If you’re like me you have specific research, teaching, and service goals in this new year and new semester. If you’re like me, you’re also wondering what you need to change in order to make those goals happen. Here are a few things that have helped me: 1. Turn off all your notifications on your […]
You’ve been going to the gym for a couple of days, and you feel great. It’s awesome. You’re on a high of sorts, and you feel like you could bench-press mountains. As any of us who have worked to get in shape and then fallen off the wagon can tell you, this doesn’t always last. […]
Dante, The Divine Comedy (Audible). I love Audible because it lets me listen to the classics on my (short!) commute. You can get a Kindle version for $0 (click the image). My current listen is Paradise Lost & Paradise Regained. Thomas Sowell, Discrimination and Disparities. This reminds me a lot of Wealth, Poverty, and Politics, which came out a few […]
Spoiler Alert: If You Haven’t Yet Seen the Premiere Episode of The Walking Dead Season 7 and don’t want to know what happens until you do, stop reading right now. I’m surprised that so many people seem to be appalled by the gore and violence of the Season 7 premiere of The Walking Dead. We […]
Mike Rapport, 1848: Year of Revolution. This is a detailed look into the revolutions that rocked Europe at the beginning of the “treason of the clerisy”–Deirdre McCloskey’s term for the intellectuals’ rebellion against European liberalism and embrace of socialism, nationalism, and nationalism. James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States. […]
I finished “Salvation.” It’s fun brain candy popcorn tv with a sort-of-cliffhanger ending that makes me think a Season 2 is coming. There’s a nice, healthy dose of skepticism that the government will do the right thing, which makes it satisfying. On the exercise bike in the basement, I watched “Omega,” which is a set […]
Niall Ferguson, Civilization. I think this is the first Ferguson book I’ve read. He writes beautifully and comprehensively. In the book I’m writing with Deirdre McCloskey—it’s based on McCloskey’s The Bourgeois Virtues, Bourgeois Dignity, and Bourgeois Equality—we criticize some of Ferguson’s claims about his “killer apps,” but the book is a pretty solid survey of […]
Here’s a great article from the New York Times that discusses one of my pet peeves: “I feel like.” The law of demand doesn’t care how you feel. The statistical properties of data don’t care how you feel. Things like the law of comparative advantage are not matters of emotional intuition or feelings. They are […]
At the end of January, CNN reported that in response to new tariffs on solar panels, Chinese solar panel manufacturer JinkoSolar would build a plant in the United States. These tariffs make Americans poorer, not richer. The nineteenth-century French economist Frederic Bastiat exhorted us to look beyond what is immediately apparent to the harder-to-see but […]
Life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. This is nowhere more clearly in evidence than in the AMC hit The Walking Dead. How well will we do after the zombie apocalypse? Not well, I think—we’re a species that burns cars when a football team loses. If anything, watching The Walking Dead has made me wonder how […]
Several years ago, a counselor recommended The Valley of Vision: A Collection of Puritan Prayers and Devotions. The puritans get a bad rap, historically, and their history illustrates the complex tensions that come with fallen people following God in a fallen world. Here are two thoughts worth considering from the “The Love of Jesus,” page […]
Just so we’re clear, calling the cops because you see a large black guy in your neighborhood is harassment. This has happened to a friend with a door-to-door job in three separate neighborhoods over the last few months. And if you’re going to protest and appeal to the black male crime rate to justify your […]
The University of Richmond’s Jepson School of Leadership Studies sponsors an annual Summer Institute for the History of Economic Thought with excellent lectures by Deirdre McCloskey and James M. Buchanan (several by Buchanan). Of particular interest are McCloskey’s lecture and Buchanan’s talk “Chicago Thinking: Old and New.” Most students of economic thinking who are familiar […]
Life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. This is nowhere more clearly in evidence than in the AMC hit The Walking Dead. How well will we do after the zombie apocalypse? Not well, I think—we’re a species that burns cars when a football team loses. If anything, watching The Walking Dead has made me wonder how […]
