You've probably already heard the grim news: The economy shed another 190,000 jobs last month, driving the unemployment rate up to 10.2 percent (though the job-loss total wasn't so far out of line with what economists expected). But here's the number I'm seizing on: 5.594 million.
In the latest issue of Grant's Interest Rate Observer (not online), the venerable James Grant, with a big assist from his colleague Dan Gertner, makes the case that expectations of a jobless recovery are seriously misplaced, and that the current recovery will end up looking a lot more like the "jobful" recoveries that preceded the 1991 and 2001 recessions/recoveries.
In P.G. Wodehouse's finest novel, The Code of the Woosters, there appears the following insight:
She was trying to give the boyfriend a build-up, and, like all girls, was overdoing it. I've noticed the same thing in young wives, when they are trying to kid you that young Herbert or George or whatever the name may be has hidden depths which the vapid and irreflective observer might overlook...
Living in Rwanda After the Genocide By Jean Hatzfeld (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 242 pp., $25)
The Antelope’s Strategy:
Killing Neighbors: Webs of Violence in Rwanda By Lee Ann Fujii (Cornell University Press, 212 pp., $29.95)
After Genocide: Transitional Justice, Post- Conflict Reconstruction and Reconciliation in Rwanda and Beyond Edited by Phil Clark and Zachary D. Kaufman (Columbia University Press, 399 pp., $50)
A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster By Rebecca Solnit (Viking, 353 pp., $27.95)
I.
The subject of catastrophe invites the high eloquence of writers, the explanatory power of historians, and the deepest empathy of ordinary people. But the aftermath of catastrophe--that is not yet a subject to which many people kindle. Most of us prefer to back away from the scene of torment, with its inconsolable survivors and its insoluble problems. The survivors, though, cannot back away. They continue to live where the others died. Jean Améry, tortured at Auschwitz, wrote powerfully about the world’s readiness to isolate the survivor, who is unable to join in “the peace chorus all around him, which cheerfully proposes: not backward let us look but forward, to a better, common future.”
I am loathe to think that one solution to the problem of the credibility of bankers and the banking system is prison. Yes, I know Bernie Madoff is in prison and there are a few more Ponzi schemers who will join him there. But these are not the financiers who destroyed the American financial system basically on a lark, using their skills of ingenuity and deception without considering either the moral or legal constraints on their behavior.
A headline in Friday's Financial Times shouts out at me: "More prison sentences may renew financial credibility." And a sub-head: "There are precious few financiers behind bars." You know I don't much like the FT on foreign policy matters, and on Israel it borders on—no, it crosses the lines of—the anti-semitic. But it is quite reliable on financial matters. Moreover, it is Gillian Tell, a very sound observer of banks and bankers, who has put forward the idea.
Jeffrey Herf is one of the pre-eminent intellectual historians of totalitarianism. He is a frequent contributor to The New Republic. See, for example, his last few contributions here, here, and here. You can also find a TNR review of one of his books, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys, here.
In the current issue of The American Interest, Herf makes a highly convincing argument that radical Islam today is in fact a totalitarian movement with totalitarian ideology and totalitarian methods. No, it is not Nazism or Communism. And, though its ideas are rather more primitive (my word, not his) than either of the reigning doctrines of the twentieth century and though its weapons are also more primitive, it partakes of contemporary methods--and, increasingly, technological methods--in the mobilization of masses of people.
Please read this essay and read it carefully...
In today's New York Observer, Felix Gillette has a thorough postmortem on "The Wanted," the short-lived and controversial NBC News show I wrote about earlier this month, in my piece about the case of Leopold Munyakazi, a former Goucher College professor accused of participating in the Rwa
From the NY Observer Jason Horowitz's profile of a trio of New York Democratic consultants, one of whom is Josh Isay:
The Evolution of God
By Robert Wright
(Little, Brown, 567 pp., $25.99)
I.
The News & Observer reports that Rielle Hunter showed up at the federal courthouse in Raleigh, North Carolina, today to speak the grand jury investigating whether John Edwards misused campaign funds to buy her silence about their affair. Who knows what Hunter told the grand jury, but it's curious she brought her 18-month-old daughter with her.
--Jason Zengerle
On Tuesday afternoon I attended a health reform rally at Chicago’s Federal Plaza. (Readers should know that I attended in the capacity of a supporter/observer, and am not a fully detached reporter covering this one.) The event included impressive headliners: Representative Jan Schakowsky, Governor Pat Quinn, County Board President Todd Stroger, and many others. Wendell Potter, the former Cigna publicity executive, also spoke.
Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think By Brian Wansink (Bantam, 276 pp., $25)
Messianism, Zionism, and Jewish Religious Radicalism
By Aviezer Ravitzky. Translated by Michael Swirsky and Jonathan Chipman
(University of Chicago Press, 303 pp., $17.95)
When Major League Baseball let George Steinbrenner resume active ownership of the New York Yankees after his celebrated two-and-a-half-year banishment in 1993, it was like Commissioner Gordon telling Batman that the Joker had once again escaped from prison: it was only a matter of time before Gotham would be held hostage to some new outlandish threat. True to form, Steinbrenner soon began making noises about moving the Bronx Bombers out of the Bronx home where they've been for seventy-two years.
