Coda

Author(s):  
Peter H. Christensen

This chapter mentions Nicolai Ouroussoff, former architecture critic for the New York Times, who published an editorial entitled “Saving Buffalo's Untold Beauty” at the peak of the 2008 financial crisis. It discusses how Ouroussoff depicted Buffalo as a place replete with architectural treasures and a history of experimentation that was in outsize proportion to its population, economic health, and the resources of its preservationists. It also examines Ouroussoff's article delighted many local officials and cemented some of the very clichés that have trapped Buffalo in a fugue of “ruin porn.” The chapter points out how Buffalo ardently remains a dynamic city that neither begs pity nor romance from its inhabitants. It highlights Buffalo's traits of being quotidian, emblematic, and archetypal as part of a larger effort to move beyond facile depictions of Buffalo and show how its lessons are transposable by being allegorical.

2020 ◽  
Vol 94 (1) ◽  
pp. 257-261
Author(s):  
Hugh Rockoff

Robert Skidelsky, a historian whose fame for his monumental biography of John Maynard Keynes is well deserved, here provides us with a brilliant, well-informed history of macroeconomics stretching from the “British recoinage debates” of the 1690s to today. Money and Government was prompted by the 2008 financial crisis. It is an attempt, Skidelsky tells us, to answer the question that Queen Elizabeth II posed to a group of economists at the London School of Economics in October 2008: “Why did no one see it coming?” Not surprisingly, to skip to the bottom line, Skidelsky believes that macroeconomics reached its apogee with Keynes and that it has been more or less downhill from there. The 2008 financial crisis could have been predicted, and ameliorated after it occurred if not prevented, if macroeconomists had remained loyal to Keynes.


Author(s):  
Michael Harris

What do pure mathematicians do, and why do they do it? Looking beyond the conventional answers, this book offers an eclectic panorama of the lives and values and hopes and fears of mathematicians in the twenty-first century, assembling material from a startlingly diverse assortment of scholarly, journalistic, and pop culture sources. Drawing on the author's personal experiences as well as the thoughts and opinions of mathematicians from Archimedes and Omar Khayyám to such contemporary giants as Alexander Grothendieck and Robert Langlands, the book reveals the charisma and romance of mathematics as well as its darker side. In this portrait of mathematics as a community united around a set of common intellectual, ethical, and existential challenges, the book touches on a wide variety of questions, such as: Are mathematicians to blame for the 2008 financial crisis? How can we talk about the ideas we were born too soon to understand? And how should you react if you are asked to explain number theory at a dinner party? The book takes readers on an unapologetic guided tour of the mathematical life, from the philosophy and sociology of mathematics to its reflections in film and popular music, with detours through the mathematical and mystical traditions of Russia, India, medieval Islam, the Bronx, and beyond.


2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ivelina Pavlova ◽  
Ann Marie Hibbert ◽  
Joel R. Barber ◽  
Krishnan Dandapani

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