Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

  Here is a full list of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize winners. Here are the 2023 Pulitzer Prize winners : NPR One of them seems extraordinary enough to be worthy of discussion in the august forum you are now perusing: the Pulitzer for biography. it went this year to G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century. A distinguished historian, Beverly Gage, wrote the work. Viking published it. I've never read a word of it, and don't plan to. I have to say the prize committee's praise of it sounds quite off-putting to me.  Gage is praised for "a deeply researched and nuanced look at one of the most polarizing figures in U.S. history that depicts the longtime FBI director in all his complexity, with monumental achievements and crippling flaws."  It sounds to me like the prize committee has suffered from a crippling attack of both-sidesism. I would imagine his life did have lots of "complexity," heck in the drag-demonizing 2020s his fashion choices al...

  The headline says the 45th President has written to the Pulitzer Prize committee to rescind the Pulitzer Prizes given to reporters who filed stories on Russian collusion with the Trump campaign in 2016.  Yuk yuk yuk.  Pulitzer committee, "Tell ya what Mr. 45. We'll do a forensic audit of the course of events leading to those awards. We will carefully study whether the reports receiving the award were at any stage written on bamboo paper. When we're ready, we'll put out a report that will say that the awards were slightly MORE deserved than we had originally thought.  "You'll be able to declare that a victory for yourself because, after all, that is how you roll." 

Back in 2007, as Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden and several others were maneuvering in anticipation of the Democratic Party's upcoming presidential primary campaign, Alfred Knopf brought out a book by Pulitzer Prize winner Carl Bernstein, A WOMAN IN CHARGE, about Hillary's life. Here's a fascinating passage, describing the inner workings of the Clinton administration in early 1994. "Many of Bill Clinton's top aides felt that Hillary was impatient when listening to their criticisms [and that Ira Magaziner was acting as her bulldog]....Magaziner infuriated the president's aides when they learned he was meeting privately with the Clintons in the White House residence and urging them to make important decisions without consulting either the [health care] task force or the economic team. Hillary's stature with Bentsen and even her old friend Shalala was deteriorating. "The president seemed caught between his wife and his advisers. More often...

On December 27th The New York Times ran a long piece by David Kocieniewski under the headline, "Academics Who Defend Wall St. Reap Rewards." The article constitutes an elaborate and somewhat indirect charge to the effect that two particular academics, Craig Pirrong and Scott Irwin, are sell-outs. Pirrong is a professor of finance at the University of Houston (that is his photo above) and Irwin is at the University of Illinois. Both gentlemen (I know Pirrong slightly, he's been a source of expert commentary for me on a couple of stories I worked on, and I like him -- take that as disclosure of bias if you like) -- both gentlemen are of generally free market orientation. This does not necessarily make them defenders of wall street, since much of wall street thrives as a consequence of very non-free-market activities. You can't really blame Kocieniewski for the headline., I guarantee he didn't write it. But he is responsible for the general slant of the ...