Selected Letters, Volume 2

Recent News

• James Delbourgo, author of Collecting the World, explained the British Museum’s controversial origins—in colonialism and slavery—to WNYC’s Leonard Lopate.
• Sam White, author of A Cold Welcome: The Little Ice Age and Europe’s Encounter with North America, wrote at Time about early European colonists’ experience of climate change in the Americas.
• Jonathan Lear’s understanding of the psychotherapeutic relationship as one of “thinking-together”—explicated in Wisdom Won from Illness: Essays in Philosophy and Psychoanalysis—was lauded at Psychology 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 …