The Ambiguity of Virtue

Recent News

• The New Yorker published an excerpt from Cass Sunstein’s Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide.
• Reinier de Graaf, author of Four Walls and a Roof, wrote at TIME about how architecture should adapt to climate change.
• Mehrsa Baradaran’s conclusions on the limits of black economic self-sufficiency and the government’s role in perpetuating the racial wealth gap, explicated in The Color of Money, were examined closely at the Atlantic.
• Laurent Dubois, author of The Banjo, recounted to WUOT [Knoxville, TN]’s Changing Course how stringed instruments journeyed with enslaved people from Africa, to the Caribbean, and then to the United States—eventually consolidating into the familiar shape and sound we recognize today.

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September 6: The Problem with Privatization

“I’m going to get good contractors and push the hell out of them,” said Donald Trump. Though the sentiment jibes with any number of declarations made on the campaign trail and since taking office, the exact quote actually dates from 1986, when Trump was making a push to take charge of work to revive a moribund Central Park skating rink. Placed alongside words from James Madison and James Landis, FDR’s SEC chairman, that Trump quote now rounds out an absurdist trio of epigraphs employed by legal scholar Jon D. Michaels in a new book on the pitfalls of privatizing government. While the book, Constitutional Coup: Privatization’s Threat to the American Republic, considers the …