Here is a link to a beautiful and moving piece of writing in today's New York Times . Here is the person who wrote it: Almudena Gra...

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” -- George Orwell

Thomas Jefferson Scott, artist, architect and designer, was fond of quoting Hippocrates' observation that life is short but art is long....

Much current commentary tends to describe the Tea Party phenomenon as just a bit more extreme than mainstream Republicanism, but within the ...

There is a story, thought to be of Cherokee origin, quoted in today's New York Times . It goes like this: A girl is troubled by a rec...

Not long ago, economic historian Brad Delong published some snippets of information for students in one of his courses. One snippet was a qu...

Actually, I'm still a bit unsure as to whether Derp is just a noun, or whether it can be a verb as well. What is a derp? Economist Noa...

Churchill saw Tyranny as the foe. So who were the tyrants? Economic historian Brad DeLong has a very interesting blog post today on the ...

Today's New York Times web site posted a very interesting analysis of the electoral college by Nate Silver on his blog, Five Thirty-Eig...

Courage comes in many guises. Here , in a story from Today's New York Times , is one of the most powerful forms of courage. I don'...

My wife is from Texas. When I was stationed in a distant location, she would write home and ask for a "care package" of essentials...

There is a specter haunting America. Like many apparitions, it is also sometimes an object of religious devotion. It is the specter of gre...

"There are three kinds of men. The one that learns by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the ...

“The past is never dead. It's not even past.”       William Faulkner , Requiem for a Nun “For I have known t...

For years I have reflected that many of our institutions would work better if they were run like the Navy. I don't mean by that to hav...

"When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?" John Maynard Keynes

"There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that if you just legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, that the...

I had a conversation last evening with a Korean War veteran. The veteran shared a thought from an earlier time: "If Fascism comes here,...

Both recent political conventions had a lot to say about the "middle class."  As I listened to the speeches, I realized I don...

Last May I came across a blog titled Middle Class Political Economist .  The post that caught my eye was an examination of over representati...