Jacob Soll on Muck Rack

Jacob Soll

Los Angeles
As seen in: The New York Times, Yahoo News, Le Monde, Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, Inc., POLITICO, POLITICO Europe, Salon, The Boston Globe and
Covers:  Politics, economics, books, and information
Born into Books Author of FREE MARKET: THE HISTORY OF AN IDEA (Basic Books, 2022)
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How Islam Shaped the Enlightenment

How Islam Shaped the Enlightenment

The New Republic — Dan Kitwood / Getty Images A new book recovers the work of scholars who helped establish greater understanding between religions. In 1698, the noted Arabic scholar and Catholic evangelical crusader, Ludovico Marracci published the first historically accurate Latin translation of the Qur'an, as well as a refutation of the Muslim holy book-both of which he hoped could be used to help "fight Islam."
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The Long and Brutal History of Fake News

The Long and Brutal History of Fake News

POLITICO — The fake news hit Trent, Italy, on Easter Sunday, 1475. A two-and-a-half year-old child named Simonino had gone missing, and a Franciscan preacher, Bernardino da Feltre, gave a series of sermons claiming that the Jewish community had murdered the child, drained his blood and drunk it to celebrate Passover.
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Why We Should Be Really Worried About the Panama Papers

Why We Should Be Really Worried About the Panama Papers

Politico — In a world seemingly inured to financial scandals, the Panama Papers leak has reminded us of their capacity to shock. This huge document dump, which has revealed thousands of offshore accounts held in the tax haven of Panama by the world's new superwealthy class, has already shaken British Prime Minister David Cameron, pointed to Russian President Vladimir Putin and led to the resignation of Iceland's prime minister. At its core, the affair provides a window into something we knew existed, but whose scale we couldn't always imagine: offshore zones of total lawlessness that fuel kleptocratic governments and undermine the rule of law across the globe.
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You don't turn universities around. You build on their traditions

You don't turn universities around. You build on their traditions

Des Moines Register — In hiring Bruce Harreld as president of the University of Iowa, the governor and the Board of Regents have told us they think the university is not on the right track. But they haven't told us what track they want. We do know they don't believe in the tradition of the university or in the freedoms of shared governance. The problem is, it's impossible to build a great university without these elements. Thanks to the opportunities given to me as an in-state alum of the University of Iowa, I have gone on to be a professor at the University of Southern California, a historian, writer and journalist on the topics of politics, education and finance.
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Why we still need to worry about China's stock market

Why we still need to worry about China's stock market

Politico — Anyone who thought China might finally be developing a normal stock market was reminded last week that China still does things its own way. When the market suddenly lost $3 trillion in assets, shedding almost 30 percent of its value in just four weeks, the government stepped in and started forcing state-run companies, and even individual investors, to pump in money. One result was what China wanted: the market stabilized. The other, however, was that investor confidence in China was severely shaken. Opaque state intervention is not how stock markets are supposed to work.
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Greece owes less than Europe says

Greece owes less than Europe says

Politico — As of midnight Tuesday, it now appears that Greece has defaulted on part of its debt by missing a $1.7 billion loan payment to the International Monetary Fund. With its banks now closed, and citizens running out of cash. Greece appears bankrupted by its vast debt load - an immense $350 billion, a figure calculated by the Greek statistics agency ELSTAT, and confirmed by the European Commission. But wait: is that what Greece really owes? In fact, there are few if any accountants who agree with that number. Due to debt restructuring, many independent observers have calculated the market value of Greece's debt at somewhere closer to a tenth that number.
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The European problem we aren't talking about: Where are the accountants?

The European problem we aren't talking about: Where are the accountants?

Politico — As the Greek debt crisis lurches toward a major missed payment and potential catastrophe, the familiar political crossfire has heated up -- the charges of southern European irresponsibility and northern heartlessness; the dire predictions about the Euro and even the EU itself. But with the prospect of a much-feared "Grexit" becoming more likely, serious arguments have started to center on accounting. How much does Greece really owe - and who even decides? This sounds like an easy question. But the only simple thing about "Greek debt" is how short the words are.
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The Culture of Criticism

The Culture of Criticism

newrepublic.com — Wherever we look today in academia, scholars are rushing to defend the Enlightenment ideas of political and individual liberty, human rights, faith in scientific reason, secularism, and the freedom of public debate. Why the worry? These ideas are, after all, enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. And yet, to hear the defenders of the Enlightenment, they are under assault. There is no shortage of enemies-from mullahs and Christian conservatives to science deniers and left-wing post-modernists. Defending the Enlightenment has become an academic cottage industry with various camps hunkering down behind their own interpretations, and, in good academic form, attacking others.
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Jacob Soll

Jacob Soll

newrepublic.com — Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and NationsBy Norman Davies (Viking, 830 pp., $40) There is a well-worn story that is told in one form or another in all European history textbooks. In 824, ten years after the death of Charlemagne, Agobard, Archbishop of Lyon, hailed a new Christian imperial ambition to unite all the peoples and lands of the Western Holy Roman Empire by reformulating Galatians 3:28: "There is now neither Gentile nor Jew, Scythian nor Aquitanian, nor Lombard, nor Burgundian, nor Alaman, nor bond, nor free.
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Biography of a Sixteenth-Century Torturer

Biography of a Sixteenth-Century Torturer

newrepublic.com — Anatole Deibler, France's official executioner from 1899 to 1939, once remarked, "To kill in the name of one's country is a glorious feat, one rewarded by medals. But to kill in the name of the law, that is a gruesome, horrible function, rewarded with scorn, contempt, and loathing." Deibler not only knew his craft-he took part in 395 executions and trained his favorite nephew to follow in his footsteps-he also knew that modern society needed and even wanted torturers and executioners, but that it did not like to talk about them. Talking about torture is not simply distasteful-it can be downright dangerous.
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I Would Prefer Not To-What Paperwork Means in Modern Life

I Would Prefer Not To-What Paperwork Means in Modern Life

newrepublic.com — IN FRANZ KAFKA'S novel, The Trial, the hapless protagonist, Josef K., is asked to stand trial for a crime that has never been defined, in a court that is never in session. Instead of a trial, the protagonist spends his time arguing with bureaucrats over paperwork: "You come home one day and find all the documents you've submitted ... lying on the desk, they've been sent back ... they're just worthless scraps of paper." "Kafkaesque" has come to define the existentially hopeless bureaucratic mazes with no exit. It is, therefore, puzzling that The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork mentions Franz Kafka only once and in passing.
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Accounted For: The Origins of Modern Finance

Accounted For: The Origins of Modern Finance

newrepublic.com — A HISTORY OF double-entry accounting? Not a sexy prospect. The very idea evokes rows of half-starved, bent-over Dickensian clerks, with visors and arthritic hands, scribbling in giant, unending registers. But maybe this is wrong-double-entry is, after all, the tool by which financiers calculate profit and loss. Profit can be very sexy, and as Lehman Brothers and Greece illustrate, there is great drama in massive loss. The story of accounting should, at this moment of economic crisis, give a sense of the passion, glory, and pitfalls of this seemingly banal practice. This drama is missing from Jane Gleeson-White's primer, a well-written, short history of the origins of accounting.
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Note This

Note This

newrepublic.com — By Ann M. Blair (Yale University Press, 397 pp., $45) In 1945, in an article called "As We May Think," Vannevar Bush evoked a specter for the modern age beyond the bomb: information overload. He warned that the scientific progress of humankind would be "staggered" by the "growing mountain of research" made by "thousands of researchers." A professor of electrical engineering at MIT in the 1920s and 1930s, Bush became science adviser to Franklin Roosevelt, and would go on to head the Manhattan Project until 1943, later becoming founding director of the National Science Foundation in 1950.
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The Long and Brutal History of Fake News

The Long and Brutal History of Fake News

POLITICO — The fake news hit Trent, Italy, on Easter Sunday, 1475. A 2 ½-year-old child named Simonino had gone missing, and a Franciscan preacher, Bernardino da Feltre, gave a series of sermons claiming that the Jewish community had murdered the child, drained his blood and drunk it to celebrate Passover.
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Can America Benefit from Covid? Ask 14th-Century Florence

Can America Benefit from Covid? Ask 14th-Century Florence

POLITICO — In sheer numbers, the Black Death of 1348 was an unalloyed horror. The bubonic plague killed between 30 and 70 percent of Europeans, and left the survivors bereft. At the height of the plague, in 1349, the poetPetrarch wrote: "The life we lead is a sleep; whatever we do, dreams. Only death breaks the sleep and wakes us from dreaming.
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The Revelatory Horror of The Zookeeper's Wife

The Revelatory Horror of The Zookeeper's Wife

The New Republic — In Niki Caro's adaptation of Diane Ackerman's The Zookeeper's Wife , the protagonist listens in fascination and horror, as Lutz Heck-a German zoologist, director of the Berlin and Munich zoos and avid game hunter-describes tracking a lioness in the wild and shooting it.
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Spain: Europe's socialist torchbearer

Spain: Europe's socialist torchbearer

POLITICO Europe — Press play to listen to this article Jacob Soll is university professor and professor of philosophy, history and accounting at Dornsife College at the University of Southern California. He is the author of "The Reckoning: Financial Accountability and the Rise and Fall of Nations."
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