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New Orleans, Louisiana, United States
Admire John McPhee, Bill Bryson, David Remnick, Thomas Merton, Richard Rohr and James Martin (and most open and curious minds)

31.5.15

History Books

14 History Books That Will Change Your Life

From period dramas to museums and re-enactments, history is a popular commodity in our cultural consciousness. There is sometimes the misconception that history is dry, boring and even irrelevant, when often it teaches us plenty about ourselves. We check out 14 history books that will change your life.

The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1928-1968 | Andrew Sarris

Written by renowned critic Andrew Sarris, The American Cinemawas the foremost book on film criticism when it was first published in 1968 and still remains one of the most renowned books on the history of Hollywood. It is both extensive and compact, giving a good overview for those with a passing interest in cinema but with enough depth and auteur theory auteur theory for serious cinephiles and filmmakers alike.

Art in Time: A World History of Styles and Movements | Gauvin A. Bailey, Stella Paul, Alistair Rider, Matthew P. McElway

Art in Time explores 150 of the most significant movements and styles in worldwide art-history from Greek antiquity through to the recent artistic developments of the 21st century. While this is a solid crash course in artistic styles, it is equally useful for putting these artistic movements in their historical, political and social context. Art is, and always has been, for the people, and Art In Time shows that this has always been the case.

The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World | Niall Ferguson

Harvard professor and well-known TV historian Niall Ferguson's tenth book charts the history of money, credit and banking. The Ascent of Money looks at how the use of money progressed and changed over time, and importantly, what effects it had on society. With the recent and ongoing economic crash, this book puts economic theory into a context that helps us to better understand the status of money in the world.

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West | Dee Brown

Now a major motion picture, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is one of the most prominent works about the history of native Americans during the late 19th century. Told from the perspective of native Americans, the book particularly focuses on the years 1860-1890, a time when white Americans pushed ever westward and the Indians lost their land. An important book showing a shift from traditional Eurocentric histories of the world.

Life of the British Home: An Architectural History | Edward Denison

An architectural history with a difference. Where most books on architecture examine 'great' buildings such as churches, town halls and palaces, Life of the British Home looks mostly at the home of the common man to give an insight of how our lifestyles have changed over time. With its detailed pictures and floor plans, it often highlights that modern living isn't necessarily so bad after all.

Lives of the Artists | Giorgio Vasari

A notable painter in Renaissance Italy, Giorgio Vasari's tome Lives of the Artists is regarded as being the first important and influential book on art history. Renaissance art remains as one of the most enduringly popular areas of interest in the art world. The book profiles a series of artists from the Italian Renaissance and shows both how artistic style developed over the period and tales of how the artists really lived. A must-read for fans of art, the Renaissance and celebrity.

The Making of the Middle Ages | R. W. Southern

The Middle Ages are a period of history that is often overlooked by popular audiences. The Making of the Middle Ages inspired a new wave of interest in the period after its publication in 1993. While it covers the major events from the 10th to 13th centuries, it is the smaller, more obscure stories that enable this book to capture the imaginations of so many.

The New Biographical Dictionary of Film | David Thomson

Thomson's Biographical Dictionary of Film is a must-have for anyone with an interest in cinema. Often cited as a favorite book by film critics, the book details historical and contemporary actors, directors, producers, screenwriters and cameramen, with each new edition adding to this impressive selection. Thomson makes the film world come alive in a way that shows his real love for the medium and each of his critical essays provides insight behind the camera.

The Origin of Species | Charles Darwin

The first book that comes to mind when thinking of natural history, and possibly one of the most revolutionary books ever to have been printed, The Origin of Species was the first major work to posit the theories of natural selection and evolution. The research and detail that went into the work is remarkable and the written style allows the natural history of our world to be accessible to all.

A People's History of the United States | Howard Zinn

Much of American history is very much written from the perspective of 'great men', the leaders of society. Zinn's A People's History of the United States is a seminal work in American social history, telling the stories of the laymen and women that have largely been ignored prior to the book's publication. The histories explored also cast a different view upon American history as a whole, resulting in the revision of many prescribed 'truths' in the field.

A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium | Chris Harman

Most people throughout time have not been kings, queens, or social elites. Recommended by fellow 'history from below' historianHoward ZinnA People's History of the World gives a counter-history to the usual 'battles and dates' style that has long dominated popular understanding of the subject. The book examines the rise and fall of different societies across the world dating back to pre-written history. Indispensable reading for those who want to know about world history and those with an interest in societal change.

Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town | Mary Beard

In Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town, Britain's best known classicist Mary Beard uses ancient relics and archaeological evidence to bring life to the long-buried Roman town. The history of the city has long interested scholars and the public, but for obvious reasons has often eluded deep investigation and knowledge. Covering everything from market stalls to government, the humdrum to the thrilling, Beard gives an immersive account of life in a lost city.

The Story of Art | E.H. Gombrich

The Story of Art is one of the most famous and best selling books on the history of art. Gombrich's clear writing style and intelligent discussions on art coupled with the new edition's redesign with 376 color and 64 black and white illustrations makes this one of the most attractive art books available. It is sure to inspire and educate even those with just a passing interest in art history.

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany | William L. Shirer

Winner of a National Book Award and a bestseller in the US and Europe, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich tells the history of Nazi Germany like no other. Shirer gained access to secret and previously unseen documents and diaries to comprehensively tell the story of Hitler's regime from 1920 to 1945. Having provoked much scholarly and popular debate, the book continues to enlighten readers about one of the most provocative periods in world history.

Books

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The Open

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Books

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David McCullough CreditIllustration by Jillian Tamaki
The author, most recently, of “The Wright Brothers” originally planned to write fiction. “Again and again come vivid reminders that the truth often is not only stranger than fiction, but far more remarkable as a story.”
What books are currently on your night stand?
Two gifts from two valued friends: “The Swerve,” by Stephen Greenblatt, given to me by Morley Safer, and Winston Churchill’s delightful “Painting as a Pastime,” a gift from my former editor Michael Korda.
Who are your three favorite novelists of all time?
Anthony Trollope, Willa Cather and Wallace Stegner.
Whom do you consider the best writers — novelists, essayists, critics, journalists, poets — working today?
Alan Furst, Penelope Lively, Ruth Rendell, David Brooks, Thomas Friedman, Peggy Noonan, Maureen Dowd, Michiko Kakutani and Billy Collins.
Which books by contemporary historians — academic or amateur — do you most admire?
There’s never been a time such as now when so many first-rate writers are writing history and biography, and I read and admire the work of nearly all. To name only a few books would require omitting many too many I have no wish to bypass.
What are your favorite presidential biographies?
Dumas Malone’s multivolume life of Thomas Jefferson and Robert Sherwood’s “Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History.”
When you wrote your first book, on the Johnstown flood, did you have a model in mind, a kind of storytelling you admired?
Walter Lord’s “A Night to Remember,” about the sinking of the Titanic, was the best book about a disaster I had ever read. But in an odd way I think I was more influenced at the time by the novels of Conrad Richter, and particularly his Ohio trilogy, “The Trees,” “The Fields” and “The Town,” in the extremely skillful way he evoked a sense of place.
You studied English at Yale with some impressive writers, including Robert Penn Warren, John Hersey and Thornton Wilder. Who taught you the most about writing at college, and what did you learn?
The presence on campus of such literary giants as Penn Warren, Hersey and Wilder was inspiring in the extreme, but greater for me was the influence of the extraordinary lectures on architecture by the incomparable Vincent Scully, who taught us all to see as never before. Wasn’t it Dickens who said, “Make me see”?
You originally planned to write fiction? What made you decide to give it up? Do you feel you have a novel in you yet?
I wanted to be a writer, and that’s what I wound up being. The difference is, I write about real people, and in telling their stories, I’m not free to play around with facts or make things up. And again and again come vivid reminders that the truth often is not only stranger than fiction, but far more remarkable as a story. Would any novelist dare have John Adams and Thomas Jefferson die on the same day and have that day be the Fourth of July? Still, I don’t rule out having a go at a novel one of these days.
Who is your favorite fictional hero or heroine?
Inspector Reginald Wexford in the mysteries by Ruth Rendell, who to my mind was one of the most compelling writers of our time.
What books might we be surprised to find on your shelves?
A book I keep going back to for the sheer pleasure of the writing, as well as all it brings to life about a subject I might otherwise have taken no interest in whatever, is “Life on a Little-Known Planet,” by Howard Ensign Evans, which is all about insects. And there, too, on my shelves is a treasure house of song lyrics, “Reading Lyrics,” edited by Robert Gottlieb and Robert Kimball, who take the words of songs, as do I, as one of the joys of life.
What kind of a reader were you as a child? Your favorite books and authors?
I had the good fortune to grow up in a home amply supplied with books, and those I loved best have stayed with me in a way I could hardly have imagined. One of the earliest and most important, I’ve come to see, was “The Little Engine That Could.” (“I think I can. I think I can.”) Then there was “Horton Hatches the Egg” and “Mr. Popper’s Penguins.” And it wasn’t long before I was reading Jules Verne — “The Mysterious Island” and “Around the World in 80 Days,” which I adored. And how I loved poring over the N. C. Wyeth illustrations for “Treasure Island” and “The Last of the Mohicans”! I still do.
If you had to name one book that made you who you are today, what would it be?
“The Elements of Style,” by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White. I read it first nearly 50 years ago and still turn to it as an ever reliable aid-to-navigation, and particularly White’s last chapter, with its reminders to “Revise and Rewrite” and “Be Clear.”
If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?
Dean Acheson’s “Present at the Creation,” a brilliant, superbly written account of the processes of decision making during the highly eventful Truman years when Acheson was secretary of state. The book is, along with so much else, a great lesson in courage and loyalty.
You’re hosting a literary dinner party. Which three writers are invited?
If limited to the living, then Stacy Schiff, Billy Collins and Walter Isaacson. Otherwise, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., Robert Louis Stevenson and Cole Porter.
Disappointed, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel you were supposed to like and didn’t? Do you remember the last book you put down without finishing?
I recently reread, or started to reread, Sherwood Anderson’s “Winesburg, Ohio,” which when I first read it long ago I knew I was supposed to like and did. This time I found it flat and slow, and after 50 pages or so, I put it down.
What books do you find yourself returning to again and again?
The delightful and very funny 18th-century fictional travel adventures of one Matthew Bramble and family, to be found in “The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker,” by Tobias Smollett; “Moon Tiger,” by Penelope Lively; Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s “Wind, Sand and Stars”; Walker Percy’s “The Moviegoer”; the stories of William Trevor; and the letters of Flannery O’Connor.
What books are you embarrassed not to have read yet?
Mainly, “Middlemarch,” by George Eliot, which I’ve had every good intention to undertake. Maybe this is the year!
What book do you plan to read next?
“The Second Son,” by Jonathan Rabb.

Sinatra


Why Frank Sinatra still matters

 May 29  
Frank is just like you. Just like me. Only bigger.” — George Schlatter, a friend
Let’s get one thing straight. There can’t be another Frank. These days, you don’t operate on that plane and get away with it. Was he in the Mob? Was he an informer? Did he ruin Ava Gardner, sleep with Marilyn, throw a plate against a restaurant wall just because they cooked the pasta too long? Come on, al dente!
Act like that today and you’d be TMZ’d faster than you can tweet Alec Baldwin. But that’s just behavior. Flip on your TV and you’ll understand the other reason nobody can match Sinatra. In this age of the media megatropolis, of over-saturated, over-exposed, over-everything, competition is just too fierce for one figure to so dominate the spotlight. If Milton Berle were starting out now, he wouldn’t get a 30-year deal from NBC. He’d be cross-dressing on Comedy Central to beat out Guy Fieri on a Wednesday night.
With Frank’s 100th birthday approaching, along with an NSO Pops concert devoted to his music, I’ve been talking Sinatra over the past week, on the phone, at neighborhood barbecues, with other music fans. I’ve been throwing on his records, from the classics (“Come Dance With Me!”) to the spottier (“Trilogy: Past, Present, Future”), sifting through good books and that Kitty Kelley paperback and scouring YouTube for every scrap of visual data.
Truth is, celebrity anniversaries are nothing more than dates, and dates nothing more than marketing opps for album reissues, tribute concerts and related product. But for me, an unrepentant fan, it’s a great time to remind everyone why Frank still matters.
It goes well beyond the tough-guy themes, torch songs and “Duets” albums that, although sterile and disappointing, launched an entire industry of songbook-styled projects. Some of them are even quite wonderful.
1. Presence
What’s most startling, when you focus on Frank, is how ever-present he is 171/years after his death, how regularly he bullies his way into your living room.
There he is, on David Letterman’s “Late Show” farewell week, channeled through Bob Dylan, the greatest songwriter of our time, who decided to croon a classic made famous by Sinatra. There’s “The Theme From New York, New York,” played 81 nights a season, without fail, after the final out at Yankee Stadium. Even in death, Frank can insert himself into the middle of a nasty domestic squabble. Third wife Mia Farrow taking a swipe at Woody Allen by suggesting that Ol’ Blue Eyes, not her film-directing ex, may have fathered son Ronan. And his staying power is undeniable, even as the icons of yesteryear — Ray Charles, Liz Taylor, even Hemingway — fade away.
“As far as touching him goes, nobody touches him,” Dylan said in a surprisingly personal interview earlier this year, explaining why his new record featured 10 songs made famous by Sinatra. “Not me or anyone else.”
“The word ‘icon’ is much overused, but if it applies to anyone in American popular culture, it is Frank Sinatra,” critic Terry Teachout said in the Alex Gibney documentary that aired on HBO in April, “Sinatra: All or Nothing at All.”
2. Beyond imitation
Let’s play a quick parlor game. Try to come up with a contemporary equivalent of Sinatra. I tried. You can at least take a good stab with Jimmy Stewart (Tom Hanks), John Wayne (Clint Eastwood) or Jackie Wilson (Bruno Mars.) With Sinatra, you’ll need to combine superpowers, taking Robert Downey Jr.’s swagger, Beyoncé’s Forbesian reach and Justin Timberlake’s triple-threat skills. And that still doesn’t fill out the man.
“He conquered every medium — television, recording, films,” Tony Bennett said after Sinatra’s death. “He was just born for what he did.”
The “fully emancipated male,” Gay Talese called Sinatra in his famous 1966 Esquire profile, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.”
Then take on that other quote, the one that sounds, at first blush, like enough jive to knock your DeSoto out of second gear.
“Frank is just like you. Just like me. Only bigger.”
This, to me, is about authenticity. It’s a word often tossed around but rarely practiced. It is about being real in everything you do, on or off stage. Remaining authentic is no small feat when you’re hanging around presidents and movie stars, selling millions of records, and when your very identity comes from singing songs written by others.
Yet Sinatra, with all of his qualities and flaws, remained completely authentic. As a singer, he didn’t just adapt, he crawled into each phrase. On those rare moments where he chose poorly — listen to his corny take on the Beatles classic “Something” — the singer still feels 100 percent committed. As a public figure, he never hid, whether accused of having ties with the Mafia or playing out his marital splits in public. There would be no joint press releases on a “conscious uncoupling” with Gardner, Farrow or anyone. To the end, Frank confessed that he knew nothing more than the average galoot.
“I’m supposed to have a PhD on the subject of women,” he is quoted in Bill Zehme’s wonderful “The Way You Wear Your Hat: Frank Sinatra and the Lost Art of Livin’. ” “But the truth is I’ve flunked more often than not. I’m very fond of women; I admire them. But, like all men, I don’t understand them.”
3. Reinvention
He came from a different world. Francis Albert Sinatra was born Dec. 12, 1915 — before TV, before radio — to a pair of Italian immigrants. He grew up in Hoboken, dropped out of high school and then, after working an odd job or two, scored a recording contract with bandleader Harry James. That led to the Tommy Dorsey band, fame and the first stage of his career as the baby-faced big-band crooner.
Eventually, everything came apart: his first marriage, to Nancy Barbato; his singing career (Columbia Records cut him loose in 1952); and his confidence. In the early ’50s, Sinatra tried to kill himself, once with sleeping pills, a second time by slashing his wrists. (He denied the attempts.) It wasn’t until his Academy Award for best supporting actor in 1953’s “From Here to Eternity” that Sinatra’s luck seemed to change. He signed with Capitol Records and reinvented himself. He sang in a lower register and his material stretched, from winks and highballs to smoky, dark confessions.
“At times, the lowest note of a melody becomes almost spoken, giving him a much greater sense of intimacy,” Elvis Costello wrote in Mojo.
These days, we marvel at the entertainers atop the Forbes list — Dr. Dre raking in hundreds of millions from headphones, Taylor Swift defying all with her Spotify grab. Frank Sinatra did this 60 years ago, at a point when artists were usually too busy being ripped off to become corporations. Yet Frank had “his own film company, his own record company, his private airline, his missile-parts firm, his real-estate holdings across the nation, his personal staff of seventy-five,” as Talese wrote.
(Sinatra also, the writer revealed, had a woman on his payroll at $400 a week to follow him around with one of his many hairpieces.)
As far as he got from New Jersey, as much as he reinvented himself — there was the second “retirement” in 1971, before a return two years later — Frank never forgot his roots. He took pride in his Italian heritage, even if part of that pride came from feeling mistreated because “my name ends with a vowel.”
How much was true, how much was simply who he hung out with? The FBI had more than 1,000 pages on Sinatra but never charged him with anything. Mario Puzo created the fictionalized Johnny Fontane in “The Godfather,” a crooner whose career is saved multiple times, in ways mirroring Sinatra’s life, by the Corleone family.
4. The Song
There are a lot of Sinatra albums and a lot of people who have pontificated on them. Most start by praising 1958’s ode to pathos, “Only the Lonely.”
But to me, the greatest Frank record is from a June show in 1962. He’s playing with his sextet in Paris, and it’s as loose as a show can get. “It’s obvious what his trouble is — girls,” Frank tells the audience as he introduces the saloon ballad “One for My Baby.” “Cherchez la femme. Which in French means ‘why don’t you share the broad with me?’ ”
At other moments, he coughs, clears his throat and apologizes. “I’ve gotta stop sleepin’ in the park.”
Jokey or not, his performance is impeccable, whether swinging through “Goody, Goody” and “Without a Song” or breathlessly roaming through the verses of “My Funny Valentine” and “One for My Baby.” More than anything, this performance — stripped down from his orchestral heft and captured in its entirety, unlike the other live recordings released during his lifetime — gets to the essence of what made Sinatra Sinatra.
It is how a man takes a song written by somebody else, performs it for decades, and it still sounds as fresh, pained and passionate as the first time it emerged. It is a special gift and one we don’t need a special birthday to recognize.
NSO Pops: Let’s Be Frank: The Songs of Frank Sinatra Friday and Saturday at the Kennedy Center Concert Hall. Tickets: $30-$99. 202-467-4600. www.kennedy-center.org.

Museums

What are modern museums really for?

The existential crisis that they face - both philosophical and financial - means that museums have to be more nimble or they'll lose the Google generation
Cornelia Parker’s War Room at the Whitworth, Manchester
Cornelia Parker’s War Room at the Whitworth, Manchester, shortlised for the Art Fund's Museum of the Year Prize
On 1 July, at a swanky party at Tate Modern, one of Britain’s museums will bank a cheque for £100,000, as the Art Fund announces this year’s Museum of the Year. Sure, the money will come in handy. Sure, the publicity will be useful. But this posh bunfight can’t disguise a growing sense that museums face an existential crisis. Cuts are one problem — some say the present round will take museums ‘back to the 1960s’. But they also face a more profound dilemma. In the age of Wikipedia and Google Images, what are modern museums actually for?
When I was a child museums were my adventure playgrounds, but was my enthusiasm merely relative? After all, in the 1970s there really was very little else to do. Shops were shut on Sundays. Television was awfully finite. Never mind the internet — even home video was science fiction. If you wanted to mug up on anything, there were two options: get a book out of the library or go to a museum.
Half a lifetime later I still love museums, but my children don’t feel the same way. I used to drag them along when they were younger, but now they’re nearly as big as me it’s almost impossible to persuade them. It’s hard to recreate that sense of wonder I used to feel, now all the treasures I used to marvel at are only a computer click away. For them, my passion for museums has become a running joke, a quaint example of how old and out-of-touch I am. They’re interested in the world around them, but they’d far rather watch a DVD or look it up online than trek to a museum.
Museums used to be monuments to the wealth and power of nations. The British Museum was a demonstration of imperial muscle. But now nationalism is taboo and hoarding foreign artefacts is frowned upon. And the people building big museums — and big collections — these days are the Qataris. In cost-cutting Britain, conversely, museums have become a soft target. Culling curators is a lot more politically expedient than sacking nurses.
12 issues for £12
Told to be inclusive, not elitist, in order to justify their funding, modern museums have sometimes swung too far the other way. ‘An ace caff with quite a nice museum attached’, ran the slogan of the V&A’s ad campaign in the 1980s. This self-deprecating sales pitch attracted widespread ridicule at the time, but it was prophetic. Some weekends, Tate Modern resembles nothing so much as an enormous crèche. The bookshop and restaurant are both heaving, but if you sneaked in and stole all the exhibits, would anybody notice? It’s become a buzzy meeting place, but it often feels as if the artworks are incidental to its success.
One thing museums need to do to survive and thrive is challenge the preconceptions of their audience. The Tower of London, one of the six nominees for the Art Fund’s prize, is a perfect case in point. I’m sure I wasn’t alone in dismissing it as a tourist trap for foreign sightseers, but that was before ‘Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red’, Paul Cummins’s memorial to the fallen soldiers of the first world war. By flooding the moat with 888,246 ceramic poppies — one for each British and Commonwealth serviceman who died — Cummins remade the Tower’s reputation. Millions of people came to see it. They didn’t even need to pay. For a week or so, apparently, it was the most Googled image in the world.
Dunham Massey, a stately home on Manchester’s leafy outskirts, is another example of the sort of thing I mean. Like so many National Trust properties, the house is handsome but I wouldn’t pay to look round it more than once, and it’s hard to separate it in my mind’s eye from a lot of other stately homes I’ve seen. However, like a lot of stately homes, during the Great War it was a military hospital, and as the centenary of this event drew near Dunham Massey had the bright idea of recreating those makeshift wards, in meticulous detail. ‘Every story we tell is true,’ says Dunham Massey’s general manager Stephen Adams. ‘It’s all based on diaries, letters, archives…’ Actors in period dress wander round, talking together in character, seemingly oblivious to modern visitors. You learn a lot about these injured Tommies. You almost feel you get to know them. It’s intensely atmospheric and very moving. Stephen often finds visitors in tears. No wonder admissions have more than trebled. This is something you could never recreate on the internet. It’s the first National Trust property to be nominated for the Art Fund’s award.
Dunham Massey’s success shows there’s no need to bore the punters with the whole story. Visitors can find that online. Instead, museums need to find something, anything, no matter how small or incidental, that people can connect with. When the National Trust started, it never used to bother showing off the backstairs stuff. It didn’t think anyone would be interested. Now the kitchens and stables and servants’ quarters are among the most popular attractions. Other museums need to follow suit. The best thing about the Imperial War Museum’s new first world war galleries isn’t the military hardware but the personal ephemera, such as the letter from a nine-year-old boy begging Kitchener to let him join up and fight the Hun.
A successful museum isn’t about dumbing down, it’s about sharing expertise — and when it really works it can regenerate an entire district. Belfast’s new Metropolitan Arts Centre, aka MAC, has played a leading role in rejuvenating the neighbourhood around St Anne’s cathedral. The side streets are filling up with trendy shops and cafés. It shows how an arts centre can act as an economic catalyst. The foyer is full of people — eating, drinking, gossiping… You can see why it’s such a popular rendezvous: it’s a beautiful building. Its centrepiece is a rainbow of tinted copper wire, stretched taut across the atrium. Sunlight streams through it, shedding a kaleidoscope of coloured shadows across the walls. An artwork by Mark Garry, called ‘The Permanent Present’, it’s a memorial to Thomas Devlin, a local schoolboy murdered ten years ago.
Oxford University’s Museum of Natural History is an illustration of what a museum can achieve when it’s prepared to change. A palatial neogothic pile, full of Pre-Raphaelite statuary, this was where clerics and academics debated Darwin’s Origin of Species. This was where the first dinosaur bones were displayed. They’re still here today. This museum has always been open to the public, but it hasn’t always been so user-friendly. It used to close on Sundays. The café is a recent addition. It’s still a scholarly institution, but now it’s full of families and schoolchildren. ‘Please touch’, say the signs. ‘Children see things before adults,’ says Wendy Shepherd, who shows me round. ‘We try not to say no.’ Since she started working here in 1999, visitor numbers have increased nearly tenfold. Children who come here on school trips learn to think of Oxford University as somewhere they could end up at, rather than a place for other people. Institutions like these show why museums still matter, and why they matter even more in our brave new virtual world. Learning should be something you do in three dimensions, with other people. In isolation, on a cold computer screen, it simply isn’t the same.
This article first appeared in the print edition of The Spectator magazine, dated 

The Dismal Science

Rewriting (some of) the rules of the American economy: the Stiglitz Report

In this report as in the work of Piketty or Atkinson, there appears a new sense of confidence. But in adopting a middle class frame, it misses an opportunity.
NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio.NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio. Flickr/Kevin Case. Some rights reserved.On May 12, Joseph Stiglitz and the Roosevelt Institute (a progressive thinktank of which Stiglitz is the chief economist) released a 100 page-long report,Rewriting the Rules of the American Economy: An Agenda for Growth and Shared Prosperity.  US Senator Elizabeth Warren and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio also spoke at the report’s launch, suggesting that the document could become an important political manifesto for the American Left. 
The report is slickly designed, with inset ‘definition boxes’ and innovative graphics adorning the green-and-white pages, and a video of the launch looms large on the report’s website. And it has received considerable attention, being covered in the New York TimesSlate, and Time, with many journalists speculating that it may foreshadow Hillary Clinton’s economic thinking, since Clinton has used Stiglitz as an economic advisor. 
But what does Rewriting the Rules of the American Economy actually say? Are any of its proposals novel or original? And what does the report tell us about the state of current progressive economic thinking?

The American dream, the current rules, and reform

The report (which has a long list of contributing authors and acknowledged individuals) begins with an executive summary and extended introduction, which signal to the reader the direction of the report’s analysis. 
Emphasis is placed on the fact that the “American dream increasingly appears to be a myth”. Traditional economic models are criticised: the introduction notes, for example, that there is no evidence that redistributive measures undermine economic growth, as many economists have long claimed (as part of a broader efficiency-equality trade-off).
And the report’s authors make it clear that inequality in America is the product of specific policies, rather than being natural and inevitable. “Inequality has been a choice,” says the report, “and it is within our power to reverse it.” The introduction indicates that the report will take an “institutionalist approach” in suggesting how inequality might be reversed. Such an approach, according to the report, involves recognising the importance of power and the need for rules to tame that power. It also involves finding a “broader range of policy solutions” than those normally recommended by economists.
The second section of the report, ‘The Current Rules’, describes and evaluates the present-day policy landscape in the United States of America. It discusses policy challenges across a range of areas: the innovation-stifling effect of patents, the threat posed by free trade agreements, the failure of the financial sector to produce socially optimal outcomes, the trend towards an increasingly regressive tax system, a skewed monetary policy that prioritises inflation targets over employment, the weakening of labour power, and the continuing scourge of racial discrimination and gender discrimination. 
The third section of the report then recommends a suite of policy reforms to address each of these problems. Amongst other things, the report criticizes investor-arbitration settlement clauses in free trade agreements, talks about the need to regulate non-banking financial institutions, demands regulation of debit and credit fees, advocates for worker representation on corporate boards, explains the need to reform immigration law, proposes that US firms operating overseas be taxed on all global profits, suggests that monetary policy be more focused on employment outcomes, and calls on politicians to raise the minimum wage and protect reproductive rights. 
The tour through such diverse topics is as breathless as this list suggests.

A more transformative economics?

Some of these solutions might seem tepid to United Kingdom readers looking for novel policy ideas. Legislating for paid sick leave and paid family leave, or subsidizing childcare, are hardly radical moves--although they remain necessary reforms in the United States.
However, some of the suggestions in the report are bold and to be welcomed. The push to reform the criminal justice system to reduce incarceration rates--through allowing more discretion in the use of mandatory minimum sentences, improving legal representation, and eliminating “onerous fees”--is an encouraging sign that the campaign against mass incarceration in the United States is moving towards the mainstream of political debate.
The proposed creation of public financing for housing is also creative. The report notes that the government already backs lending for housing indirectly, and says that a “government homeownership agency” could reduce transaction costs, minimize risky products, benefit borrowers, and encourage the private financial sector to be more responsible. 
In many ways the report echoes Anthony Atkinson’s recent book, Inequality: What Can Be Done?, in focusing on strengthening labour, questioning the value of the rise of technology, and advocating for a less regressive tax system. In the recent work of Piketty, Atkinson, and others, and now with the release of this report, there appears to be a new progressive surge in economic thinking--or at the very least, a new sense of confidence amongst economists calling for the State to take its regulatory and redistributive responsibilities seriously. 
In some respects, though, Rewriting the Rules could be criticised for being not transformative enough. There is a reference to the financial sector now making up 7% of the US economy, but no discussion of diversifying the economy so that there is less reliance on finance. 
Furthermore, Stiglitz and the other authors perpetuate dominant Democratic Party rhetoric, which could be criticised as intellectually hollow. Despite discussing the emptiness of the notion of the American dream (and despite citing statistics about limited social mobility in the US), the report maintains a focus on equality of opportunity as a guiding ideal; it does not engage with richer debates about systemic racial or gender-based injustices, or about the values and end-goals of a new progressive politics. 
It also uses the middle class as its primary point of reference: the final sentence says that there is a need to “establish rules and institutions that ensure security and opportunity for the middle class”. Of course, some of the report’s policy prescriptions could be beneficial for those not in the middle class: including the prescriptions relating to the strengthening of unions and reform of immigration and criminal justice law. 
As well, it may be that the report is seeking to be palatable to US politicians, who continue to make the middle class (construed very broadly) their lodestar. But it is nevertheless the case that the report, in adopting this middle class frame, misses an opportunity to attempt to revamp the terms and priorities of US political thinking.
A second limitation of the report is that, as Jim Cranshaw of People & Planet has said about recent trends in progressive economic thinking, Rewriting the Rules does not explain how new policies can be moved from ideas into action. 
There are at least 37 policy ideas in Rewriting the Rules, and the report is to be commended for focusing on different areas of the economy--on trade relations and the labour market, on the financial sector and the tax system--rather than on one or two big ideas. 
However, there is insufficient attention paid to the barriers blocking change, and no programme is sketched for overcoming these barriers. Is there a need for a populist movement, which calls for an economy that works for real people? Do thinktanks need to join forces and reach a consensus on key economic changes? Can vested interests be brought round to the report’s recommendations? These questions are not asked, or answered. 
The most charitable reading of the report is that it is written directly for politicians--that it is an attempt to give politicians a set of ideas, and that it expects politicians to find ways to turn ideas into legislation or policy action. (It may also be an attempt to encourage economists to explore certain proposals more deeply.)
But if the report does assume this electoral-political theory of change, then this theory is a fairly technocratic vision that does not empower activists, advocates, and the general public. And the report still does not consider how politicians ought to ward off the influence of lobbyists (although it does nod at their influence when referring to the need for campaign finance reform).
Moreover, if the report is a guide for progressive politicians (such as, say, Elizabeth Warren and Bill De Blasio), it could be criticised for being not specific enough. To put the point another way: if what the report is trying to do is make it easy for politicians to implement transformative change quickly, one might expect precise policy prescriptions.
But at crucial points the report is vague in its phrasing. Take, for example, what the report says about patents and about monetary policy. On patents, Rewriting the Rules says that there is a need for both incentives for innovation and fair competition. The report says: “Better balance is possible.” But what does this mean, and how could this be operationalized? The report is not clear. 
In relation to monetary policy, Rewriting the Rules notes that the Federal Reserve currently sets interest rates with inflation and employment goals in mind, and says “[t]he Fed should place a greater priority on full employment.” Stiglitz and his co-authors are a little more specific on this point. They note that inflation should be allowed to rise above 2 per cent, and that it should consider broadening its instruments. But again the language is open-ended: how can the Fed ensure “greater priority” is given to full employment?
Perhaps the report is attempting to avoid being sectarian by staking out strong positions. But by omitting specific recommendations, the report ends up being not completely satisfactory to anyone: it does not provide, at a general level, new language and framing for the activist and the advocate; and it does not provide more specific policy recommendations for the technocrat and the politician.

Why regulation matters – and bringing back the State

Overall, despite these weaknesses, we should recognize the great value of this report. It will spark debate (in the US and elsewhere) by highlighting the need for economic policy to be bold, and by suggesting that economists also consider health policy, the criminal justice system, and issues of race and gender.  In addition, the report’s own gaps reveal what is most urgently needed in progressive economic thinking today: specific policy prescriptions, but also deep,creative thinking about the framing, language, and assumptions of modern economic debates. 
Most importantly, the report draws our attention back to a key State function that has not been defended at length in recent times: namely, regulation.  Throughout the report, and its title, the focus is on rewriting the rules for the economy--an accessible way of saying that the regulatory framework needs to be changed. 
And it is high time regulation was the subject of more analysis. The UK and the US have both been engaged in single-issue debates, for example about the financial sector and free trade agreements, that touch on regulation (and threats to regulation) but do not address this broader topic directly. Had a stronger case for regulation been established prior to the global financial crisis, the crisis may have been if not averted, then at the very least mitigated--and addressed more swiftly. 
Rewriting the Rules reminds us that only the State can regulate in a robust way, and that regulation is a key part of a functioning economy. It may not be a flashy topic, but regulation may be a key pillar in a new framework for the role of the State in the twenty-first century economy. 
Economists, policy-makers, and activists now need to add further pillars: by, for instance, explaining other core State functions, such as redistribution and the steering of the economy as part of what Mazzucato has called “the entrepreneurial state”. And this emerging framework, if it is developed, could well contribute to the intellectual counter-narrative to neoliberalism that progressives all around the world are seeking.