in 1910: It is well if a large proportion of the leaders in any republic, in any democracy, are, as a matter of course, drawn from the classes represented in this audience to-day; but only provided that those classes possess the gifts of sympathy with plain people and of ... Read More
Sometimes you read a Tyler Cowen post and you think to yourself, simply: Did he really just say that? Here’s Cowen on payday loans and unprotected sex: The unprotected sex is riskier and less prudent than borrowing money at an annualized rate of two hundred percent. Why prohibit one and not the other? Many of the borrowers are being fooled, ... Read More
HuffPo is reporting that Tim Geithner has expressed opposition to Elizabeth Warren’s nomination to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — a department that she helped create. The article isn’t sourced well — it comes from an unnamed “source with knowledge of Geithner’s views” — and in response to the report Michael Barr, Assistant Treasury Secretary and one of the ... Read More
Jeff Kalmus argues that the idea of a “race” between China and the United States over green tech (suggested by Will Rafey here) is misguided. Clean energy anywhere benefits everyone, everywhere. If there are no losers, then why call it a “race”? The “race” is just another manifestation of the phenomenon Will described in his fall article, an attempt by environmentalists ... Read More
