Link Exchange

• Excellent piece on the "mystery of capitalism." The author argues that capitalism faces a lot of deep-seeded acrimony, resists telling its own story and has no great heroes. It is counterintuitive and that is perhaps what makes it all work. I agree.
• Megan McArdle with further proof that the U.S. Postal Service, were it a private business, would go bust, like, yesterday.
• Break up the big banks and have real competition instead of crony capitalism? Arnold Kling thinks we should. His case is a persuasive one.
• John Maynard Keynes as "economic Impressionist," or if you like, the Seurat of economics? This, for me, raises the ever-wide gap between the elegance of a theory and the messy work of putting it into practice.
• Long before Alfred Kinsey and longer before Masters and Johnson, a researcher at Stanford University questioned women about their sexual behavior and their views on sex. Interesting stuff, given what we think we know about attitudes towards sex in the early twentieth century. Read it here.
• Reviews of three new important books about the Dreyfus Affair (click the link if you don't know what this is. No, it has nothing to do with this guy.) The Dreyfus affair raised questions of antisemitism, class, nationalism and whether the rule of law can be bent in times of crisis, real or imagined.
• Evolution and the historians. The notion of culture being an adaptation of nature rather than an attempt to change it is an interesting (if debatable) one.