Showing results by narrator "Kevin Stillwell" in All Categories

In LA Times First Fiction Award winner Maggie Shipstead's "Angel Lust", Simon Orff, a thrice-married movie producer, departs for his deceased father’s house, daughters selfishly in tow. “If he had to referee their squabbles and navigate their quicksilver emotions while sifting through his father’s possessions, he hoped the house would not seem so empty, or he hoped at least the emptiness would be neutral.” "If only," writes Halimah Marcus, co-editor of Electric Literature, in her introduction.

After living in the White House for four years, in November 1980, Jimmy Carter lost the presidential election to Republican Ronald Reagan in a landslide. Carter's unpopularity helped Republicans win seats in the House and gain control over the Senate for the first time in over 20 years. The Reagan Era had begun, ushering in a generation of conservative power. Democrats blamed Carter for this catastrophe and spent the next decade pretending he had never existed.

As China’s global power grows, Beijing is learning that its image matters.

The populism that Trump espouses is rooted in the thought and culture of Andrew Jackson. Jacksonians are skeptical about the value of liberal order building, so the challenge for international politics in the days ahead is to find a way to stop the liberal order’s erosion.

Commentators tend to focus on the combination of extremism and poverty in Pakistan, but the combination of extremism and growing prosperity may prove even more dangerous.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian military rotted away. In one of the most dramatic campaigns of peacetime demilitarization in world history, from 1988 to 1994, Moscow’s armed forces shrank from five mil-lion to one million personnel. As the Kremlin’s defense expenditures plunged from around $246 billion in 1988 to $14 billion in 1994, the government with-drew some 700,000 servicemen from Afghanistan, Germany, Mongolia, and eastern Europe.

Did you know that to make a task seem easier, all you have to do is lean back a little? Or that retail salespeople who mimic the way their customers speak and behave end up selling more? If you like stats like this, are intrigued by ideas, and find connecting the dots to be a critical part of your skill set—this book is for you. Culled from Harvard Business Review's popular newsletter, The Daily Stat, this book offers a compelling look at insights that both amuse and inform.

Chinese policymakers have been making a push to internationalize the renminbi but, if they want it to displace the dollar, they will have to move much faster on a set of broad economic and regulatory reforms and take a less centralized approach to economic policymaking.

Why equality is likely to make a comeback.

A hundred years after World War I, new accounts of the drama help listeners navigate the intricacies of European politics and the political and diplomatic maneuverings that kicked off the war. Yet there is still no consensus on its origins or lessons.

Ever since the emergence of mass democracy after World War II, an inherent tension has existed between capitalism and democratic politics; capitalism allocates resources through markets, whereas democracy allocates power through votes. Economists, in particular, have been slow to accept that this tension exists. Instead, they have tended to view markets as a realm beyond the political sphere and to see politics as something that gets in the way of an otherwise self-adjusting system.

What should the United States do after ISIS’ all-but-inevitable defeat? Despite President Donald Trump’s campaign rhetoric, the best approach is one close to the strategy the Obama administration pursued in 2016: airstrikes, raids by special operations forces, and battalion-sized U.S. forces deployed to counter specific threats.

Thirty-five years now. Through American invasions and wars, and famines and genocides, and tsunamis and earthquakes and volcanoes, George Waite’s red, white, and blue mail truck has lurched from mailbox to mailbox with the utter predictability of a brightly painted figure on a cuckoo clock.

In the last days of April, Russian television aired a 150-minute documentary about Vladimir Putin’s decade and a half as the leader of Russia.

Over the past three millennia, China has made three attempts to project its economic pow-er westward. The first began in the second century BC, during the Han dynasty, when China’s imperial rulers developed the ancient Silk Road to trade with the far-off residents of Central Asia and the Mediterranean basin; the fall of the Mongol empire and the rise of European maritime trading eventually rendered that route obsolete.

What does it mean to be Chinese?

Russian President Vladimir Putin used to seem invincible. Today, he and his regime look enervated, confused, and desperate. Increasingly, both Russian and Western commentators suggest that Russia may be on the verge of deep instability, possibly even collapse.

As surprising as the recent financial crisis and recession were, the behavior of the world’s industrialized economies and financial markets during the recovery has been even more so. 
Most observers expected the unusually deep recession to be followed by an unusually rapid recovery, with output and employment returning to trend levels relatively quickly.

Compared with the most sophisticated weapons systems in use today, tunnels have withstood the test of time. There’s no way to know how long drones or lasers or anti-missile defense systems will last, but as long as there is warfare, tunnels will almost certainly be part of the fight.

Nothing casts a more sinister shadow over our nation's history than the gruesome lynchings that happened between 1882 and 1937, claiming 4,680 victims. Often, in a show of racist violence, the lynchers tortured their victims before murdering them. Most killers were never brought to justice; some were instead celebrated as heroes, their victims' bodies displayed or even cut up and distributed as trophies.