Raritania

In reading Theodore Dreiser's Frank Cowperwood novels, especially after having read his memoir A Book About Myself , I instantly found m...

Theodore Dreiser, after having begun the story of Frank Cowperwood in 1912's The Financier , continued it in 1914's The Titan --orig...

I first picked up Theodore Dreiser's The Financier just after finishing his most celebrated work, An American Tragedy , precisely becau...

Remarking the anniversary of the signing of the Versailles Treaty in the weeks after Dunkirk and the fall of France and on the eve of what w...

The deficiencies of Robert Ludlum's prose as measured by the conventional criteria of "good style" are of course notoriously l...

The implicit assumption of the phenomenon we call "self-help" is that people, as individuals, are the causes of their own problem...

It was in 2009 that the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences expanded the final list of nominations for Best Picture from th...

Those who have actually read the work of theoreticians of the information age like Alvin Toffler may remember its view that the centralized...

I suppose that few these days encounter theorizing the "rise and fall of great economic powers" outside a university program or co...

I remember decades ago first encountering the cyclical theories of the rise and fall of great economic powers--the patterns those theories...

The sorts of economic commentators who are given the kind of media platform from which one can reach an appreciable audience are famously a...

It is a commonplace that the famous complain (ceaselessly) about the downsides to being famous. How complete strangers may be inappropriatel...

It is a commonplace that celebrities often complain about the less attractive aspects of being famous (or rather, fame on the very particula...

Back in 2018 an individual working as a security guard in a hospital recorded videos of his flatulations and, using the name "Paul Flar...

Far from being a situation where those who "work hard" may reasonably hope to make steady progress, those who have been "ind...