Good Reading For Week Of November 10

Some good reading regarding this and that

: Op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal about why a conventional bailout of the Big Three won't and shouldn't work. (Made my husband happy; he's been saying all of this for months.) (In case it can't be read at the WSJ site, try googling the author of the piece, Paul Ingrassia.)

Paul Krugman in the New York Times on FDR's New Deal and the audacity needed for an BHO New Deal (BHO, of course, is Almost-President Obama's initials.)

Fascinating rumination on the future of the blogosphere, written by Nicholas Carr

A good companion piece is this entry from Alan Mcleod at A Good Beer Blog.

Also from the Times, a piece by Nicholas Kristof on his hopes that an Obama administration might reverse the anti-intellectualism of the recent past

. Also see this piece from the Wall Street Journal, in which Mark Lilla ponders the way in which conservatives shot themselves in their collective feet by their embrace of dumbing-down. I could not agree more with Kristof. I'm THRILLED that our new president is a, gasp, writer, and that he doesn't mind admitting that he likes to, ya know, think about issues and problems. There's a long, long tradition of anti-intellectualism in this country, but in the past thirty or so years, it's gotten completely out of hand. I want smart people running the show, and I'm all for thinking. (Which, as I noted earlier, was one reason I believed Governor Palin was unsuited for the job at hand.)

Finally, lovely piece also in the Times, from writer Michael Sokolove. He grew up in Levittown, Pennsylvania, and wrote about what the election says about how his hometown is changing and why.