I guess I'll go log in to Twitter again to retweet this.
We should do a book group for old times sake.
Apparently, I haven't used Twitter in so long that just logging in was suspicious.
America! Where even a hedgehog impersonator can eventually write a 600-page book!
If I understand correctly, that was at a rate of about thirty pages a year?
Which is faster than I'm reading "Mort".
I am happy to orchestrate such a group if there's interest, although I personally am barely getting through the light and fluffy Malibu Rising, so it's unlikely I'll graduate towards real books any time soon.
While searching to see if my library system has the book (not yet--am sending them a recommendation to get it), I see where "Slouching Towards Utopia" was the final chapter in Neal Gabler's book on Disney.
And a subsequent internet search turns up a number of uses of the phrase for articles titles in the last decade.
Also turned up that for those in the Bay Area, KPFA is having an event with the author at the Back Room in Berkeley on September 13th,
9.1: I did that too, although I expect that I will eventually buy it for my Kindle.
9: Hah, Sally is an intern there now. I'd tell her to show up and say hi from me but she'd be horrified by the weirdness of it.
To a young person, isn't a job in radio like if I got my first job at Western Union?
I don't think so -- I think radio stations still have a lot of listeners through streaming internet. Talk/news radio, that is -- music radio might be different.
14: Probably an excellent gateway to the most lucrative part of the entertainment industry today - podcasting.
16: I was going to explain to you patiently that a streaming TV show is not the same thing as a podcast, but it turns out that a podcast plays an important role in that tv show. Thanks for educating me, Moby!
No spoilers. I'm still on like episode 3 of season 2.
Yeah, radio's doing fine (as is Western Union, actually; people still wire money). It has its niche and there's plenty of demand for it.
I continue to maintain that podcasting is just radio and I still don't get why people make such a big deal about it.
19: That's why I picked Western Union. I was baffled that it still existed now that telegrams aren't really a thing.
I still have yet to listen to a podcast.
21: The one that gets me is that the Hudson's Bay Company still exists as a going concern doing more or less the same things it's been doing since 1670.
When I moved Newt up to Toronto a few years back for college, we bought him bed linens and so on at the Hudson's Bay Company store, which left me in a tizzy of feeling all Jack Londony and him completely unimpressed.
I had a similar reaction to the continued existence of Hudson's Bay Company, but the ones I've visited (Vancouver, Montreal) mostly reminded me of a particularly rundown Macys.
23: I don't know that it's doing quite the same things as it was for the first 200 years of its existence, when it was the government of a territory larger than India.
26: that is the exact description. The ones you find in smaller cities are even more run down.
27.1: Yes, "more or less" was doing a lot of work there.
They closed the Macy's by me and replaced it with a charter school.
I vaguely remember a seeming hierarchy of department stores when I lived in Vancouver and somehow Hudson's Bay was at the top. Zellers (now out of business) was at the bottom and I thought something was in the middle. All three ultimately owned by Hudson's Bay.
28: you're definitely right that it's kinda amazing that Canadians have been buying kettles, pots, and blankets from the same company since the reign of Charles II. We can't use beaver pelts as currency anymore though.
Speaking of podcasts, Gnoled has one and it's pretty good. His co-host will not be to the taste of some but they bounce off each other well. It's a better format for informally seeing where an ideas goes than Twitter.
Podcast is radio in a similar sense to how Youtube is television. The underlying medium is the same but the constraints of the format, both economic and distributional, are different enough to radically change the content.
And for Bay Area NE, Delong at a "book store near Boston" tonight at 7.
34: I was just thinking of one of my favorite 30 Rock bits, wherein Twofer starts a sentence with "When I went to college in Boston, well, not IN Boston..." and Liz shuts him down.
I think it's that it's such an old, transparent trope, but he's engaging as if nobody will see through it. Just well executed.
Yes! And reviews from peope who are not my friends have started arriving! And relatives have started saying: Wow! it i readable!"
Alas! I am only #83 in "Business"...
Gnoled Darb
Yes! And reviews from peope who are not my friends have started arriving! And relatives have started saying: Wow! it i readable!"
Alas! I am only #83 in "Business"...
Gnoled Darb
Yes! And reviews from peope who are not my friends have started arriving! And relatives have started saying: Wow! it i readable!"
Alas! I am only #83 in "Business"...
Gnoled Darb
Hooray! People outside my circle of friends seem to like it! At least some of them! https://www.economist.com/culture/2022/09/08/bradford-delong-reconsiders-the-20th-centurys-economic-history
The "Economist" review is by Ryan Avent, so I still have no big reviews from non-friends
It's never too late to make an enemy.
Triple posting demonstrates that we have, "enough," but it is difficult to make it satisfying.
Congratulations on the book launch. I should get my copy tomorrow, and I'm looking forward to it.
Pls tell me what I get BigTime wrong in it!
And: should I ask to meet LizardBreath's daughter-the-intern when I arrive at the KPFA event Tuesday night? (Yes/No)
Not sure if she's planning to go to the event, but I've told her to say hi from me if she does.
Pls tell me what I get BigTime wrong in it!
Starting the book, I don't have anything BigTime wrong but I do have a question and/or nitpick.
I read Labrys this memorable paragraph as an example of the ways in which the book is fascinating:
Marvel still. In 1870 the daily wages of an unskilled male worker in London, the city then at the forefront of world economic growth and development, would buy him and his family about 5,000 calories worth of bread. That was progress: in 1800, his daily wages would have bought him and his family perhaps 4,000 coarser-bread calories, and in 1600, some 3,000 calories, coarser still. (But isn't coarser, more fiber-heavy bread better for you? For us, yes -- but only for those of us who are getting enough calories, and so have the energy to do our daily work and worry about things like fiber intake. In the old days, you were desperate to absorb as many calories as possible, and for that, whiter and finer bread was better). Today, the daily wages of an unskilled male worker in London would buy him 2.4 million wheat calories: nearly 500 times as much as in 1870.
She was immediately skeptical; I tried to reverse-engineer the calculation, and ran into problems. Back-of-the-envelope, if £1 buys approximately 1500 calories of white bread, and minimum wage in London is £9.5/hr (or £76/day) that would be 114K Calories/days wages. That's a rough approximation, but it's an order of magnitude away from 2.4M.
I do see that it says, "wheat calories" and that it's possible to buy flour for much cheaper (3kg for £1 or 10K calories for £1). That gets us much closer to the 2.4M figure (~800K calories for a days wages, and there might be cheaper options for flour in bulk), but it feels like there's a bit of slight of hand going on, since the prior figures are all specified as "bread" rather than flour, it's misleading to switch to raw flour. It both breaks the expected sequence, and isn't a representative of staple calories.
I preordered the book long ago, but the tracking number says it hasn't reached USPS yet. I'm sure it's a bookshop shipping issue, but annoying since I'd have liked to start over the last week. Still, congratulations on the positive reviews and reception!
46: Ironically, after just noting that the tracking number had never been activated, the book was delivered with the morning mail.
No: I do not know why it triple posts...
Ye: pls tell me other things I get BigTime (or LittleTime) wrong in the book...
45: touché...
It ended up not being a good first impression. I fear she will now be skeptical about anything else from the book.
Relentless promotion works: https://nitter.net/delong/status/1570184488994603011#m
Also, I see that Yglesias is doing a Slouching Towards Utopia book event for subscribers only. That would make me even more inclined to think we should do an unfogged book club.
Not that it's a competition but . . .
It's about to pass "Flared Base: The Life and Times of Karl Rove."