Kathleen Geier

This weekend’s New York Times features a not-terribly-clever op-ed by Bob Garfield that purports to support the recent decision by BuzzFeed.com banning negative book reviews. However, if you read it closely you’ll see that it’s actually a satirical piece poking fun at BuzzFeed’s decision. Unfortunately, the satire falls flat because the writing is weak — […]

“If We Make It Through December” by the great Merle Haggard was first released during the recession of 1973, and since then has become a holiday classic. It injects a note of economic realism amidst the other Christmas songs with their invocations of Santa, visions of sugar plum fairies, etc. What better way to kick […]

Last week, Michelle Goldberg wrote a smart and provocative blog post that didn’t get anywhere near the attention it deserved. In it, she argues that conservatives may be giving up the ghost, and abandoning the pseudo-populist brand of conservatism that, for decades, has been their mainstay, in favor of a more open elitism. Goldberg takes […]

“Mr. Johnson is no scientist, but he has stepped into the kind of debate over the relationship of I.Q. to race and poverty that has tripped up many others before him.” — from today’s New York Times article about London’s Mayor Boris Johnson Boris Johnson (a Conservative, of course) is a loathesome human specimen — […]

Will the Obama administration meet its deadline — which, for those of you keeping score, is midnight tonight — for making significant improvements in the HealthCare.gov website? Well, how you answer that question depends on which newspaper you’re reading this morning. The Washington Post says yes (“HealthCare.gov will meet deadline for fixes, White House officials […]

Last time I blogged here — which wasn’t that long ago, but seems like a thousand years — I memorialized Lou Reed. Since then, I’ve been making my way through his solo work, music I hadn’t given a serious listen to in years. Much of it holds up amazingly well, including late works (Set the […]

Before I hang it up and hand the keys back to Ed, I wanted to be sure to say a few words about Binyamin Appelbaum’s very interesting New York Times article about inflation and macroeconomic policy. The piece suggests that, at long last, it is finally beginning to dawn on influential policymakers that inflation is […]

Lou Reed deserves a more complete tribute than the brief post I put up earlier. So here is my attempt to pull some of my thoughts together. Age 71 when he died, Lou Reed was hardly a young man, and he’d been seriously ill — as was widely reported, he’d received a liver transplant in […]

Lou Reed has died at the age of 71. I just heard and I am tearing up writing this. More later when I finish writing some other things and have had some time to think. His music meant the world to me, and he was a giant. In the meantime, here’s a film of the […]

If you write for the internet, sooner or later you’re bound to get one these. It’s an email that will begin by stroking your ego and saying flattering things about your work. Then the emailer will explain that she’s an editor at a website and would loooove to publish your stuff. Just as you’re rummaging […]