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Yet more links

September 07, 2020

Some stuff for you all!

 

This is an incredible review—ten years old now—of Mark McGurl’s The Program Era, a book about post-war American fiction writing.  Elif Batuman really takes on the book in a serious way, from a position of strong dissent, but she does not, I think, slander the book, trash or disparage it; she just disagrees.  It’s very...

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Some links

September 06, 2020

Good stuff here.

 

 

sharp essay about English historians of the mid-Twentieth century, such as EH Carr, Hugh Trevor-Roper, and the like.  They were genuinely popular historians, that is, historians who is writing was not only for fellow professional academics, but for an intelligent general audience.  What happened to render such an audience...

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Start of September links

September 01, 2020

It's a new month!  Always a chance to start afresh.  Read some stuff!

 

A good analysis of the 1994 crime bill—a topic of interest now because of Biden’s support for it back in the day—and a careful accounting for what we can say about its effects, and what it was doing at the time.  As ever, policy...

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Books I'm reading: John Lewis Gaddis, ON GRAND STRATEGY

August 28, 2020


I picked this book up in a charity shop in the UK, and having read a couple of his history books, and knowing of his work with the so-called “grand strategy“ undergraduate program at Yale University, I was interested to see what he would do here. But it was not good.

 

There’s a lot here to sniff at, legitimately or no. First of all, he relies on something called dictionary.com for his word definitions. This reminds me of...

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Demographics again

August 27, 2020

I’ve yammered on about demographics a lot on this blog, but for reasons I think are important.  It turns out that we don’t think about demographics much, imagining that the future will be a lot like the past.  But that is not necessarily true.  

 

First, two 

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Some new links

August 25, 2020

There's nothing on TV you want to watch tonight.  Trust me.  Instead, read some stuff.

 

 

A useful collection of data showing, pretty powerfully I think, the way that economic inequality in the US is (a) anomalous across other “developed” nations, and (b) correlated with...

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Start of the week links

August 24, 2020

They're "start of the week" links, but they're not the weakest links, for sure.*  Far from it: Some cool ones in here -- the podcast especially, I can't recommend it enough:

 

 

So I've praised the podcast Talking Politics a number of times, but I wanted to say they've had a series of great episodes lately.  They had one about being an English football fan, and being the fan of one team over...

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