What is the most beautiful folk song you’ve ever heard?
Herewith I offer a list of 25 of my top candidates, with links to brief audio clips. For this purpose, I am defining a “folk song” to be something that would likely be filed in the “folk” section of a Barnes and Noble music department.
Note that the criterion is “most beautiful”, not “favorite”, though of course there’s quite a large overlap between the two.
I am aware that my choices might be colored by the circumstances in which I first heard these songs as well as by their intrinsic merit. I also acknowledge, without a shred of embarrassment, that some might consider the overall tenor of this list to be shockingly lowbrow. Nevertheless, I believe every song on this list to be stunningly beautiful in its way.
Do tell me what I’ve overlooked.
Continue reading ‘A Musical Interlude’
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Tyler Cowen started a blogospheric whirlwind recently when he posted the list of books that had influenced him the most and called on other econ bloggers to do the same. In short order, we got entries from Peter Suderman, E.D. Kain, Arnold Kling, Michael Martin, Niklas Blanchard, EconJeff, Bryan Caplan, Matt Yglesias, Jenny Davidson, Will Wilkinson, Matt Continetti, Ross Douthat, Mike Konczal, Kieran Healy, Ivar Hagendoorn, Scott Sumner, and no doubt others. [Update: Some of these links were wrong; I think they're all fixed now.]
I’m late to the party, but here’s my list:
Continue reading ‘Books, Books, Books’
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In a triumph of collective action, commenters have now managed to identify all of the personal heroes in my portrait gallery, either in comments to the original post or to the followup. For those who would like to check their answers, here is the gallery again, with full captions. After all the pictures, I’ve attached some brief commentary explaining who’s who and why some of these people are here. I’ll write in more detail about some of them over the coming weeks.
Continue reading ‘Who’s Who’
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Yesterday I posted a portrait gallery honoring 60 of my personal heroes; readers were quick to identify 47, with remarkably few mistakes, all of which were quickly corrected. As of this writing, thirteen remain. Among these thirteen are the greatest mathematician of the 17th century (assuming we classify Newton as a physicist) and the three greatest mathematicians of the 20th; one of these is quite probably the greatest mathematician of all time. (All in my educated-but-not-fully-educated opinion, of course.) Musical, literary and cinematic greatness are also well represented here.
Over the next couple of weeks, I will try to tell you a little bit more about some of these 60 people. Meanwhile, here are the thirteen mystery men/women. I’ve retained the numbering from yesterday’s post. Who can you identify?
Continue reading ‘Unidentified Persons’
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Since childhood, I have dreamed of someday having a house with a portrait gallery, where I would hang portraits of people I greatly admire. Every time I’ve either moved or redecorated, I’ve thought about dedicating a wall to this, but I never really had that much wallspace to spare.
A short time ago, it dawned on me that I actually have an infinite amount of wall space! My wall space is called the World Wide Web. And the World Wide Web is better than a physical wall, because the images are readily available (as opposed to hiding away in antique shops), and it’s easy to put things up and take things down, and you can share it with people you might not want to invite to your house.
So now I am prepared to unveil my World Wide Wall, or at least a first draft. I am well aware that many of these heroes are deeply flawed. I did not disqualify anyone for slaveholding, Louisiana purchases, Nazi sympathies or the imposition of protective tariffs. Not all of them are at the very top of their professions. The only criterion for inclusion was to make my heart go pit-a-pat.
My wall. Let me show you it. How many of these do you recognize? (No fair answering if you’re a personal friend who’s already seen an early draft of this.) And who would be on your wall?
Continue reading ‘The World Wide Wall’
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If you’re at work on this post-Thanksgiving morning, it’s probably a slow day around the office (unless you’re in retail, in which case you’re probably not reading this). So to help you while away the hours, here are a few of my favorite logic puzzles from around the net:
Warning: These are majorly addictive. Enjoy, but resolve not to let them take over your life. You have a blog to get back to.
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The greatest financial mistake of my life occurred on the day my father offered to bet his entire net worth against mine that the great Johnny Mercer had written the song Don’t Fence Me In. Now “Don’t Fence Me In” is a marvelous song, and Johnny Mercer could have been justifiably proud to write it—if only Cole Porter had not written it first. I happened to know this about Cole Porter; I knew it as surely as I know the authors of Romeo and Juliet and The Wealth of Nations. But for some reason I’ve never understood, I refused the bet, thereby condemning myself to a life of poverty. Still I console myself with the knowledge that you don’t have to be rich to be touched by the grace of Johnny Mercer, who was born one hundred years ago today.
The guy was a phenomenon. He wrote the lyrics for over 1500 songs, and the music for at least a few hundred. And he was a singer-songwriter decades before the likes of Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs and Joni Mitchell allegedly invented the genre. God, he was smooth. By and large, I’d rather hear Johnny Mercer sing his own songs than any of the myriad covers that have become American classics—and that’s saying something for a guy who was covered repeatedly by the likes of Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald.
Continue reading ‘Too Marvelous for Words’
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