Terrible pun; sorry about that, and no disrespect to the memory of the late John Kenneth Galbraith. Anyway, don't miss my boundlessly intelligent friend Scott McLemee's essay about, among other things, Galbraith's pseudonymous 1963 collection The McLandress Dimension and, to add to the satirical capers, the star economist's co-alter ego's review of the Leonard Lewin/Victor Navasky concoction Report From Iron Mountain. Scott begins (links are his):

The wedding announcements in The New York Times are, as all amateur sociologists know, a valuable source of raw data concerning prestige-display behavior among the American elite. But they do not provide the best index of any individual’s social status. Much more reliable in that respect are the obituaries, which provide an estimate of the deceased party’s total accumulated social capital. They may also venture a guess, between the lines, about posterity’s likely verdict on the person.

In the case of John Kenneth Galbraith, who died last week, the Times obituary could scarcely fail to register the man’s prominence. He was an economist, diplomat, Harvard professor, and advisor to JFK. Royalties on his book The Affluent Society (1958) guaranteed that — as a joke of the day had it — he was a full member. But the notice also made a point of emphasizing that his reputation was in decline. Venturing with uncertain steps into a characterization of his economic thought, the obituary treated Galbraith as kind of fossil from some distant era, back when Keynsian liberals still roamed the earth.

He was patrician in manner, but an acid-tongued critic of what he once called “the sophisticated and derivative world of the Eastern seaboard.” He was convinced that for a society to be not merely affluent but livable (an important distinction now all but lost) it had to put more political and economic power in the hands of people who exercised very little of it.

Read the rest. Speaking of the Times wedding announcements, I enjoyed Troy Patterson's piece in Slate about the "appalling" new Times online wedding videos (which, Patterson notes, are all of straight couples so far):

I just love wedding announcements, and nothing satisfies my passion like the New York Times. This gloriously ridiculous section of the paper of record is a vestige of an earlier, more nakedly hierarchical, time. As Slate's Timothy Noah put it four years ago, "The wedding pages remain because a very small aristocracy demands that they remain." He wrote that in derision; I cite it in celebration.

Week after week, these dispatches (a species of open letter: public honeymoon post cards that just happen to announce the partners' pedigree, schooling, and profession) offer an unmatchable voyeuristic delight. Is there a more entertaining way for young members of the Northeastern professional class to size themselves up against their peers? How better to indulge in status-gawking and idle matrimonial fantasies? What fun!

Back to Galbraith for a moment—my grandfather, who knew him, wrote some nice lines about Galbraith's legacy in an email a few days ago, and I'm going to see if he'll let me reprint them.

Unrelated: Art School Confidential, which I saw tonight, is full of laughs, but not very deep or lasting ones. John Malkovich is hilarious in it, though, and Steve Buscemi got a bit hurrah from the audience just by walking on. That's absolutely right.