Please join us at Bard College at Simon's Rock on Alford Road in Great Barrington for a local, national, and global conversation on Monday, October 5th, starting at 5.30pm. This will be the first "CHINA Town Hall: Local Connections, National Reflections" in the Berkshires or Tri-state region. We’ll be joining 75 larger communities and university campuses
Tonight, the president of the People’s Republic of China, XI Jinping, will give the only policy speech of his first state visit to the United States. Below you’ll find a link for the live feed from the dinner taking place in Seattle. This has reminded me of the time I heard Mr. Xi speak in Washington DC.
In the days after the 2001 terrorist attacks, people across the United States asked, “Why do they hate us?” President George W. Bush responded with characteristic certainty, “They hate our freedoms, our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.” Here at Berkshire Publishing, where we
Amazon just celebrated its 20th birthday with something called Prime Day. The Authors Guild simultaneously announced a call for a Department of Justice investigation of the company. You may remember my letter last August, “Amazon update: when will the Justice Department step in?” I wrote: “I suspect that Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, is alert to the
Berkshire Publishing’s tagline is about to change, but before we make the switch I’d like to explain why we have been, for ten years, “A global point of reference.” This was partly a play on two meanings of the word reference. In early days, we were known for our encyclopedias – reference books that lived in the reference
The poet T. S. Eliot was a practical joker, and his second wife, the much younger Valerie, liked to loosen the tops of salt shakers and even bottles of Worcestershire sauce at restaurants. I never saw that side of her – she was a grande dame by the time I worked for her in the late
We celebrated Bill (William H.) McNeill's 97th birthday a couple of weeks ago, in the Connecticut house where he has lived full-time since retiring from the University of Chicago. This year's party was a last hurrah, a bon voyage, because the following day he moved to an apartment in a senior living complex. Bill took the change more easily
Berkshire Publishing relishes the chance to work, at long last, on a major food publication, the Encyclopedia of Chinese Cuisines.
A lot has happened since I wrote about how Amazon has pressured Berkshire Publishing (“How Amazon.com is hurting readers, authors, and publishers” – 4 June 2014). There have been accusations, petitions, and even a network TV documentary. I received many thoughtful emails and was interviewed on BBC TV Newsnight and by the New York Times (“Amazon,
