Miscellaneous: An interview with Mike Davis, author of Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb. A review of The Islamist: Why I Joined Radical Islam in Britain, What I Saw Inside and Why I Left by Ed Husain. Research finds the most effective campaigns to encourage ethical consumption are those that take place at a collective level, such as the creation of Fairtrade cities, rather than those that target individual behaviour. People use the term "anarchy" recklessly. They might be surprised at what it actually means. The industry that time forgot: The Big Dig was no fluke — it was just another day at the office for the most wasteful, least productive industry in America. What's wrong with the $1 trillion construction business?
From PopMatters, a review of Instructions for American Servicemen in Iraq during World War II by The United States Army. Surviving prison rape: A review of Fish: A Memoir of a Boy in a Man’s Prison by T.J. Parsell. The transformative power of a good scrub: A review of Clean: A History of Personal Hygiene and Purity by Virginia Smith (and more). The first chapter from The Embedded Corporation: Corporate Governance and Employment Relations in Japan and the United States by Sanford M. Jacoby. The underworked American: Stop your whining: leisure time is on the rise. The Pantsuit Paradox: How do women signal power at the boys' club? From Popular Mechanics, an article on the 10 worst disasters of the last 101 years.
From Financial Times, Samuel Brittan on the crooked path of capitalism. Go Forth And Gentrify? So are "transitional" homebuyers guilty of class warfare? It's easy to talk about the downside of gentrification—high housing prices, evictions, and a creeping NIMBY-ism that elbows out social services. A review of The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product that Defined America by Allan M. Brandt. What did Paul really mean? "New perspective" scholars argue that we need, well, a new perspective on justification by faith. A look at the strange, modern cult of being busy. Women often emerge from the history of the American West as academic icons. After all, it was proto-feminists struggling against the frontier patriarchy who actually won the West, or so we're led to believe. An interesting set of studies recently looked into the role of situation in influencing “ethical” consumption.
