When it comes to politics I’ve never connected with the vision of a single group. When I do find myself leaning towards a party, it is typically only because I am leaning away from its opposite. Part of this is because as humans we are much better at knowing what we don’t want. Yet I would like to think that the other reason is that I try to value substance over partisanship. ...

“They’ve been living this way for centuries, are you really gonna change that in a year? All you can do is try.” Summary The above words, quoted from an unlucky soldier stationed in Iraq, seem to epitomize the entire endeavor. George Packer does a brilliant job setting the stage and providing an overview of the why’s and how’s of the Iraq war. When it comes to events as significant as war, there are seldom singular reasons that confidently explain everything. WMDs were a reason the administration gave for invading; September 11th provided the provocation for public support. Beyond that, a menagerie of motivations and political realities were aligning to push America into war. According to Packer, George W. Bush was a principled man but not a leader with vision. As a result, when the catastrophe of 9/11 struck, he fell back on his gut instinct, which told him justice needed to be done, without adequately considering long-term consequences. Meanwhile, a parallel ideology known as neoconservatism, which had a particular vision of America’s role in the world, happened to be ascending. Thus, Bush’s gut feelings found theoretical support, providing the vision he lacked. ...

Most of us are necessarily ignorant of many complex fields, from botany to brain surgery. As a result, we simply do not attempt to operate in, or comment on, those fields. However, every voter and every politician that they vote for affects economic policies. We cannot opt out of economic issues and decisions. Our only options are to be informed, uninformed, or misinformed… Summary Economics touches everyone’s life, often before we even realize it. Most opinions on economic issues emerge from personal experiences rather than formal theory. For instance, you notice higher tomato prices long before contemplating global vegetable markets or thin-inventory economies. Thomas Sowell’s Basic Economics provides an insightful primer on economic principles, helping readers understand the broader context behind everyday economic experiences. ...

A Year of Magical Thinking is a meditation on grief. Faced with the sudden loss of her husband and the uncertain health of her daughter, Joan Didion tries to hold the pieces of her world together. The book offers a voyeuristic glimpse into an upper-class introvert’s ideal life—Didion and her husband, also a well-known author, had built an insulated existence that, apropos of nothing, ended. Full of anecdotes and disarming vulnerability, the reader can’t help but participate in Didion’s loss.

Summary As was the fashion in 1759, Adam Smith endeavors to explain what we call right and wrong, as well as why we arrive at these conclusions. The cornerstone of his theory is based on the concept of sympathy. Smith posits that, just as humans are endowed with the sense of sight, they are also equipped with a sense of sympathy. The brief definition of sympathy is the ability for one human to “enter into” the experience of another. This “entering in” does not perfectly mirror the original experience, but critically, it is perceived through the lens of an impartial spectator. This impartiality forms the foundation of all morality. ...

Deserves its place in classic American literature. It also deserves to be read in high school as it walks the balance of respecting norms and traditions while maintaining a personal responsibility to rise above them when they fall short of our ideals. Thus, the reader is left neither a dupe nor Anarchist, but responsible for their own sphere as well as their ‘place’ in society.

Summary I remember coming across the Wikipedia summary for this book after Baudrillard did an analysis in his bewildering Simulacra and Simulation, which read: It follows a group of car-crash fetishists who, inspired by the famous crashes of celebrities, become sexually aroused by staging and participating in car accidents. At the time, I thought it was a strange summary, maybe a typo or something—after all, it doesn’t make any sense! So I, in my naivete, tucked this away in the “read later” list. I’ve read the book and can confirm the above sentence is a valid summary. ...

I was expecting this to be a collection of stories, but it was more about the actual mentality of survivors themselves. Overall, really entertaining read, but I wouldn’t rely too heavily on the advice inside it other than general rules of thumb. The one thing about survival stories is everyone is unique, and so advice that is good in one situation may get you killed in others.

Summary Rosenberg sets out to ‘prove’ through Neuroscience that the way we understand our past, present, and future might not be based on a misunderstanding. In what is sure to ruffle the feathers of academics of every stripe, Rosenberg uses various studies as a lever to overturn several common theories of mind. For the uninitiated, a theory of mind is an explanatory framework whose purpose is to explain the mind to itself. Most common theories of mind rely on the iconic duo of desire and action. Charles is crying because he can’t get an ice cream cone. In the previous sentence, we are met with Charles’ desire and the action that results from the desire, a cause and an effect. Rosenberg then uses this as a jumping-off point to argue that this core assumption that almost all theories of mind make is flawed. ...

Summary This book follows the careers of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, focusing on the second half of FDR’s administration from 1940 to 1945. By this time, Franklin had been the U.S. President for nearly two full terms. During those two terms, he had transformed the federal government to an almost unrecognizable extent, implementing many policies we now take for granted, like Social Security, the FDIC, the SEC, and the 40-hour workweek. These policies were part of a larger platform known as the “New Deal,” which was essentially a labor reform agenda that emerged during the Great Depression. ...