Jay Weiser

Jay Weiser on the forgotten industrialist who led the great silver rush.

Wonder Woman isn’t the only Amazon who’s beating people up. Municipalities across the country are competing to land the second headquarters of the giant online retailer of the same name, including an offer by Chicago to give tax revenue collected from Amazon workers directly to Amazon. But…

The New Deal's Farm Security Administration (FSA) photography project remains a landmark of documentary photography—and social realism. The project launched the careers of several major photographers, and when we think of Depression America, we see its searing images. But it was a political…

This spectacular history traces the rise and plateau of the American economy since industrialization. Massive productivity gains from a networked society led to huge rises in life expectancy and per capita income. Addressing the slowdown of recent decades, economist Robert J. Gordon adopts the…

Stephen Silverman and Raphael Silver offer a boisterous, colorful history of New York’s Catskill Mountains, but like the tummlers of yesteryear, once they depart, it's hard to remember what the noise was about. The Catskills have always been at the edge of the American experience—a hinterland of…

Coined is like Malcolm Gladwell for investment bankers, with intriguing anecdotes to close the quick sale while obscuring the larger picture. Money matters: Over the last half-century, the world economy has swung from high inflation to financial crisis to zero interest rates. But Kabir Sehgal, an…

Fragile by Design is James Madison for depressives—and he’s even a protagonist. Charles Calomiris and Stephen Haber argue that states are essential for banking systems (and vice versa) and that rent-seeking bargains drive their joint structure. No mere reverse Panglossians, Calomiris and Haber…

The Anglosphere is everywhere. In this engaging and tendentious popular history, Daniel Hannan offers an unofficial update of Winston Churchill’s massive History of the English-Speaking Peoples (1956-58). A British member of the European parliament, Hannan has taken upon himself the mission of…

Despite their striking resemblance, Li’l Abner, the midcentury comic strip hero, was everything his creator Al Capp was not: an unlettered, unambitious, all-American hillbilly who was strapping (rather than one-legged) and repelled by sex with women (rather than compulsively bedding them). Al Capp…

Not long ago, New York City stopped a Walmart store from being built in its downtrodden East New York neighborhood, another defeat in the giant discounter/grocer’s six-year effort to enter the five boroughs. Small retailers and unions, in prevailing, embraced a century-old tradition of political…

I first saw Brenda Starr at midnight, lured to a derelict pier by a promised interview. Suddenly the moon, skewing shadows on twisted steel beams, silhouetted yachtsman Broker Proffitt against the glinting bay beyond. (Brenda preferred her villains upscale.) As he drew a gun, Brenda was seized with…

Doomsayers have denounced consumer debt for decades. But today, for the first time since the 1930s, consumer chickens have come home to roost, with a debt crisis in the housing markets and a looming student loan debt disaster. Debtor Nation digs through a century of trade publications and…

According to the Wall Street Journal, Fannie Mae is riding to the rescue of as many as 150,000 struggling homeowners by offering to refinance up to 120% of the property value of the homes it insures: "We're saying to the consumer, 'You're not trapped any more,'" said Jeff Hayward, a senior vice…

The first time I heard them was in the late 1990s at Zinno's, a now-departed New York piano room/Italian restaurant that was my Friday night haunt--and it was a shock. It wasn't just the speed: Lots of jazz musicians can spit out the notes with the facility (and imagination) of a machine gun. It…

The City

The Reformation

Icarus in the Boardroom