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Happy New Year’s!

Miss me? Sorry for the hiatus, I’ve been taken a little holiday blogging break. Had a lovely Christmas in NYC, and headed to New Orleans for New Year’s. I’ve managed to see quite a few movies of late, and highly, highly recommend Doubt. It’s masterfully compressed, the writing is brilliant and the acting is sublime. I also really liked Frost/Nixon, though it’s not quite on the same plain.

If you’re looking for a lucid, concise and highly readable book that attempts to explain the origins of the current financial crisis, it’s hard to do better than George Cooper’s “The Origin of Financial Crises: Central Banks, Credit Bubbles and the Efficient Market Fallacy”:http://www.economist.com/finance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12209655. Cooper belongs to the “central-banks-are-to-blame” school, and makes the case quite convincingly. Though it’s important to note that his account is by no means the final word.

Finally, for a dose of fiction: I’m about 100 pages into 2666 the final novel by Chilean writer Roberto Bolano, who died in 2003 before the novel could be published. His literary executor arranged for its publication, and just recently, the mammoth work was translated into English and is now available here. Like I said, I’m only 100 pages in, but so far it is stunningly good. Wow.

Spencer Ackerman shows us. (Very NSFW)

Hmmm.

Intriguing. I’m really hoping that a) Obama installs a court in the White House and b) I manage to worm my way into one of the pick-up games. In all honesty, I’d take that over an interview any day of the week.

Derrick Rose is the Truth. (Also, the only reason to watch the Bulls this season, so far.)

Jay Z brings it.

This (via Kat) will really put you in a good mood on the eve of the holiday:

Watching this it occurs to me that there are a lot of people who made a lot of money on Wall Street who are basically Taylor writ large.

Well, that’s an overstatement, but this bit from Howard Wolfson sheds some light:

By the end of the campaign, I was seeing the Drudge siren in my sleep. As people in politics know all too well, Matt Drudge, the Internet provocateur who runs the Drudge Report Web site, posts a flashing siren whenever he wants to alert readers to major campaign news or rumors. The siren haunted my dreams and was always in the corner of my eye — except when it was in plain sight, on my computer screen, signifying success or, more often, terrible failure and impending doom. As soon as that siren started flashing, instant messages would pop up, just below the siren, one after another — each one beginning with “Seen Drudge?” until my entire computer screen was filled with instant-message boxes illuminated by the light of Drudge’s siren. It might have been beautiful if it hadn’t been so frightening.

Who cares what Drudge thinks? If you’re running a campaign afraid of incurring Drudge’s wrath, you’re not running a good campaign.

From the indispensable JKG, in 1993:

Additionally, there is the sad fact that in a recession monetary policy doesn't work. The elasticity of the response to reduced interest rates is then very low. People and firms spend and invest, or fail to do so, pretty much as before.

This is kind of a remarkable video:

For setting the record straight

These four photos pretty much says everything that needs to be said about Tuesday night.

Amen, Rachel. Amen.

This is making the rounds, understandably:

If you want to do something these last four days, that’s what you should do. If you’ve never done it before, it’s an incredibly experience: