Yet we’re not close to consensus on central questions of economic statecraft. Can the cycle of booms, bubbles, and busts be moderated? How much money can a welfare state redistribute to the poor without encouraging dependency? Economists, for all their hardcore mathematizing, still disagree with one another on basic issues. Which raises a question: Was it a mistake to entrust them with public policy in the first place?
Elizabeth Popp Berman, a sociologist at the University of Michigan, certainly thinks so. In her new book, “Thinking Like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in U.S. Public Policy”, she argues that the mid-century turn toward “the economic style of reasoning” had devastating consequences for progressive Democrats.
A shortcut. A tunnel. A bridge through spacetime that lets you skip through all that boring space travel and speed to the fun stuff. It’s a staple of science-fiction, and it’s rooted in science-fact. How difficult could it be?
Here’s a hint: incredibly difficult.
I can count the number of interactions I’ve had with my waipo on two hands. Several times when I was a kid visiting Taiwan from California, once on a family vacation to China a couple years back, and the most recent two times at her home in southern Taiwan when I was recording her and her recipe for zongzi — a pyramid-shaped rice dumpling wrapped in bamboo leaves — for my upcoming cookbook on Taiwanese cuisine.
I haven’t seen her since.
It is a bold author who heads off potential criticisms of their work with a self-aware allusion, but in Emily St John Mandel’s ambitious new novel, the character of the writer Olive Llewellyn is confronted by an unimpressed reader in a book-signing queue. Her interlocutor impatiently claims “there were all these strands, narratively speaking, all these characters, and I felt like I was waiting for them to connect, but they didn’t ultimately”.
Some may agree with this as a description of Sea of Tranquility, but it also elegantly anticipates censure of this thought-provoking read.
How does a man turn into an island? Oppression and scarcity and disempowerment, yes; the bafflement of trying to form coherent selfhood without strong role models, certainly; and at the base, always, an absence of empathy and of love.
No plot summary can do justice to a story woven this carefully, whose strength lies in its deliberate pacing and sharp dispensation of detail. Samuel is as real as a shaking hand.
It may not sound like it, but joy is a vital ingredient in Ruth & Pen. Sometimes, accessing it requires thinking back to the past or imagining a fanciful future; more often it’s to be found in life’s small, everyday details – a serendipitous painting or a pleasing idiom, a train pulling in to the platform so that the carriage door is exactly in front of you.
For philosopher Victor Menza, whose book The Rabbit Between Us has recently been published (nearly a decade after his death), an affinity for rabbits emerged in childhood and remained with him throughout adulthood. Rabbits like Brown Bunny, a childhood stuffed toy who accompanied Menza as he navigated family disruption and later became a companion to his daughter as she, in turn, navigated family disruption, and a rabbit’s foot he carried for good luck throughout his childhood and adolescence, are just a few of the many rabbits who accompanied Menza’s development and whose presences he explores in this book.
Yet The Rabbit Between Us is about much more than one man’s relationship with rabbits, literal and figurative. This is a book about loss, in which rabbits figure prominently as symbols and messengers.
"Are you in any pain," and the 1-to-10 pain scale, have become part and parcel of American health care. But does it make sense to reduce pain to a yes-or-no binary, or a number on a scale? Haider Warraich, a physician and Harvard Medical School professor, says absolutely not. In his new book "The Song of Our Scars: An Untold Story of Pain," Warraich argues that modern medicine has "asked people to take the most complex experience they could ever have, one that fundamentally challenges the artificial distinction between the body and the mind, between the physical and the metaphysical, one that has emotional, spiritual, genetic, epigenetic, evolutionary, racial, and psychological dimensions, and reduce it to a single number on a 10-point scale."