The 10th Justice

As a doctor I am prescribing a new therapeutic tool to counteract the mental havoc caused by Trump: the book These Truths by Jill Lepore. Dr. Lepore is a chaired professor of American history at Harvard and a staff writer for The New Yorker. These Truths is a narrative history of the United States written like one of those tremendously engaging New Yorker articles about a subject you never even thought about but the writing is so powerful it pulls you so deeply into the world of orchids or artisanal iron work construction that you want to change careers. Except These Truths is nine hundred pages long. There are a hundred pages of notes, however, as support and amplification of any subject that comes up. That in itself is such a pleasant change from Trump who, not only lies about whatever suits him, offer no supporting evidence for anything he says, lies or not. These Truths calmed me down. To begin with, the Trump/populism thing has happened many times in this country and our dem...

Adam Tooze's book Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crisis Changed the World , is a good reminder of how much about international economics I don't know. And probably never will. However, for anyone interested in the events that caused the 2008 recession, why that recession was an international event, and its repercussions, the book is worth struggling through. For a non-economist I have a pretty good understanding of the mechanism that led to the 2008 recession. During that difficult financial time, articles from NPR, the New York Times, Rolling Stone and Bloomberg did a good job of explaining how the housing crisis developed. The creation of mortgages that required no down payment and no collateral, the combining these into MBSs (mortgage backed securities) and CDOs (collateralized debt obligations), and all the insurance that went with them in case they failed, the CDSs (credit default swaps), are explained and amplified in Tooze's narrative. What was new to me was th...