The rejectionists

It’s awfully difficult for me to write more than three average-sized paragraphs. I’d rather limit myself to the bare gist, which often sounds cocky. I first wanted to call this project “The Opinionated Russian”. One conservative observer has written recently…

Merely d..d

Therefore Keynes is “defunct” only in the sense of “dead” (as we all are in the long run) — not “inactive” or “no longer in force or use”. There’s a great deal to be said // For being dead.

Defunct but not debunked

I think it was in the preface to the General Theory that Keynes put his famous maxim on “some defunct economist” whose ideas often hold in bondage the minds of “practical people”. Does anybody think JMK — or, rather, the…

Why bother inserting links?

What’s the point of inserting links nearly to every name and concept one mentions? It takes the fun out of the live writing. If the reader is intrigued, she can always run a Google search for what she’s curious about.…

Not a scourge of Moscow

As a side note, Ghengis Khan did not invade Kievan Rus (although three Russian princes lost a battle with his generals on the river Kalka); his posterity did, though. As for Moscow, it was a town of limited significance at that…

A natural ally?

Andrew Sullivan (it’s almost bad taste to link to his weblog — to do so is to assume the reader doesn’t know or remember, i.e., is a downright ignoramus) quotes an e-mail saying Note also that Kaiser Wilhelm was positive that…

Polanski

One way of choosing subjects for blogging – for lack of originality – is to follow the posts of some bright, opinionated, and outspoken blogger and pick on them. Why don’t we start with Eugene Volokh? I think the question of…

The State of the Arts under Communism

Brian Micklethwait comments on a piece by Alan Little, who is asking: “So why does art produced under Stalin not make me queasy whereas art produced under Hitler does?” Because it is simply not true that all works of art and letters produced…