Matt Taibbi
Matt Taibbi brutally and puckishly destroys Thomas Friedman's "The World is Flat", not so much picking apart the core thesis, but by just roasting Friedman to death with style. Matt Taibbi doesn't worry so much about being generous taking Friedman apart point by point. Instead, he argues that you should judge an author by the incoherence of his rhetoric, metaphor, and imagery. I find this novel because, frankly, there are lots of researchers doing good work in anthropology, history, and some economics showing globalization is not necessarily new and it definitely cannot be described so simply as flattening. Engseng Ho's "Graves of Tarim" describes old cosmopolitans, their investments, and their travel documents; Alan Klima's Thai Love Thai describes how money isn't just about financial instruments and buying power, but takes on very local meanings uses like tree ornaments and religious symbols; Anna Tsing's "The Global Situation" explains why when we talk about global flows, we have to pay attention to the locally unique infrastructures, cultural developments that make those flows happen and are in turn influenced by those flows. In short, the world isn't flattening, or even leveling. But it is changing and globalization is changing different places differentl. Friedman's world leveling account, written for a mass audience, is actually just echo-ing early 90s arguments from the left that McDonaldization will turn the world into America, which is also not true and also masking the more complex changes social justice people or investors ought to understand.

So if Friedman's rhetoric is 10 years too late, too bad so sad. And the bad metaphors are a red flag that something in the thinking is maybe a bit cloudy -- too many simplifications crashing up against each other and contradictions not quite resolving.

Taibbi's review is pretty literary in its own right. I like his style. He is delightfully excessive in his imagery but he does it darkly and mischieviously. I'm all for accessibly florid for justice and snippiness.

Choice phrases that cracked me up, capturing tropes that aren't general truths but are definitely out there:

It is a tale of a man who walks 10 feet in front of his house armed with a late-model Blackberry and comes back home five minutes later to gush to his wife that hospitals now use the internet to outsource the reading of CAT scans.

"He is the perfect symbol of our culture of emboldened stupidity."

The walls had fallen down and the Windows had opened, making the world much flatter than it had ever beenbut the age of seamless global communication had not yet dawned.[Friedman's passage]

How the fuck do you open a window in a fallen wall?