Curtis Wilkie and the Dickie Scruggs Story

Richard Scruggs is probably the only man in his prison, or even perhaps the entire U.S. Federal prison system, that is currently legally being paid $20 million a year, up until the year 2025, as part of a few legal settlements he'd put together with Big Tobacco in America. NPR's Morning Edition covered the book and the Dickie Scruggs story. See also: Dixie: A Personal Odyssey Through Events That Shaped the Modern South, Arkansas Mischief: The Birth of a National Scandal. NPR notes that: Right now, Scruggs is serving a sentence in an Ashland, Ky., prison. But he has held on to his money — and continues to make more. As Wilkie says, Scruggs' tobacco settlement fee arrangements will continue to pay him $20 million a year until the year 2025. View the webpage for this feature story, here. Read an excerpt here.

"Robert Morris: America's Founding Capitalist" from NPR's Morning Edition

There are a few things we're all taught to notice about the Declaration of Independence: the famous preamble, the phrase "all men are created equal," the defiantly large signature of John Hancock. But off to the right of Hancock's name is the cramped signature of a man few Americans have ever heard of. His name was Robert Morris, the nation's founding capitalist and the financier of its revolution.

Read the NPR feature webpage here. Download the podcast of this Morning Edition show here. The WSJ also covered the book:

Mr. Rappleye has a gift for explaining the complicated financial and mercantile world of the late 18th century, the milieu in which Robert Morris grew up, thrived and, eventually, went broke. (He died penniless after a stay in debtors' prison, undone during the 1790s in part by the "earliest American real estate bubble," the author notes.) Mr. Rappleye is equally good at explaining the economic forces that battered the new country after independence; America was burdened by debts, and its central government lacked the powers to deal with the financial problems confronting it. Fame is a fickle mistress, and even many students of the period know little more about Robert Morris than the soubriquet given to him by Washington himself: "the financier of the Revolution." Charles Rappleye has done a marvelous job of explaining why this mostly forgotten Founder deserves our gratitude.

Read that WSJ article here. See also: The Blessed Life: The Simple Secret of Achieving Guaranteed Financial Results, Robert Morris: The Financier and the Finances of the American Revolution, Vol. 1, Financiers of the American Revolution: Robert Morris

Symbolism and Pragmatism: "How We Got From Estate Tax To 'Death Tax'" from NPR's The Two-way

Don Gonyea speaks with Columbia Law School's Michael Graetz (update at 10 a.m. ET: he's also a professor emeritus and lecturer at Yale law School) about the history of the tax for Morning Edition. Graetz is co-author of the book Death by a Thousand Cuts: The Fight Over Taxing Inherited Wealth. [...] Graetz tells Don that the estate tax in its current form was passed by Congress in 1916, just three years after the start of the federal income tax. Roosevelt supported the tax as an instrument for enforcing the equality of opportunity in the U.S. by making it more difficult to pass great fortunes from one generation to another. Graetz says that the public accepted the tax as a another progressive-era reform. "It was the beginning of the progressive era," says Graetz. "The income tax had just come in, in 1913. So, the public was very interested in progressive taxation and the estate tax was a natural piece of that kind of system." Significant opposition first appeared in the 1920s when Andrew Mellon of Gulf Oil tried to repeal the estate tax during his stint as secretary of the Treasury during the Coolidge administration. Then, in the 1940s, Graetz says that opponents started labeling it the "death tax" in a bid to gain wider support for the repeal movement. The movement never succeeded. But the 1990s saw a resurgence in efforts to kill the tax, with an emphasis on how it affects family farms and small businesses. Graetz tells Gonyea, however, that the estate tax has rarely affected these types of small family operations and that opponents eventually fell back to the position of advocating a complete repeal. In the end, Graetz says the debate over the tax seems more symbolic than anything else in light of the fact that it has never produced more than 2 percent of federal revenues in any individual year since World War II.

Read the full Two-way post here. There was also this Morning Edition radio show on the topic. "Symbolic." Politics is all symbolism these days, and so much of the inflated U.S. economy is about political gestures, i.e. purely symbolic gestures, in an attempt to win a philosophical argument or debate: we buy organic to make a statement, more than anything else; we buy books; we use certain sorts of social media. This book cuts to this symbolism, and at that, there's a pairing here. There's a paring with the pragmatism of Obama, which is best understood through the book, Reading Obama.

"Patti Smith's 'Just Kids' Wins Nonfiction Award" from NPR's Morning Edition by LYNN NEARY

Rock musician Patti Smith is now a literary star. Her memoir about life in New York City in the 1960s, Just Kids, won the National Book Award for nonfiction. The literary awards were handed out Wednesday night in New York City. Lord of Misrule author Jaimy Gordon won for fiction. NEARY: The most emotional moment of last night came when Patti Smith won the non fiction award for her memoir "Just Kids," about her lifelong friendship and early love affair with the late artist Robert Mapplethorpe. Smith said she promised Mapplethorpe she would write the book the day before he died of AIDS. Ms. PATTI SMITH (Author, "Just Kids"): I was the only one that could write it really, since we grew together, we evolved as artists together. And he could also trust that I would present him to the world as I knew him, which was as an artist, a loving friend; mischievous, generous, kind, funny and beautiful. So I did my best. NEARY: In accepting her award, Smith recalled the time when she was a young girl, new to the city, working at Scribner's Bookstore and dreaming of writing her own book one day.

Download the podcast here. See also: Patti Smith Complete 1975-2006: Lyrics, Reflections & Notes for the Future, Auguries of Innocence: Poems, Early Work: 1970-1979, Patti Smith: Dream of Life

"No Ink, No Paper: What's The Value Of An E-Book?" from NPR by LYNN NEARY

The growing popularity of e-books has raised a difficult question in the publishing marketplace that used to have an easy answer: What's a book worth? Because they cost less to produce, consumers think e-books should be cheap. But publishers are afraid that if the price goes too low, they may never recover from the diminished expectations. Some observers wonder if the publishers' pricing strategy is short-sighted. Jason Epstein, a well-known editor, publisher and author who has worked in the business for more than a half-century, says e-books are "the most exciting event, as far as books are concerned, in 500 years." [...] The $9.99 price per e-book, set by Amazon for its Kindle e-reader, was a major source of frustration for publishers. So when Apple unveiled the iPad, which includes an e-book reader and store, they seized the opportunity to make prices more competitive. Most of the major publishing houses have negotiated a higher price for newly released e-books. But McQuivey says the inflation is a mistake.

Listen to the NPR Morning Edition podcast here. Check the full NPR feature story out here.