MAGA Metapolitical Philosophers

The second Trump administration hones its isolationist, reactionary, postliberal worldview.

A. Tom Stoppard has died. Charlie Rose remembers.

B. Laura K. Field has a new book on MAGA metapolitical philosophers called Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2025). Jacobin has a review; Field is at the Brookings Institution.

C. Today’s MIT OCW free course is on Investments, created by Professor Reto Gallati.

D. A new book on Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX.

E. A Bloomberg documentary on the negativities of social media. Also see Jaron Lanier’s Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Account Right Now (New York: Vintage Digital, 2018).

F. The late actor Udo Kier’s (Criterion) closet picks.

G. A hedge fund quant explains how to retire early by building your nest egg & the importance of asset allocation in (diversified) portfolio construction. Robert Engle’s advanced practitioner text Anticipating Correlations: A New Paradigm for Risk Management (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).

Professor Emeritus Engle in 2024 on a financial approach to climate risk.