Monthly Archives: February 2016

Against sideline-ism

Bernie Sanders should get the nomination (and then win the election) because he makes the clearest, most believable and trusted appeal to the self-interest of a strong majority of Americans. The trouble is that a lot of us don’t vote self-interest. We don’t vote for the candidate we really think will best represent us. A […]

Tourist development: Cape Cod and Mexico

Notes on tourist development from down where they really know how to do it. In the late 1980s, a friend wrote me a letter from Mexico. “Hey, you would love this place.” He and his wife were staying in rustic palapas (rudimentary straw-roofed open air structures) on the Mexican Caribbean beach in a place called […]

The argument vs. pleasure

In the war against drug addiction, the strategy that gets the most press is taking the drug itself out of play, mostly through law enforcement. But until we succeed in ridding the world of such potent, life-wrecking pleasures, there should be more emphasis on learning to live in a world that has such temptations in […]

Will capitalism survive “The Big Short”?

Is everyone seeing “The Big Short,” now playing in local theaters? Everyone should be. We should all be thinking and talking about it. It’s a high energy tragi-comedy about about the hit-and-run of the 2008 housing collapse—and about the sort of work that tends to produce that sort of disaster. There are some movies which, […]