>How about some news about your visit to Amsterdam, and how is Boris
>K? I met him last year at a friend's house; it was really great to
>meet an unneurotic socialist (from Russia AND Jewish) who was
>actually optimistic and whose writing was comprehensible.
It was a good conference - smart people, though a bit too fond of crisis for my taste. Boris most of all - I always like to hear what he has to say (though I never quite get his frequent "old Jewish jokes"), but every panic or recession is a crisis to Boris. Maybe it comes from living in Russia. I recorded interviews with some of the participants which I'll be running on the radio over the next few weeks: the Turkish economist Sungur Savran talking about the Turkish economic crisis (where the word is deserved) and how the country fits into U.S. designs on Iraq; Bill Robinson, a UCSB sociologist who studies the evolution of a global ruling class (and the obsolescence of national r.c.'s); and Kevin Danaher, talking about "socialist entrepreneurship," which people unfriendly with Kevin call by less kind names.
I was struck again by how Europeans don't have the affirmative actions standards familiar in the U.S. Participants were mostly white guys, with few exceptions.
Doug