2007 Essays - a listing

Just about everybody is creating lists of their own. Not to be outdone, I decided to give it a try. Nothing spectacular like the list of celebrities who seem to have had wardrobe malfunctions (either of their own volition or not), but this is a list of magazine essays that were deemed some of the best of 2007. This list is a selection among the many that David Brooks of the New York Times recommends. I read almost all of the essays over the last five days and every one of them is worth a read – even if you print it out and read it on your way home from work…

Roger Stone, Political Animal by Matt Labash in the Weekly Standard
"Some original, some borrowed, Stone's Rules address everything from fashion to food to how to screw people. And one of his favorite Stone's Rules is "Unless you can fake sincerity, you'll get nowhere in this business." He is honest about his dishonesty. "Politics with me isn't -theater," he admits. "It's performance art. Sometimes, for its own sake." "

The Evolution of an Investor by Michael Lewis in Portfolio
"Blaine’s training at Lehman consisted of a monthlong class, which focused mainly on overcoming customers' objections, and a close reading of the bible on how to peddle stocks to people you've never met: Successful Telephone Selling in the '80s, co-written by a Lehman managing director named Martin Shafiroff."
- A well-planned presentation creates a sense of urgency. If the prospect fails to act now, he will risk a loss of some sort.
- Speak with confidence and authority.
- The most important part of the presentation is the close.

The Story of a Snitch by Jeremy Kahn in the Atlantic
"He ambled past the massive Board of Education building, with its columns, and headed down North Avenue to Greenmount Cemetery. There he turned left, passing the abandoned row houses where the “corner boys” were already opening for business, hoping to find a junkie in need of a morning fix. Farther on, past still-shuttered hair salons and check-cashing outfits, he turned down East 24th toward Bartlett. Just after seven o’clock, he reached his front porch and called out for his girlfriend, Yolanda, to let him in. Then he sensed something behind him..."

Crime, Drugs, Welfare—and Other Good News by Peter Wehner and Yuval Levin in the Commentary Magazine
"Over the course of the preceding three decades, Bennett wrote, the United States had indeed experienced “substantial social regression.” About this, the data were unequivocal. Since 1960, there had been a more than 500-percent increase in violent crime; a more than 400-percent increase in out-of-wedlock births; almost a tripling in the percentage of children on welfare; a tripling of the teenage suicide rate; a doubling of the divorce rate; and a decline of more than 70 points in SAT scores. To Bennett, the conclusion was inescapable: “the forces of social decomposition [in America] are challenging—and in some instances overtaking—the forces of social composition.”

A death in the family: Politics and Power by Christopher Hitchens in the Vanity Fair
"Having volunteered for Iraq, Mark Daily was killed in January by an I.E.D. Dismayed to learn that his pro-war articles helped persuade Daily to enlist, the author measures his words against a family's grief and a young man's sacrifice."


There and Back Again - The soul of the commuter by Nick Paumgarten in the New Yorker
"The commuting paradox reflects the notion that many people, who are supposedly rational (according to classical economic theory at least), commute even though it makes them miserable."

Everybody Sucks: Gawker and the rage of the creative underclass by Vanessa Grigoriadis in the New York magazine
"Journalists are both haves and have-nots. They’re at the feast, but know they don’t really belong—they’re fighting for table scraps, essentially—and it could all fall apart at any moment. Success is not solid. Consider the Gawker mind-fuck at a time of rapid deterioration of our industry: Young print journalists are depressed over the state of the industry and their inability to locate challenging work or a job with health insurance."

The Immigration Charade by Christopher Jencks in the New York Review of Books
"Certain poll questions suggest that 69 percent of Americans want to deport illegal immigrants. Others indicate the true figure is only 14 percent. Conservatives, having learned from past failures, demand “enforcement first.” Employers, fearing bankruptcy, demand the legalization of the current immigrants first. Neither powerful group will budge."

Moral Psychology and the misunderstanding of Religion by Jonathan Haidt in The Edge
"Our brains, like other animal brains, are constantly trying to fine tune and speed up the central decision of all action: approach or avoid. We have affectively-valenced intuitive reactions to almost everything, particularly to morally relevant stimuli such as gossip or the evening news. Reasoning by its very nature is slow, playing out in seconds. Studies of everyday reasoning show that we usually use reason to search for evidence to support our initial judgment, which was made in milliseconds."

Creative Destruction's Reconstruction: Joseph Schumpeter Revisited by J. Bradford Delong in The Chronicle
"But as fascinating as his life was, it is Schumpeter's economics that sing to me, because he tried to set long-term economic growth — entrepreneurship and enterprise — at the top of the discipline's agenda.

Over the previous two and a half centuries, three different economic worldviews, in succession, reigned. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Adam Smith's was the key economic perspective, focusing on domestic and international trade and growth, the division of labor, the power of the market, and the minimal security of property and tolerable administration of justice that were needed to carry a country to prosperity. You could agree or you could disagree with Smith's conclusions and judgments, but his was the proper topical agenda.

The second reign was that of David Ricardo and Karl Marx. Their preoccupations dominated the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They worried most about the distribution of income and the laws of the market that made it so unequal. They were uneasy about the extraordinary pace of technological, organizational, and sociological change, and about whether an ungoverned market economy could produce a distribution of income — both relative and absolute — fit for a livable world. Again, you could agree or disagree with their judgments about trade, rent, capitalism, and machinery, but they asked the right questions.

The third reign was that of John Maynard Keynes. His agenda dominated the middle and late 20th century. Keynes's theories centered on what economists call Say's Law — the claim that except in truly exceptional conditions, production inevitably creates the demand to buy what is produced. Say's Law supposedly guaranteed something like full employment, except in truly exceptional conditions, if the market was allowed to work. Keynes argued that Say's Law was false in theory, but that the government could, if it acted skillfully, make it true in practice. Agree or disagree with his conclusions, Keynes was in any case right to focus on the central bank and the tax-and-spend government to supplement the market's somewhat-palsied invisible hand to achieve stable and full employment.

But there ought to have been a fourth reign, for there was a set of themes not sufficiently explored. That missing reign was Schumpeter's, for he had insights into the nature of markets and growth that escaped other observers. It is in that sense that the late 20th and early 21st centuries in economics ought to have been his: He asked the right questions for our era."

The Abduction of Opera by Heather Mac Donald in the City Journal
"Welcome to Regietheater (German for “director’s theater”), the style of opera direction now prevalent in Europe. Regietheater embodies the belief that a director’s interpretation of an opera is as important as what the composer intended, if not more so. By an odd coincidence, many cutting-edge directors working in Europe today just happen to discover the identical lode of sex, violence, and opportunity for hackneyed political “critique” in operas ranging from the early Baroque era to that of late Romanticism.

The Abduction from the Seraglio is a humorous tale of the capture of a group of Europeans by a Turkish pasha, who tries to win the love of one of them; Mozart lavishes joyful, driving rhythms—led by piccolo, triangle, and cymbals—on its Turkish themes, and adds a rich lode of elegant solos, particularly for tenor. Bieito transferred the Abduction to a contemporary Eastern European brothel and translated the dignified pasha of Mozart’s sadly irrelevant tale into the brothel’s sick pimp overseer. To give the production’s explicit sadomasochistic sex an even greater frisson of realism, Bieito hired real prostitutes off the streets of Berlin to perform onstage. Needless to say, neither the streetwalkers nor the whippings, masturbation, and transvestite bondage are anywhere suggested in Mozart’s opera. In one representative moment, the leading soprano, Constanze—who has already suffered digital violation during a poignant lament—is beaten and then held down and forced to watch as the pasha’s servant, Osmin, first forces a prostitute to perform fellatio on him and then gags the prostitute and slashes her to death. Osmin hands the prostitute’s trophy nipples to Constanze, who by then is retching."