1. I am currently reading, among others, Harold Bloom’s ‘Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds‘. I am finding it to be an extremely erudite and accessible compendium of great minds, from Shakespeare to Tolstoy and beyond. There are some excellent excerpts that I’ll share in a later post.
2. Candidate for line of the day: “… of the kind of pre-linguistic jouissance that could launch a thousand Julia Kristeva dissertations.” From a discussion on Pitchfork.
3. My friend Eric and I are tentatively going to a blind beer tasting Sunday at 3 at Sycamore Restaurant here in Columbia. The theme is stouts.
4. Brad Delong on Paul Krugman on Greg Mankiw, here. Money line: “To me, the thing to note about the economists–the Mankiws, the Lucases, the Beckers, the Barros, and all the rest–who have pledged allegiance to the Republican Party this year is how much they hagve stopped thinking like economists.”
Ducks and Economics 