Part of what’s visceral for me about watching the Kavanaugh circus play out over these last two weeks is that he is to me a banal social type, cut from precisely the same cloth as scores of douchebags I knew when attending an East Coast boarding school in the 1980s.... The features of this social type: moderately talented but profoundly entitled, extremely hard-working but ultimately selfish, enormously arrogant but carefully polished, and above all exquisitely sensitive to what he can and cannot get away with.

If you're looking for a juicy history dissertation topic, I would recommend the history of the financial analysis by investment banks, especially of overseas investment targets. As far as I know, nothing has been written about this, and it is an enormously important subject. My impression is that overseas financial investment really gets going after WWII (I learned this in "Do You Sincerely Want To Get Rich," about the Bernie Cornfeld/OIC fraud) but the institutionalization really starts in the 1970s as part of the general globalization of finance.

My own view is that gradualism followed by a final exclamation point is a very likely extinction scenario, both for dinosaurs — and for humans. Indulge me in long thread that ends with meditations on #TransformationOfTheHuman... 1/

https://twitter.com/nils_gilman/status/1033548612309987328

Today, we are clearly in the middle of what scientists refer to “The Sixth Great Extinction,” akin in many respects to the Fifth one, that killed the dinosaurs, and whose causes are debated in that @TheAtlantic article. So: when did the SGE begin, and how will it end? 2/

I’m all in favor of concussive top marginal tax rates, but I want to note here that this will do little to curb the income and wealth (and thus power) of the truly rich. Thread...

https://twitter.com/econ_marshall/status/1026508961946783744

2: The first thing to understand is that—unlike lawyers or pro athletes or what have you—the truly rich don’t earn “incomes.” Instead, they own assets, each of which is structured as a separate LLC, usually chained together via a complex series of interlocking ownerships.

A largely heriditary elite is anathema to the principles of meritocracy. But this much must be said: an elite that is secure in its prerogatives has a strong incentive to focus on the care and feeding of the system. Long thread: 1/10 The old WASP elite, the one @nytdavidbrooks celebrates, felt confident and secure in their privileges. They understood that the system worked well for them, which made many of them prepared to put personal effort into maintaining that system. 2/10

1/7: We are now in a transitional moment: as was the case internally for people in the Soviet system c.1980, most people in the West who today are involved in or thinking about the int’l system realize that the warm & fuzzy things that are said about this crumbling system are BS. 2/7 Many Western commentators are nonetheless holding onto the hope of somehow restoring the old order — the “rules-based order,” they call it — because that world, even if its principles were mainly honored in the breach, is the only one they can imagine without fear & trembling

Ok, let’s do this, tweeps. What works of nonfiction have you found “profoundly moving”? And especially, what works of *history* have found profoundly moving?

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Ginsburg, The Cheese and the Worms
Scott, Seeing Like a State
Tuchman, The March of Folly
Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory
Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind