Lessons From History Biographies

  Without international cooperation on nuclear weapons, we are all in a game of Russian Roulette (pun unintended).     Few books can rivet my attention more so than histories of the evolution of bombs, and to that end there are few books I've read that are as fascinating and terrifying as Serhii Plokhy's terrific The Nuclear Age , which chronicles the history of both nuclear weapons and how we as a species have perceived them. While reading it, I was reminded of one of my favorite all-time works, Sven Lindquist's A History of Bombing . While Lindquist's book, with its bizarre "jump all over the timeline" structure, is pretty inaccessible to all but the most dedicated historians (I would know as one who's tried to make laypeople read it), Plokhy tells a much more accessible version of the story where humanity's inherently contradictory dreams of bringing peace to the world through superbombs reached its culmination with the development of weapons that h...

  A stock market that seems too good to be true, eventually proves to be so.     I have long known that the American stock market and its fortunes often has only the loosest connection to the lives of ordinary people, but I don't think I have ever felt as disconnected from it as I have over the past few years. According to the stock market, the American economy is invincible and the future has never been brighter--its overall value has gone up somewhere in the area of 400% over the past 15 years or so. That assessment might come as news to a vast majority of Americans, most of whom are decidedly pessimistic about the future of the economy; NO ONE I talk to amongst my friend base feels like they're doing spectacularly well and they have no concerns about anything, and most of the people in  my circle would definitely not count as "poor" in the technical sense of the word. That made reading Andrew Sorkin's new study of 1929 and the start of the Great Depression to b...