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...

Good stuff here.

A 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...

A great essay, by Anthony Grafton, on Arnaldo Momigliano, his revered teacher.  Anyone who knows Grafton knows that for him to revere somebody, that somebody must be really impressive.  The simplest way to complete this thought is just to say: Momigliano was.  

Above all, he told me stories—the principal...

Do artists cross ideological lines these days, in their fan bases?  It’s hard to think of someone, maybe Marilynne Robinson’s novels?  What about movies or music; has aesthetics been colonized by partisanship?  

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...

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...

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 

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...

As this Google N-gram seems to suggest, the popularity of the word "neoliberalism" seems to have crested in 2016, and declined a little bit in the past several years--perhaps with the rise of the popularity of words like "fascism" and phrases like "white supremacy" to...

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...