I have not been very consistent this year about writing in this blog, despite my resolution last year. After a flurry of posts in January (Flattery at the Money Cage, Stalin as Reviewer #2, Democracy Data, Updated, and Charisma and Representation), I only wrote one other thing - my piece Against Renaming Victoria. (About which - the no change position won, at least for now; and I’m proud to have been an early participant in the “stick with Vic” campaign). The “Charisma and Representation” piece was the most popular of these posts; and I’m currently working on a more academic version of the arguments there. Thank you all for reading!
I also published a paper of potential interest to this blog’s readership: “Two Models of Political Leader Cults: Propaganda and Ritual” (ungated version here); but my other research projects took a bit of a beating at the hands of increased administrative responsibilities. (Still, more is coming - and perhaps will be previewed in this blog if I can find the time next year).
In the spirit of the holiday season, here are some reading recommendations:
Books
- Possibly the best book I read (or rather, finished reading) this year was Yuri Slezkine’s The House of Government. It’s not an easy book – it’s more like 3 or 4 books in one, including an essay about the Bolsheviks as a millenarian sect, an interpretation of pre-WWII Soviet literature, a history of the private lives of the residents of the “House on the Embankment” told through their letters and personal reminiscences, and a tribute to Yuri Trifonov’s work – but for readers with some background about the history of the period the overall effect is magnificent. I’ve been mulling over writing a long post about it, which will probably never get written.
- Slezkine’s work also led me to read some of Trifonov’s novels – The House on the Embankment and Another Life, both of which I found powerfully moving in their reflections about memory and identity. I also finally read The Master and Margarita, a book that I finally feel I understand a bit. (I had tried reading it years ago, and never got past about the halfway point). Lots more “serious” literature this year than last! Perhaps I enjoyed these now only because I could understand some of their background better; and yet I still feel like I barely know anything about Soviet society. (This is how historians must feel all the time).
- I did lots of other communist-related reading this year, including A. James McAdams’ Vanguard of the Revolution: The Global Idea of the Communist Party (a sort of global history of communist parties - I learned a lot from this!); Kevin Morgan’s International Communism and the Cult of the Individual (a history of communist leader cults in the West); Wang Shaoguang’s Failure of Charisma: The Cultural Revolution in Wuhan (a really interesting analysis of what I might call the “irrelevance of charisma” in the Cultural Revolution, written by a former Red Guard turned political scientist). If I had some time, I would write more about all of these; though these books are primarily for specialists, they are all quite interesting…
- I finally took a crack at Leszek Kolakowski’s Main Currents of Marxism; I found volume I really useful in thinking about what was utopian in the communist projects of the 20th century. (And the fact that I had to give a public lecture on Marx spurred me to actually read it).
- Lest you think I actually have any taste, I also read I lot of sci-fi. I enjoyed Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota series, though I thought the third volume flagged a little. And I always enjoy anything by Charles Stross - this year’s Dark State and The Labyrinth Index were great fun. (I’m a fan of the Cthulhu+bureaucracy genre that Stross has perfected).
Other Stuff Online
- Ribbonfarm always gets a mention here (because I like it), and this year is no exception. I love Sarah Perry’s essays - this year I especially liked Metaphor Therapy, Treasure Hunting, Social Media Consciousness, Deep Laziness, and perhaps most of all Luxuriating in Privacy.
- Somewhat idiosyncratically related: Agnes Callard’s beautiful essay on Unruliness.
- This year I spent a lot of time on Gwern’s site; I really enjoyed his extraordinarlily thorough exploration of My Little Pony fandoms, but there’s lots and lots there worth reading. (I expect most people reading this already read Gwern, but it’s only recently that I delved into his site).
- Also idiosyncratically related: this totally different essay in Commune on Ursula LeGuin’s “Hainish” novels, Communism Might Last a Million Years. (I think both My Little Pony and LeGuin’s novels have to do with utopia, but don’t ask me to articulate the connection right now).
- Cosma Shalizi had some great new posts, after a while of not posting anything: a reading of Marx’s Capital, Practical Peer review (I’ve used this with my PhD students).
- This year I’ve tried to add some art to my twitter feed, and I’ve really enjoyed @inconvergent’s procedurally generated pieces (follow him here). I’ve also enjoyed the algorithmic and conceptual weirdness catalogued in Esoteric.Codes (not on twitter).
- Some other random pieces worth mentioning: Perry Anderson on Anthony Powell; The Endless Reign of Rupert Murdoch (much more than you ever wanted to know about Rupert Murdoch, but also a brilliant sociology of the newspaper industry); Interfluidity on Authority; Andrew Batson on A Weberian Analysis of Xi Jinping’s Authority (also read his blog more generally, e.g this); Justin Smith on Cave Art; Welcome to Armaggedon.
- And for the extremophiles fans, there was this nice NYT piece recently about microbes 3 miles under the crust.
