Pearl River Depending on how things go in coming months, Thomas Frank, the lawyer and author of the well-regarded book, What’s the Matter with Kansas, may have to work on a new volume about What’s Right about Kansas? I’m talking about the first test before US voters of their reaction to the Supreme Court’s …
Dollar Stores: Sweetening Food, Sweating the Labor, Collecting the Cash
New Orleans Dollar stores are now literally everywhere. How can you miss them, especially in rural and lower-income areas? It’s not easy. There are 18,000 Dollar Generals, 16,162 Dollar Trees, and they own another 8,200 Family Dollars. That’s 42,362 stores, and they’re still opening new ones as often as they can. Driving an …
Malcolm Gladwell’s Pop Psych-Soc Business Model
Marble Falls Along with millions of other people, I read with some interest Malcolm Gladwell’s early books The Tipping Point and Blink. I’ve certainly read his pieces in The New Yorker, where he is one of their staff writers, and now seems to mostly publish pieces as trial runs for future books, …


