Book Reviews

  • Data.1

    Today I’m starting a new series of short posts on data I pull from things I’m reading, listening to, or watching online about history and politics. Right now I’m listening to the podcast Millenials Are Killing Capitalism where they interview Michael Hardt, who teaches at Duke here in Durham. Hardt has a new book out…

  • Pretty Bubbles Turning Into Grime

    Michael Hudson has a new book out so I thought it was high time I posted some thoughts I’ve been meaning to write up about his last one, The Bubble and Beyond. I’ve posted before about Hudson’s 1973 classic Superimperialism, whose analysis of the economic strategy of American Empire was followed by a terrific 1977…

  • The Residents and the Arctic

    I rarely hear an entire record played on the radio.  A few months ago, I heard the album Eskimo by the Residents played on WXDU’s stellar Sunday afternoon show, Polyphonic Perversity.  I soon purchased it and have really enjoyed hanging out with it since. I know very little about the Residents, so I won’t say…

  • New Video: The Wrong Tree

    Making a video with Michael Galinsky and his family was so nice, I had to do it twice.  Here is what we came up with together for The Wrong Tree: Don’t miss Michael’s new book Malls Across America!  It reminds me of how nothing makes me think of death more than watching decades old sports…

  • Corporate Welfare.1: Blackwater’s Warfare Welfare

    (This is the first in a new series of posts about how corporations that claim to generate profit in the private sector are heavily subsidized by taxpayers in ways that I could only wish fields like education and healthcare were.  For an overview on that, see “Free Lunch:  How the Richest Americans Enrich Themselves at…

  • Secrets of the Temple.2: Double Dutch

    (This is a follow up to the post Secrets of the Temple.1: More Than a Doorstop, dated 1/13/13.) As I wrote in my first post on William Greider’s history of the Federal Reserve board, one of the aims of “Secrets of the Temple” is to question whether Ronald Reagan really was the primary source of…

  • Secrets of the Temple.1: More Than A Doorstop

    The operations of the Federal Reserve board are notoriously shrouded in mystery.  Technocratic decisions on monetary policy that supposedly need to be protected from the fickle pressures of politics are carried out by an appointed board of governors who like to operate behind closed doors.  William Grieder set out to demystify this institution in the…

  • Ill Communication

    It’s easy while thinking critically about trends in US history to fall into two traps – romanticizing a period in the past when things were supposedly better, or telling the story of past oppressions in ways that make it sound like no one spoke or acted out against it at the time.  The recent book…

  • Wanna read Wainaina? You should!

    I’ve decided many of my posts are too long, so I’m gonna keep this short:  I just started reading One Day I Will Write About This Place by Binyavanga Wainaina this morning and it’s awesome.  Check it out!

  • Reading Yvonne Rainer today …