Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them.

Walden is a reflection on humanity and its place in the natural world from a place of love and concern regarding what will become of mankind in an industrial civilization. Civil Disobedience is a powerful exploration of the ties between an individual and the state, going on to inform his views on injustice, of slavery, on war, and ultimately when an individual is obliged to disrupt them. Both are intensely personal; the former rooted in Thoreau’s foray into his friend’s backyard and the latter after his arrest for not paying a poll tax, both enriching the journey they take you on.

Our choice is a clear one. We can continue acting as if tomorrow will be just like yesterday, growing less and less prepared for each new disaster as it comes, and more and more desperately invested in a life we can’t sustain. Or we can learn to see each day as the death of what came before, freeing ourselves to deal with whatever problems the present offers without attachment or fear.

If we want to learn to live in the Anthropocene, we must first learn how to die.

We are fucked when it comes to climate change. It may be too late to save our civilization, but Roy Scranton argues it is not too late to save humanity. This is an opportunity to develop a serious understanding of what it means to be a human alongside how best to avoid this crisis (or other ones) again, and pass on that knowledge to the survivors of the coming disaster. Depressing but liberating, realizing our destructive vision of human life cannot be the only one is more than saying to accept death, it’s saying we finally try to learn to live.

I had all the characteristics of a human being—flesh, blood, skin, hair—but my depersonalization was so intense, had gone so deep, that my normal ability to feel compassion had been eradicated, the victim of a slow, purposeful erasure. I was simply imitating reality, a rough resemblance of a human being, with only a dim corner of my mind functioning

Two years later, I have to come to appreciate this book even more as a scathing critique of capitalism’s effects on human beings. The absurdity, the violence, the ambiguity all coming together to flesh out incredibly artificial characters alongside a poignant window into the logical conclusion of a culture in love with vanity and materialism. Abridged, without the violence, it is much easier to see American Psycho for the rich, hilarious satire it is. With the violence, it is a challenge to get through the book without waves of disgust that drown the commentary of following scenes–but maybe that’s the point.

But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.

By far, without a doubt, the greatest book I read this year. How do you put in words the soul-searching that occurs on multiple levels as Ta-Nehisi Coates writes a letter to his son about the blessing and curse that comes with having a body, more importantly a black body? Poignant, painful, as much a statement about the experience as it is a debate about defining it. Meditations on Coates' own life, the history looming behind it, the culture, the politics, all wrapped in an unflinching look at the world that comes together to–when it chooses–smash the black body.

Our thesis is that the idea of a self-adjusting market implied a stark utopia. Such an institution could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society; it would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness.

The Great Transformation works to remove the idea of preeminent structures whether they be laws of economics or the free market itself, instead trying to frame economics inside an institutional context informed by society and its developments. Polanyi argues that markets are toxic and artificial, built solely for the benefit of states and private interests as the national economy historically began to emerge as a facet of society. The book, convincingly I think, explains that the failure to recognize this at the turn of the 20th century–the belief that markets were not social but natural–sparked The Great Transformation.

Is it capitalism or states that must be destroyed in order to get peace, or must both be abolished?

An incredibly dry walk through the prospects for lasting peace by dividing theories about why war occurs into those focused on human nature, the structure of states, and the presence of some central authority, Man, the State, and War makes the realist case among other perspectives but never convinces so much as pontificates. To Waltz’s credit, he goes through an expansive backlog of literature to try and make his points about each individual category of theoretical analysis (“image”) while connecting the three images to one another and his analysis forms the foundation of realism. However dry, still an interesting read.

The cycle of violence will continue far into the new millennium. Hopes for peace will probably not be realized, because the great that shape the international system fear each other and compete for power as a result. Indeed, their ultimate aim is to gain a position of dominant power over others, because having dominant power is the best means to ensure one’s own survival.

The Tragedy of Great Power Politics is another realist text but puts forth the idea of “offensive realism” or the idea that great powers constantly look to gain power at the expense of other states, only finding peace if hegemony is reached. This forces lesser nations to become aggressive, looking to survive by developing their ability to project military might. His attempt to capture history in one paradigm is ambitious and sheds light on the nature of power in various episodes of history but has little to say about peace between powers or the internal pressures that act on powers.

If political scientists couldn’t predict the downfall of the Soviet Union—perhaps the most important event in the latter half of the twentieth century—then what exactly were they good for?

The Signal and the Noise has sat in my room for years, largely because I thought it was about statistics and I hate(d) statistics. It is actually about the limitations of prediction–namely that there are no secret recipes that churn out good predictions all the time. Mental shortcuts plague our ability to carefully pour over data or trends, leaving us susceptible to overconfident bullshit. His chapters on political forecasting, baseball, and poker offer are a great grounding in real-world examples while the second part lays bare just how counter-intuitive probabilities can be and what we can do about this–become Bayesians

In brief, for the United States, Eurasian geostrategy involves the purposeful management of geostrategically dynamic states and the careful handling of geopolitically catalytic states, in keeping with the twin interests of America in the short-term: preservation of its unique global power and in the long-run transformation of it into increasingly institutionalized global cooperation. To put it in a terminology that hearkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together.

Part of my fascination with Brzezinski is that, unlike most intellectuals, he is self-aware about his assumptions regarding America. Brzezinski doesn’t pretend America isn’t an imperial power nor does he pretend that noble intentions have always taken precedence over power concepts in policy decisions. Here, he basically describes geostrategic imperatives meant to maintain global American power as centralized in the country or decentralized in each region’s cultural system and the institutional framework each individual polity is embedded in. As always, Brzezinski lays out clearly what he sees as the roadblocks to an Americanized world, whether they be states or trends.

We have to face the fact that irrespective of what we think of ourselves, we are perceived in the region very differently, and especially by the Iraqis. We are seen as essentially a continuator of British colonialism, and we’re now in the post-colonial era. Our presence, based primarily on military force, is simply making it impossible for a genuine, autonomous stability to develop in Iraq.

A fascinating dialogue between two of the Bush II administration’s loudest critics, their discussion focuses not only on the ramifications of the Middle East invasions but foreign policy concerns in East Asia (ex. Japan/China/Russia) and elsewhere. Everything from globalization and demographic trends in the Third World, to the rise of non-state actors and nuclear proliferation comes up as they discuss the world outside. Their conversation also turns to the homeland, examining the political climate and how it may impede efforts to stabilize relations abroad and pursue various national interests. America and the World could use a glossary though.