Cory Doctorow, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI: How to Think about Artificial Intelligence Before It's Too Late (2026)

This book was not as good as Doctorow's previous one, Enshittification. It rehashes a lot from the earlier book. Here Doctorow seems to often shoot from the hip. In Enshittification there wasn't a ton of evidence in support of his claims, but they still seemed quite persuasive. Here the evidence and assessment is thinner. For example, he blithely dismisses self-driving cars by referring to a handful of accidents - without considering that (I believe) self-driving cars' safety record is better than that of human drivers. I still learned interested things, and as always Doctorow's prose is very entertaining. He made an interesting, if not definitive, case that AI is a bubble and scam driven by Big Tech's need to come up with the next growth driver. My biggest beef with the book relates to its core argument. Doctorow says that what a technology does doesn't matter; what matters is who it does it for and to. In this case, he says, AI (like Big Tech, generally) is benefitting bosses and the owners of capital and is hurting workers. That may be the case. But I think it's simplistic to say that what a technology does doesn't matter. From Marshall McLuhan to Walter Ong to Neil Postman to Sherry Turkle and others, many scholars have made a persuasive case, I think, that the technology itself, our use of it, can affect us a great deal. When all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail - that idea. p.s. I should say something about the title. A centaur - a bull with a man's head - refers to a person using a tool. This is usually a good thing. The person is in charge. A reverse centaur, by contrast, means the machine is directing the human. But as I suggest above, what Doctorow means by this is not what I worry about, that machines change us. What he means is that giant tech companies and their AI systems employ human cogs.

Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976 [1996])

This book was rather disappointing. I came to it with high hopes. Paul Lachelier, with whom I'm working on an article about the role of capitalism in some of the current crises (rampant anxiety among the young, declining academic engagement and achievement, perhaps political disillusionment) had told me that the book had been pivotal for his early intellectual development. I can see why that might have been so. Bell's central argument - that by the 1970s, the work ethic necessary for capitalism to function was incompatible with a culture of hedonism - does not seem implausible. (Had Bell not written the book in the 1970s, but rather in the 1980s, one wonders whether he would have been equally struck by this putative incompatibility. In his 1996 afterword, Bell unfortunately doesn't address this question.) For me, though, the book was neither fish nor fowl. It didn't offer a grand enough hypothesis to make it seem like a worthy successor to the works of Schumpeter, Weber, or Durkheim. Nor did it offer enough specific evidence to seem persuasive, as somebody like Robert Putnam might have. Bell spent a lot of time discussing high culture and culture in holistic terms, rather than ordinary people's behaviors. In the end, Bell argues that our culture needs a return to the sacred, which he seems to think must come from religion. I'm not sure if that's the case.

Cory Doctorow, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It (2025)

This is a delightful (Doctorow is a whimsical novelist/technologist who rarely pulls his punches) and informative book about the enshittification of the internet and, thanks to digital's colonization of the rest of the world - think the "internet of things" - of almost everything, as well. In its bare bones, Doctorow traces how and why the internet went from being initially "good" - i.e. we gained connections to nearly everyone in the world and to vast stores of previously difficult to tap knowledge and, crucially, we were able to choose how we wanted to use it - to the current enshittocene (one of Doctorow's many variants on the basic pun). This enshittification follows from the tech giants' essentially rigging the internet, first against individuals, i.e. "consumers," then against companies/publishers, i.e. "producers." In more technical economic terms, the tech giants have captured "rents" - profits above and beyond what they could achieve in a truly competitive market. Doctorow helpfully explains how this came about. Four guardians of the good internet were undermined: 1) competition 2) regulation 3) "self-help" 4) tech workers. Let me briefly explain 2 through 4. 2) Doctorow devotes considerable attention to what he considers the highly deleterious doctrine of the "consumer welfare standard" regarding monopolies. Promoted by jurists and scholars such as Robert Bork and Richard Posner from the 1970s, this doctrine claimed that monopolies per se were not bad. One had to assess whether they, in fact, artificially jacked up prices. Doctorow shows how giant tech lobbying in the naive '90s led to federal regulations such as the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (1998), which perversely gave tech "digital locks" on their intellectual property. Even after a comsumer had purchased software or an app, for example, it was now a felony crime to tamper with the app. This statute alone opened the gates to massive rent capture. Previously, I had only been aware of Section 230 (I believe) of the 1996 revised Communications Act, which declared tech giants to be merely "platforms," and hence not responsible for the content published on said platforms. The mistakes of the '90s were more numerous and far-reaching than I had realized. 3) By "self-help" Doctorow means the ability of consumers or users to modify digital software and products they have purchased. When this was possible - i.e. before the DCMA - it helped to keep the tech companies honest. Doctorow adds that this self-help didn't rely only, or even mainly, on individual users, who were, of course, at a technological disadvantage vis-a-vis the giants. Rather, what he calls "adversarial interoperability" - the ability of, and incentive for, other companies to offer software that was interoperable - prevented the giants from gaming the system. 4) Finally, until the last couple of years, tech workers were relatively few in number, and hence had real leverage over their employers. Many of them were also genuinely committed to the lofty ideals promulgated by the giants - "connect everyone in the world" (Facebook), "make the world's knowledge universally and freely available" (Google). This allowed them to say "no" to at least some of their bosses' schemes. That leverage has been lost in recent years, for complex reasons. Interestingly, in this book, at least, Doctorow doesn't address AI's impact on tech workers' leverage or on the other aspects of enshittification. To learn more about that, one will have to read his latest, The Reverse Centaur, which I plan to do in the coming weeks.

Omer Bartov, Israel: What Went Wrong? (2026)

This book, by an esteemed Israeli-born historian of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust who has lived and worked in the US for decades, is good, though its origins in separately published academic and journalistic pieces sometimes gives it a disjointed feel. The book makes a compelling case that Israel - founded and conceived by many of its citizens and supporters as redemption for the sins of the Holocaust - is now itself, tragically, engaged in a genocide. Bartov makes interesting observations of parallels between the Nazi German and now Israeli cases - for example, the perception of earlier vulnerability at the hands of an outsider helps to justify extreme measures. I learned that Israel subjected its Palestinian subjects to military rule from 1948 to 1966; only six months later, upon the Six-Day-War, the current, six-decades long military rule recommenced. I learned how Old Testament stories - of Samson and the Gates of Gaza, of Amalek and the Israelites' extirpation of its population - have come to serve modern Israel's sense of its righteousness and its enemies' perfidy. How does Bartov answer the question in his subtitle? He makes a great deal of Israel's failure to adopt a constitution. This, he suggests, might have prevented Israel's brazen disregard for Palestinian rights. However, I don't think Bartov nailed this argument, or really even pursued it very systematically. For one, he shows that the attempts to give Israel a constitution starting in the 1990s under the influential supreme court justice Aharon Barak didn't preclude the same justice and court from partially endorsing Israel's apartheid system. More broadly, Bartov treats the issue of Zionism itself somewhat gingerly. He simply doesn't have that much to say about the period before 1948. When he speculates about what a constitution might have meant for Israel, he almost daydreams that it might have led to Israel losing its official Jewish character and becoming a regular liberal democracy. If that's what he wished had happened, though, does he think Zionism itself was a mistake? He doesn't say.

Barbara Tversky, Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought (2019)

This is a rich book. I had been tentatively familiar with its central idea, that the foundation of thought was movement and action. Somebody I'd read thirty years ago, possibly Victor Vanberg, had written that "Denken ist Hantieren im Sich Vorgestellten Raum" - thinking is movement in imagined space. That idea - of chimps swinging from branch to branch, and us doing the same when we were contemplating something - has stuck with me. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's seminal Metaphors We Live By had explored the foundational role of metaphorical thinking. Recently, Joseph Henrich's The Secret of Our Success had pointed out that the same regions of the brain involved in movement also light up when we think. So the basic idea was not totally unfamiliar. But Tversky, an emerita professor of psychology at Stanford, extends and deepens these ideas, showing their support in numerous psychological studies and connecting them to all sorts of aspects of our thinking, behavior and culture. Particularly interesting (and possibly relevant for my course Media & Minds) were Tversky's ideas about how we "put thought in the world," for example through gesture, writing, and graphic media of all kinds. Those outside products then become food for inside thought - for us and others. Spirals of thought ensue. In one reading, I'm sure that I didn't absorb everything from this book; I'll almost certainly return to it, perhaps repeatedly.

Michael S. Gazzaniga, Tales from Both Sides of the Brain: A Life in Neuroscience (2015)

This is a fun and informative read about a pioneering scientist who is also full of life. Gazzaniga made his mark by pioneering the study of split-brain patients, people who elected to have the corpus callosum - the major nerve pathway connecting the two brain hemispheres - cut in order to treat severe epilepsy (it worked). The initial shocking revelation was that the two hemispheres appeared to have minds of their own. As the years went by, as individual patients adapted to their new situation and as Gazzaniga and his team performed more experiments, it turned out that some communication between the brain-halves, even quite a bit, was possible after all. In some cases, this occurred when the cut was not complete and some nerve strands remained. More interesting, however, was the phenomenon of what Gazzaniga calls "cross-cueing." Namely, one hemisphere - say, the left, verbal one - might indirectly and unconsciously "cue" or hint to the other hemisphere what the left knew. Perhaps many brain functions work this way, Gazzaniga suggests, not just communication between the halves. Gazzaniga writes in a conversational, informal style. One very much senses the personality behind the prose. He enjoys life, he enjoys colleagues and people generally.

Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter (2016)

An amazing book, certainly a leading candidate for my book of the year. I had read and greatly admired Henrich's more recent book, The WEIRDEST People in the World (2020). I knew that Henrich was a student (by now, clearly the leading student) of Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson, who since the 1980s have pioneered work on gene-culture coevolution. I haven't read Boyd and Richerson's works (for example, Culture and the Evolutionary Process [1985] or Not By Genes Alone [2005]) in quite a few years, so I can't say precisely how Henrich builds on, and perhaps modifies, their approach. Henrich makes a persuasive case that cultural evolution - learning ideas, techniques, facts and values from others - has become the dominant force shaping human genetic evolution over roughly the last two million years. Just to give one among Henrich's innumerable fascinating examples, one of early humans' early advantages was that we became excellent pursuit hunters. Even though we weren't faster or stronger than most animals, we became able to track animal spoor and, over hours, run our prey into exhaustion. In order to become excellent long-distance runners, our legs had to become longer and we had to develop the ability to sweat over much of our bodies. However, certain skills and technologies were also required, such as the ability to follow the tracks of particular individual animals, and the ability to carry water with us or extract it from the ground. These skills and technologies, Henrich shows, could never have been developed by individuals or even by groups - they had to evolve culturally, over generations. A key concept for Henrich is cumulative cultural evolution - culture (technologies, say) build on previous culture. Henrich has command of a wide range of literatures, showing how multiple streams of evidence support his case. As I said, I can't say exactly how his argument compares to Boyd and Richerson's, but I think he puts cultural evolution even more in the driver's seat than they did. As he says, he's proposing a new science of "a new kind of animal," one that draws on a collective brain to solve problems. Citing John Maynard Smith and Eors Szathmary's work on major transitions in evolution, Henrich suggests humans now find themselves in just such a transition to super-organisms. On a smaller scale, I learned fascinating things about "faith," i.e. trust in cultural processes that are smarter than any individual's intelligence; humans' two systems of status hierarchy - the dominance hierarchy we've inherited from our great ape forebears, and a newer prestige hierarchy; how our perception of "races" (sometimes mistakenly) draws on our "ethnic" psychology, which uses cues such as dialect and clothing to determine if somebody likely shares our norms; the close ties between tool making and language; etc. This short, and hastily written, comment doesn't do justice to this landmark book.

J. Bradford DeLong, Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century (2022)

While this was a fun read, it was ultimately a disappointing book. DeLong, an economist at Berkeley, is very smart (and knows it) and widely read. He writes in a very conversational way and, in the acknowledgements, even thanks the Committee on Degrees in Social Studies at Harvard, his undergraduate major (and where I developed a love of teaching 20 years after DeLong was a student there) - a rare acknowledgement by an established scholar. I learned quite a bit from the book and jotted down quite a few notes. But DeLong's reputation as a brilliant thinker, the blog posts of his which I've read, and the intriguing title led me to expect a tour de force. Instead, his arguments are often too informal - his account, for example, of why the near-utopia under the Bretton Woods system ended amounts to a listing - not even a weighing - of familiar culprits. Perhaps more fundamentally, his focus is on material well-being (economic output and standards of living) - understandably, for an ecobomist. But while he briefly acknowledges that material well-being is insufficient to human flourishing, he never explores the other elements - for example, the kinds of social relations and communities people live in; the role of rising expectations and positional, zero-sum competition.

George W. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology (1987)

I read this extremely learned and (for me) fairly accessible book by one of the authorities on the history of anthropology for my project on scientific history. Most broadly, Stocking traces the shift from James Prichard's early 19th century "ethnology" to the post-Darwinian social evolutionism. The former was primarily an ethically motivated (intending to protect "savages" in the face of European colonialism) and Biblically influenced study that aimed to demonstrate humanity's common monogenesis. The latter, represented by figures such as Herbert Spencer and Edward Tylor, either assumed a monogenetic origin and tried to explain the great dicversity of cultures and cultural levels, or argued for polygenesis. My summer reading for my science of history project included this book; Daniel Moses, Prophet of Progress; Stephen Gaukroger, The Natural & the Human; and Frederick Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition. All of them illuminated, from different angles, the question of what I'll call, as shorthand, the "science of man." I've taken notes on each, but here I want to memorialize some of my own tentative conclusions. I come away especially from Beiser and Stocking thinking that many of the ingredients were in place for what I would consider scientific history, above all competing explanations of key questions and a norm-bound community of scholars. Of course, at the same time there were also deep challenges, having to do with individuality, the widespread belief that humans were sui generis, etc. In the case of German historicists, unfortunately, there was a turn away from these ingredients - away from common questions, away from explanation, and, as nationalism gained momentum, away from a single community. As I suggest in my notes, Ranke and others' "source criticism" may have preserved a veneer of scientificness, while really misunderstanding how science worked. And "common sense" may have added a further apparently indubitable warranty. In the case of evolutionary anthropologists, people like Tylor basically got it right, I think. However, as Carl Degler has shown in In Search of Human Nature, this approach was rejected from roughly 1900 to 1960, and supplanted by Boasian cultural relativism, largely for moral and political reasons. Since the 1960s and evolutionary - and theory-comparative - approach has made a big come back.

Robert D. Putnam with Shaylyn Romney Garrett, The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again (2020)

The specific impetus for reading this book - beyond my general veneration for Putnam's work - is a project I've just started working on with my good friend Paul Lachelier. We want to place the current youth crisis - the anxious generation, the disengaged teen - in a longer-term context of capitalism and modernity. (Paul and I met more than twenty years ago when we taught the sophomore tutorial in Harvard's Social Studies concentration, a wonderful great books course focused on capitalism and modernity.) Putnam's latest book seemed right up our alley since it, too, examines our current predicament by placing it in a broader context. Roughly 125 years ago, namely, in the first Gilded Age, conditions were quite similar to today: wealth and income were distributed very unequally; politics were polarized and bitter; social ties were frayed; and the culture was narcissistic. Then, things turned around on all four dimensions from roughly 1910 to 1970 - this is the "upswing" of the book's title. In this middle, We-phase, there was much greater concern for the common good, stronger institutions, greater social capital.Since the 1970s we've returned to a second Gilded Age. Putnam and Garrett thus refer to the three phases of the cycle as I-We-I. Putnam's message is optimistic - if America came together 125 years ago, we can do it again today. Putnam provides plenty of evidence that the country indeed followed an I-We-I cycle. He also includes nuanced discussions of the more complicated cases of African-Americans and women. The book doesn't go into great detail about the Progressive Movement which launched the country on its turn from I to We. However, Putnam and Garrett identify several features of that earlier movement that, they believe, a new turn to We will also require: the movement was very broadly based, with innumerable individuals and initially small groups taking action, eventually inspiring policy change (Paul, who runs a non-profit dedicated to civic activism and "family diplomacy," will be happy to hear this); the progressives saw the challenge as starting with moral reform, not only of others, but also of themselves; women played an important role. I think in our essay Paul and I should reflect on whether these features are likely, or even feasible, today.

Frederick C. Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition (2011)

I read this for my project on historical methodology. In fact, I'd read it several years ago, but I'd forgotten the contents nearly completely, and it seemed to fit with my current focus within the project, i.e. understanding how and why the study of human history parted ways with other historical sciences (geology, paleontology, archeology, anthropology) in terms of methodology. Beiser seems to know the topic quite deeply and his judgments seem persuasive. What I came away thinking was that the earliest historicists - Chladenius, Moeser, Herder, Humboldt - all seemed open, or even committed, to the 18th century idea of a naturalistic "science of man." This was particularly true of the last two thinkers. At the same time, compared to Scots like Smith and Hume, and Frenchmen like Montesquieu, Rousseau or Condillac, the Germans were simultaneously wrestling with heavy-duty philosophical questions - about individuality, free will, and providence in history, for example. The enormous (and in my eyes disastrous) influence of Ranke from the 1830s on cannot be explained by the originality or persuasiveness of his ideas. Ranke is the first historicist who fully rejects naturalism and seeks to establish history in a way fundamentally distinct from the natural sciences. He emphasizes the importance of source criticism - this is to provide the scientific certainty of history. However, source criticism had been around for some time, originating in the Renaissance with men like Lorenzo Valla and Agricola, and in Germany being promoted in the 18th century at the University of Goettingen. My argument might be that source criticism didn't become the rallying cry of history in the 18th century, say, because a more naturalistic science of man was still being considered. Once that is dropped - because it would require unacceptable compromises when it came to philosophical ideas about individuality, free will, and providence - source criticism comes to seem especially appealing as an adequate source of scientificness. (Alas, it really isn't!). At least, this is one of the reasons. Another might be that the naturalistic science of man became associated with Hegel's teleological and procrustean account, something historians found distasteful for several reasons. No doubt I will have to return to this book when I am ready to return to writing.

Stephen Gaukroger, The Natural & the Human: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1739-1841 (2016)

This is the third in Gaukroger's four-part series on the emergence and transformation of a modern scientific culture. Gaukroger is astonishingly erudite. I only read parts of this book as my aim was to get back into reading for my project on historical methodology. The most interesting point for me was the contrast between Herder and advocates of a "natural history of man" (think Hume, Voltaire, Smith, Ferguson, Buffon, etc.). Both see themselves as pursuing a science of man, both subscribe to the notion of man's development over time. Yet, they work quite differently and will lead to very different schools or approaches. Herder is one of the founders of historicism. He focuses on differences between particular cultures or peoples and sees the study of language as the key to understanding their thought. Advocates of the natural history of man, on the other hand, rely on comparison across time and space as their essential tool. Many of them adhered to stadial theories of human development - hunter, pastoralist, farmer, trader and craftsman - which meant that their topics were on the grandest of scales. This seems to me like a pivotal moment, in which a comparative and, in my eyes, truly scientific approach to history was available, but lost out to historicism. A few decades after Herder, Ranke supplied historicism with an apparently scientific veneer in source criticism. I'll most likely incorporate this into my methodology manuscript. Next up: Frederic Beiser's history of German historicsm.

Michael Albertus, Land Power: Who Has It, Who Doesn't, and How That Determines the Fate of Societies (2025)

This is not exactly a bad book. I learned some interesting facts about parts of the world that I don't know well. For example, I learned that many dictatorships in Latin America made efforts to redistribute land from the wealthy to the poor. I learned that the Aboriginal movement in Australia has been much more successful than the Native American movement in the US. Down under, Aborigines now lay claim to more than half the land, albeit in remote and desert-y places. Also, I hadn't realized how widely the US promoted land reform after World War II. In this connection, Albertus makes some helpful distinctions between different kinds of land reform: collective (the Soviet Union, for example), communal (many Latin American countries), and tiller (as in land to the tiller, those who are already working it). Nonetheless, this is an extremely disappointing book, certainly one of the worst we've read in our Zoom book club. I came to the book with very high expectations. The title and subtitle suggested a bold, big history and big theory work. Albertus's position as a 40-year old full professor of political science at the University of Chicago suggested a scholar of great promise. Finally, the blurbs came from a who's who of eminent thinkers - Piketty, Acemoglu, Ziblatt, and Fukuyama. Measured against these great expectations, the book was a complete dud. Let's start with two of Albertus's key concepts - land power and the Great Reshuffle. Albertus fails to carefully explicate what land power is, exactly. Rather, he simply invokes the term, over and over. Once in a while he acknowledges that things like property rights and a functioning legal system matter to land power. But it would seem that property rights matter above all when it comes to economic development; they matter less, or perhaps not at all, when it comes to traditional, collectively used land. Albertus wants to honor traditional land uses, but never bothers to provide a theoretical framework that encompasses both them and the goal of economic development. Besides this major lacuna, Albertus vastly exaggerates the significance of land, again without much justification. He repeatedly suggests that land power (whatever it may be) is decisive, "determining the fate of societies." But does it really? Aren't there today whole societies that are doing pretty well without advantageous land holdings? One thinks of Japan or the Netherlands. And what about the biggest land power of all, Russia? Albertus suggests that control of land is key to uplifting the fortunes of downtrodden groups. But many immigrant groups to the US and elsewhere (Jews, East Asians, Nigerians, etc.) have done quite well for themselves not by dint of land holding. In short, while I don't want to suggest that land does not matter, it behoves Albertus to compare its importance to that of other things, like education and culture. The Great Reshuffle is another damp squib that Albertus trots out repeatedly. The ostensible Great Reshuffle commences with European land grabs all over the world, though Albertus equivocates whether this starts in 1492 or only in the 19th century. (He designates this "settler reforms.") But then it also includes the attempts, whether in collective, communal, or tiller form (in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, South Vietnam, etc.), to spread land more equally. What's the rationale for lumping settler colonialism - conquest - together with these reform efforts? Albertus's big history, such as it is, is unrecognizable to me. In order to legitimate the idea of a single, early modern or modern Great Reshuffle, he must ignore the continuous history of land reshuffles plural since farmers began to displace hunter-gatherers, if not since homo sapiens displaced neanderthals, denisovans, Indonesian hobbits, etc. In general, there's very little argumentation here. For example, he distinguishes between land reforms that have failed and those that have succeeded, at least partially. But he never explores what explains the difference. Instead we have, along with his repeated recourse to mantra-like terms, only basic (and often redundantly told) narratives of his case studies.

Natasha Dow Schuell, Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas (2012; new edition, 2026)

Since its publication in 2012 this has become a touchstone for anybody trying to understand (and counteract) how screens have taken over the world. Schuell starts from the plausible premise that addictions develop out of the confluence of traits and behaviors of the addict and features of the object of addiction. Her book explores the lives of the gamblers and their internal states while gambling, as well as the persistent and increasingly systematic efforts by the gambling industry to "hook and hold" their customers. In terms of the experience of gambling, Schuell's most noteworthy finding is that persistent gamblers are not motivated by the possibility of winning. Rather, they speak of a "zone" in which they lose themselves and their worries. Schuell has very interesting things to say about how this zone both resembles and differs from Mihaly Csikszentmihaly's "flow state." I found myself wondering how it might resemble and differ from the Stoics' tranquillity and, furthermore, from Aristotle's eudaimonia/flourishing. Topics for further research....In her illuminating new preface, written in 2024, Schuell identifies four characteristics that machine gambling and other screen addictions have in common: 1) isolation and asociality 2) continuous action and immediate feedback 3) randomness (as is well known, intermittent reinforcement is most addicting of all 4) non-resolution (i.e. infinite scroll).

Anna Lembke, Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence (2021)

This book was extremely interesting. Lembke draw both on her clinical work as a psychiatrist and on her research (she's the head of a program at Stanford devoted to addiction research), which makes for gripping, highly stimulating reading. The book is of relevance to my course on Media and Minds, to my thinking about the modern condition, and, not least, to my own efforts to live well. It joins David Courtwright's Age of Addiction and Bruce Alexander's Globalization of Addiction as the third book in my addiction trilogy. A central point Lembke makes has to do with the pain-pleasure balance and how, in complex ways, the brain's homeostatic tendencies respond to pleasure. Like Courtwright and Alexander, Lembke recognizes the unprecedented nature of the modern age of plenty, in which we are inundated by dopamine-generating substances and behaviors. Her recommendations include various forms of self-binding (a la Odysseus) and even the pursuit of moderate pain, in order to stave off greater pain.

Daniel Noah Moses, The Promise of Progress: The Life and Work of Lewis Henry Morgan (2009)

This is a wonderfully written, sensitive, nuanced, and persuasive account of Morgan, a 19th century pioneer of anthropology and social theory. Morgan was the only author cited by Darwin, Marx, and Freud. For me this is not just any old good book. It's a bridge back to a meaningful experience and set of friends. Daniel is a close friend, whom I got to know more than 20 years ago when were both teaching the sophomore tutorial in Social Studies at Harvard. This great books course, in which a handful of smart students and I read and discussed Rousseau, Smith, Mill, Weber, Freud, Beauvoir, Habermas, and others, is where I cut my teeth as a teacher and has shaped my approach to teaching ever since. (It's no accident that teaching the First-Year Seminar class has consistently been my favorite class to teach at BHSEC Queens). On Thursdays, Daniel, Paul Lachelier, Thomas Ponniah, and I would meet, usually at Grendel's, for nachos and drinks, to debate the world. After reading this book, I see why Daniel was the perfect teacher in Social Studies 10. Daniel paints a vivid, persuasive picture of Morgan's life and thought in an industrializing America. Born in 1818 to an affluent, educated, Calvinist family in the Finger Lakes region of NY State, which benefitted from the nearby Erie Canal, Morgan's thinking combined classical reverence for the virtues with liberal confidence in progress. Early on he became fascinated by, and drawn to, the remnants of the nearby Iroquois Nation. He befriended some of them and spent considerable time living with them, which launched his scholarly career as an ethnographer (which he pursued alongside his more traditional career as a lawyer). The Iroquois' tribal conception of property seemed utterly different than the Europeans' and convinced Morgan that kinship was both malleable and profoundly important. Eventually, he would expand his study of kinship, and its varieties, to encompass the rest of the world and changes over the long run. Morgan's mature theory, as presented in Ancient Society, was teleological - there was a single path, from simple kinship to more complex (and ultimately, the European nuclear family), along which different societies were travelling at different paces. Through this teleology, Morgan remained hopeful that the communal aspects of the Iroquois could be reconciled with the gains made by individualistic societies. Namely, while the Iroquois were fated to disappear, Morgan hoped that progress would lead full circle back to a newly invigorated community.

Jennifer M. Silva, We're Still Here: Pain and Politics in the Heart of America (2017)

This slim volume adds fascinating, often moving ethnographic detail to our understanding of what the hell is happening in American politics. Silva allows down-and-out working class residents of an anonymous Pennsylvania coal belt community to tell their own stories (she comments only occasionally and always empathetically and gently) - and what their experiences mean for how they think about politics. The common thread is that these people's painful experiences with physical and emotional abuse, unemployment, addictions, racism, and ephemeral relationships have for the most part left them deeply distrustful of elites, institutions, and politics as a way to improve things. Instead, they cope by means of anger, addiction, conspiracy theories, self-help, radical acceptance, etc. The book fits in the genre of ethnographies of the disaffected that has grown enormously since 2016, such as Kathleen Cramer, The Politics of Resentment, Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in their Own Land. I read the book in the hope that I might be able to use an excerpt in my How Democracies Die course. I was looking for something as perfect as the chapter from Robert Putnam's Our Kids, which I used to introduce Wealth and Power. This book doesn't quite provide what I had hoped - a before and after snapshot told through affecting personal stories. The "before" is, for the most part, missing. And the book studies only one slice of the working class, rather than the entirety of the electorate. But I do think I'll use a chapter of We're Still Here - for the connections it draws between people's life stories and whether they see democracy and politics as worth engaging in; for its portrait of the white working class and suffering, which many of my students will be unfamiliar with; for its suggestions about the deep anger that motivates at least some of Trump's base; and for its engaging stories.

Matt Grossmann and David A. Hopkins, Polarized By Degrees: How the Diploma Divide and the Culture War Transformed American Politics (2024)

This book is like Jalen Brunson on an off night. One wishes it had been as good as one knows it could have been. But it's still very good. Grossmann and Hopkins teamed up on an earlier book that I found quite illuminating - Asymmetric Politics, about the role of specific policies and interest groups, on the one hand, and general attitudes (liberal or conservative), on the other. The current collaboration is about a very important topic, the reshuffling of Republican and Democratic voters over the last 30 years, and especially since 2016. Above all, the Democratic Party has lost significant support among the white working class, and instead gained the loyalty of whites with college degrees. Republicans are now the political home for the vast majority of white working-class voters. This switch has happened as both parties focus increasingly on cultural and social - "post-material" - issues. As the Democrats have become dominated by educated whites, the party has openly and assertively taken ever more progressive stances on these cultural issues. The topic will be much more prominent in my the next iteration of my course "How Democracies Die," which I'll be offering this fall. Unfortunately, Grossmann and Hopkins' writing is too dense and academic to serve my students well.

John Jeffries Martin, A Beautiful Ending: The Apocalyptic Imagination and the Making of the Modern World (2022)

After Israel's tome, I wanted both to read something much shorter and to stick with the early modern period, which I've been enjoying recently. A colleague, Jacqueline Allain, had recently praised Martin's book. So, voila. A Beautiful Ending was engagingly written (far fewer names and offices than in Israel's book) and made an argument that was new and generally persuasive to me. I have to admit that whenever I've taught or thought about political leaders' motivations in earlier times, I've tended to discount religious motivations. For example, if I mention the European explorers and conquistadors and we come to the "three Gs" - god, gold, and glory - I only emphasize the latter two and suggest that spreading Christianity was largely a fig-leaf for power- and lucre-hunger. Martin provides enough evidence to make me reassess. Specifically, he shows that hopes for, and expectations of, a good apocalypse - an era, perhaps even 1000 years, of peace and prosperity - were very widespread from the 1400s to 1700s. His chapter on Columbus was all new to me, and quite surprising. I appreciated that he often stepped away from his European focus to examine the same phenomenon that was occurring among Jews and Muslims. On some fronts - especially regarding causality - I wish Martin had made a stronger case. He does best when he discusses why the early modern period, in particular, saw an upsurge in good apocalypticsm - the increasing destructiveness of warfare between newly powerful empires (Ottoman, Habsburg) and states spurred a longing for a radically better world, as did the Black Death and its aftershocks. He's less persuasive when he assesses the relative role played by apocalypticism and by power and wealth. Time and again he avers that the former was just as important as the latter, but he gives us no reason to agree with this view - aside from his own judgment. Finally, he briefly points to the connections between the religious belief in a radically better, perhaps even perfect, world and similar Enlightenment ideas. But again, he doesn't explore the connection in much, if any, detail. So he falls a little short when it comes to "the making of the modern world."

Jonathan I. Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall, 1477-1806 (1995)

Despite having studied European history for many, many years, I knew embarrassingly little about the Dutch Republic in the early modern period. I had a vague sense that it had developed in parallel with early modern England in many respects: as constitutional polity, highly commercialized economy, global trading and colonial power, and pioneer of religious toleration. In many of these respects, I thought it was somehow even more advanced than its cross-Channel neighbor. And I knew that William and Mary of Holland had become king and queen during the English Glorious Revolution of 1688-9. But while I knew a fair amount about 17th century England leading up to 1688, I really had no idea of the backstory to the Dutch Republic's modernity. I didn't know, for example, why what I took to be the Dutch monarch was called the Stadholder. With these motivations, and after having appreciated Israel's book on Dutch trade (Dutch Primacy in World Trade), I turned to this highly praised book. I can't claim that I read every single one of its 1130 pages, but I read most of the pages on the nation's rise and greatness. I knew from the previous book of Israel's that I had read that he rejected purely materialist accounts of historical change (a la Braudel or Marx). Nonetheless, he acknowledges the importance of these underlying conditions and begins his account with some fundamental distinctions between the Low Countries north and south of the rivers (Rhine and Maas) that became pronounced during the 14th century. To the north, there was one large historical state (Holland), in which there was a wide urbanization. In the south, there were two states (Brabant and Flanders), in both of which a few larger cities predominated. My main interest was in the political evolution of the Dutch Republic. It's a bewilderingly complex tale, involving partly self-governing, increasingly commercial cities; regions (Holland) embedded in larger entities (once the revolt against Spain starts, the Union of Utrecht, 1579; the Holy Roman Empire); dynastic holdings (Burgundian, Habsburger); religious tensions (between Catholicism and Reformed Churches, later between different tendences within the Reformed, and also a smattering of Lutherans and Mennonites), etc. The Stadholder or Stadholders were counts or governors of, to begin with, the dynasties and, later, independent governors of regions (Holland, Friesland, etc.) Often several of the regions had the same Stadholder. For much of the period the Stadholders were from the House of Orange, whose ancestral seat was in southern France (talk about confusing!). A second powerful position, sometimes working in concert with the Stadholders, but also at times in opposition, were Advocates or Pensioneers of the single largest state in the north, Holland. Throughout the period, but especially once the Dutch Revolt against Habsburg Spain starts (1572), great power politics is a constant concern - the Dutch against or with Spain, France, England, various principalities along the Rhine, etc. The basic story of how the Dutch established themselves as a republic fits with Mancur Olson's argument: a contest for domination ended in stalemate and, ultimately, compromise. The two parties were the Orangists (Stadholder - who at times became somewhat monarchical, but also at times enjoyed more popular support) and states party (Advocates/Pensioneers of Holland). The contest started earlier than in England (late 16th century), but compromise was only achieved at roughly the same time (1680s). Two tidbits that illustrate the efficacy and modernity of this society: in 1670, Amsterdam was the first city in the world to introduce public street lights. And the 1688 invasion of England, involving 20,000 troops and 500 ships, was the most impressive logistical feat of any early modern state. I'm deeply impressed by Israel's mastery of such a complex story. Nonetheless, his "seamless" telling of this story is grist for the mill of my argument that historians need more social science discipline (an argument I hope to make and publish down the road).