Via Ben Smith at Politico, Ira Stoll, at The Future of Capitalism, reviews Christine Ward’s Confidence Game: How a Hedge Fund Manager Called Wall Street’s Bluff and explains how hedge fund manager William Ackman shook the Municipal Bond Insurance Association’s money tree with a little assistance from Marty Peretz, Eliot Spitzer, and Barney Frank. Money…
Author: Alan Vanneman
Michelle Obama, diva-ish if not diva-esque
A lot of people are whining, moaning, or otherwise slapping our beloved first lady around about her decision to celebrate her husband’s 49th birthday by, well, leaving the country to party with four score well-chosen chums at a five-star resort in sunny Spain and, not so incidentally, hang with European royalty. So, do the Obamas…
Monk — “Caravan”
Berlin 1969
Megan McArdle advocates death panels
Death panels of one, to be precise. Here’s her entire post on the subject: I’m probably going to have a lot of thoughts about this Atul Gawande piece on hospice care [in the New Yorker], but here’s a slightly off the wall question: how much better off are patients now that doctors don’t lie to…
Brad DeLong, Professor of Economics and Censorship
I’m a huge fan of Brad DeLong’s “Grasping Reality with Both Hands” blog. Like Brad, I’m a pro-stimulus Krugmanite (or at least “Krugmanite-ish”) with a special interest in economic history, particularly the whole “European Miracle” thing. Unfortunately, I part company with Brad on global warming. My position is, yeah, it’s getting warmer, and it’s definitely…
Suffering white Christians, suffering at Harvard
Ross Douthat, whom I in the past have unkindly—and even perhaps unjustly—referred to as Ross Dumb Fuck—is at it again, bemoaning the suffering of white Christians, citing a study by Princeton sociologists, Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Walton Radford for support. According to Ross, Espenshade and Radford provide “statistical confirmation for what alumni of highly selective…
At Least It Wasn’t A Jew Joke
Marine Commandant James T. Conway gets a little carried away at the thought of some down and dirty all-male action in the Corps: “Our men need to know they can count on each other in battle, and we can’t have them getting distracted by illicit romantic dalliances. Especially if one’s a little blond Adonis farm…
Yes, it’s a real beaver
Well, it is. The hand puppet that Mel Gibson talks to in his in the can but not yet on the screen (and apparently not going to get there any time soon) new flick The Beaver really is a beaver, a buck-toothed, tree-cuttin’, dam-buildin’ beaver. You were thinking maybe kind of a vagina dialogues kind…
Thelonious Dub—“Bemsha Swing”
Joe Bartone, guitar, Sean Rainey, drums, Kyle O’Donnell, tenor Sax, Brandon Schmidt, Acoustic Bass. Thelonious Dub is a group, with an eponymous Monk album available from cdbaby.com. OK, you know the story on Thelonious Dub, but what about “Bemsha Swing,” which I’ve been playing a lot? Monk wrote the tune with drummer Denzil Best, who…