All posts by chris
Kevin (from Heaven) White: Footnotes in his Favor
Ride the Orange Line end to end and share the sense that the Seventies in Boston — the vision and activism of, let’s call it, the Kevin White era — left the city a gift that keeps on giving and seems still vastly under-appreciated…
Steve Pinker’s “Better Angels”: Dodging Our Own Bullet?
Steven Pinker spells out the science and history behind his game-changing conclusion that we live in a near-heaven of peace.
Anatol Lieven: how to end the US dust-up with Pakistan
Anatol Lieven, of Pakistan: A Hard Country, knows why the so-called allies in the so-called War on Terror are now in a lethal dust-up with each other.
Ha Jin’s recovered memory of Americans in China
Ha Jin, the prize Chinese-American novelist, has reconstructed a moral drama of American-Chinese solidarity in the agony of Nanjing in 1937.
Mark Blyth (7): “We can’t all export to Mars”
Mark Blyth is flying us over the embattled Eurozone -- populations aging, economies flagging, and now democracy shrinking...
David Grossman: looking for an end of “the situation”
David Grossman, of the Israeli epic novel "To the End of the Land," considers why his own brave politics has not availed for peace.
Harold Bloom’s Moby-Dick
Harold Bloom's class at Yale on the Melville classic Moby-Dick feels like a one-man performance of a one-act play.
My evening with Joan Didion
Joan Didion, meeting a hungry market for introspection on death, talks about frailty but comes to embody indomitability.
Leslie Chang: “The Dickens of China today is doing real estate.”
Leslie Chang says the great epic of China's transformation is untold. "The Charles Dickens of China today is doing real estate."
