News from financial industry
A good book, recent winner of the National Book Award for non-fiction, the author is Tom Zoellner and the subtitle is The Revolt that Ended Slavery in the British Empire. Here is one excerpt about Jamaica, the central theater for the book: Among the staple crop civilizations of the nineteenth century, Jamaica was noteworthy for […]
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1. Devaki Jain, The Brass Notebook. What is it like to grow up in a Tamil Brahmin family, be molested by relatives and Nobel Prize winners, and go on to be an economist? Short and extremely readable. The personal tale is very charming, the politics (Nyerere and Castro, never repudiated) are not. 2. Walter Isaacson, […]
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In the early 1930s, so the story goes, Albert Einstein was in Hollywood, entertaining a visit by a friend, the comedian Charlie Chaplin. They were enjoying some tarts baked by Elsa Einstein and idly chatting when Einstein’s son turned to Chaplin. “You are popular,” he said, “because you are understood by the masses. On the […]
The post The nature of fame appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the summary: She joined Tyler to discuss what caused the Bronze Age Collapse, how well we understand the level of ancient technologies, what archaeologists may learn from the discovery of more than a hundred coffins at the site of Saqqara, how far the Vikings […]
The post My Conversation with Sarah Parcak, space archaeologist and Egypt lover appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
I will be doing a Conversation with Daniel, who is a professor of political science at Harvard and one of the world’s leading experts on the history of regulation and also the FDA. Here is part of his bio: Professor Carpenter’s previous scholarship on regulation and government organizations appears in Reputation and Power: Organizational Image […]
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1. Cat Jarman, River Kings: A New History of the Vikings from Scandinavia to the Silk Roads. An excellent history of what the title claims, starting from an archaeological point of view and incorporating many of the latest discoveries. The book is especially good at telling the reader how we know what we know about […]
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That is a Substack essay from Matt Yglesias, and open source at that. Excerpt, using quotation marks rather than forcing further indents on the segment: “To me, there’s something attractive about the “constitutional copyright” idea of returning to the 1790 Copyright Act rule. But there’s also something attractive about the idea of an author retaining […]
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Meanwhile in the non-ideological regions of the culture the deepening of decadence seems assured. The pandemic has (further) weakened every cultural institution that relies on physical presence, spontaneity and localized or mid-sized audiences, which means basically all of them except the “content” industry, the ever-expanding realm of Peak TV. The spirit of Mustapha Mond presides over the […]
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1. Kevin Donnelly, Adolphe Quetelet, Social Physics, & the Average Men of Science, 1796-1874. The Belgian Quetelet was one of the pioneers of applying statistics to the social sciences, and he had a long-running and fascinating career obsessed with astronomy, crime, opera, jokes, and short essays, among many other things. He developed the notion of […]
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The last chat was with Brian Armstrong about bitcoin, this one started with Isaac Newton and bit coins (really). Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the CWTeam summary: Patricia Fara is a historian of science at Cambridge University and well-known for her writings on women in science. Her forthcoming book, Life After Gravity: […]
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