Films About Totalitarianism: A Series

 

A Rather Fascinating Person

And then, a last snapshot. It's eleven years later - the invasion of Iraq, which I backed, is a disaster; the financial system that my friends helped build has crashed; my wife and I are divorced; the New Republic is sold after I feared going bust - and here I am in my white suit walking across Harvard Yard, surrounded by students: "Harvard, Harvard shame on you, honoring a racist fool." The racist fool is, apparently, me. It's a sodden coda, one I don't quite grasp, or believe.

-  Martin Peretz

The Man Who Never Sleeps: Samples of His Nonfiction

Whoa!

 

All Modesty Aside

If I had not written this, I would have wished that I had.

Ballad

 And this is the ballad of my life: that I mumble strange syllables before the people of silence.

- Avrom Sutzkever

Sowell on Education's Problems

 

Fascinating

I will also show, with the help of facts and figures that my research team and I have collected, block by block and farm by farm in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America, that most of the poor already possess the assets they need to make a success of capitalism. Even in the poorest countries, the poor save. The value of the savings among the poor is, in fact, immense - forty times all the foreign aid received throughout the world since 1945. In Egypt, for instance, the wealth that the poor have accumulated is worth fifty-five times as much as the sum of all direct foreign investment ever recorded there, including the Suez Canal and the Aswan Dam.

- Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

The Cambridge Story Is Not Going Away

 

First Paragraph

 My hometown was, in the 1960s, a passable embodiment of the American Dream, a place that offered decent opportunity for all the kids in town, whatever their background. A half century later, however, life in Port Clinton, Ohio, is a split-screen American nightmare, a community in which kids from the wrong side of the tracks that bisect the town can barely imagine the future that awaits the kids from the right side of the tracks. And the story of Port Clinton turns out to be sadly typical of America. How this transformation happened, why it matters, and how we might begin to alter the cursed course of our society is the subject of this book.

- From Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis by Robert D. Putnam, published in 2015.