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It’s a great record, hardscrabble and honest and charming; Dolly Parton was just coming into her own as a writer and solo performer. All the tropes we now associate with country music—the idea that the genre boils down to “three chords and the truth,” as the songwriter Harlan Howard once put it—were beginning to crystallize. Parton was such a crucial engineer. Her writing contained enormous warmth and tenderness; unlike some of her erstwhile male colleagues, she possessed an almost uncanny capacity for empathy.
~ Amanda Petrusich via The New Yorker

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Wolfgang Streeck may be best known for his essays in New Left Review, including a dazzling series on the cascade of financial crises that followed the crash of 2008. He resembles Karl Marx in his conviction that capitalism has certain internal contradictions that make it unsustainable — the more so in its present “neoliberal” form. His latest book, “Taking Back Control? States and State Systems After Globalism,” published this month, asks whether the global economy as it is now set up is compatible with democracy. He has his doubts.
~ Christopher Caldwell

via This Maverick Thinker Is the Karl Marx of Our Time
published by The New York Times on November 28, 2024

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