Read This!

by Joseph Adler For me, it was the numbers. I didn’t really discover baseball until I was in college, in the 80s, when a roommate left a copy of that year’s Bill James Baseball Abstract in the suite. I was smitten. It wasn’t just the statistics – it was the analysis and the writing. James understood that baseball statistics were individual performance in a team context and knew how to separate the two. He knew how to make the numbers tell a story. It wasn’t just playing games with numbers, […]

by Gerald Knight I can’t tell you how much I wanted to like this book. I’ve admired O’Reilly’s technical books for years, and now that I’ve branched out into business applications, I was delighted to see that they had, too. When I finished business school last year, one of the classes I had to take was in financial modeling, and it had a heavy Excel emphasis. We did a little bit with Macros and VBA, but the most complex model we did was nothing compared to what this book aimed […]

by Simi Peters The Biblical text is sparse. Read literally, straight through, you’d get the impression that P.G. Wodehouse wouldn’t do well among the nomads. Even the strictly narrative portions leave out most of the story, and leave room for all sorts of questions. The Rabbis thought so, too. Enter the Midrash. The Midrash – stories recorded in the Talmud and in collections – are the rabbinic attempt to fill in the gaps. Some of these stories are exceedingly well-known; better-known, in fact, than parts of Tanach itself. Nechama Leibowitz […]

by Glenn Reynolds – Instapundit Prof. Glenn Reynolds, that’s Instapundit to you, brews his own beer, has his own record label, and writes one of the most successful blogs on the planet. All of this is possible because of the massive increase of productivity in the last few years, placed in the hands of everyday people all over the world. The great story, the great trend of the 21st century is going to be the 18th and 19th centuries – the movement of society from decentralized to centralized, and back […]

by Katherine Albrecht and Liz McIntyre If Mesdames Albrecht and McIntyre are right, corporations and governments are conspiring, even as you read this, to bring on the apocalypse. Universal surveillance, in the form of nascent RFID (Radio Frequency ID) technology, is on the way, and they don’t think you’re going to like the results. They make a compelling and insightful case that RFID technology can put dangerous power into the hands of the government. But it’s a case that’s undermined – although not fatally – by overestimating the technology and […]

by John Keegan Churchill is in fashion again. His wartime leadership made him one of the character studies in Supreme Command. He’s been used as a model of executive leadership. He and Reagan have been the subjects of a joint study. The one limitation of all these studies is that they focus on his wartime leadership, often giving little background to his earlier political career. That’s fine for most Americans – most of us probably conceive of Churchill as having emerged from the womb arguing for an increase in the […]

by Joel Miller Of “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness,” it’s the last that’s come under the most sustained ideological attack over the last half-century. And while modern conservatism has always included an element of deregulation and tax cuts, it’s also fair to say that only recently has it developed popular intellectual defenses of free markets and property rights. Size Matters fits squarely in this genre. Joel Miller makes the pragmatic case for smaller government, and basing it on two principles. First, it’s fundamentally unfair and undemocratic to expect […]

by Robert F. Bruner One of the problems with books of historical case studies is a lack of general principles, and a feeling that the authors are looking in the back of the book for the answers. The post-mortems don’t really offer any guidance for the pre-mortem. A book like Thinking In Time, popular with the public administration crowd, seems too clever by half, proving the importance of judgment without helping much to develop it. It compares the handling of two different potential epidemics, but which one applies to the […]

by Tom Holland The fall of the Roman Republic has gotten a lot of attention recently, with ABC and HBO both producing series on the subject. The Founders were intimately familiar with the story, and tried to frame the Constitution, both in federalism and in the national government’s balance of powers, to make this republic more durable. Perhaps out of a sense of our own non-drift towards empire, but also perhaps out of a growing concern for the fragility or vulnerability of our own institutions of government, the period continues […]

by Victor Davis Hanson Why do we still care about the Peloponnesian War, 2500 years after it ended? Because it became the prototype war for death struggles between ideologies. With the possible exception of the Punic Wars, the Roman wars of conquest were primarily political and personal matters, only incidentally spreading the idea of Roman Law. By the time of the Empire, the Romans were more civilized, but hardly more idealistic than their enemies. It’s also the best-documented ancient war. Along with Thucidydes’s and Xenophon’s contemporaneous accounts, the 4th-Century Athenians […]