Dual coverage from The New York Times

Damon Darlin liked my new book, An Economist Gets Lunch:

It’s a sports bar, which seems like an unlikely choice, but not to Professor Cowen’s way of thinking. He chose it precisely because it was an unlikely choice. An American sports bar might mean Buffalo wings and cheeseburgers, but an Ethiopian sports bar? “They are making no attempt to appeal to non-Ethiopians,” he said.

…As for the food at Eyo’s Sports Bar, it persuaded me on his thesis that immigrants rejuvenated the American palate and it was best to leave the finicky children, or teenagers, at home.

Dwight Garner did not like it:

Reading Mr. Cowen is like pushing a shopping cart through Whole Foods with Rush Limbaugh. The patter is nonstop and bracing. Mr. Cowen delivers observations that, should Alice Waters ever be detained in Gitmo, her captors will play over loudspeakers to break her spirit.

These observations include: “There’s nothing especially virtuous about the local farmer”; “buying green products seems to encourage individuals to be less moral”; and — a contender for Orwellian sentence of the year — “technology and business are a big part of what makes the world gentle and fun.”

I think it’s Orwellian that he thinks this is Orwellian.  On the two errors he claims to have found in the book, he is wrong in both cases.  Brad DeLong adds appropriate comment on the first.  My estimate for the Google search number claims was correct and multiply checked when I did it, and these days it comes in at around the high 400,000s, nothing near his 115,000 figure.

You can pre-order the book on Amazon here.  For Barnes & Noble here.  For Indiebound.org here.  It is due out tomorrow.

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