I'm sure you remember Quad City DJs, who are known for their hits "C'mon N' Ride It (The Train)", from 1996, and the theme song to Space Jam that same year. Hawaii's dance class is performing to their What You Want For Christmas. All their songs have a ton of energy and honestly are really fun.

So I went to their wikipedia page, as one does, and found out they wrote the hit song Whoot, There It Is, from 1993. It reached #11 on the Billboard Charts. I have absolutely no memory of this song. However, I have a VIVID memory of the song Whoomp, There It is, which was a gigantic hit and camped out at the #2 spot on the Billboard Charts.

It turns out that "Whoot, There It Is" was released one month before "Whoomp! There It Is." I just cannot imagine the dismay at working so hard on an album, and having to explain for the next year or two that no, your big song isn't Whoomp but Whoot. I hope with time they now find it as hilarious as I do.

Honestly, I'm at the airport right now, so I don't want to listen to "Whoot, There It Is", so I can't yet vouch for it's quality either way. But Whoomp! There It Is is just great (and you probably know it. As the wikipedia entry says:

Though Tag Team is considered a one-hit wonder, as their subsequent singles did not find the same success, "Whoomp!" has remained a pop culture staple with multiple placements in film, television, and advertisements. The song has also endured as a mainstay at sporting and arena events.

)

Out of an abundance of holiday cheer, I will release you all from the 40 comment rule of staying on topic on this one particular thread. JUST TODAY.

I like to buy the kids four series of books for Hanukkah each year. They're not really specifically tagged to a kid, but I like them to span a large range of genres and ages. The kids are 8-13 right now. (One complication is that the older kids read a ton of e-books now, so it's very hard for me to keep track of what they've burned through.)

What's been enjoyed lately in your parts?

LW says:

This one careens through the aftermath of WWI, mostly with a political and macroeconomic focus. The industrial discussion is US-centric. Writing for an audience with diverse backgrounds is a challenge, DeLong seems to be trying for both. (ie not wanting to lose readers new to the subject while also presenting new ideas that complement considerable existing knowledge).

William Jennings Bryan, Herbert Hoover, Henry Cabot Lodge, and JP Morgan biographical cameos in this chapter were well-done, I liked the idiosyncratic history presentation. Also a good take on Europe's winning powers' reparations myopia shading into greed. I liked his discussion of Henry Ford, as an example of interchangeable parts workshops and an example of a very Hayek-style view of the relation between capital and labor.

But that wasn't the only possible trajectory in the 20s, there were a few places where there were attempts at a less brutal version of capitalism with mechanized workshops. For instance, maybe Aristide Briand, whose attempt at humane industrial policy in France was (in this books's useful contextualization) a middle ground between Rosa Luxembourg and Henry Ford. His loss of power had a big effect on France's reparations demands and the character of French industrialization, labor relations especially. Fiat's growth and rebuilding of Turin also, maybe? New industrialization in Europe as in the US meant migration, either across borders because so many war dead, or from countryside to cities. Wouldn't clarify anything to include any of this, but maybe this a case where the overall structural argument leads to simplifying the description of events through selective inclusion pretty drastically.

I was glad to have read Tooze's Deluge before this chapter. I was slightly surprised not to have seen it cited. I'd be curious to know whether Tooze's description of rapidly-maturing US credit markets as central to both war finance and reconstruction in Europe is sound. Also, I thought creation of the US federal reserve in 1913 could have had more context-- were there opponents, did any of the early actions taken have political consequences? The earlier alternative of having JP Morgan step in with self-interested force was described pretty clearly.

I have a couple of detailed questions-- DeLong discusses immigration restrictions (I thought that was mostly why Henry Cabot Lodge appeared), which changed both US demographics and apparently also planned business spending- he mentions 7% excess housing wrt new immigration restrictions and its consequences, but that one's not footnoted-- I would have actually liked to read more about that.
Similarly, earlier (intro, page 30), DeLong discusses quantitative change in "growth of technological and organizational capabilities"-- probably the editors forbade a technical appendix with real detail, but again, I'd be interested in the definition of this synthetic quantity from measured ones, maybe there are relevant lecture notes?

Again, both any particulars and the need to pack both a lot of volume and different kinds of discussion (events and ideas) present maybe insurmountable opportunities when presenting both historical development, development of ideas, and commentary on both simultaneously, I'm not trying to nitpick.

To fill in the missing industrial development sections, this is a little later, from 1938, but worth it for the cellulose manufacture alone. Fantastic stylish industrial documentary about Kodak, film starts after five minutes of intro commentary.
https://www.eastman.org/highlights-and-shadows

Thread per request. Hearts go out to those affected.

This is intended to be our system for checking in on imaginary friends, so that we know whether or not to be concerned if you go offline for a while. There is no way it could function as that sentence implies, but it's still nice to have a thread.

Episode Kobe forty-four