Lately I've read, as you probably did too, about the profits gained by Wall Street firms through "flash trades" executed on the basis of information received thirty milliseconds before being shown to traders generally. There is also a lot about Twitter in the news: its hacking by the enemies of a Georgian professor, its possible use by NFL players during games. Something I did not learn from the newspaper—I had to be told by a friend—was that the Marxist political scientist Giovanni Arrighi had died, on June 18 of this year. There was no obituary in the Times, any more than there had ever been reviews of Arrighi's books while he lived. Read More

One morning earlier this year, my friend Dot and I drove north out of the city. We were taking her dog for a walk. Our destination wasn't far—a beach near Balmedie, eight or so miles from the northeast Scottish city of Aberdeen, a stretch of sand dunes and sparse grass between fields and sea. It was bright and gusty and, although the day before midsummer, chilly.

We drove on past Balmedie and turned onto a path where a sign indicated that the area was protected by a security firm. Ignoring the sign, we drove slowly between high, blowing arrases of grasses and cow parsley, past an empty mansion house, past empty lawns and ponds and landscaped gardens. Another sign stuck incongruously into a flowerbed bore two words, ‘Trump International.' The whole place was empty. Only a Land Rover parked beside what once must have been a farm building indicated human presence. On the rustic wall hung a plaque bearing a grandiose coat of arms. I got out of the car to read the motto but there wasn't one. Instead there was one word: Trump. Read More

How much money does a writer need? In New York, a young writer can get by on $25,000, give or take $5,000, depending on thriftiness. A slightly older younger writer—a 30-year-old—will need another $10,000 to keep up appearances. But that's New York. There are parts of this country where a person can live on twelve or thirteen thousand a year—figures so small they can be written out. Of course it depends. Read More

In New York, they saved.

They saved on orange juice, sliced bread, they saved on coffee. On movies, magazines, museum admission (on Friday nights). Train fare, subway fare, their apartment out in Queens. It was a principle, of sorts, and they stuck to it. Mark and Sasha lived on the 7 train that year and when they got out, out in Queens, Mark would follow Sasha like a little boy as she checked the prices at the Korean grocers, and cross-checked them, so they could save on fruits and vegetables and little Korean treats. They saved on clothes. Read More

Pt. 1: Currency Crosses

n+1: Would you like something?

HFM: Just a water.

n+1: Bottled water? It's on me.

HFM: Just tap water, thank you.

n+1: No, really, it's on me.

HFM: Thanks, I'm OK.

n+1: All right, let's get to it. Is America now a Third World country?

HFM: No, we're a First World country with a weak currency. From time to time, the dollar's been very weak; from time to time, it's very strong; and unfortunately what tends to happen is people tend to just extrapolate. But in reality, over the very very long term, currency processes tend to be fairly stable and mean-reverting. So the dollar's very weak today, but that's no reason to believe the dollar's going to be weak forever or that, because it's weak today, it's going to get dramatically weaker tomorrow.

As hockey fans emerge from the long slumber of summer into the new NHL season (exciting! fast-paced! shootouts!), they will find that much has changed. There are new, tighter-fitting uniforms that supposedly make it harder for opponents to pull your jersey over your head when you're fighting. The Canadian dollar, for the first time ever, overcame its American counterpart. And the second post-lockout off-season was unprecedented in its activity. Buffalo and New Jersey now lie in ruins; the New York Rangers are being picked to win the East; and everyone but everyone is mad at Edmonton.

The pathos of the NHL off-season is second to none. Baseball players switch teams as often, but baseball is played in warm, relatively pleasant places—Baltimore, San Diego, Seattle. There are two teams in sunny Los Angeles and two in the lovely Bay Area. Whereas here are some places a hockey player might wind up: Ottawa, Buffalo, Edmonton. To make matters worse, these depressing destinations often lie at the end of a long, long road. Because hockey players mature early, and because the places where hockey is played are sparsely settled, the young aspirant makes a fateful choice at the tender age of, usually, 14: if he wants to keep improving his game, he must leave his home and his family and travel to a small city in Canada or the northern US to play in the so-called junior leagues. There he will live with a host family, eat dinner with them, go to school, and, of course, dream of being drafted by the NHL. Read More

To get to Jones Beach via public transport, you have to do one of those dances whose fancy footwork is peculiar to New York: a train to a train to a bus. For a single passenger, this three-step mambo is crazy enough; and so imagine adding to it beach chairs, towels, coolers, blankets, umbrellas, swimmies, toys—to say nothing of children—for a party of caravan length that is something out of One Thousand and One Nights.

Why, one might ask, would anyone do such a thing? Especially when, at the end of the day, you have to turn around and do it all over again?

The short answer is because Jones Beach is as close as one can get to "making it" in three hours' travel. Sure, the place is beautiful, its vistas the sort that would have been snapped up by private developers had the land not been placed in the public trust. But it is not only the beach's beauty that distinguishes it. Unlike most public projects, the State of New York—thanks to the lobbying of Robert Moses—spared no expense building the 2,400-acre spread of beach. The result is intentionally grand: Art Deco bathhouses built from Ohio sandstone and Barbizon brick, pristine dunes hand-planted with beach grass to prevent erosion, and, most dramatically, the water tower, an Italianate obelisk that rises majestically from the beach's infinite flatness, for an effect that, even from miles away, imparts upon visitors a sense of arrival. Read More

Maureen Dowd. Are Men Necessary? When Sexes Collide. Putnam. November 2005.

Caitlin Flanagan. To Hell with All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife. Little, Brown & Company. April 2006.

Linda R. Hirshman. Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World. Viking. June 2006.

Laura Kipnis. Against Love: A Polemic. Pantheon. August 2003. 

In Kentucky, a rapture is near. It's 9:16 p.m., Tuesday, April 3, 2007. A dark and stormy night in the Commonwealth. Tornado warnings, warm air colliding with cool air, pavilions of cloud blotting out moonlight. A condo complex is struck by lightning in Louisville. Despite the turbulent skies, a twin-engine Cessna owned by Walter D. Yeager of Coleman, Michigan departed Gainesville, Florida at 9:00. A charter flight headed toward Kentucky airspace.

December 13, 2006

Bruce Robbins replies to Walter Benn Michaels [see Michaels's letter below]:

The legacy of racism, Walter Benn Michaels concedes, has produced disproportionate poverty among blacks in America. But doing something to compensate for that legacy would do nothing whatsoever to aid the struggle for economic equality. "We'd just have more poor whites and Asians."