Wall Street’s market forecasts are too tepid. The S&P 500 could rally next year on a combination of AI growth and deregulation. But investors should prepare for a wilder ride.
The Federal Reserve could find it harder to balance growth and inflation next year, given the incoming Trump administration’s policies. So far, the forecast looks sunny.
Foreign Policy Magazine(December 8, 2023): The Best of Books 2024 on international politics, economics, and history that were featured in the magazine this year, selected by Foreign Affairs’ editors and book reviewers.
In a revelatory book, Farrell and Newman describe how the United States has turned its control over information networks into a hidden tool of economic domination—and warn of the risks of Washington’s weaponization of data power for ordinary people, as well as for the global financial system.read the review
In a major reconsideration of Cold War history, Radchenko examines the Soviet Union’s competing ambitions for revolution, security, and legitimacy—and how Soviet leadership, blinded by its own hubris and aggression, set the stage for the downfall of the USSR. read the review
Kahan argues that what unifies liberals across the centuries, including those involved in building and defending liberal democracy today, are their efforts to build societies free from the fear of arbitrary power. He sculpts a masterful and beautifully written history of liberalism’s long intellectual journey. read the review
In this sobering study, Levitsky and Ziblatt demonstrate how the United States’ enduring constitutional order—one forged in a pre-democratic age—increasingly thwarts the will of an expanding multicultural majority in favor of a shrinking rural white minority.read the review
Focused on the sophisticated and networked world of autocracy, dictatorship, and tyranny, Applebaum argues that what separates hardcore autocratic states, such as China and Russia, from softer illiberal and authoritarian regimes, such as those in Hungary, India, and Turkey, is the ruthlessness and reach of their dictatorial power and their deep hostility to the Western-led democratic world.read the review
July’s second novel, which follows a married mother and artist who derails a solo cross-country road trip by checking into a motel close to home and starting an affair with a younger rental-car worker, was the year’s literary conversation piece, dubbed “the talk of every group text — at least every group text composed of women over 40” and “the first great perimenopause novel” in just two of many articles that wrestled with its themes. Sexually frank and laced with the novelist’s loopy humor, the book ends up posing that most universal question: What would you risk to change your life? Read our review.
In Alderton’s brisk, witty novel, a 35-year-old struggling comedian in London tries to make sense of a recent breakup at the same moment when the majority of his friends seem to be pairing off for life. Cue snappy dialogue, awkward first dates and a memorable quest for a new home; toss clichéd gender roles, the traditional marriage plot and a ho-hum happily ever after. Not only does Alderton cement herself as a latter-day Nora Ephron, she also puts her own mark on the classic romantic comedy form. There are no second fiddles in “Good Material”; every character sings. And there is a deeper message, revealed in a surprise twist, having to do with independence, adventure and charting your own course. Read our review.
It takes a lot of ambition, skill and vision to reinvent one of the most iconic books in American letters, but Everett demonstrates he possesses those virtues in spades in “James.” The novel is a radical reworking of Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn,” telling the story not from Huck’s perspective, but from the point of view of the enslaved man who accompanies Huck down the Mississippi River: Jim (or, as he clarifies, James). From James’s eyes, we see he is no mere sidekick but rather a thinker and a writer who is code-switching as illiterate and fighting desperately for freedom. Everett’s novel is a literary hat trick — a book that highlights the horrors in American history and complicates an American classic, all while also emerging as a work of exquisite originality in its own right. Read our review.
Cyrus Shams, an Iranian American aspiring poet and recovering drug addict, wallows in a post-college malaise in a fictional Midwestern town. He’s working dead-end jobs and halfheartedly attending A.A., while grieving his parents’ deaths and, increasingly, fantasizing about his own. Cyrus is lost and sad, but this captivating first novel, by an author who is himself a poet, is anything but. As Akbar nudges Cyrus closer to uncovering a secret in his family’s past, he turns his protagonist’s quest for meaning — involving a road trip to New York and a revelatory encounter in the Brooklyn Museum — into an indelible affirmation of life, rife with inventive beauty, vivid characters and surprising twists of plot. Read our review.
History has long been Enrigue’s playground, and his latest novel takes readers to 16th-century Tenochtitlan, or what is now Mexico City. Hernán Cortés and his men have arrived at Moctezuma’s palace for a diplomatic — if tense and comically imbalanced — meeting of cultures and empires. In this telling, it’s Moctezuma’s people who have the upper hand, though the emperor himself is inconveniently prone to hallucinogenic reveries and domestic threats. The carnage here is devilishly brazen, the humor ample and bone-dry. Read our review.
Debreczeni, 39 when he was deported from his native Hungary to what he calls “the Land of Auschwitz,” would later memorialize the experience in a book that defies easy classification. First published in 1950, “Cold Crematorium” is a masterpiece of clinical, mordant observation. In a cattle car he watches a fellow deportee whose hand retains the gestures of a chain-smoker; newly arrived at Auschwitz, he encounters the lousy barroom piano player he avoided back home. This is more than gallows humor; it’s a stubborn fight to stay human and place the unimaginable in the context of the known. Look elsewhere for platitudes — Debreczeni witnessed, and reported, the best and worst of mankind and showed it to us to use as we will. Read our review.
Blitzer, a staff writer at The New Yorker, presents a timely analysis of the situation at America’s southern border, placing the blame for today’s screaming headlines, detainee camps and unaccompanied minors firmly on post-Cold War U.S. policy. His kaleidoscopic narrative moves between the Central American insurgencies that flooded this country with refugees, and the shifting and frequently incoherent policies that worsened the fallout. We meet morally pragmatic domestic politicians, a tireless activist who’s moved from El Salvador to Chicago, Los Angeles teenagers ensnared in gang pipelines. None of it is simple; all of it has a terrible cost. Blitzer handles his vast topic with assurance and grace, never losing sight of the human element behind the global crisis. Read our review.
When the veteran literary and cultural critic came out as transgender in 2021 at the age of 66, she described in an email to her loved ones the devastating realization that her “parallel life” — the one presented to her by a “gender-swapping” app that showed her how she would have looked as a girl and then a woman at various junctures in her life — had passed her by. “Fifty years were under water, and I’d never get them back.” As she reflects on her upbringing as the “only child of isolated immigrants,” her early adulthood in 1970s New York and her career of seeking truths through writing while hiding an important truth about herself, Sante fearlessly documents a transformation both internal and external, one that is also a kind of homecoming. Read our review.
This elegant biography of the 40th president stands out for its deep authority and nimble style. Boot, a historian and foreign policy analyst, grew up idolizing Ronald Reagan, but after a decade of interviews and research, he finds himself asking whether his onetime hero paved the way for Donald Trump, the man whose ascent to power led Boot to abandon the right. The book is a landmark work that shows how Reagan emerged from his New Deal roots to become a practiced Red baiter and racist dog whistler before settling into the role of the optimistic all-American elder statesman. “It is no exaggeration,” Boot writes, “to say that you cannot fully comprehend what happened to America in the 20th century without first understanding what happened to Ronald Reagan.” Read our review.
In this masterly history, Sides tracks the 18th-century English naval officer James Cook’s third and final voyage across the globe, painting a vivid and propulsive portrait that blends generations of scholarship with the firsthand accounts of European seafarers as well as the oral traditions of Indigenous Pacific islanders. The story begins in Britain as the last embers of the Enlightenment are going out, a time when curiosity and empathy gave way to imperial ambition and moral zeal. Between tales of adventure on the open ocean, complex depictions of Polynesian culture and colorful scenes of a subarctic frost littered with animal life, Sides expertly probes the causes of Cook’s growing anger and violence as the journey wears on and the explorer reckons with the fallout of what he and others had wrought in expanding the map of Europe’s power. Read our review.
The company is facing pressure on two fronts—the government and a host of new AI-powered search rivals. It has the capacity to meet both challenges and continue to prosper.
Wall Street is making a push for more extended hours in the stock market, and Trump’s incoming regulators are likely to approve. What to know so you don’t lose your shirt.
John Williams, who heads the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, says 2% is the rate that can best balance the Fed’s employment and price stability goals.
Smithsonian Magazine (November 21, 2024) –The latest issue features ‘The Hidden History of Bermuda’ – New archaeological finds are reshaping our views of early colonial life in the Americas…
What excavations in Bermuda are revealing about one of Britain’s first settlements in the Americas—and the surprising ways it shaped the New World. By Andrew Lawler. Photographs by Nicola Muirhead
The untold story of Matilda Gage, the freethinker who inspired her son-in-law L. Frank Baum’s classic novel “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz”. By Evan I. Schwartz
Barron’s interviewed more than a dozen senior executives across the world’s most important tech companies. Here’s why they remain bullish on the long-term opportunity for AI. Plus, the stocks to buy now.
Berkshire was a net seller of $127 billion of stocks this year, bringing its equity portfolio down to $300 billion and nearly doubling its cash position to a record $311 billion.
Boomers Daily 