Chasing Sustainable Growth: Understanding the Impact of Productivity of Economies

Sustainability is a contemporary conundrum that is likely going to grow in importance with each passing generation. Increasingly, Millennials and Generation Z are looking back at history to avoid the mistakes that their parents or grandparents committed. Examples include over-reliance on fossil fuels and rapid consumption of natural resources. They…

The Bird Trapped in the Airport

“Women who die alone at midnight contributing to the end, to lost time, to the rain and flies, seeing the bird they saw trapped in the airport surviving by the water fountain”   —Mary Ruefle, “Women in Labor”   A few years ago, I…

“Boris, Brighton Beach in Brooklyn, New York”

“I moved here from Russia as a young boy. My dream was to become Mr. Universe. You know, like Arnold Schwarzenegger? One day while training I fell to my knees from a bad dizzy spell. I was 34 years old. Later that week my doctor asked to have a series…

Slowing Down To Catch a Breath: The Economics of a Recession

The hard thing about economic cycles is that it is very hard to predict when an economy is sliding into a recession or moving to a period of sustained growth. Imagine that you are a fish in a fishbowl oblivious of the universe outside. Being in a recession is a…

Ars Moriendi

If Us Weekly’s popular segment “Stars – They’re Just Like Us” were to compile celebrities’ personal moments from social media instead of paparazzi-stalking celebrities at seafood counters or walking dogs named after pieces of fruit, the American public might have to think more deeply about what binds…

To Save a Life

This week, Dr. Caitlyn Collins, an assistant professor of sociology at Washington University in St. Louis who studies gender inequality, asked what it would take for the United States to consider providing safe, affordable, quality childcare for its citizens. To underscore the urgency of the question, Collins…

Happiness in Twenty Minutes

Credit Michaella A. Thornton The weather in St. Louis is often as uncertain as our times. Many days it seems as if we live inside a giant Newton’s cradle, just waiting for a gust of wind to blow one metallic ball into the next. We observe the swinging temperatures, trying…

Within Our Gates

May aims to demonstrate that, over the past fifty years or more, there has emerged a “new consensus” that Americans have everything to fear—especially from each other—despite the fact that in very many ways their world has grown safer.

How Old Jim Crow Inspired the Nazis

Hitler’s American Model is invaluable in comprehending the creative political maneuvering deployed, across time and international boundaries, to satisfy this racism.

Charles de Gaulle and the France He Made

Though Jackson has a generally favorable opinion of de Gaulle, he makes no attempt to hide his difficult personality and his craftily dishonest manipulation of people and institutions. The result is both even-handed and definitive.

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