The decades-long boom in financial services has created tremendous wealth for a handful of people. The once-stodgy banking sector became a Xanadu for the quantitatively gifted, attracting talent that might have once been drawn to industry or academia. But has this transformation contributed to the growth of the real economy? In A Call for Judgment, economist Amar Bhidé argues that it has not. Rather, it has undermined the foundations of free-market capitalism by encouraging a dangerous centralization of financial decision making.

A rubbery lump, the human brain swirling in a specimen jar is an unimposing sight—more an overgrown mushroom than the seat of consciousness. The old gray matter is just that: gray. But when depicted by skilled anatomists or subjected to microscopes, MRIs, and electroencephalographs by neuroscientists, the brain and its parts can offer up visually […]

“Never liked girls or knew many, except my sisters, but our queer plays and experiences may prove interesting, though I doubt it,” Louisa May Alcott confided to her journal in 1868, while writing Little Women. Deemed more than “interesting,” the semiautobiographical novel became a classic in Alcott’s lifetime and remains so today. Each year some thirty-five thousand fans descend on Orchard House—the place in Concord, Massachusetts, where Alcott wrote and set her bestseller—looking to imagine the lives of the March girls, as well as that of their creator. Suffice it to say that Alcott has never lacked for devotees, especially

BIOGRAPHY & HISTORY

The idea that elegy is the essence of poetry is an old one, and has always seemed to me worth resisting. This protest is probably the privilege of youth—and, if I’m honest, probably the privilege of privilege—but I prefer to think of it as an insistence that art can be larger than life, and life larger than loss.

Matt Taibbi is, by some margin, the best polemical journalist in America. His dispatches for Rolling Stone—long, carefully reported, deeply angry, and chock-full of information and vitriol—throw complex policy debates into stark relief and are loud and powerful enough to compete with the sex and celebrity filling up the rest of the magazine.

Los Angeles Times book critic David Ulin would readily admit that what, how, and why one reads inevitably change over time. What concerns him is that the act of reading is itself now being changed by the times. The quiet space we require for reading “seems increasingly elusive in our over-networked society,” he writes, “where … it is not contemplation we desire but an odd sort of distraction, distraction masquerading as being in the know.” I have suffered from a form of this allergy to deep engagement and its corollary need for “information”; for the better part of the past

Foreign Bodies, the sixth novel by Cynthia Ozick, is being billed by the publisher as a “photographic negative” of The Ambassadors—“the plot is the same, the meaning is reversed.” Hardy is the soul who scans that description and does not feel a tingling at the base of his spine! For The Ambassadors is not just any Henry James novel, but the work—a towering, virtuosic portrait of turn-of-the-century Europe—that James himself considered his most-accomplished. Is there not something audacious in the suggestion that it could now, even a hundred-plus years later, be re-envisioned? And yet Ozick has produced something truly remarkable