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[...] nations in deficit could not sustain fixed exchange rates with the rest, especially in times of crisis. To remain within Europe's monetary snake, a country with a trade deficit, France for example, urgently needed to attract foreign money to finance its net imports. Foreign money is attracted…

So, when in 1971 Europe was jettisoned from the dollar zone, and exchange rates between its currencies started bobbing up and down, some of them falling as violently as others were rising, the European Union had real trouble managing the heavy industry cartel and the common agricultural policy that…

Likewise children deliver us from the pressure of our ambitions, the shadows of our failures. I often think of Geoff Dyer's brutal, bravura passage in Out of Sheer Rage. In describing his decision not to have children, he writes, "People need to feel that they have been thwarted by _circumstances…

Badinter has referred to herself as a "fanatic of clarity"; and at times her commitment to clarity, her desire to overresolve or over-pin down, can be a bit constricting. (I prefer [...] what Elizabeth Hardwick referred to as Simone de Beauvoir's "brilliant confusion"--that is, the willingness to t…

[...] the woman with the baby on her Facebook page [...] this style of effacement, this voluntary loss of self, comes naturally to her. Here is my pretty family, she seems to be saying, I don't matter anymore.