I’ve been working for months on a review of Sven Beckert’s new book Capitalism: A Global History. It’s a monster of a book—more than 1300 pages, with notes and the index—and I’ve had trouble writing my way into the review. When I write, I label each draft with a number. If I’m writing an article, the first draft is Article 1, the second Article 2, and so on. I put a date on each draft, too, to remind myself when I started the draft. In this review, my Article 1 has a date—October 11, 2025—and then a blank page. Which means I circled around and around the piece for months and wrote nothing that I could even keep. Then the […]