All posts by chris
Kevin White and the Boston He Imagined
“… it seems to me now that Kevin White’s vision of the “world-class city” was a wistful evocation of what this Boston-Cambridge core of New England has in fact become: the best big college town in the country, arguably the intellectual capital of the world — a tolerant and cosmopolitan old address with durable Brahmin and Irish inlaid veneers, an endlessly charged, stimulating place to live. Kevin White’s sort of city, in short, and still today a work of his fervid imagination.”
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."
Glenn Greenwald: who will rescue the rule of law?
Glenn Greenwald and Noam Chomsky are holding the Obama presidency accountable for a radical degradation of the rule of law.
