Category Archives: Top Posts

Posts that got a lot of readers

Secret, Illegal Music

It was sort of like buying drugs:  to get this book you had to go into an alley, and pay cash, or go back behind a legit music store, where the clerk furtively snuck you a copy; or grab it out of the trunk of some guy’s car. Maybe you had a teacher who sold […]

The Gold Standard of Lunacy

The gold standard is coming back in a a big way. Not only do a number of recently elected congressman and Senators favor a return to the gold standard: the President of the World Bank recently initiated a conversation about returning to gold, and the New York Times recently ran an editorial by James Grant […]

Attention and Information

There is no more information than there ever was, there’s just more surplus attention

Evidence and Scarcity

As digital technology expands, our whole relationship to presenting evidence will have to change. Other disciplines roll their eyes at historians for having  too many examples. A lit scholar might read a historical article and think “he had me at five: the forty five examples that followed  didn’t accomplish a damn thing.” And even history […]