I had planned on beginning this entry about 90 minutes earlier, but the live coverage from eleven years ago of the 9/11 attacks is almost as compelling today as it was then.  Like most of us, I can remember exactly where I was on that date.  I had turned on the news, but then gone upstairs to grade papers from an online composition course I was teaching.  I finished the grading and was feeling good because I had been productive and because the papers had been generally well written. I came downstairs, probably to get more coffee, and at first wasn't sure what I was seeing.  I watched the replays of the planes hitting the towers, and then suddenly I saw the collapse of the south tower.  And now, as I write today, at 9:29 a.m. central time, I relive the unbelievable sight of the north tower collapsing. 

This afternoon we go to the KU Med Center for a six-week check-up.  This time, it's just blood work and a consultation with Jennifer, the physician assistant.  I have a long list of questions to ask.  As everyone counsels, it is really good to have someone with you because it's too easy for the patient (i.e., me) to forget some of what he wants to ask or while listening to the answer to a second or third question to lose focus and revert to thinking about a previous answer.  As I said six weeks ago, I don't usualy get nervous or worried about these meetings, but then I had had to revise that observation since I had awakened at 5 or 5:30 a.m.  This morning, I woke up at 5 a.m., thought about the blog and having to admit that perhaps I wasn't as calm about the consultations and tests as I had wanted to believe.  And the next thing I knew, it was 7 a.m., and the alarm was going off, so perhaps my first opinion was correct. 

In the current New York Review of Books, Michael Chabon (Wonder Boys) has a brief reflection on dreams: "I hate dreams," it begins.  At his house, he says, breakfast table recountings of dreams have to be limited to one sentence: "Better just skip it, and pass the maple syrup."  I agree entirely.  My heart sinks when someone wants to narrate a dream.  I realize, of course, that I've told a couple of dreams here, and now I'm going to indulge myself and tell you last night's, not in one sentence, but as concisely as possible.  I was staying with my American friends, John and Eric, who live in Paris.  Instead of an apartment, they had a three story house, crammed not only with their belongings, but with mine as well--my pants and shirts and suits and outerwear, my books (shelves and shelves of these), my dishes and pots and pans.  We were all flying permanently back to America at 4 in the afternoon, and nothing was packed.  I was panicked.  All the boxes were too small to hold much.  There wasn't time to sell or give things away.  What would the new owners think if I left all my stuff behind?  And every time I thought I had one bag packed, I remembered another closet full of clothes.  I don't think the dream is very hard to interpret: France "symbolizes" France.  My reluctance to get ready equals, well, my reluctance to be ready to say goodbye to France.  Sometimes a suitcase is only a suitcase.

I've subscribed to the NYR for probably forty years now.  I usually read it front to back, skipping maybe one or two articles.  One idea appeared in two articles in this issue related to the theme of Why Nations Fail, a book I blogged about a couple of months ago.  That book made its argument in terms of politically and economically inclusive institutions versus politically and economically extractive ones, ruling out the relevance of such factors as geography (fertility of the land, prevalence of natural resources, etc.).  Its main thesis was that politcal factors precede and trump economic ones.  Two reviews in this NYR echo that argument.  The first is a review of Paul Krugman's End This Depression Now! and Joseph Stiglitz's The Price of Inequality.  Both Krugman and Stiglitz are Nobel prize winning economists.  But as the reviewers point out, the most striking feature of the two books is their emphasis on politics: "Only in recent years .  . . has there been a turn to politics to explain America's distinctive economic challenges--a reorientation that brings economics back toward its original conception as the science of political economy."

Later in the issue, Ian Johnson reviews three books on the Chinese economy and its "lost decade."  Despite the common belief in China's inexorable economic rise, the books under review make clear that the economy has actually stalled, that the leadership is desperately trying to orient itself to new realities while clinging to power, and that divide between those who have profited and those who have been left behind is creating rising tensions.  Johnson writes that all three books "make clear that most of all, China's economic challenges are political."  It's impossible to think about these books and reviews without considering America's current problems--and the solutions, or the lack thereof, that mark the current campaign: political and economic inclusivity on the one hand, the 1% and an extractive political and economic prescription on the other.