Princeton University Press Blog
Mind over chatter since 1905
Today marks the anniversary of the Chinese warlord Koxinga’s victory over the Dutch during the Sino-Dutch War–China’s first war with Europe. Emory University has put together this fun book trailer for Tonio Andrade and his new book Lost Colony: The Untold Story of China’s First Great Victory over the West, which shows how Koxinga outfoxed the Dutch at every turn to capture Taiwan:
Happy Year of the Dragon!
Daniel A. Bell, co-author of The Spirit of Cities: Why the Identity of a City Matters in a Global Age with Avner de-Shalit, visited Hub’s Davos Pavilion and spoke with Hub Culture’s Executive Editor Edie Lush during his recent trip to the World Economic Forum. Professor Bell uses “I Heart NY” as the best known example of “civicism,” the term for urban pride he and de-Shalit coined in their recent PUP book, but from the looks of it, perhaps “I Heart Davos” is next:
Along with “quit smoking” or “lose weight,” “save more” is consistently one of the most popular new year’s resolutions. But that’s easier said than done, especially when millions of Americans still lack access to a basic bank account.
Sheldon Garon, Princeton professor and author of Beyond Our Means: Why America Spends While the World Saves, argues that there are ways to change that. In addition to the new reforms and protections recommended by the Dodd-Frank Act and the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, the U.S. Postal Service could provide services similar to the postal banks still popular in countries with high personal savings rates–such as Belgium, France, and Germany. In the process, the USPS might also “save” itself from its well-publicized financial woes.
Professor Garon recently talked with Kiyoshi Okonogi of the Asahi Shimbun about postal savings and other possible solutions–read the full Q&A here. (See also Reid Cramer’s post at the New America Foundation’s The Ladder blog, Felix Salmon’s article at Reuters, and Tim Fernholtz’s post at GOOD.)
Gregory Mills of the Urban Institute‘s MetroTrends blog wrote up a post earlier this week about the importance of making it easier for would-be small savers to access basic financial services. He goes on to argue that the U.S. could seriously benefit from “modern-day, higher-tech equivalents” of school or postal savings banks.
Want to add your two cents to the discussion? Prof. Garon will be speaking with Marty Moss Coane on WHYY’s “Radio Times” this coming Tuesday, January 3rd–call in with your questions!
Princeton Professor Sheldon Garon has done a few major interviews so far this week to discuss the big ideas in his new book, Beyond Our Means: Why America Spends While the World Saves.
His recent Q&A with NPR’s senior business editor Marilyn Geewax is the most popular post on the NPR site today: http://www.npr.org/2011/12/05/143149947/why-americans-spend-too-much
And Kimberly Blanton of the Squared Away Blog of the Financial Security Project at Boston College recently spoke with Prof. Garon about savings rates, “over-indebtedness,” and America’s “unusual” Christmas shopping season: http://fsp.bc.edu/united-states-of-credit/
You can also check out Prof. Garon’s interview yesterday with Marilyn Geewax and host Michel Martin on “Tell Me More” from NPR News: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=143141870
Daniel A. Bell, co-author with Avner de-Shalit of The Spirit of Cities: Why the Identity of a City Matters in a Global Age, was sent this fantastic iPad drawing of a recent book talk he gave at the Beijing Bookworm store:
Artist Wu Peng was in the audience at the talk–how cool is that!
If that wasn’t enough, Debra Bruno recently wrote a blog article featuring Daniel A. Bell and the book at The Atlantic Cities blog, which Chicago magazine’s staff blog The 312 picked up earlier today, with a Windy City twist.
Norway’s biggest bank DnB NOR is banking on customers, well, banking on their clever new commercial to promote personal savings accounts. In it, a dazed newlywed wakes up in a luxurious white hotel room after a night of partying only to discover that eternal bachelor George Clooney has put a (giant diamond) ring on it:
The tag line reads, “Some people are lucky in life. For the rest of us, saving up can be smart.” DnB NOR’s ad has gone viral this week, with major newspapers such as Britain’s Independent and Australia’s Telegraph and gossip bloggers such as Perez Hilton posting it to the delight of their readers across the globe.
Funny viral video aside, countries in Europe and Asia share a common modern history of promoting small saving, which is the subject of Princeton professor Sheldon Garon‘s forthcoming book, Beyond Our Means: Why America Spends While the World Saves. Garon’s sweeping transnational history shows how nations such as Germany and Japan have encouraged a culture of thrift by supporting government and private institutions that single-mindedly promote popular savings and wage savings campaigns.
Do you think U.S. banks should start personal savings campaigns featuring stars like Clooney? Tell us what you think in the comments section, and become an early fan of Garon’s forthcoming title on Facebook.
Talk of patents (and of patent reform) has been the hot tech topic this summer, with every outlet from “This American Life” from WBEZ (“When Patents Attack!”) to the Economist weighing in on the patent “arms race.”
Just last week, Google announced it is buying Motorola Mobility (and, by extension, Motorola’s library of an estimated 25,000 patents) for a neat $12.5 billion. Intellectual property scholars James Bessen and Michael J. Meurer, co-authors of Patent Failure: How Judges, Bureaucrats, and Lawyers Put Innovators at Risk, have been all over the news arguing that such deals don’t bode well for future innovation.
Bessen, Meurer, and their path-breaking 2008 title have been mentioned in Corporate Consul magazine, Techdirt, and the San Francisco Chronicle, just to name a few. In an article by Peter Svensson syndicated in the Washington Times, James Bessen sums up the problem, saying, “Patents have become legal weapons–they’re not representing ideas anymore.” Bessen is likewise quoted in a recent article at the Huffington Post, and his comments were picked up in a piece by Rhodri Marsden in the Independent.
If you want to be the most tech-savvy person at your Labor Day BBQ, you can read the first chapter of Patent Failure here.
Harvard Business School professor Max Bazerman and Notre Dame business ethics professor Ann Tenbrunsel are taking questions about business, ethics, and everything in between over at Freakonomics, so make sure to post your queries and comments here.
While you’re there, make sure to read the authors’ recent guest post adapted from their recent Princeton book, Blind Spots: Why We Fail to Do What’s Right and What to Do about It.
Watch the author of Debtor Nation: The History of America in Red Ink speak with Liz Claman about solutions to the government debt crisis on yesterday’s “Red Ink Watch” segment:
The Press is publishing a plethora of new poetry titles this April, so we have a lot to celebrate! We are pleased to announce two important translations, the first annotated critical edition of a major poem by W. H. Auden, and two books in the revived Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets. Don’t forget to join the Lewis Center for the Arts later this month for the second biennial Princeton Poetry Festival and you can check out the Press’s poetry offerings here.
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Poems Under Saturn: Poèmes saturniens
Paul Verlaine The first complete English translation of the collection that announced Paul Verlaine (1844-1896) as a poet who would come to be regarded as one of the greatest of nineteenth-century writers. This new translation, by respected contemporary poet Karl Kirchwey, faithfully renders the collection’s heady mix of classical learning and earthy sensuality in poems whose rhythm and rhyme represent one of the supreme accomplishments of French verse. |
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The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue
Edited and with an introduction by Alan Jacobs This volume–the first annotated, critical edition of the poem–introduces this important work to a new generation of readers by putting it in historical and biographical context and elucidating its difficulties. Alan Jacobs’s introduction and thorough annotations help today’s readers understand and appreciate the full richness of a poem that contains some of Auden’s most powerful and beautiful verse, and that still deserves a central place in the canon of twentieth-century poetry. |
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New Impressions of Africa
Raymond Roussel This bilingual edition of Raymond Roussel’s most extraordinary work, New Impressions of Africa, presents the original French text and the English poet Mark Ford’s lucid, idiomatic translation on facing pages. It also includes an introduction outlining the poem’s peculiar structure and evolution, notes explaining its literary and historical references, and the fifty-nine illustrations anonymously commissioned by Roussel, via a detective agency, from Henri-A. Zo. |
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At Lake Scugog: Poems
The eagerly awaited collection of new poems from the author of Tom Thomson in Purgatory, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was hailed by the New York Times as a “snappy, entertaining book.” A triumphant follow-up, At Lake Scugog demonstrates why the San Francisco Chronicle has called Troy Jollimore “a new and exciting voice in American poetry.” |
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Carnations: Poems
Often taking titles from a biblical vocabulary, Anthony Carelli’s remarkable debut, Carnations, reminds us that unremarkable places and events–a game of Frisbee in a winter park, workers stacking panes in a glass factory, or the daily opening of a café–can, in a blink, be new. |
Louis Hyman, author of Debtor Nation: The History of America in Red Ink, sat down with Gregg Greenberg at TheStreet.com to talk about how American consumers and the economy at large became addicted to borrowing.
You can also listen to the latest on Gregg Greenberg’s TheStreet.com podcasts here.
Charles Kupchan, Georgetown professor and author of How Enemies Become Friends: The Sources of Stable Peace, spoke with NewsHour’s Jeffrey Brown, Tom Malinowsky of Human Rights Watch, and Maurizio Molinari of La Stampa about the international community’s response to Col. Moammar Gadhafi’s use of violence against protesters in Libya.
Read the entire transcript here.
At Goodreads, enter for a chance to win Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age by W. Bernard Carlson.
This major biography sheds new light on Tesla’s visionary approach to invention and the business strategies behind his most important technological breakthroughs.
Enter by May 28, 2013 for a chance to win!
Good luck!
These are the best-selling books for the past week.
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The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order by Benn Steil |
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The Bankers’ New Clothes: What’s Wrong with Banking and What to Do about It by Anat Admati & Martin Hellwig |
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The Crossley ID Guide: Raptors by Richard Crossley, Jerry Liguori, & Brian Sullivan |
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The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking by Edward B. Burger & Michael Starbird |
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Higher Education in the Digital Age by William G. Bowen |
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Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman by Jeremy Adelman |
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The Golden Ticket: P, NP, and the Search for the Impossible by Lance Fortnow |
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On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt |
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Einstein Gravity in a Nutshell by A. Zee |
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Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age by W. Bernard Carlson |
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