Category General Nonfiction

Liberals, Conservatives and “The Big Short”

What do liberals and conservatives have to say about capitalism and the human heart? How to assign blame for the massive bubbles and frauds perpetrated in the financial markets in recent decades? Can the relentless pursuit and possession of capital be effectively shaped by any ethic save for the unfettered freedom to pursue its own ends?

These questions—and quite a few more—occurred on a few recent long drives during which my car’s CD player offered up Michael Lewis’s greatly entertaining and gravely dismaying The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine. Lewis’s book chronicles the subprime mortgage episode that brought the U.S. economy to its knees in 2008, just in time for Barack Obama to stride into the Oval Office in that confident way of his, glance at the up-to-date economic data and ask, “Now what the hell just happened here?”

What happened, as the gifted Lewis (Moneyball, Liar’s Poker...

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Jagged Trajectory: From Renaissance Glory to Lord of the Flies

The older I get, the more sense history makes. All the pieces of humanity’s exceedingly checkered past fall more into place, resulting in both more compassion for what we have come through and alarm for what continues to befall us. More than 500 years after the Renaissance posited that humanity could become a shining beacon of perfectly realized rational values, we lurch from one crisis, one massacre, one civil war, one bellicose despot to the next. One part or other of our world is always threatening to go up in flames even as many of us preoccupy ourselves with whose dessert will make the grade on the next installment of some epic cooking show that plays like the Last Judgement, set to music.

These thoughts occur as I work my way through two books that have piled atop each other on my reading table this week: Charles Taylor’s sweeping account of the secular-religious tracks running on their often paral...

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The True “Twilight Zone”

When I was 9 or 10 years old, my brother landed a paper route, distributing the Eagle Rock Sentinel on Thursday and Sunday mornings. It meant getting up at 5 a.m., walking six or seven blocks to the drop-off point, bagging up papers on the street corner in the dark, then hoofing it up and down a hillside neighborhood for a couple of hours, dropping a paper as near to every porch as possible (especially those whose owners were known to tip an extra dime on top of the 40-cent monthly fee).

Pete was three years older and already showing the entrepreneurial bent that would lead him to a long career as a partner in an accounting firm. So he hired me to help deliver the papers, scoring me my own bag so we could walk up both sides of each block and thus cut the delivery time in half.

He paid me the princely sum of a dollar for each such outing, eight dollars a month...

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John Muir and the Wild Calm Within

*Why do I always feel, when I am meandering about in the mountains, so wildly free and self-possessed, and at the same time so puny and insignificant? Does the vastness and majesty of the setting release some heretofore unknown chemical that allows me to settle contentedly into my niche as a speck of cosmic dust, desiring nothing more than to exist in this moment of plain clarity and calm?

These are questions the naturalist John Muir may well have asked himself at age 30 when he nixed an offer of a partnership in an Indiana machine shop that made wagon wheels and set out to discover the world. He first headed to Florida on a 1,000-mile walk and eventually crossed back over the continent toward the Sierra Nevada Mountains, over which he was to spend much of the rest of his life tramping...

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Letter From Birmingham

Please forgive the impossibly pretentious headline above. I think Rev. Martin Luther King would both forgive and understand it, because he above all would appreciate the tremendous sense of solidarity engendered by his justifiably famous “Letter From Birmingham Jail” and all the other events of 1963 in this quintessentially Southern town that would so change the course of history.

I arrived here on the eve of the 50th anniversary of George Wallace’s theatrical standing in the University of Alabama school doors to ostensibly prevent the admittance of black students in defiance of a federal court order. (Wallace at least had enough sense not to actively defy the federal marshals and troops sent there by President Kennedy and his attorney general and brother Bobby to enforce the law.) I paid respects with my family at the now historic 16th Avenue First Baptist Church where Ku Klux Klansmen murdered four...

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