It hardly needs saying that, although I’m going to take a break from posting here, I’m not going anywhere. I’m going to concentrate on the second round of the writing project, which is alre...
18 and 19 September Tuesday 18th Thanks to the republication of Iris Origo’s brief war diaries, I felt compelled to read up, for the first time, on Benito Mussolini, the Fascist forerunner and ...
11 and 13 September Tuesday 11 Well, this Tuesday, the weather in New York is on the dismal side, humid, cloud-covered and glum. Nothing like what it was seventeen years ago. (When was the last t...
4 and 7 September Tuesday 4 In his new memoir, Every Day Is Extra, John Kerry apparently regrets not having been more aggressive about refuting the “Swift Boat” attacks that were made during ...
28 and 30 August Tuesday 28th This Web log is becoming difficult to maintain. It is hard to think, much less to write, with all the background noise of crumbling. And is this noise a sound effect...
21, 22 and 23 August Tuesday 21st Reading the novella, “Reading Turgenev,” the first of two that William Trevor collected under the cover of Two Lives, I was reminded of a short story that I ...
16 and 17 August Thursday 16th Most human organizations that fall short of their goals do so not because of stupidity or faulty doctrines, but because of internal decay and rigidification. — Ja...
7, 9 and 10 August Tuesday 7th Nearly fifty years have passed since Jane Jacobs published The Economy of Cities, and nearly thirty since the appearance of its sequel, Cities and the Wealth of Nat...
31 July and 3 Augst Tuesday 31st Last week, I wrote a few lines about the anti-democratic thrust of neoliberalism. The neoliberal program endeavors to take certain economic options — principall...
24, 25, and 26 July Tuesday 24th Last night, I finished reading Jane Jacobs’s The Economy of Cities for the first time. I had paused in the middle of re-reading her Cities and the Wealth of Nat...
17, 18 and 19 July Tuesday 17th While the commentariat is fixated on the arguable treason of President Trump’s response to his meeting with Russian President Putin, I’m bemused by other groun...
10, 11 and 12 July Tuesday 10th Quinn Slobodian’s Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism is not a fun read. It’s as well-written as it can be, I suppose; as the history ...
26, 27 and 28 June Tuesday 26th How many times have I quoted a passage from one of David Brooks’s columns only to say, “Yes, but…”? It doesn’t bear counting. My reservations, my hesitat...
19 and 20 June Tuesday 19th I have something new, I think, to say against television. I don’t think that I’ve said it before. Television is a dream. Last night, as I was finishing up Thinking...
12, 13 and 15 June Tuesday 12th Looking for a book, a few weeks ago, I emptied a triple-decked shelf that I have not yet catalogued. I found what I was looking for, but I left the books that I’...
6, 7 and 8 June Wednesday 6th More about the meritocracy: in today’s Times, a review of Steven Brill’s Tailspin: The People and Forces &c. According to Jennifer Szilai’s review, Brill charg...
29, 30, and 31 May Tuesday 29th The most interesting thing about Donald Trump, I’ve concluded, is his abstemiousness. The man doesn’t drink. And what’s really interesting about this is that...
22 and 25 May Tuesday 22nd The anecdote appears on page 59 of Andrea Barnet’s new book, Visionary Women: How Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, Jane Goodall, and Alice Waters Changed Our World (Ecco),...
16, 17 and 18 May Wednesday 16th The weather got very hot yesterday, and then very windy: it was clear even without reference to meteorology that we were in for some storms. And they came, says t...
8 and 11 May Tuesday 8th Lady Susan, an epistolary novel, appears to be Jane Austen’s first complete work of mature fiction. She made no attempt to publish it, however; her nephew appended the ...