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Yelp, Antitrust, and Google
Google, Amazon, and Facebook are modern-day railroads. The technology companies are three of the few organizations that own and control our modern infrastructure. Connor Dougherty published a nice look at how Google’s monopolist position impacts the businesses that rely on the infrastructure it owns. Like farmers and railroads before, web service providers like Yelp are effectively…
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Why did FDR drop Henry Wallace from the 1944 Presidential Ticket?
In July 1944, a little over a year before WW2 ended, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt looked tired and sick. Publicly, he was taking a month-long rest under the guise of war planning. Privately, he was diagnosed with severe hypertension, heart disease, cardiac failure, and acute bronchitis. The stress of leading a nation at war, rehabilitating…
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Review: The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson
With a scope wide as it is personal, Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns paints a historical picture of one of the largest, but least reported events in the 21st century: the mass northern migration of African Americans.
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Book Review: How Not to Network a Nation
How Not To Network a Nation by Benjamin Peters provides an exhaustive look at one of the functional problems that plagued the Soviet experiment: information management.
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Book Review: The Most Powerful Idea in the World by William Rosen
The Most Powerful Idea in the World is a surprisingly readable, insightful, and entertaining book about the steam engine and patent law.
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Book Review: The New Deal by Michael Hiltzik
In The New Deal, journalist Michael Hiltzik, tells the story of the people, policies, and actions that shaped the nation.
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It’s 2017 and the impossible has happened. I agree with Ross Douthat.
It’s 2017 and the impossible has happened. I agree with Ross Douthat. Douthat is an op-ed writer for the New York Times. He shouldn’t be. He once argued that people waiting longer to have children is “a decadence that first arose in the West but now haunts rich societies around the globe.” He spent most…
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Classic Read: How Democrats Killed Their Populist Soul
Matt Stoller’s How Democrats Killed Their Populist Soul is the best political analysis I’ve read all year.
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The Forgotten Falk Corporation
Like many great companies, today the Falk Corporation is forgotten. At its height, it perfected the silicon chips of the industrial era. Falk designed and manufactured fat gears and thin gears, cheap gears and expensive gears, gears that could open the Panama Canal, and gears that fit on a small desk. It made gears for…
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Book Review: Rana Foroohar’s Makers and Takers
Foroohar’s book isn’t perfect–it goes on a bit long and only offers a few solutions—but it’s a well-meaning and well researched book on the modern economy.