William Watson

In the introduction to Does North America Exist? Governing the Continent after NAFTA and 9/11, Stephen Clarkson relates how, over the several years he worked on this long investigation of the effects of the North American Free Trade Agreement on our continental life together, his “nearest and dearest” took to calling it his…

My father died two years ago, suddenly but not unexpectedly: he was six weeks short of 84. When, a few months later, my mother decided to move in with one of my two sisters and her family, we siblings faced a problem many children of literate members of that generation face, namely, what to do with my father’s…

What a life John Kenneth Galbraith has led! Reading this new biography by Kennedy School economist Richard Parker, you feel you have been dropped into a William Boyd novel, The New Confessions, say, or Any Human Heart, whose heroes roam through the 20th century meeting all the great characters. Galbraith, who turns 97 on October…