Partial Readings: You Are What You Wear

Partial Readings: You Are What You Wear

Partial Readings: You Are What You Wear

You Are What You Wear
Walter Benn Michaels: “What the neoliberal novel likes about cultural difference is that it sentimentalizes social conflict, imagining that what people really want is respect for their otherness rather than money for their mortgages. But they don’t. You get a better sense of the actual structure of American society from any of Bret Easton Ellis’s famous descriptions of what people are wearing.”

Two Pens Are Even Mightier…
Ethan Bronner on Amos Oz: “One way he marks the separation between the two forms of writing is by using two kinds of pen, one blue, the other black, that sit on his desk in the book-lined study of his home in this quiet desert town. ‘I never mix them up,’ he says of the pens. ‘One is to tell the government to go to hell. The other is to tell stories.'”

Team of Rivals
Robert Kuttner on Cass Sunstein: “How do we reconcile the massive government intervention of Roosevelt’s Second Bill of Rights with the minimalism of Nudge? Are we for large-scale government intervention, or not? Well, sometimes we are, sometimes not…There is a whole team of rivals inside Cass Sunstein’s head.”

Another Reason Why the Young Should Rule
A Rasmussen report found that while 53 percent of U.S. adults favor capitalism, those under the age of 30 “are essentially evenly divided: 37% prefer capitalism, 33% socialism, and 30% are undecided.”

The Caudillo’s End
Alvaro Vargas Llosa on Peru’s former President Alberto Fujimori: “In many ways, the history of Latin America has been one succession of strongmen…Fujimori’s sentence sends the message that that tradition does not have to be honored forever.”