I'm about halfway through Horns after what sprint I could muster this weekend.


Neuromancer will follow whenever I get done with it, followed by some Back To The Future novelization I found.

paul krugman's newsletter from last week

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Paul Krugman
Opinion Columnist

More than six months ago, I wrote a column titled “Elizabeth Warren and her party of ideas,” in which I described Warren as the closest modern equivalent to the role once played by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a serious intellectual turned influential politician. The article was, in effect, a plea for the news media to tone down the traditional obsession with “likeability” — the modern version of “a guy you’d like to have a beer with” — and pay attention to candidates’ policy proposals.

To be honest, I fully expected the column to be a tree falling in the forest, where nobody could hear it. And for the next few months, my pessimism seemed justified. In fact, many pundits seemed to have written Warren off. Nevertheless, as Mitch McConnell famously complained, she persisted.

And something strange has happened: Bit by bit, policy proposal by policy proposal, Warren has been clawing her way into the position of a major contender. People are showing up at campaign rallies wearing “Warren has a plan for that” T-shirts. There has also been a startling shift in the media narrative, with a spate of articles — most recently in today’s Times — marveling at the way Warren’s wonkiness has become a defining, popular piece of personal branding. Pundits are even starting to say that her policy earnestness makes her … likable.

Will she actually get the nomination? Could she win if she did? I have absolutely no idea. Neither, by the way, does anyone else.

But there is one point I think even the somewhat bemused pro-Warren punditry is missing. There’s a reason, beyond being smart and well-informed, that Warren is able to come up with so many interesting policy ideas. Namely, there is a huge gap between what inside-the-Beltway opinion considers serious policy and what actual policy researchers have to say. This creates what I think of as the Great Wonk Window: a surprisingly wide range of policy areas where a politician can be simultaneously radical by conventional political standards and solidly grounded in expert analysis.

One example is taxation of the rich. Conventional wisdom is still obsessed with the notion that taxing high incomes and/or giant fortunes will have dangerous effects on incentives. Actual experts in public finance have, however, long argued that substantially higher top-end taxation is justified — and Warren devised her wealth-tax plan with help from Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, superstars in the field.
Another example is child care, where there is a large body of evidence that investments in child care pay back significant dividends in both the short run — by helping mothers remain employed — and in the long run, because well-cared-for children grow up into more productive adults.

So as I said, there’s a surprisingly big window for politically radical but economically sound policy. And Warren clearly both knows that this window exists and is trying to use the resulting opening to promote her agenda.

Whether she or anyone else will manage to climb through that window remains to be seen. But opening the wonk window is, at least potentially, a really big deal.

Finished The Gender of Debt: The Last 50,000 Years by Mariano Pavanello, from a review request by the scholar himself! https://rxttbooks.blogspot.com/2019/...huge-debt.html

Mariano Pavanello emailed me thanking me for the review and he said "I wish your blog a longstanding success."

sweet.

hurray!

ok, now i gotta read your review

btw, speaking of longstanding success... do you know how to export your data to xml should you ever need to migrate servers or whatever?

hoo leee shiiiittt!!,

so, the hunters are the parasites??

i intuitively recognize this structure oh yeah i do



it would be great to see some numbers

I keep a Word file of all my reviews, separate from the Blog.

I would love any info on exporting my data to xml... send that shit my way

A friend picked up this book for me:



I started reading it today and it is so wonderfully weird. It's stories about chinese families who immigrated to america, "told by" the little girls living in those families. I love it. loVE LOVE LOVE IT. kinda reminds me of the weirdness of miranda july.

Hey Severian, Neil gaiman on how to read Gene Wolfe https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/p...folio-society/

it’s serchable and the instructions are in blogger itself plus there are videos/etc, but a better way to backup than word as it can be rebuilt in a different platform pretty straightforward, in the original order, with comments and all. e.g. migrating to wordpress if gmail decides to remove support.

Nice. Thanks for heads up.

sure thing. one always have to be ready to fuck off at a moment’s notice, ha ha ha...

hahaha. true about pimps...bastards.

I'm reading Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson

Finished up "Horns" earlier, and am starting either the Back To The Future novelization or Neuromancer next. Not quite sure which. Also thinking I should tackle "IT" in preparation for chapter 2 in September. Given that it's a beast of a novel, I should probably start it soon.

I never read, decided to change it. Let's see how far I get.


Found this book in the book closet that I bought a long long time ago. It's a first edition, 1994. Possibly bought it in 1998 while in the US, it still has the price tag of Borders Bookstore on the back.


It's a book about a band I never heard of





Confusion Is Next - The Sonic youth Story by Alec Foege

haha— borders!

i remember borders in the 90s, before kmart bought them

you’ve had it with you all this time?

just started this one!

[IMG]https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1407109549l/21671.jpg
[/IMG]

I pre-ordered this bad boy from Re-Search when it was announced. Awesome. Interview from 1985 unearthed in the reSearch archives.