American Oracle: Milton Friedman
Milton Friedman died this week at age 92. Seems like he was just getting started.
Friedman was easily one of the dozen most influential thinkers of the 20th century. He was a...
Oriana Fallaci
The lioness is dead. She didn’t die as a teenage resistance fighter when, as a member of the Tuscan anti-fascist underground, she carried messages and explosives in Nazi Florence. She did...
China After 32 years
Thanks to a series of peculiar accidents, I was granted a visa and allowed to visit China under government supervision for 25 days in November of 1974. Nixon had opened the...
Honor Labor
If your teacher was like mine, she told you that Labor Day is our how we honor the American worker. True enough, but it is also a holiday that commemorates the...
Fiasco, by Thomas Ricks
On vacation, couldn't wait to get to Thomas Ricks Fiasco, acclaimed by many as the best writing to date on the Iraq war. Ricks is the Pentagon correspondent for the Washington...
Make Unskilled Immigrants Customers as Well as Workers
The New York Times ran an excellent article on immigrant assimilation last weekend. They framed the article as a debate between Harvard’s Cuban born Economist George Borjas and Berkeley’s Canadian-born David...
Harvard’s Loss: Farewell to Larry Summers
This week marks the end of Larry Summers Presidency of Harvard University and an appropriate moment to reflect on what a remarkable presidency it was.
I don't know Larry Summers well, although...
Heroes of the written word: David Remnick
There are a few writers whose work I have learned to seek out and read, regardless of the subject. Christopher Hitchens, our national pugilist and probably our Orwell, is one. The...
The Money Campaign: A Diary of the Alibris Open IPO
American stock markets have replaced commercial banks as our most important source of corporate financial capital. Today about 15,000 companies worth trillions of dollars sell shares to the public. Public companies...