December 2005

Schooling America: Adjustment

Lucy Sprague Mitchell and Carleton Washburne, embody the Adjustment period from 1920 to 1954. Mitchell with her friend Caroline Pratt founded the City and Country School in New York City as her children entered school in the 1920s. Mitchell had tried unsuccessfully to break the formalism of the New York City schools, and having inherited family money, she decided to establish a school of her own design. Its 1922 program of arts, play, shop, rest, as well as a little reading, is revealed in this chart showing the “Greenwich Village School Program, 1922 -1923.”

Undercover Economist at Tech Central Station

The feature article at Tech Central Station today is a wonderful review by Arnold Kling of Tim Harford’s book The Undercover Economist. Kling does not shrink from making the “inevitable comparison with Freakonomics.” Kling gives his “enthusiastic recommendation to The Undercover Economist” over its best-selling rival. (Click HERE to read Kling’s review of Freakonomics). Kling […]

Law & Politics

The central metaphor of Richard Pacelle’s review of Advice and Consent by Lee Epstein and Jeffrey Segal in the Law & Politics Book Review is just too entertaining to avoid posting. At the appropriate age (and, truth be told, maybe a little beyond that), I would anxiously anticipate the second or third week of the […]

The Kabbalah

I couldn’t help but notice – try as I might to resist – this story from a few weeks ago in which Madonna, aka Esther, claimed that she’d likely get less grief from the media if she had become a Nazi instead of devoting herself to kabbalah. It made me think of this image from […]

Freakonomics is Gone!

Marginal Revolution reports that the first signed copy of Freakonomics has been sold for $610. Tim Harford, author of The Undercover Economist and original owner of the book, has donated the proceeds of the Ebay auction to Levitt’s favorite charity, Smile Train, and Levitt has matched that amount with a donation of his own.