Endnotes

There was a bit more activity on this blog than last year, though still very little (only 5 posts); my New Year’s resolution is to write more. In any case, I especially enjoyed writing on Utopia and Revolution and reading KCNA’s headlines as literature. I also wrote a couple of R packages that I hope are useful to others. Offline, I managed to edit a volume on “democratic moments” in political thought. Unlike many such collections, this one (forthcoming in February 2018) will also be freely available online (under a Creative Commons license), though of course you can always buy a physical copy. Thank you readers!

As usual, some end of the year reading recommendations:

• This year, I read fewer books than I had hoped. There was a fair amount on the Russian Revolution; beyond Richard Stites’ fantastic Revolutionary Dreams, I also recently picked up Yury Slezkine’s The House of Government which is so far excellent (but will take me a while to get through, at over 1000 pages), and Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, perhaps the most important Russian novel of WWII.
• I also visited Beijing for the first time in my life (exceedingly interesting!), which led me to pick up some books on Chinese history (many via recommendations from Razib Khan); so far, I’ve really liked Timothy Brooks’ The Troubled Empire, and I’m currently finishing Jonathan Spence’s The Search for Modern China, which I have found useful.
• Seva Gunitsky’s Aftershocks was excellent; it’s in part about how the prestige of power helps drive regime change. I hope to write more about it next year.
• I also read a lot of sci-fi (I have no taste in literary fiction – for that, look at David Auerbach’s amazing list), but the only things that really stood out were Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem trilogy and Charles Stross’ novels; the Laundry files novels strike me as great “novels of bureaucracy,” in particular. But everybody knows about those, right?
• Scott Alexander’s reviews of Eichmann in Jerusalem, Surfing Uncertainty, and Seeing Like a State are well worth reading.
• Lots of Ribbonfarm, including Chris Reid’s Games, Videogames, and the Dionysian Society; Sarah Perry’s Idiots Scaring themselves in the Dark and Feeling the Future; and especially Venkatesh Rao’s How to Make History (which is a really interesting use of Hannah Arendt to think about Silicon Valley).
• Joseph Heath on Iain M. Banks’ “Culture” novels - an excellent exploration of what a purely “memetic culture” would entail.
• Mike Travers on eclipses and rituals.
• Other web pieces worth mentioning (at least, things that stuck in my mind or found interesting): Christian Thorne’s Fulfilling the Fascist Lie (on Adorno’s Authoritarian Personality); Randall Collins’ Faces Around a Dictator; The Sacred Monarchies that survive into the postmodern age; The Conservation of Coercion.

There was much more worth sharing, but this is enough for now. Happy new year everyone!