Category: Politics
-
Beyond perfect
“Perfect is the enemy of the good,” attributed to Voltaire, is a bit of wisdom about diminishing returns. Seeking perfection by improving something that is adequately good for the task at hand is a fool’s goal. We can all identify with losing hours, weeks, or years in pursuit of some imagined but elusive standard of…
-
Books read in 2016
Books! Best to worst. Paul Beatty, The Sellout Extraordinary, hilarious, brilliant. Racial stereotypes dancing in front of a funhouse mirror of satire, through a knowing lens of American literature and culture (both African- and Anglo-). More great comic one-liners per page than any other fancy hardbound book I’ve ever read. Jon Meachum, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power…
-
Books 2013
Only one nonfiction book in this very random collection, but it tops the list in its insight and importance. From the best to the least best: Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future? George Saunders, Tenth of December Teju Cole, Open City Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge AM Homes, May We Be Forgiven Leavitt, Two Hotel Francforts…
-
Big themes at Morningstar Investment Conference 2012
Several themes emerged at last week’s Morningstar Investment Conference: Don’t panic 1: “It’s hard to imagine the Eurozone coming apart” (Michael Hasenstab, Franklin Templeton) Don’t panic 2: “For China to experience a hard landing would require two unlikely near-term events… a massive overtightening error, and a banking crisis” (Michael Hasenstab, Franklin Templeton) The best growth…
-
Hitch-22 : Christopher Hitchens
Further proof that erudition does not equal intelligence. Despite a moving account of his youth, the book devolves into an extended rationalization of Hitchens’s approval of the Iraq invasion by his adopted country, the United States. That and the book’s meaningless, arbitrary title undermine its narrative and its pretension to intellectual rigor, by unfairly borrowing…