Blog

Jonathan Levy is Assistant Professor of History at Princeton University. About Freaks of Fortune:  The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America Until the early nineteenth century, “risk” was a specialized term: it was the commodity exchanged in a marine insurance contract. Freaks of Fortune tells the story of how the modern concept of risk emerged in the United States. Born on the high seas, risk migrated inland and became essential to the financial management of an inherently uncertain […]

Make sure to read The Economist book review! Barbara T. Dreyfuss was a Wall Street analyst for twenty years, covering health policy issues. She was part of a five-member Washington, D.C., team that consistently won top honors in Institutional Investor magazine’s ranking of Wall Street analysts. She was a senior correspondent  for The American Prospect, and has contributed to The Washington Monthly, Mother Jones, and The Veteran. About Hedge Hogs:  The Cowboy Traders Behind Wall Street’s Largest Hedge Fund Disaster […]

Paul Farmer, M.D., Ph.D., is Kolokotrones University Professor at Harvard University and Chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School.  He is Chief of the Division of Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, and co-founder of Partners In Health.  He has also served as UN Deputy Special Envoy for Haiti, under Special Envoy Bill Clinton. Dr. Farmer and his colleagues have pioneered novel, community based treatment strategies that demonstrate the delivery of […]

Thomas Rid is Reader in War Studies at King’s College London. He is also a non-resident fellow at the Center for Transatlantic Relations in the School for Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, Washington, DC. About Cyber War Will Not Take Place  “Cyber war is coming,” announced a land-mark RAND report in 1993. In 2005, the U.S. Air Force boasted it would now fly, fight, and win in cyberspace, the “fifth domain” of warfare. This book takes stock, twenty years […]

Cass R. Sunstein is one of the nation’s leading legal scholars who, for the past fifteen years, has been at the forefront of behavioral economics. From 2009 to 2012, he served as the administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. He is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. His book, Nudge, coauthored with Richard Thaler, was a national bestseller.   About Simpler:  The Future of Government  Simpler government arrived four years ago. It helped put money in your […]

Jake Breeden teaches on the faculty of Duke Corporate Education, the world’s top-rated provider of custom executive education. He has taught leaders in some of the world’s leading companies, including Google, Starbucks, Cisco, Microsoft, and IBM. He has an MBA from Duke University and lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where his three daughters keep him laughing and learning.  About Tipping Sacred Cows:  Kick the Bad Work Habits that Masquerade as Virtues We all know the “sacred cows” at work […]