Just to read, think about.

The political struggles we are engaged in today are rooted in the survival after the Civil War, of a racist and patriarchal vision of the self, society, and government, and its escape from the Old South to the Far West.  So the book reviewed here by Randall Stephens argues.  Stephens is a wise historian of American politics and religion, so I’m inclined to take him seriously.

Belton does not demonise Putin. Instead she looks at the reality of how a group of men, bred by the KGB and driven by greed, have jeopardised Russia’s future and pushed it into a state of war with itself and the world. Its value is not so much in its thesis, as in the detail, and the invaluable descriptions of the inner workings of Putin’s regime, much of it based on original reporting and interviews.

Interesting review of what looks like an interesting book on Putin and what he has wrought. 

Here’s a reasonably hot take, if you read between the lines of this article: The consequence of the Coronavirus (say, a decade from now, but becoming visible in a year or so) will be that people will mistrust a globalization based around Chinese manufacturing, while the US dollar will be ever-more important as the Renminbi and Euro continue to be unreliable.  In short, in these ways, the pandemic will promote US power in the world, if only by showing the weakness of all potential rivals. This is not a congratulatory story.  It is, if anything, a highly ironic one.

““If authors have any responsibilities in the face of disaster, the greatest of them is to bear witness,” she said in an interview. “I’ve always cared about how the weak survive great upheavals. The individuals who are left out — they’ve always been my chief concern.””  I agree.  Excerpts from a diary kept by a writer in Wuhan during the first outbreak.

Well, this is splenetic and bracing but maybe it’s worth reading for all that.

I worry a somewhat about the New York Times book section—that in the past couple years it has become a bit more weaponized for political propaganda than for reviewing books.  (Its reviewing seems to suffer from this as well, by the way.)  Their latest climate change reading list misses some amazing older authors—say, Carson, Leopold, Abbey, Berry, McPhee—and to be frank, some solid scholarly works rather than ones written by journalists.  And I’d like some more historical work placing this in context, like McNeill and Engelke’s Great Acceleration.  Instead they went for flash or buzz.

Be well--be safe--care for one another.  Keep thinking.