Gone Vacationing....
Here's what I will be reading.
The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World will be taking a summer vacation to panic that summer is halfway over rest and recuperate and think about Big Future Projects. Posting here will be on the light side until after July 4th.
My wife once told me that the primary difference between me going on a work trip and me going on vacation is that I bring different books. So here are the books I’ll be cracking open while lounging on a couch or a beach or a bed or some other comfortable surface:
Romantic Comedy, by Curtis Sittenfeld. I am embarrassed to say that I have never read one of Sittenfeld’s books directly; I have instead read them vicariously through my wife reading portions of them aloud to me. She laughed pretty hard while reading this book, and that doesn’t happen too often, so I’m giving it a whirl. Also, I cannot think of a better vacation read than a story about a comedy writer at a Saturday Night Live-type show who falls for a John Mayer-type singer and has to figure out how to overcome her outstanding ability to self-sabotage her romantic relationships.
Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time, by Dava Sobel. Sailors have been able to calculate their latitude for millennia. Determining their longitude, however, was far more difficult because it required an accurate chronometer on board the ship — and pendulum clocks were kinda tricky to function out at sea. This quick read profiles John Harrison, an engineer who managed to fashion the first accurate clocks that could work out at sea, thereby helping to ensure British hegemony on the seas. It’s a fascinating tale about how an uneducated craftsman was able to claim a prize that astronomers coveted for themselves.
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin. Have you ever had a book that folks from all aspects of your life keep recommending that you read? Well, this is the book everyone keeps recommending I start. Challenge accepted!
End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration, by Peter Turchin. I will be teaching my “End of the World and What Comes After” course in the spring of 2024, approximately two years after teaching it the last time.1 Turchin’s book proposes a cyclical theory of societies collapsing due to the “overproduction of elites.” I am a wee bit suspect of Turchin’s hypothesis, and have my own theory about the “overpraise of complexity scientists reproducing what conventional social science has already hypothesized” that I’m noodling on. But I am willing to have Turchin’s logic and prose persuade me otherwise.2
Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century, by J. Bradford DeLong. I will also be teaching “Global Political Economy” this fall. I like having a good economic history text to match my course lectures. Brad will not shut up about his book on his Substack, and so I guess I should see if it’s Fletcher-worthy.
This Is How You Lose the Time War, by Amal El-Mohtar. My Space the Nation podcast with Ana Marie Cox has been having a really good book run as of late, with N.D. Stephenson’s Nimona and Annalee Newitz’s Terraformers providing a lot of grist for the talking mill. We’ll be talking about this book next, and I’m looking forward to tackling it!
See you all after Independence Day!
I suspect I’ll be expanding the AI portions of the course.
That said, from what I’ve read so far I have some questions about his definition of “elites.”
"This Is How You Lose The Time War" will take you an afternoon and be a very great pleasure.
Your comments on Brad DeLong's "Slouching Toward Utopia" (if you managed to read it as intended) would be much more valuable than some of your more recent posts.