The Ambiguity of Virtue

Recent News

• The Guardian published an excerpt from Brooke Harrington’s Capital without Borders: Wealth Managers and the One Percent, on the daily paranoia and intrigue central to a wealth manager’s mission.
• Earl Boebert discussed Deepwater Horizon: A Systems Analysis of the Macondo Disaster on the British radio program The Monocle Daily [starts at 31:24].
• Orlando Patterson, editor of The Cultural Matrix: Understanding Black Youth, discussed whether we are paying enough attention to the culture of young black Americans (as opposed to the structure of society in which they must live) on WCPN (Cleveland, OH)’s The Sound of Ideas.
• Real Simple summarized some of the lessons from C. K. Gunsalus’s The Young Professional’s Survival Guide: From Cab Fares to Moral Snares on avoiding common mistakes at your first job.

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September 22: Claudia Rankine’s Genius

Likely no book of poetry—no book designated as poetry—in the United States in the twenty-first century has received as much attention, discussion, and debate as Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric (2014), from which these paragraphs come. They occupy exactly one page of the meticulously designed book, which includes other anecdotes like this one; sparse pronouncements and queries in verse (“How to care for the injured body, // the kind of body that can’t hold / the content it is living?”); evocative, more conventionally lyrical blocks of prose; essays on racial stereotypes in sports, such as those that vex Serena Williams; and multipage “scripts” for short videos, c…