Tag Archives: Books

Putin-centered approaches to Russian politics also assume that President Putin can easily turn his preferences into policy outcomes. To be sure, Putin is the central node in Russian politics, has faced no serious political challenger since returning to the presidency in 2012, and can often pass legislation with few amendments in Parliament, but he also confronts the physical limits of ruling Russia and challenge of governing a modern society. He must rely on close advisers who in turn...

One day I showed my father a copy of some tattoos from the ‘Crosses’ (solitary confinement cells), where I worked as a supervisor, and he said to me, ‘My son, collect the tattoos, the convicts’ customs, their anti-social drawings, or it will all go to the grave with them.’ He taught me the methodology for documenting prison folklore and how to encode material, which was essential to the dangerous undertaking. For thirty-three years I, a ward of a home for children of ‘enemies of the...

The Biden administration is relying on the promise of harsh economic penalties to avert a Russian invasion of Ukraine. That’s just one of the instances where it’s wielding those tools. When were modern economic sanctions invented? In the aftermath of World War I, is one answer. Yesterday Adam Tooze reviewed a new history of this tool, The Economic Weapon, by Nicholas Mulder. Fighting was ruinous. But here was a multinational instrument, still painful to wield, but better than most of the...

One last example of a recent technology that scaled exceptionally well comes not from business but from social activism. In the days following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin in the spring of 2020, before anyone had been charged with a crime, the Grassroots Law Project organized a call drive to flood the phone lines and answering machines of public officials in Minnesota to demand justice. All volunteers had to do was call the number the Grassroots Law...

It began a few years ago, when prominent democracy rating organizations started downgrading the United States, putting its institutions on par with Panama, Argentina, or Romania. In retrospect, that seems like the good news. Last year, the international security and intelligence expert Greg Treverton predicted the breakup of the union in a piece titled Civil War Is Coming. And early this year, in a book titled The Next Civil War, journalist Stephen Marche outlined America’s many future...

It was about the beginning of September, 1664, that I, among the rest of my neighbours, heard in ordinary discourse that the plague was returned again in Holland; for it had been very violent there, and particularly at Amsterdam and Rotterdam, in the year 1663, whither, they say, it was brought, some said from Italy, others from the Levant, among some goods which were brought home by their Turkey fleet; others said it was brought from Candia; others from Cyprus. It mattered not from whence...

Continuing from last week, a few more favorites of the past 12 months (none of which were written all that recently). And a reminder that you can sign up to get posts by email. Gods of the Upper Air, by Charles King, alongside Euphoria, by Lily King (and Gillian Tett’s Anthrovision for good measure) Euphoria was my recommendation for best book in 2015. “Pioneering anthropologists in the field, making it up as they go along: The novel,” was my description. It was a thinly-veiled...

It must be four or five years since I last blogged. I’m going to test the engine a little, see if the thing starts up again, and how far I feel like running it. I’ll start with some favorite books of the past year, blurred as that period may be. I will highlight some today, more in a few days, and some fiction after that. If any of this interests you, I’ve made the newsletter function of the blog easier to use. Sign up to get email delivery of posts as they happen. I decided against going...

Through Amazon and other sellers, plus a UK release 10 days earlier. Decades of social science completely changed how I think about conflict. But no one seemed to be talking about these ideas. How do you fix a problem if you don’t understand it? That’s why I wrote this book: to boil down for a general audience the big ideas from political science, economics, psychology, history, and a dozen other fields. A lot of people think war is easy and peace is hard. It’s actually the opposite: war is...

By James Kwak I’ve never wanted to write a book as much as I wanted to write Take Back Our Party. And I’ve never wanted people to read one of my books as much as this one—in particular, before the 2020 Democratic primary season ends. For that reason, I bypassed the usual publication route. (As my editor at Pantheon liked to say, the period for turning a manuscript into a book is, for unknown reasons, the same as the gestation period of a human. In his defense, he did get both 13...