The hope for more rapid, equitable, stable and sustainable development has been too long deferred by economists and policymakers who are so wedded to the neoliberal orthodoxy that they can neither imagine nor countenance any alternative. They have pursued the neoliberal agenda with extraordinary single-mindedness and even hubris. The effect has been devastating: in the wake of the neoliberal experiment, we find extraordinary misery, inequality and despair on a scale unknown in recent human history.

The Washington Consensus is ironclad for the most part, having set the terms by which most nations and their various economic agents interact with one another. This book clearly lays out the arguments and ideas behind pillar neoliberal policies that compose the overarching development model, then deconstruct the economics behind them so myths can be dispersed and serious alternatives proposed. Important today in the aftermath of the Great Recession as activists and policy makers across the developing and developed world consider the limitations of current models. The solutions aren’t that radical, in fact they’re necessary as capitalism continues to transmogrify.

In all the known history of Mankind, advances have been made primarily in physical technology; in the capacity of handling the inanimate world about Man. Control of self and society has been left to to chance or to the vague gropings of intuitive ethical systems based on inspiration and emotion. As a result no culture of greater stability than about fifty-five percent has ever existed, and these only as the result of great human misery.

For 12,000 years the Galactic (Roman) Empire has ruled the cosmos. It spans 25 million worlds, holds 1 quadrillion, and is destined by the laws of psychohistory (mathematics predicting the future of large social groups like planetary civilizations and galactic empires) to collapse into a thirty thousand year dark age. Enter Hari Seldon, the creator of psychohistory, and his far-reaching plan to save human civilization by limiting the dark age to one thousand years by hiding away a cache of science and technology. But will it be enough? Smart, funny, dank; the reason Paul Krugman is an economist.

Why should propaganda be the exclusive preserve of the Western media? Just because they do it better?

A pleasant read. My only complaint is that the essays are more inciteful than insightful. While Roy manages to paint a very compelling picture of the people and places left behind by neoliberalism or sacrificed for its sake, her descriptions of empire are just that. I found myself wanting for a grander vision that constructed some sort of narrative or theory to deconstruct why or how these people were sacrificed and what it truly meant for the humans on both sides of this exploitation. Regardless, a great series of essays for those interested in a tour of the world today.

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look at thousands of working people displaced from their jobs with reduced incomes as a result of automation while the profits of the employers remain intact, and say: “This is not just.” It will look across the oceans and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.

Give this book to anyone that invokes Martin Luther King Jr. to effectively quell dissent. Written in total isolation, the impatience, fiery passion, and unyielding optimism are palpable. This, without a doubt, is King’s greatest work. Never before has humanity had the material wealth to seriously undertake eradicating poverty. Never before has humanity had a value system that, at least rhetorically, compelled society towards that aim. The fact that the United States refused to translate either into action spoke volumes to King, speaks volumes today, and gives fuel to this sweeping call to action.

You looked at them and wondered why they were so ugly; you looked closely and could not find the source. Then you realized that it came from conviction, their conviction. It was as though some mysterious all-knowing master had given each one a cloak of ugliness to wear, and they had each accepted it without question…. And they took the ugliness in their hands, threw it as a mantle over them, and went about the world with it.

It is hard to believe this was anyone’s debut novel. Centered on an 10 year old black girl, Pecola Breedlove, you painfully explore the burden beauty and its myths can bring to bear. Pecola learns, too soon, that there are worse things than being ugly–such as dehumanization and the betrayal of trust between peers and family. My soul still burns when I think about how each character is savaged by the myths they cling to, desperately, for some semblance of sanity and stability. The horror of this book’s world gives hope that people will understand this terror inevitably springs from racism.

Before the young god Brad saved me, I was an atheist when it came to poetry. At his suggestion, I got this book and am incredibly happy I did. No book I have ever come across has so clearly laid poetry out bare–showing how effective (or ineffective) its various structures can be in creating and invoking meanings or achieving a purpose. The book serves as an incredibly accessible guide to classic poets, the magic of poetry, and how to read it. Comrades like Blake, Keats, and even Shakespeare are finally made intelligible, and therefore enjoyable, or your money back.

So I want to propose an alternative: first, we save globalization by ditching neoliberalism; then we save the planet – and rescue ourselves from turmoil and inequality – by moving beyond capitalism itself.

Post-Westphalian, post-structural, post-modern, the prefix has been used to death and has become vacuous in many instances. Not here, not with post-capitalism. Mason describes, quite lucidly, the transmogrification of capitalism and its implications for those on the left, right, or Planet Earth. The entire system is threatened, fundamentally, by a shift in information technology (which interestingly enough Marx predicted) that stands ready to redefine the very concept of value as production costs are driven closer and closer to zero. What’s next when incomes, profits, markets, and the very concept of property are disrupted? We have to move beyond capitalism to find out.

For those of us who delight in such things, the twentieth century has, in it’s unfolding, presented mankind with an array of behavioural paradoxes and moral conundrums hitherto unimagined and perhaps unimaginable. Science, traditional enemy of mysticism and religion, has taken on a growing understanding that the model of the universe suggested by quantum physics differs very little from the universe that Taoists and other mystics have existed in for centuries. Large numbers of young people, raised in rigidly structured and industrially oriented cultures, violently reject industrialism and seek instead some modified version of the agricultural lifestyle that their forebears debatedly enjoyed… Children starve while boots costing many thousand dollars leave their mark upon the surface of the moon. We have labored long to build a heaven, only to find it populated with horrors.

An amazing graphic novel, there isn’t a superhero story that beats it in intelligence, ambition, emotional richness, or aesthetics. Set in an alternate 1985 America where superheroes are outlawed, Nixon is President, and the Cold War is turning hot. The murder of a former superhero starts an investigation that quickly reveals a disturbing conspiracy. Above all, Watchmen does not let you forget the humanity–or inhumanity–of these superheroes. Good and evil are boring when they are ideals or caricatures and Watchmen knows it; the story never flinches from exploring its character’s morality but leaves plenty of room for you to.

Language does this to our memories–simplifies, solidifies, codifies, mummifies. An oft-told story is like a photograph in a family album; eventually, it replaces the moment it was meant to capture.

What’s the difference between humans and animals? Fowler’s story holds that while all the mental trappings of cognition play a role, it is the family which really defines individuals–for better and for worse. Two sisters, Rosemary and Fern, serve as a lens to ask just what it means to be a person with relationships. How do love, anger, family, self, and all the experiences in between separate us from (or bring us closer to) our humanness. If this story doesn’t gnaw at your soul, tear at your heart, make you laugh or cry, then we have to talk.

Middle East has always been of great significance if only because of location in the hub of the World Island–Eurasia and Africa. Trade and travel routes have crossed region since earliest human migrations. Cradle of civilization, especially in Fertile Crescent. Rich history, ancient and mediaeval. Birthplace of three great monotheistic religions. Many ethnolinguistic-religious groups, with Arabs dominant in center and Turks and Persians across North. Home of Islam, which still dominates religion and culture…Region in headlines but background poorly understood.

This book is, in retrospect, not meant to be read from cover to cover but to serve–at best–as a reference guide. This does not, however, detract from the fact that Middle East Patterns is amazing. It’s an exhaustive account of the political and economic realities coloring the region that also manages to provide necessary context for past and current conflicts via explorations of the ethnographic foundations. Unrivaled in depth and breadth of vision when it comes to national issues (such as the demands of policy linked to resource scarcity) and international ones (the mismatch between religious, cultural, and political borders).