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Crisis Cranks  

Economists Posner and Weyl’s book Radical Markets attempts to make sense of the current moment and propose a way out, but their unorthodox proposals come up short.









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Balancing Act  

If two recent analyses of populism agree on one thing, it’s that democracy and capitalism have fallen out of balance. Less clear is how—or whether—the truce between them should be restored.











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Hollinghurst’s Ghosts  

The Sparsholt Affair by Alan Hollinghurst Knopf, 2018, 432 pp. [contentblock id=break] Keith Vaughan, “Drawing of a seated male nude,” 1949 (The estate of Keith Vaughan) If a novel gains its reader’s regard but not her affection, does she like …



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Improbable Outcomes  

Some Trick: Thirteen Stories by Helen DeWitt New Directions, 2018, 224 pp.   Some Trick is Helen DeWitt’s third book. That is to say, her third published book. She has written dozens of others that haven’t made it from her …



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Trickle-Down Urbanism  

For all his differences with his predecessor, New York City mayor Bill de Blasio has inherited the same fundamental dilemmas that faced Michael Bloomberg—and much of the billionaire’s approach to resolving them.



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Edifices of Empire  

Capitalism, from its very beginning, was twinned with racism. Two books describe how these two forces emerged together, at the same moment in the unfolding of Western political economy.