There is a study getting some attention, suggesting that Harvard University Press leans strongly to the left: David Gordon, a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and Per Nilsson, a Swedish consultant, scrutinized—but did not always actually read—494 titles Harvard published between 2000 and 2010 in economics, history, philosophy, political science, and sociology. [...]
I skipped this one when putting together Today’s New Books post, and I’m starting to regret it. Economics is today among the most influential of all professions. Economists alter the course of economic affairs and deeply affect the lives of current and future generations. Yet, virtually alone among the major professions, economics lacks a body [...]
This editorial from the New York Times represents a fairly typical way of thinking about the digital transition. Can publishing and bookstores survive? Like discussions of the music industry, the presumption seems to be that if the corporations that monopolized market share before the transition can remain profitable, it is a good thing, and it [...]
The journal N+1 has a big statement, ‘by the editors’, about the question of why anti-elitism in the U.S. takes the shape of anti-cultural elitism. Immediately there is confusion about what exactly is meant by cultural elitism. They refer to three quite different phenomenon. One is disdain for those feted as cultural achievers–here they refer [...]
Bad for Democracy: How the Presidency Undermines the Power of the People was written during the Bush administration, when author Dana Nelson, like so many somewhere on the left of the political spectrum, was alarmed by the expansion of executive power and its arbitrary exercise. Yet as a new preface written just after the election [...]
Ever since it was announced in October of last year that Mohammed was the most popular name for baby boys in Britain, this fact has become the source of much hand-wringing about the ostensible Islamization of Europe. ’Liberal’ Bill Maher openly declared his fear that ‘the Western World (would) be taken over by Islam’. Now [...]
Elliot Weinberger, author of the widely circulated Foucauldian review of Decision Points in the London Review of Books, is brilliant here describing the peculiarities of US literary culture: The USA is possibly the only country on earth that doesn’t take nationalistic pride in its cultural producers. Everywhere else, literary writers — as presumably the most articulate [...]
Once again, we are hearing calls for a toning down of political discourse in the US. This summer, the trigger was the “March to Restore Sanity” called by Jon Stewart. This week, it is the tragic events in Arizona. The notion is the same, and it was wrong then, and it is wrong now. Calls [...]
Welcome to the inaugural book club event for Conducive Media’s Left Eye on Books. We will focus on books centered around current progressive issues and invite readers to share their thoughts and comments and join in on the discussion. Our subject is Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply by the renowned environmentalist [...]
When was the last time you read a left wing writer arguing for the violent overthrow of the United States government? I’m guessing it’s been a while. For ten years or so, non-violence has been the quasi-official position of the world left, epitomized by the World Social Forum’s banning armed groups from its meetings. The [...]
It is the virtue of The New Jim Crow to show the way mass incarceration and the drug war have come together to create a new system of racial control
It is simultaneously an unusual and well thought out ‘looking up’ ethnography ( a trend in anthropology to examine the thinking and culture of more powerful groups rather than more ‘traditional’ subjects of research), and a full blast political challenge to their role in American and global political and economic structures.
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