Nathan Williams

Happy Repeal Day! Have a drink.

... I'm not a target of the latest and greatest government anti-sex initiative.

Now the government is targeting unmarried adults up to age 29 as part of its abstinence-only programs, which include millions of dollars in federal money that will be available to the states under revised federal grant guidelines for 2007.

Today alphacygni and I spent a nice afternoon at the Bookmill. I picked up a paperback copy of The Brewmaster's Table, which is a book that I've been saying for at least a year that I'm surprised I don't already own. After I got home, though, I thought the book looked odd, and indeed, they've changed the cover from the hardback to the paperback.

Hardback:


Paperback:


I know that there are lots of reasons to change the cover of a book. I really hope that one of the reasons was not "The book will sell better without a black man on the cover".

[Poll #503391]

I just started reading The Price of Loyalty. While I want to be sympathetic to the generally negative portrayal of the Bush administration, and I understand that the author has many reasons to be grateful to Paul O'Neill, his primary source, the first chapter is entirely too positive about the guy. It spins him as a complete Renaissance man of corporate and government policy; a free thinker and seeker of solutions outside the usual left-right cycle; public-interested, a budget hawk, an environmentalist, and an all-around good guy. It's being laid on far too thickly. I'm sure there are negative things that have been left out.

It's hard to take the author seriously when he's spending his first pages performing literary fellatio on the main character.

This evening I went to Harvard Square to see an event on Paul Krugman's book tour, for his new book The Great Unraveling. The form of the event was an interview by Christopher Lydon (formerly of The Connection). It went pretty well; it was at the First Parish Church, which was totally packed (I'd estimate 650 people) and somewhat stifling in tonight's heat and humidity.

Mr. Krugman is not as polished at public speaking as some people, and he stumbled a bit, and from my balcony seat it was hard to see him unless I stood up. The interview and the Q&A that followed were mostly stuff that should sound familiar to any regular reader of his work; it was all on current politics rather than economics. It's sensible, since it's the reason why he's become a minor celebrity outside of the world of economics, but I would love to hear something more meaty and technical. There was one good question, wondering about the role that opening foreign markets to US corporations played in setting the administration's foreign policy; his response was that there doesn't seem to be any Grand Corporate Conspiracy, but that individual corporations with the ear of the administration are having influence as individuals. I think the questioner was fishing for some more generic anti-corporate propaganda, and was disappointed by not getting it.

(On the way down from the balcony I was spotted by deberg (you should read electdeberg if you don't already)).

About a sixth of the crowd stuck around to have books signed. Unfortunately, he was not really sociable throughout this process, and was just signing books as quickly as possible. I had wanted to ask him what he considered good resources for learning basic economics (given that I can't just sign up for 14.01), but I didn't get the chance.

( He's not really aware of me, is he? )

Today is the 57th anniversary of the Trinity test, the first detonation of a nuclear device. The detonation occured at 5:29:45am Mountain War Time (6 hours off GMT).