## Peter Drucker looks at the big picture of the world economy today — really four economies, he says: information, money, multinationals and mercantile exchange.
For thirty years after World War II, the U.S. economy dominated practically without serious competition. For another twenty years it was clearly the world’s foremost economy and especially the undisputed leader in technology and innovation. Though the United States today still dominates the world economy of information, it is only one major player in the three other world economies of money, multinationals and trade. And it is facing rivals that, either singly or in combination, could conceivably make America Number Two. |
## Cynthia Ozick reviews Joseph Lelyveld’s memoir. I haven’t read the book, but the former N.Y. Times editor apparently did a vast amount of legwork researching his own childhood. This is Ozick’s discussion of the limitations of Lelyveld’s approach:
…There is no all-pervading Proustian madeleine in Lelyveld’s workaday prose. Yet salted through this short work is the smarting of an unpretentious lamentation: ”If this were a novel,” ”If I were using these events in a novel,” and so on. Flickeringly, the writer appears to see what is missing; and what is missing is the intuitive, the metaphoric, the uncertain, the introspective with its untethered vagaries: in brief, the not-nailed-down. Consequently Lelyveld’s memory loop becomes a memory hole, through which everything that is not factually retrievable escapes. Memory, at bottom, is an act of imaginative re-creation, not of archival legwork. ”Yes, I was finding, it was possible to do a reporting job on your childhood,” Lelyveld insists. Yes? Perhaps no. The memoirist has this in common with the novelist: he is like the watchful spider alert to every quiver on its lines. Sensation, not research. |
Well put. I think one of the reasons I chose, as a young writer, a career as a critic rather than as a reporter was that I could not see devoting my life to writing that was all “nailed-down.” Reporting is a necessary and valuable skill, and I have deep respect for those who do it well; it’s hard, hard work, too. But it will typically miss that dimension of “the intuitive, the metaphoric, the uncertain, the introspective.” In American journalism as it is conventionally defined by those who carve out the job descriptions, a critic’s portfolio is broader, and it’s possible, under the right alignment of stars, to feel as well as to record — or rather, to record what one has felt along with what one has witnessed.
## Apparently there’s a movement afoot in the world of writing about games to be less “nailed-down.” It’s called the “New Games Journalism” — “a narrative, experiential approach that acknowledges the effect of the game on the player.” I’ll need to read up. This was sort of what I had in mind 15 years ago when I began to move my attention from the world of theater to the digital realm, and thought, hey, why not try writing more ambitious reviews of videogames? I’d just turned 30, though, and was already feeling that the gaming world was one I would be less and less able to keep up with as the decades advanced. (So right!) So I wrote one opus — an “experiential” discourse on the world of Super Mario — and moved on to broader terrain.
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