A quick review of a book that explains how eceonomics became
"[T]he dominant explanatory framework of our time, commonly rolled out to account for matters from criminal sentencing to the dating “market.” In the words of a district court judge who attended a two-week course on introductory economics at the University of Miami, “More and more, life is best explained not by religion, not by law, but by economics.”" This has led to the following tragedy:
"Our ancestors “constructed a market society, and the defining feature of a market is the freedom to walk away,” Appelbaum writes in closing. “Our problem is too many markets, and too much walking away.”"
I've not been super-prone to like Jeanette Winterson, from a bad encounter with a book of hers several decades ago; but I'm impressed with this and I think it will make me re-think whatever suspicions I have of her.
"Do books serve a moral function? Absolutely. And it isn’t a question of subject matter, because fiction isn’t obliged to tackle the world head-on. If we are only interested in the now, then the past is obsolete. Reading is such an odd act — solitary, introspective, outside of time (not controlled by time) and not subject to surveillance. Reading isn’t data. Books more than ever are agents of freedom from a snoopy controlling data-driven nightmare that pretends we are free when we have never been more scrutinized. So reading certainly has moral value — and is increasingly subversive. Literature is a compass — useful to get your bearings even if you want to go in a different direction. Literature is a tool kit. Books are the most practical of endeavors. They teach us about life, about motive, about our own darkness, about why we act as we do, and they give us back real live language. Anything that frees your brain from the karate-chop syntax of newsfeed and social media is in part a meditative act.
The purpose of art changes as society changes. Sometimes art has to break us up — sometimes art has to heal us up. Literature, because it is made of language, returns language to us. If we have the words, we are not silenced, although we learn, through the enforced quiet of reading, what it means to be silent."
(Also, who wouldn't want the OED? I have the compact version, four pages on a page, two massive volumes, with the magnifying glass. I got it as a gift from a dear friend almost thirty years ago, and I still use it and treasure it.)
A useful "deep backgrounder" on what the Founders thought impeachment might be for.
The "Whistleblower complaint" (about Pres. Trump's call with the Ukranian PM) read as a model of excellent and punchy writing.
Finally, New York City has 633 languages spoken in it. And it's a good thing.