It’s official: I no longer enjoy really spicy food. One of Birmingham’s better places is Carrigan’s Public House. They make a very, very good burger, but I’ve learned that the ghost pepper cheese option simply isn’t for me. On a recent visit, I got the burger with the ghost pepper cheese, and while the fries […]
I “Read” Things: Audiobooks and Webcomics
Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises. I found it bleak, honestly–a story about people with what seems like nothing more to live for than the next drink. I could be completely off base with this, but I’m reminded of Deirdre McCloskey’s description of the characters in La Boheme. Audiobook: if you don’t have Audible, you […]
I Read Things: Bedtime Stories
Essential Hulk, Volume 1. This is bedtime reading with David (our five-year-old). It’s interesting to read comics from the 1960s and see, among other things, one of the ways in which fear manifested itself in the early cold war. Rise of the Isle of the Lost. This is the third novel in the Disney’s Descendants franchise, […]
I Listen to Things: Led Zeppelin Since Led Zeppelin
I was that kid in high school who knew that Led Zeppelin was originally called the New Yardbirds (and that Jimmy Page had, with Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton, been a member of the Yardbirds). When I got my first iPod in 2007, one of my first purchases was the complete Zeppelin catalog—a bargain at […]
I Play Things: Civilization Revolution 2
We got our first “real” computer when I was in high school. It had a two-speed CD ROM and a 435 MB hard drive. It ran Windows 3.11. And it was powerful enough to run Civilization and SimCity 2000. These were, as far as I was concerned, the peak of computer gaming (just as, in opinion, […]
Bust Your Writer’s Block
“I don’t know what to write about.” The affliction plagues us all. The blinking cursor mocks us. Everything else in our lives that needs to be done calls out to us, saying “don’t write right now. Watch a movie. Clean the kitchen. Aren’t you hungry? It’s a nice day for a walk. You’re tired—you really […]
How I Organize My Bookshelf
I have a few hundred books in my office. In light of something that recently came across my social media feed, here’s how I organize them. Alphabetically by author. It makes them easy to find. McCloskey’s Enterprise and Trade in Victorian Britain? Over there. North’s Structure and Change in Economic History? Right there. Liberty Fund’s […]
I Read Things: Thomas Sowell Edition
Thomas Sowell is one of my favorite economists and intellectuals, and here are some of my favorite books in his oeuvre. A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles. I first read this at the suggestion of my colleague Mark McMahon at Rhodes College, and beginning in 2007-08 I started assigning it in my […]
Appearances Can Be Deceiving: We’re Wasting Resources Making Solar Panels in the US
At the end of January, CNN reported that in response to new tariffs on solar panels, Chinese solar panel manufacturer JinkoSolar would build a plant in the United States. These tariffs make Americans poorer, not richer. The nineteenth-century French economist Frederic Bastiat exhorted us to look beyond what is immediately apparent to the harder-to-see but […]
Just Give Them Water Filters And Whatnot
Infant and child mortality has fallen precipitously in the last few centuries, and life expectancy has increased dramatically. We have made a lot of progress in the protection of public health, but we are still wasting staggering amounts of life that gets snuffed out early by disease and war. Consider diarrhea, which is an inconvenience […]