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After Saving The City, I thought it would be interesting to read about the collapse of 2008 and the failure of Shearson. Instead, I accidentally grabbed this well-written book about the Lehman Brothers’s decision to sell itself to American Express in 1983. This is a nicely-written take of feudal revolt in a staid Wall Street institution, with lots of infighting between bankers and traders. A good read, but irrelevant to the questions I wanted to pursue.

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Revisited this fine book on a day when, once again, the world’s financial machinery appeared to be breaking down. A significant difference now is that the people in charge are fools and poltroons, some of them actively seeking to end civilization.

Here’s what I wrote before:

A fascinating and detailed study of the financial crisis that struck London in 1914 and engulfed the world. World Trade in 1914 was highly globalized – far more so than at any time before, and world trade only surpassed this mark recently. Back then, the Pound Sterling was the international reference currency, all major...

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This memoir by David Chang. the chef behind Momofuku, is dominated by Chang’s chronic and nearly unmanageable depression. A problem is that Chang is a very thoughtful fellow with some very intriguing ideas about food, and these keep being pushed to the side as he writes about the experience of being depressed. It’s hard to find a narrative shape to depression, and Chang’s insights on the topic are limited.

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A portrait of U.S. Figure Skating at the end of the 20th century, the years after Harding/Kerrigan and just before the Salt Lake City Olympics made the old, corrupt 6-point scoring system insupportable. The early chapters have a certain air of John McPhee with quick cuts and interesting pacing. Later, as the World Championships approach, the book veers more closely to a sports exposé, and ultimately the author herself is declared persona non grata by the figure skating officials. Her employer, The Washington Post, fought hard for her, and her numerous colleagues rallied behind her; the past is a foreign ...

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We know that some things are connected. For example, Mark Bernstein is the author of the weblog that you are reading. (And that sentence connects in a different way to the opening of Italo Calvino’s if on a winter night a traveller.) That some things are connected to other things cannot be denied, but are these connections exceptional and instrumental, or are they ubiquitous? As a rule, I find that people who believe in ubiquitous connection embrace tools like Tinderbox, while those who disagree do not.

Leibniz (1646-1716) remains a central figure in the philosophical question of connectionism. Postulating that G...

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A beautifully-produced and evocative book by an Alsatian farm boy who became a famous New York fine dining chef. The book combines two separate books. The first is a nice cookbook about traditional foods in Alsace with an emphasis on home cooking. The second is an ambitious cookbook that takes ideas from traditional dishes and adds elegant ingredients and modernist technique. It makes for good reading.

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I’ve been reading and watching a lot of material on figure skating to prepare for seeing the Worlds next week, and this was a pleasant part of that immersion. Alina Adams, a sports television researcher, was approached to do a mystery about the figure skating world. Naturally, the investigator in this PI procedural is Rebecca “Bex” Levy, a TV researcher covering the Nationals. After a controversial ruling, an Italian judge is found dead under suspicious circumstances, and Bex’s loathsome producer is eager to have her deliver the answer in time for the closing gala.

One oddity here is that Murder On Ice ...

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An engaging, informal treatment of the natural history of the owl. People like owls, because owls look like people. (In some places, people mistrust owls for the same reason, thinking that they prophecy death and disaster.) They’re fascinating creatures with some curious habits; Burrowing Owls, for example, like to decorate their burrows with pretty little things. Some owls keep blind snakes as pets in order to help clean their nest. Some male Snowy Owls summer in the arctic and then, when the cold really sets in, fly even further North to hunt ducks and geese.

We’re learning a lot from som...