Brad DeLong has a long post up at his website, entitled “Is American Democracy Broken?”, expressing his frustration with the state of these United States. I share many of his sentiments, but near the end, he provides a list of bullets summing up “the things that make me mad” (my phrase, not his) and I…
Author: Alan Vanneman
Fear the underwear
In the latest very, very dangerous CIA-invented/exposed terrorist plot, we learn, in the very, very breathless words of the LA Times, that the underwear bomb at the heart of the matter “bears the forensic signature of feared Al Qaeda bomb maker Ibrahim Hassan Asiri,” also connected to the dreaded underwear bomb that resulted in second-degree…
The New Yorker makes another unforced error! (probably)
A few weeks back I found a small but blatant error in the New Yorker, when author Daniel Mendelsohn managed to confuse “turbine” with “cylinder” when describing the engines of the ill-fated Titanic. In this week’s NY, Joan Acocella has a rather rambling article on dictionaries. In the midst of a discussion on slang, she…
New Design
Well, this new design has forced itself upon me. Some time or another I’ll figure it out, I hope. Wish me luck.
Pseudo-New Yorker
Legal humor here. “Gay enough for you, girlfriend?” “‘Them bones, them bones, them dry bones’ playing on hidden speakers? I don’t fucking think so.” “We really had no choice. The terms of Mr. Blackwell’s behest were extremely specific.” “Yeah, but if Glee does get cancelled, we’re totally screwed.” “I thought it was the Allosaurus that…
How about that Charlie Sheen? He gets more tail than Dominique Strauss-Kahn!
Yes, Dominique the Sheik, former chief of the International Monetary Fund, who’s wasted more Trojans than Achilles, is under investigation again. The prosecutor’s office in Lille, France says that Strauss-Kahn “may have sexually assaulted a Belgian prostitute at a sex party organized at the W Hotel in Washington in December 2010,” Maïa de la Baume…
The growing inequality: Does anybody care?
99% versus 1%? Who doesn’t like those odds? It’s a well-established fact that, since 1979, American productivity has been steadily rising, but median compensation hasn’t been. (See Lawrence Mishal’s excellent new article here) Rather fortuitously, Bain boy and Romney protégé Edward Conrad is coming out with a book, Unintended Consequences: Why Everything You’ve Been Told…
The Way of the Warrior
A couple of weeks ago, the war historian Max Hastings, whom I would call excellent if not eminent, had an interesting piece in the Daily Mail* on the thirtieth anniversary of the Falklands “War,” that near-comic opera dispute—near-comic opera if you can get past the thousands of casualties, and 900 dead—between Great Britain and Argentina…
Inside of (some) neoliberals there is a socialist struggling to get out
I’m a big fan of Brad DeLong’s “Grasping Reality” blog. Brad is a liberal neoliberal’s liberal neoliberal. He knows a great deal about economic history, and knows that it was capitalism, and nothing else, that turned western civilization from a good deal for the top 10 percent into a good deal for potentially everyone. At…
James B. Stewart, lying on behalf of truth
Over at New York magazine, Jonathan Chait takes a long poke at Rep. Paul Ryan. Although I often find Jon a bit knee-jerky, when it comes to Ryan, our knees jerk in perfect time. Chait points, among other things, to the near-worshipful reception that Ryan often receives in the press, as a sort of political…