It seems there is no end to David Graeber books since he died suddenly several years ago. But this latest one, As if Already Free is different. It is a small collection of wildly different papers in anthropology. They all have just one thing in common: they were influenced if…

One of the (very few) rewards of constantly reviewing books over the decades is the occasional gift of a fresh new voice that calls a spade a spade by stretching it to its next stage of absurdity. Today, that person is Eli Grober, who has collected exactly one hundred short…

Thankfully, Your Money or Your Life was written by a doctor. Dr. Luke Messac is an Emergency Department doctor. He could honestly report he did not know what his hospital charged for his services, since he was on salary. And anyone he asked didn’t know either, so he could never…

At long last, someone has assembled most of the incredibly numerous scams surrounding crypto currencies, in one convenient package. Peter Howson’s damning book, Let Them Eat Crypto is no love letter. Howson is a British tech writer and investigator, specializing in scams. Crypto is a fine, fat target for him. …

It is becoming clear to many that capitalism is nearing its end. Tying the human symptoms together is Anselm Jappe, whose Self-Devouring Society is a remarkable, wide-ranging effort. And it is as deep as it is wide. Underlying it all is the premise that capitalism must continually grow, ceaselessly producing…

The human brain is the final frontier. Scientists of all stripes have been examining it from every conceivable standpoint, tracking every electron it transports in any direction. We seem to know everything about it — how every little crease and fold defines an area with a specific job or jobs…

Here’s an odd angle: how did scientists come to co-operate? This question and the fact that Lorraine Daston’s Rivals is in the Columbia Global Reports series, made me want to settle in to a great philosophical/historical discussion. …

Three weeks ago, Binyamin Netanyahu was celebrating an uncomfortable Jewish New Year. The country was up in arms — or rather dropping them. Thousands of young men were determined to show their extreme displeasure with him and his party, by refusing to sign up as reservists, or worse, quitting the…

Perhaps economists are their own worst enemy. In Economics in America, Princeton’s Angus Deaton tackles all the issues, of, for and by economists, and with great and refreshing perspective, puts them in their place. And as more and more authors are finding, it is the predatory corporations and the rich…