>SCOTT McLEMEE
>
>A lot of my reading nowadays is done in an effort to figure out just
>exactly what the hell is going on. To understand the news you need a
>sense of context. But the nature, and maybe even the purpose, of the
>media is to create "the context of no context," as essayist George
>W.S. Trow aptly put it - a world of pixels but no big picture. So
>you end up yelling at the television screen, or checking The New
>York Times online every five minutes (which was how I spent the
>first 18 months after 9/11, come to think of it).
>
>A few books from this past year helped reframe things. Doug
>Henwood's long-awaited book, "After the New Economy" (The New
>Press), offers more than a postmortem on the dot-com boom, Enron and
>the like. It analyzes the need of capitalism to manufacture and
>advertise scenarios of its own rosy future. Henwood takes a
>skeptical look at the concept of "globalization," while also
>challenging some of the dogmas of the so-called "anti-globalization"
>movement. An indispensable book.
[...]