Small Precautions

I have just finished Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-first Century ( Harvard UP ), and it is magnificent. The Book We Need Now....

The New York Times had a fascinating profile of Paul Kingsnorth, whose "Uncivilization" project looks squarely in the face of t...

A reading list. First semester: From the classics to the Depression Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of ...

Since I find Storify a rather mystifying app, I'm going to take a series of tweets I made yesterday and turn them into a brief blogpost...

I just read Habits of the Heart for the first time since it came out, and whoa is it a period piece, sure to be at the center of reading li...

Over at The New Inquiry Mike Konczal has an excellent review of Philip Mirowski's new book , Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste. M...

The worldview of the Tea Party: Founded by Christian patriots in a tax revolt, America has always resisted the tyranny of an out-of-touch a...

Updated A lot of people have made a big deal out of the fact that Daniel Ellsberg has been a vigorous defender of Bradley  Chelsea Mannin...

Among people who study illicit economies and trafficking it's become fashionable to suggest that illicit markets have always been with...

The 1970s is generally acknowledged as the greatest decade for cinema, especially for Hollywood, as the shackles of the old censorship we...

I've spent a good part of the last few weeks thinking about development assistance, especially development assistance in (subnational) ...

The latest United Nations Office of Drug Control report contains grim news about how the global prohibition regime is creating new opportu...

Cross-posted in slightly different form at the US Intellectual History group blog . Last week, Ben Alpers mused on the possibility of an ...

In 2006 RAND staged a wargame to think through the implications of a nuclear terror incident. They created a specific scenario - a tactical...

A couple nights ago I had a little Twitterflurry with @Interdome and @ekstasis, that went a little something like this:   The poi...

Two weeks ago George Soros wrote an article where he explained the essential political dynamic of the Eurocrisis , by invoking a specific ...