. While the general media roll out of Paul Ryan as VP pick focuses on the GOP’s chosen narrative of Ryan as “smart” and “courageous” thinker about budgetary and Medicare matters, many more careful economists, like Paul Krugman, are offering the necessary corrective in even that area. Krugman reminds us that Ryan has never crunched the numbers, […]
Politics and Art
Vladimir Nabokov did not like the novel of ideas. Artists often have their idiosyncratic dislikes, contrary expressions of the unique aesthetic vision that drives their own work. Particularly, Nabokov did not like the work of those monuments of great-idea novels, Dostoyevsky and Mann, though there is no reason his distaste should have excluded the novels […]
The Open Mind VII – the One and the Many
All previous rounds in this series can be found at the right of the horizontal drop-down menu above. Think of this as a consideration, inviting more consideration, based less on a claim than on a question: what is the proper relationship between the one and the many? “Proper” here might refer to ethics, logic, practicability. […]