Yiyun Li from KQED's Forum by forum@kqed.org (KQED Public Radio)

San Francisco-based author Yiyun Li was recently named a Macarthur "genius" Fellow. She joins us today to discuss her new collection of short stories, "Golden Boy, Emerald Girl." Download the podcast here.

Going Negative from WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show by listenerservices@wnyc.org (WNYC, New York Public Radio)

Barbara Ehrenreich, journalist, activist and author of Nickel and Dimed and Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermining America, discusses the current mood in the country and what she sees as an unwarranted obsession with optimism. Download the podcast here.

What Compels Us to Predict an Unknowable Future? from The Takeaway: Early Edition by feedback@thetakeaway.org (Public Radio International and WNYC Radio)

Anticipating the future is a classic (and possibly uniquely) human pastime. For as long as humans have kept records of the past, we have also tried to predict our future...and in so doing, control our destiny. Why do we cling to these predictions? The end of the world, the end of humanity, even our future fortunes…why do we anticipate so much? Sherry Turkle is an M.I.T. professor and the author of the forthcoming book, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. She says that by predicting future technological advances, we express a sense of hope. Simon Winchester, freelance writer and author of the book Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms,and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories, says that as science advances, we have gotten noticeably better at foretelling the future. Download the podcast here.

The Middle East in Literature from WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show by listenerservices@wnyc.org (WNYC, New York Public Radio)

Reza Aslan, associate professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside, and author of No God But God, discusses the new anthology he edited, Tablet & Pen: Literary Landscapes from the Modern Middle East. Listen to the podcast.

Billy the Kid: Pardoned After 130 Years from The Takeaway: Early Edition by feedback@thetakeaway.org (Public Radio International and WNYC Radio)

As one of his final acts in office, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson says he will pardon the man known as "Billy the Kid," delivering one of America’s best known criminals the pardon he had anticipated for much of his life. The move comes a mere 130 years after the gunslinger’s death. We speak with author/historian Mark Lee Gardener, and discuss why Richardson might want to make such a public pardon to a historical criminal, and ask why the prospect of a pardon is causing such a stir. Mark recently wrote the book “To Hell on a Fast Horse: The Untold Story of Billy the Kid and Pat Garret.” Listen to the podcast.

Vocal Economy from WNYC's Soundcheck by listenerservices@wnyc.org (WNYC, New York Public Radio)

2010 ended with a most audible of shifts, and it came from the throats of Katy Perry, Ke$ha and Lady Gaga. All three pop stars have at least one thing in common: they stay away from the trilling vocal effect known as melisma. Music journalist and author David Browne joins us to explain why the overpowering oooh has gone out of style.

James Patterson, Maxine Paetro: 4th of July (Woman's Murder Club)

Bestselling author James Patterson has recently honed his craft toward the social; that is to say, he's contributing to the production of a game that players will be able to engage with on platforms such as Facebook. The website, All Facebook, reported this in December, 2010. The game is an interesting take on the equally interesting books that the author's penned over the years. Below is a YouTube trailer of the game. James Patterson also wrote: Cross Fire (Alex Cross), Witch & Wizard: The Gift, and The 9th Judgment (Women's Murder Club).

The 2010 News Quiz: Susan Orlean from WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show

New Yorker staff writer Susan Orlean, author of The Orchid Thief, leads a news quiz of the year's top stories in arts and culture. Download the podcast here.

2011: The Year Ahead in Science from The Takeaway: Early Edition by feedback@thetakeaway.org (Public Radio International and WNYC Radio)

2010 may be coming to an end, but a whole new year of news and culture awaits in 2011. All week long, we'll be talking with big thinkers about what they’re anticipating …from new movies to world events. Today, our subject is science, and our guest is the one and only Dr. Michio Kaku, theoretical physicist, bestselling author, professor at the City University of New York, and host of “Science of the Impossible.” Dr. Kaku's newest book is called "Physics of the Future: How Space Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Lives by the Year 2100." Download the podcast here.

You Say Repugnant, I Say … Let’s Do It! from NYT Freakonomics Radio by Stephen J. Dubner

FDNY's Organ Preservation Unit follows the ambulance. Some ideas are downright repugnant. Like … paying for human organs. On the other hand, isn’t it repugnant to let thousands of people die every year for want of a kidney that a lot of people might be willing to give up if they were able to be compensated? Our new podcast ventures into the realm of repugnant ideas. The fact is that the repugnance border shifts over time. Selling eggs or sperm, “renting” a womb: not long ago, all of this was considered way out of bounds. So was birth control and adoption. Go back a bit further in history: currency speculation, charging interest on loans, even selling life insurance — these practices, too, were almost universally felt to be repugnant. Will the border shift for human organs as well? On our journey through the repugnant, you’ll hear from my Freakonomics co-author Steve Levitt; Harvard economist (and the dean of repugnant ideas) Al Roth, who has thought long and hard about organ shortages; and two doctors — one an Israeli transplant surgeon, the other a New York emergency-medicine specialist — who stare their existing organ-donor protocols in the face and spit on them. Because sometimes the best way to fight repugnance is with a little repugnance of your own. Download the podcast here.

'Fame' Connects Joan Of Arc To Britney Spears from NPR Podcast Talk of the Nation

Celebrity culture can be mystifying -- if you're not a Britney Spears fan, you might wonder why she's famous at all. And if you do, you're in good company: Homer, Plato and Horace all wondered where the true heroes had gone. Tom Payne, author of Fame, explains why we need celebrities. Download the podcast here.

Gordon Brown: Beyond the Crash: Overcoming the First Crisis of Globalization

The author of his controversial and interesting books were recently the subject of a review on The Economist, which was titled "Oh me, oh my: Why Gordon Brown won’t be believed by everyone." MANY politicians use their memoirs to settle old scores. Newspapers scour them for juicy titbits of who said what to whom, and which leaders were perpetually drunk or unreliable. Gordon Brown, the former British prime minister, is above such gossip. His first post-election effort is an analysis of the financial crisis that dominated his premiership. But “Beyond the Crash” is no less revealing for the absence of tittle-tattle. The tone is set in the four-page prologue which contains 34 instances of the words “I”, “me” or “my”. Later on, readers are told of several occasions when an anecdote by Mr Brown would reduce global leaders to silence or a speech would provoke rounds of applause from audiences. You can find the rest of that Economist review of the author's latest book, Beyond the Crash: Overcoming the First Crisis of Globalization, here. As expected, the author's on tour, peddling the book. See the media posted below.

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Rajiv Chandrasekaran: Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone

Thomas Ricks is a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter that used to work for the Wall Street Journal. He now blogs for Foreign Policy and is a fellow scholar at the Center for a New American Security, a defense policy and military think tank. Recently, on NPR's Forum with Michael Krasny, he picked his top 5 books about the war in Iraq, and listed the author Rajiv Chandrasekaran and his book Imperial Life in the Emerald City as his favorite. Now, the business and marketing around these interesting books or book is odd. The Kindle version of the book is marketed as the Green Zone, while the original hardcover of course retains its original title (just in case that throws you off at the bookstore; check for both titles). Author Rajiv Chandrasekaran writes and edits for the Washington Post, and recently wrote "The Longest War: Afghan Strategy's Proving Ground." Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone [DECKLE EDGE] (Hardcover) won the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2007 and was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Awards for non-fiction. Other interesting books about the war in Iraq: Love My Rifle More than You: Young and Female in the U.S. Army, One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer, House to House: An Epic Memoir of War.

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David Eltis, David Richardson: Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (The Lewis Walpole Series in Eighteenth-C)

In December, 2010, National Public Radio featured a story on the Transatlantic Slave Trade. This is the introduction to that feature story: In the mid-15th century, the ships of the trans-Atlantic trade system went from carrying cargoes of gold to carrying cargoes of human beings. Over the next 350 years, some 12.5 million people would be shipped as slaves from Africa. Historian David Eltis has summarized that piece of history in Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, an online database that uses thousands of documents to offer a clearer picture of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. He and fellow historian David Richardson have also published a book on the subject by the same name. Author, editor, and historian David Eltis is a Robert W. Woodruff Professor of History at Emory University. A few of his lectures are posted below. These are also interesting books and collections of maps: George Washington's America: A Biography Through His Maps, Atlas of Remote Islands.

Funding End-of-Life Counseling from WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show by listenerservices@wnyc.org (WNYC, New York Public Radio)

Under a new policy starting next month, the government will pay doctors to discuss options for end-of-life care with their patients, which may include advance directives -- instructions on how aggressively to continue medical treatment if the patient is too incapacitated to decide for themselves. Daniel Callahan, co-founder of the Hastings Center for nonpartisan research on bioethics and public policy, and author of Taming the Beloved Beast: How Medical Technology Costs Are Destroying Our Health Care; and Trudy Lieberman, contributing editor to the Columbia Journalism Review, discuss the new measure. Download the podcast here.

Why We Get Fat from WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show by listenerservices@wnyc.org (WNYC, New York Public Radio)

Gary Taubes, correspondent for Science magazine and author of Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It discusses diet and the obesity epidemic. Download the podcast here.

Fur, Fortune, and American Empire from On Point with Tom Ashbrook Podcast

We hear the remarkable history of how fur shaped a nation, with author Eric Jay Dolin. Download the podcast here.

David Winner: Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Soccer

The author, David Winner, was recently mentioned in a Salt Lake Tribune article about independent publishers and the "gems" that they tend to publish.

The Cannibal of Guadalajara by David Winner is a quirky comedy of manners set in New York and Mexico. Its central character is Margaret, a realistically drawn, sympathetic over-50 divorcee, whom we first encounter feeling ungainly and out of place at a singles bar in the Meatpacking District. To her surprise, a dark and handsome young man appears to woo her, bringing her martinis and returning to her apartment. She and Dante begin seeing each other, though he soon reveals himself to be ridiculously stubborn and deeply damaged by the childhood experiences that give the book its title. By then, however, Margaret has fallen in love with his charming upper-class Mexican immigrant family in Brooklyn, in whose elegant home they dine every Friday night. Meanwhile, her ex-husband, Alfred, reappears, first via e-mail dispatches from his world travels, then on her doorstep. A road trip and a platonic, quasi-familial ménage à trois ensue. Warning: The book is marred by a hideous cover and poor copy editing, though at times the typos add to the humor, as when a character’s “huge breasts overflow unappealingly from her glittery brazier.”

Read the rest of that Salt Lake Tribune article here. The author, David Winner, also wrote these interesting books: The Cannibal of Guadalajara, Those Feet: A Sensual History of English Football. The author was also featured on this Bloomberg Radio podcast.

Rick Bragg: All over but the Shoutin'

The author, Rick Bragg, won a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 1996, for his work with The New York Times. Rick Bragg recently spoke in front of Alabama's state legislature. The Gadsden Times reported this: “Remember My People,” was Bragg's topic and even though he spun yarns and told good natured tales, there was an edge to his voice several times as he defined just who his people are and how they can be taken advantage of by the powerful. “I know that lucky people, rich people, comfortable people don't need a lot of help,” said Bragg, whose best selling book “All Over But the Shoutin'” is partly the story of growing up dirt poor — “I come from several generations of poor white trash in northeast Alabama,” he said proudly — and his incredibly strong mother who raised him and his two brothers while married to an abusive, alcoholic father. “But I am not asking you to give my people, working people, anything they don't earn,” he said. “But I believe that every society, every great society really is judged by how it treats its working people and poor. See that Gadsden Time piece here. Rick Bragg also wrote these interesting books: The Most They Ever Had, The Prince of Frogtown (Vintage), Ava's Man, and Somebody Told Me: The Newspaper Stories of Rick Bragg.

Wallace Shawn: Essays

The author, Wallace Shawn, was recently a guest on the WNYC Radio program, Talk to Me. The program's summary of the show reads as the following: If the meek are going to inherit the earth, then Wally Shawn will be in the vanguard. The diffident playwright and essayist, known for such works as "My Dinner with Andre," "Aunt Dan and Lemon," and "The Designated Mourner," presented readings of a wide range of his essays and dramas last month at the CUNY Graduate Center. Each piece of his work offered a passionate view of a world corroded by power, but redeemable through art. The Obie-Award winner was joined by a group of literary and theatrical friends who voiced his work, including writers Fran Lebowitz, Peter Carey and Deborah Eisenberg; poet Mark Strand; and actors Mary-Louise Parker, Julianne Moore, Bob Balaban and Josh Hamilton. Shawn's most recent play, "Grasses of a Thousand Colors," premiered in London in 2009. His first book of nonfiction, "Essays," was also published last year. See the webpage for this show here. See the podcast for the show just below.



Wallace Shawn also wrote: Grasses of a Thousand Colors, The Fever (Evergreen original), Our Late Night and A Thought in Three Parts: Two Plays, and Four Plays: A Thought in Three Parts, Marie and Bruce, Aunt Dan and Lemon, the Fever.

Lawrence Wright: The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11

ABC News recently invoked the author and his Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Looming Tower, in this report on Wikileaks: Lawrence Wright is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Looming Tower," an investigation of the rise of Al-Qaida and the events leading to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. He relied in part on internal State Department documents, the kind WikiLeaks has just released by the hundreds of thousands. "That was really helpful. I'd hate not to have such inside glimpses," Wright says of the documents he obtained, including how the State Department dealt with the Taliban in Afghanistan. He sees the short-term advantage to WikiLeaks, but wonders if books such as his will become harder to write. "I worry that there will be a backlash in terms of classification, so that more information that would be considered merely confidential will be termed top secret and kept from wider distribution, so that people on the ground who could put such knowledge to work, won't have access to it." See that ABC News report here.

Michael Chabon: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

The Pulitzer Prize winning author, Michael Chabon, was recently elected to fill the role as chairman of the board of directors of a prominent artist colony. The Associated Press reported this in December, 2010: Michael Chabon, the novelist, screenwriter and father of four, has a new responsibility. He has been elected chairman of the board of the directors of the MacDowell Colony, the century-old artist residency program based in Peterborough, N.H. Chabon, best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay," replaces Robert MacNeil, author and television newsman who is retiring after serving 17 years. MacNeil turns 80 in January. Chabon, 47, has been a resident nine times at MacDowell and told The Associated Press on Monday that he was eager to contribute to an institution that had done so much for him. See that AP story here.

Daniel Yergin: The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power

Recently, USA Today invoked the author in a story about the demand for gas in the United States: "A combination of demographic change and policy change means the heady days of gasoline growing in the U.S. are over," says Daniel Yergin, chairman of IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates and author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the oil industry. This isn't the first time in U.S. history that gasoline demand has fallen, at least temporarily. Drivers typically cut back during recessions, then hit the road again when the economy picks up. Indeed, the Great Recession was the chief reason demand fell sharply in 2008. But this time looks different. Government and industry officials — including the CEO of ExxonMobil— say U.S. gasoline demand has peaked for good. It has declined four years in a row and will not reach the 2006 level again, even when the economy fully recovers. Read that USA Today report here.

Author David Winner Discusses Book, Electronic Publishing:Audio from Bloomberg - All Podcasts

Listen to the podcast.

Stephen Hawking, Leonard Mlodinow: The Grand Design

In December of 2010, the Lincoln Journal Star wrote this about the book and authors: "Scientists," in the words of "The Grand Design" authors Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, "have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge." This book is their attempt to give some answers in this quest for knowledge based on recent discoveries and theory. What they are seeking are the laws that govern the universe. Ultimately this knowledge would lead to a unified "theory of everything" that physicists, including Einstein, have sought for years. In the authors' view, this theory of everything is best described by M-theory, which is a model of string theory, basically that all particles are connected by vibrating strings. Read the rest of that review here.

CityTime and Technology Contracts from WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show by listenerservices@wnyc.org (WNYC, New York Public Radio)

Joe Flood, author of The Fires: How a Computer Formula, Big Ideas, and the Best of Intentions Burned Down New York City-and Determined the Future of Cities discusses his article in New York Magazine on the recent scandal around the CityTime payroll project, and Mayor Bloomberg’s rocky relationship with technology contractors. Read the rest of that story, here.

2010 In Review: The Year for Muslims In The U.S. from NPR Podcast Talk of the Nation

Muslim Americans have fallen under suspicion in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on September 11. 2010 was no exception. Moustafa Bayoumi, author of How Does It Feel To Be A Problem, talks about the year for Muslim Americans as it draws to a close. Download the podcast here.

Junot Diaz: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

T.J. Raphael of the White Plains Patch recently reported this about the Pulitzer Prize winning author: Junot Diaz, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of the fiction novel, "The Brief and Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao," visited White Plains Highlands Middle School on Dec. 15. Students in Yakira Tejada's class had written the author letters who then felt inspired to visit the school. Diaz has also written the critically acclaimed novel "Drown." His work has appeared in the New Yorker, African Voices and in Best American Short Stories. See that webpage here. The author also wrote: Drown, Negocios, and La breve y maravillosa vida de Óscar Wao (Vintage Espanol) (Spanish Edition). Over the years, the author's spoken at popular venues, such as the Google corporate event series, "Authors at Google" and was also a guest on The Colbert Report.

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Kevin Kelly: What Technology Wants

In June 1863, Samuel Butler wrote (but signed “Cellarius”) “Darwin among the Machines” for The Press, a newspaper in Christchurch, New Zealand. The article raised the possibility that machines were a kind of “mechanical life” undergoing constant evolution, and that eventually machines might supplant humans as the dominant species. The article ended, urging this notion that “war to the death should be instantly proclaimed against them. Every machine of every sort should be destroyed by the well-wisher of his species. Let there be no exceptions made, no quarter shown; let us at once go back to the primeval condition of the race.” This article, along with later writings by Butler on “machine evolution,” was probably largely satirical in intent, although he may have been using these fanciful writings to allude to or explore deeper philosophical issues, such as the question of whether biological life and evolution can be explained in purely mechanical terms.

“We refer to the question: What sort of creature man’s next successor in the supremacy of the earth is likely to be. We have often heard this debated; but it appears to us that we are ourselves creating our own successors; we are daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their physical organisation; we are daily giving them greater power and supplying by all sorts of ingenious contrivances that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be to them what intellect has been to the human race. In the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race. Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life. The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question.”

- “Cellarius,” Darwin among the Machines

“Ted Kaczynski, the convicted bomber who blew up dozens of technophilic professionals, was right about one thing: technology has its own agenda. The technium is not, as most people think, a series of individual artifacts and gadgets for sale. Rather, Kaczynski, speaking as the Unabomber, argued that technology is a dynamic holistic system. It is not mere hardware; rather it is more akin to an organism. It is not inert, nor passive; rather the technium seeks and grabs resources for its own expansion. It is not merely the sum of human action, but in fact it transcends human actions and desires. I think Kaczynski was right about these claims.”

- Kevin Kelly, “The Unabomber Was Right,” chapter from What Technology Wants

In November 2010, Jerry Coyne wrote “Better All the Time” for The New York Times. The thesis of Kevin Kelly’s bold new book begins with its title. How can technology — an inanimate collection of human inventions — want anything? According to Kevin Kelly, a professional tech-watcher and former editor of Wired magazine, it’s because technology is like a living organism, animated by the same evolutionary forces that resulted, over eons, in the human brain. Moreover, for Kevin Kelly, the whole process has been progressive and predictable: the eventual appearance of the BlackBerry was immanent in the Big Bang. Kevin Kelly argues convincingly that this expansion of technology is beneficial. Technology creates choice — compare the supermarket’s shelves with the pantry of a colonial farm — and therefore enhances our potential for self-realization. No longer tied to the land, we can become, in principle, what we want to become. He sees evolution — both biological and technological — as an inexorable and predictable process; if life were to begin again on Earth, he argues, we’d see not only the re-evolution of humans, but humans who would invent pretty much the same stuff. To support his claims, Kevin Kelly describes parallel inventions on different isolated continents (the blowgun and the abacus, for example), and the presence of near-simultaneous inventions in modern times (the light bulb was invented at least two dozen times).

“The system does not and cannot exist to satisfy human needs. Instead, it is human behavior that has to be modified to fit the needs of the system. This has nothing to do with the political or social ideology that may pretend to guide the technological system. It is the fault of technology, because the system is guided not by ideology but by technical necessity.”

- Theodore J. Kaczynski, Technological Slavery: The Collected Writings of Theodore J. Kaczynski, a.k.a. "The Unabomber"

In October 2010, Susan Jane Gilman wrote a review of the Kevin Kelly book for NPR’s All Things Considered. The provocative new Kevin Kelly book, What Technology Wants, claims that technology is an extension of the human body — not "of our genes, but of our minds." Everything that humans have thought of and produced over time — which Kelly dubs "the technium" — has followed, shaped and become integrated into human evolution — so much so, in fact, that it's now a part of evolution itself. As such, Kelly argues, the goal of the technium — its "want," if you will — is to foster progress ... human betterment ... and even a portrait of God. While Kelly stops short of arguing that a MacBook, an opera or Hammurabi's Code are the equivalent of, say, a live chicken, he comes close. "However you define life, its essence does not reside in material forms like DNA, tissue or flesh," he writes, "but in the intangible organization of energy and information contained in those material forms." Because the technium is all about organizing energy and information, it, too, is an evolving form of life — beholden to the forces of the cosmos.

Stan Redding, Frank W. Abagnale: Catch Me If You Can: The True Story of a Real Fake

In 2002, the author, via his webpage, said this about his book and the consequent movie that was inspired by the title:

I feel it is necessary to make the following statement concerning the book and the film, Catch Me If You Can. The reasons for this statement is to provide clarification and accuracy. I wrote the book, Catch Me If You Can, more than 23 years ago. Obviously, this was written from my perspective as a 16-year old with the help of a co-writer (I'm now 54 and I sold the movie rights in 1980). I was interviewed by the co-writer only about four times. I believe he did a great job of telling the story, but he also over dramatized and exaggerated some of the story. That was his style and what the editor wanted. He always reminded me that he was just telling a story and not writing my biography. This is one of the reasons that from the very beginning, I insisted the publisher put a disclaimer in the book and tapes. It has been reported that I had written $10 million, $8 million and $5 million worth of bad checks. The actual amount was $2.5 million. I was never on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List as this is reserved for very violent criminals who pose a threat to society. All of the crimes I committed were when I was between the ages 16 and 21. I served time in prison in France, Sweden and the United States. In the U. S. Federal Court, I was sentenced as a youthful offender because of my age at the time the crimes were committed. Even so, I was given 12 years of which I served a total of five years. This was considered harsh punishment then and almost unheard of today.

Read the rest of that "disclaimer" here. Other books by the author: The Art of the Steal: How to Protect Yourself and Your Business from Fraud, America's #1 Crime, Stealing Your Life: The Ultimate Identity Theft Prevention Plan.

Perry Mehrling: The New Lombard Street: How the Fed Became the Dealer of Last Resort

The author was recently quoted as stating that the United States' Federal Reserve Bank was acting, in fact, as the world's central bank; this is a relatively straight forward notion, and actually rather self evident when you think of the greenback as the world's base currency (in terms of volume and stability and liquidity, and in terms of currency reserves held by sovereign banks). In the Sun Herald, Bradley Keoun and Hugh Son invoked the author this way: “Things would have been worse if they hadn’t lent to foreigners,” said Perry Mehrling, senior fellow at the Morin Center for Banking and Financial Law at Boston University and author of “The New Lombard Street: How the Fed became the Dealer of Last Resort.” “We’re finally getting to understand the role of the Fed in the world.” Fed spreadsheets showed the central bank became the world’s lender of last resort as dollars flowed to European banks as well as Bank of America Corp. and Wells Fargo & Co, among top borrowers from the Term Auction Facility at $45 billion each. Read that Sun Herald piece here. Recently, the author was a guest on Bloomberg Radio; download the podcast of that show here.

The Great Recession in Historical Perspective, Part 1: Introduction from Committee on Global Thought on Vimeo.

Lauren Redniss: Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout

The New York Times recently said this about the book:

The graphic-novel genre is no longer young, but it retains, like Drew Barrymore and certain indie bands, a quirky and semi-adorable glow. Its fragile vibe is Etsy, not Best Buy. Attacking a pile of graphic novels is not unlike chucking a sackful of baby pandas into a river. If many graphic novels are, as Barack Obama put it about Hillary Rodham Clinton, likable enough, few are knotty works of art, things you’d eagerly give to both the sulky teenager in your life and your grandmother who reads serious nonfiction and thinks comics are infra-dig. Few zigzag toward the earth like mid-August lightning. The tail end of 2010 has delivered such a keeper, however, in Lauren Redniss’s graphic biography, “Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout.” Here’s to hoping it doesn’t get lost amid the grog and tinsel and pay-per-view screenings of “Elf.”

Read that New York Times piece here.

Thomas D. Seeley: Honeybee Democracy

In September of 2010, The New York Times said this about the book and author: What can we learn from the bees? Honeybees practice a kind of consensus democracy similar to what happens at a New England town meeting, says Thomas D. Seeley, author of “Honeybee Democracy.” A group comes to a decision through a consideration of options and a process of elimination. The bees are making a life-and-death decision: where to establish a new hive. Choosing a site that is too exposed, too small or too close to the ground can be fatal. Swarms don’t always do it right, but they do succeed a remarkable amount of the time, with 10,000 or more bees following the advice and signals of a few hundred leaders to re-establish themselves in a new location every spring. Along the way they have to make sure the precious queen, fatter and more sluggish than the others and prone to take a rest stop, is not lost. Read that NYT piece here.

hiving a swarm from a bait hive from matthew smith on Vimeo.

Joel Waldfogel: Scroogenomics: Why You Shouldn't Buy Presents for the Holidays

The author and his latest book was recently invoked in the Guardian article, "The economics of gift-giving: Of crackers and turkeys: In short, gift-giving is the action of a social creature rather than an economic one:" All of which makes this season something of an economic disaster. Indeed, the Wharton School's Joel Waldfogel describes present-giving at Christmas as "an orgy of wealth destruction". According to his back-of-the-till-receipt estimates, around £15bn of what we give and receive each Christmas is wasted. Or to put it another way, we are flushing away the entire annual GDP of Tanzania. It is a striking thought, and in his recent book Scroogenomics, Professor Waldfogel makes a knowingly provocative case for changing the entire cursed gift system. And yet both his assumptions in calculating that sum and the argument that he goes on to make are slightly suspect. In the process, the academic offers a gift of his own – to those who would see economists as often practising a rather antisocial science. Read that Guardian piece here.

Eamon Javers: Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy: The Secret World of Corporate Espionage

In February of 2010, the author adapted pieces of his book for a piece for the political website, POLITICO, in which he said this: In the midst of two wars and the fight against Al Qaeda, the CIA is offering operatives a chance to peddle their expertise to private companies on the side — a policy that gives financial firms and hedge funds access to the nation’s top-level intelligence talent, POLITICO has learned. In one case, these active-duty officers moonlighted at a hedge-fund consulting firm that wanted to tap their expertise in “deception detection,” the highly specialized art of telling when executives may be lying based on clues in a conversation. The never-before-revealed policy comes to light as the CIA and other intelligence agencies are once again under fire for failing to “connect the dots,” this time in the Christmas Day bombing plot on Northwest Flight 253. Read that POLITICO piece here.

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Ted C. Fishman: Shock of Gray: The Aging of the World's Population and How it Pits Young Against Old, Child Against Parent, Worker Against Boss, Company Against Rival, and Nation Against Nation

In December 2010, The Globe and Mail wrote this about the author and his latest book: The effects of an aging population will touch every family, every workplace, every public debate in the West over the next 50 years. As Ted Fishman’s new book Shock of Gray explains, nothing will ever be the same. Fishman, a journalist, former trader and author of China Inc., has produced a deeply reported book that traces the scale of demographic change across the globe: from Japan, mired in a demographics-driven economic slump, to the depressed industrial heartland of the United States, where growth means more care homes, to Spain, a country that bristles at immigration but grows increasingly dependent on migrant labour. Read that Globe and Mail piece here. Also in December of 2010, U.S. News and World Report invoke the author and his book in this way:

[Holding] on to a job in your 60s or finding a new one can be difficult. "Workforce participation among older workers is higher than it has ever been and so is unemployment," says Ted Fishman, author of Shock of Gray, a book about the world's aging population. Once unemployed, older workers generally remain out of work longer than their younger counterparts. The average duration of unemployment for those age 55 and older in November 2010 was 45 weeks, 12 weeks longer than it takes the typical younger person to find a job. When Marty Colletti of Austin, Texas, a former account manager for Dell, was laid off in March 2009, it took her nearly two years to find a new job at a comparable level. Colletti, who will turn 65 in May, began a new job at a smaller company as a search engine optimization consultant in December 2010. "I tend to attribute my age to it taking so long to get a job," she says.

See that U.S. News and World Report piece, titled "The Baby Boomers Turn 65," here. See also: China, Inc.: How the Rise of the Next Superpower Challenges America and the World

Jim Krane: City of Gold: Dubai and the Dream of Capitalism

In 2009, the author wrote "The dark side of Dubai's success" for The Guardian, in which he said this: You underestimate Dubai at your own risk. Its concoctions look ridiculous to rational-minded people. It is difficult to believe the city can succeed. But it does. Over and over, for decades, Dubai has humiliated its naysayers. This time, though, Dubai's mistake could inflict lasting damage. The projects behind the city's debts may have been flights of fancy – artificial islands larger than Hong Kong, water-sucking golf courses, and an amusement zone bigger than Orlando – but the debts behind them are not. The damage could take years to live down. Dubai, with all of its excess, is the biggest thing to happen in the Arab world for 700 years. Its rise is part of an eastward shift in the Middle East's centre of gravity, from the old Mediterranean capitals to the brash new ones on the Gulf. Dubai's success is important for the region, and for the rest of us who would like to see more stability in this roiled part of the world, where the conflicts often spill into our streets. Read that piece for The Guardian here.

Isabel Wilkerson: The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

A writer for The Guardian recently wrote this about the book and author: One of 2010's most feted books has been The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson, a powerful history of the 20th-century migration of African-American families from America's deeply segregated south. Epic in the scale of its hurt and hope, it tells the largely untold story of a people fleeing a society of segregation and lynchings to start more fulfilling lives in Chicago, New York and the west coast. In these anonymous sprawls, racial prejudice may have been alive and well in people's heads but the crucial difference was that it wasn't sanctioned by policy and pulpit. Read that Guardian article here.

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Marvin Kitman: The Man Who Would Not Shut Up: The Rise of Bill O'Reilly

In 2007, The New York Times said this, of the book and author:

In "The Man Who Would Not Shut Up," Marvin Kitman, a veteran television critic for Newsday, seeks to explain O'Reilly's astonishing ascent. Kitman, who conducted numerous interviews with O'Reilly and his relatives, friends and co-workers, has performed Boswellian prodigies of research. If you've been wondering when exactly O'Reilly yelled at his wife, Maureen, for profligately ordering a bottle of sparkling water at a restaurant, Kitman is your guy. But he aims for more than that. Kitman states in his preface that as a liberal, he relishes the chance to set the record straight about O'Reilly. He adds that via his own Newsday columns "a kind of mentoring has been going on over the years, as he has assimilated my ideas with his own and put them into practice." Kitman does a remarkably good job of telling the story of O'Reilly's turbulent life in clear, crisp prose. Still, if this book isn't a valentine, it's something of a mash note. Kitman maintains that O'Reilly is a potent (and welcome) antidote to the pap served up for decades by the television industry. What Kitman really ends up revealing, however, is that O'Reilly's struggle isn't about conservative ideas. It's about parading his seething personal resentments in order to become the very thing he purports to despise: a celebrity.

Read that full New York Times piece here.




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David Horowitz, Richard Poe: The Shadow Party: How George Soros, Hillary Clinton, and Sixties Radicals Seized Control of the Democratic Party

Conspirators of the world unite. Regardless of what side you fall on, conspiracy theories such as those in this book are interesting. Flip through a few of the pages offered up on Amazon.com or over a Kindle sample, and at almost every other paragraph, there's a claim, it seems, that should be qualified somehow. But there aren't that many foot notes or resources noted. That all said, it's a good read; interesting, somewhat persuasive. It's always good to mix things up. See The Daily Show's "spin" on the paranoia about Soros below.

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Recently, a story out of the Canada Free Press website mentioned the book and author: Like a rotten fish, the reaction to the whole WikiLeaks thing stinks—as they say—from the head, meaning not only Obama but also his Capo di Tutti Capi, George Soros, whose major role in the political lives of both Hillary and Obama and their historically toxic anti-American agendas has been brilliantly, rivetingly, and illuminatingly spelled out in exquisite detail in The Shadow Party: How George Soros, Hillary Clinton, and Sixties Radicals Seized Control of the Democratic Party by David Horowitz and Richard Poe. See that CFP blurb here.

Nandan Nilekani: Imagining India: The Idea of a Renewed Nation

In India, a hot button issue is the UID debate. A universal sort of ID, a national number sort of akin to the social security personal identifier in the United States is in the works. The author recently opined on the issue, and was mentioned on an Economic Times webpage this way: With some activists opining that the unique identity number should not be linked to the government's rural employment scheme, MNREGA , UIDAI chairman Nandan Nilekani has said the 'Aadhar' number should not be the basis for any discrimination. Asked about activists like Jean Dreze, a member of the National Advisory Council (NAC), not favouring linking Aadhar to MNREGA, he said the number should not be used in such a manner that one gets discriminated against. "Aadhar should not be a basis of discrimination," he said at the annual Rajinder Mathur memorial lecture organised by The Editors Guild of India. [...] Nilekani said the Aadhaar number will be helpful in opening a bank account, getting a ration card and many other things especially for the poor and the migrant labourers. He said the number will enable inclusive growth and development for the deprived and will act as an instrument of social inclusion. In 2009, The Economist magazine covered the book and author this way:

NANDAN NILEKANI, the co-founder of Infosys, one of India’s biggest IT firms, is a corporate icon in his homeland. But to many readers outside the country he is best known for a stray comment he made to Thomas Friedman of the New York Times in February 2004. His remark (“Tom, the playing field is being levelled”) inspired the title and thesis of Mr Friedman’s “The World is Flat”, a big-think book about offshoring and globalisation that sold millions. The publishers of “Imagining India”, Mr Nilekani’s admirable first book, must hope that many of those readers will be eager to hear the Indian side of the story, straight from the source. Not to disappoint them, Mr Nilekani provides a chapter on globalisation and two on information technology. But “Imagining India” is a very different book from Mr Friedman’s bestseller. Mr Nilekani, an intellectual trapped in an entrepreneur’s body, seeks to understand India through the “ebb and flow of its ideas” and debates. Some of these arguments are now resolved, even forgotten. Others have yet to be joined. A third category of ideas commands assent, but no action. And some arguments still burn white-hot.

Read that Economist piece here. See also: The India Way: How India's Top Business Leaders Are Revolutionizing Management, Doing Business in 21st-Century India: How to Profit Today in Tomorrow's Most Exciting Market, Doing Business in India For Dummies, The Richest East India Merchant: The Life and Business of John Palmer of Calcutta, 1767-1836 (Worlds of the East India Company). The author was a guest on The Daily Show in 2009, as well as a speaker at TED. See those videos just below.

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