There has been “an evolution in the way investors, economists and central bankers think about government debt.” This article usefully charts that evolution.

Good piece on punctuation and what it is for.

Rowan Williams on theological education.  Just reading the sentences that come from his mouth is simultaneously reassuring and clarifying.  

This is an interesting, and at times contentious, interview with Judith Butler, on gender theory today.  And here’s a lecture then a long q&a with Butler! Conducted in part by Amia Srinivasan, herself a very interesting political theorist.  And more on Butler: an interesting critique by Faisal Devji of Judith Butler’s recent book:

Butler’s inability to move her analysis beyond life as an ultimate value ensures that she is trapped in what Michel Foucault would call the language of biopolitics. She is left trying to divide one kind of life force from another in an impossible task. Her description of how the violence of the ego, in Freud’s account, is surmounted by the superego in another kind of violence, against which Butler offers mania as a kind of tragic escape, provides a good example of this failure (which she calls an “ethico-political bind”). The political outcomes Butler wants to ensure by the appropriation of force at the beginning of her argument are vitiated by the argument’s inability to free itself from violence at the end. Is this the conclusion to which Butler’s brilliantly original and career-long focus on bodies has finally driven her?

A good review of what sounds like a good biography of the playwright Tom Stoppard.  I like a lot of his plays—JUMPERS, ROSENCRANZ AND GUIDENSTERN ARE DEAD, TRAVESTIES, ARCADIA—but the one I find most moving is THE INVENTION OF LOVE.

An interesting set of policy suggestions, going from changes in the tax structure through national service for youth in exchange for free public college education, to mid-career sabbaticals, as ways to help advance the interest for the middle class. Very much worth thinking about.

And here is a whole chapter on the future of the middle class, from the Brookings Institution.

The author of “Philosophical Investigations” loved reading about private investigators.

The simplest explanation for Wittgenstein’s pulp reading—that he appreciated the magazines as a diversion from, and perhaps a counterpoint to, his work in philosophy—proves too simple on closer inspection. Wittgenstein himself claimed repeatedly that his pulp reading nourished his philosophy.

And this seems right to me too:

I think we can now see at least one reason that Wittgenstein became hooked on hardboiled writing: the minimalism of the genre often enacts an essential aspect of his philosophy. The hardboiled style is highly adept at the magic trick of saying without actually saying, of using indirect means such as tone and mood, atmosphere and scene, symbolism and choice of detail to conjure up an understanding, or simply a feeling, that is all the stronger, and perhaps all the truer, for never being stated explicitly.

Be well everybody.  May you not be like the President.