The Sunday New York Times remains one of life’s pleasures. I do miss reading the enormous print edition of the paper with the magazine but at least the online edition still suffices. Shown below are a book I’d like to read and useful analysis and advice from various columnists.
Flesh
by David Szalay
Szalay’s new novel traces the life of a young man in Hungary who eventually makes his way to England, following him from troubled youth to immigrant success to tragic fall. Each chapter provides glimpses of the major stages of adulthood — first love, marriage, parenthood — interwoven with intervals of aimlessness, reinvention and grief. With cool detachment, Szalay offers observations on both the complicated self and the unpredictable world surrounding it.
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Our current antiglobal moment could last for a long time. Illiberalism is alive and strong. Comparisons that once seemed incendiary or irresponsible now seem obvious. As in the 1930s, minority groups are being scapegoated as symbols and causes of globalization’s ills. For Jews then, read migrants or trans people now. Mr. Trump’s imminent betrayal of Ukraine suggests that we are moving rapidly through the 1930s and have already arrived in 1938. That’s when Western leaders in Munich decided to allow Hitler to dismember one of Europe’s few remaining democracies, Czechoslovakia. It was not worth risking lives over “a quarrel in a faraway country, between people of whom we know nothing,” reasoned the dangerously reasonable Neville Chamberlain. Less than one year later, Hitler browbeat the president of what remained of Czechoslovakia into accepting a complete occupation of his country.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was a déjà vu moment for historians of World War II. Will Greenland and Canada become the next Czechoslovakia and Poland?
Globalization Is Collapsing. Brace Yourselves.
By Tara Zahra
Dr. Zahra is a professor of history at the University of Chicago and has written extensively about globalization’s first collapse.
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A 20 minute agility workout to improve balance
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Instead of following the standard guidance to keep withdrawals to 4 percent of the balance in your retirement account, then adjust annually for inflation, you might forgo the inflation raise when stock prices are falling, Dr. Pfau said. Or you can install so-called guardrails, limiting withdrawals to, say, 3 percent in bad years for stocks but taking out, perhaps, 5 percent when the market is surging.
How to Protect Your Retirement Savings Now as Markets Plunge by Diane Harris
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My problem is with Trump’s magical thinking that you just put up walls of protection around an industry (or our whole economy) and — presto! — in short order, U.S. factories will blossom and make those products in America at the same cost with no burden for U.S. consumers.
For starters, that view completely misses the fact that virtually every complex product today — from cars to iPhones to mRNA vaccines — is manufactured by giant, complex, global manufacturing ecosystems. That is why those products get steadily better and cheaper. Sure, if you are protecting the steel industry, a commodity, our tariffs might quickly help. But if you are protecting the auto industry and you think just putting up a tariff wall will do it, you don’t know anything about how cars are made. It would take years for American car companies to replace the global supply chains they depend on and make everything in America. Even Tesla has to import some parts.
I Just Saw the Future. It Was Not in America. Thomas L. Friedman
Esot-eric 