Tim Barker

Tim Barker studies the history of political economy at Harvard.

Letter

Dust My Broom

6 October 2022

I was surprised to learn, reading Alex Abramovich’s piece on Robert Johnson, that ‘I Believe I’ll Dust My Broom’ may have been ‘written in an open A tuning apparently original to Johnson’. The younger Mississippi bluesman Elmore James (who, as Abramovich notes, reshaped American music with his electrified cover of ‘Dust My Broom’) used an open D or E tuning. Regarding the original...

Buckle Up! Oil Prices

Tim Barker, 1 June 2017

When​ Donald Trump nominated Rex Tillerson, the CEO of Exxon, as secretary of state, Robert McNally found the choice unremarkable. ‘The closest thing we have to a secretary of state outside government is the CEO of Exxon,’ he said. McNally is an energy consultant, a former adviser to George W. Bush, Mitt Romney and Marco Rubio, and a member of the National Petroleum Council.

Beyond the Ballot Box: Occupy and Bernie

Tim Barker, 8 September 2016

Commenting on​ Occupy Wall Street in late 2011, Barney Frank, then a Democratic congressman for Massachusetts, voiced a common complaint: ‘I don’t understand why people think that simply being in a physical place does much.’ Nearly five years later, it isn’t easy to decide whether Frank was right. Part of the puzzle is that the Occupy movement had a strange double...

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