Why don’t leaders battle out their differences and claims between themselves instead of taking their entire nations to war? This question is raised in Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, (1929), which I re-read last week. It is
History
A Wealth of Foreshadows
Graham Moore’s A Wealth of Shadows (2024) might truly be unique: the one novel of intrigue in which both heroes and villains are economists. It shows how Allied economists broke the code of Germany’s economic miracle, then created their own economic
Then They Came For Me
Note: this is a two-part post. In the first, I depict a personal crisis from the Vietnam War protest era. In the second, I reflect on the source of moral courage. 1 In my Connecticut high school sophomore year, our English
Despair Is Not an Option
In recent months, the presidential campaigns were all-too-compelling distractions. Now that Donald Trump has won and Republicans look likely to control Congress, with a Supreme Court of soulmates watching on, we are forced to contemplate a disturbing
Sisyphus
Something terrible is always happening around the world. Many of us living in peaceful places can’t help but wonder at our good fortune while we seek to understand what has gone so wrong elsewhere. 1 Two mornings a week on my ninth floor terrace,
Vladimir Putin and Self-Hatred
So many human qualities can be inversions of what they seem. Hatred of someone else can be hatred of oneself. To punish another can be to engage in self-punishment. The subject of inversion came up the other evening during the rebroadcast of Dick