Tag: late 1960s
How the Recession Doomers Got the U.S. Economy So Wrong
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In 2022, it was a matter of conventional and nearly universal wisdom that the 2023 economy would be a nightmare.
Last October, a Bloomberg economic model said that the odds of a U.S. recession this year were 100 percent. No, not 99.99 percent, as in the odds that you’ll avoid
The End of German Exceptionalism
Asked what came to her mind when thinking about Germany, former Chancellor Angela Merkel once said, “I think of airtight windows. No other country can build as airtight and as beautiful windows.”
With its history tainted, post-1945 Germany looked to its economy for a positive conception of itself. The goods Germany produced, such as those quality windows, allowed politicians to celebrate the country as an “export world champion.” Germany Inc., was a well-oiled capitalist-corporatist ensemble. Trade-union leaders and CEOs
Lauren Groff: Why Read Literary Biography?
What strange beasts literary biographies are, how mixed their reasons for existing. The desire to read one must come from admiration for the writer’s work, but a literary biographer’s central concern isn’t a writer’s work; it’s the writer’s life. And, though the gods of capitalism may grumble at my saying this, an artist’s work and life are radically separate things. The art comes alive only when it meets another mind, like desert seeds that wait patiently until a freak rainfall
Fintan O’Toole’s Passionate, Angry, Slyly Humorous History of Ireland
Early in the pages of We Don’t Know Ourselves, Fintan O’Toole’s masterful “personal history” of modern Ireland, I came upon a moment in O’Toole’s life that intersected unexpectedly with my own. The date was Tuesday, March 8, 1966. In a Dublin bedroom in the chill dark of early morning—1:31 a.m. exactly—O’Toole’s mother, given to premonitions, awoke and exclaimed, “God, what was that?” Then came the sound of a distant explosion.
I, too, heard the explosion. My American family