I've been busy with finals, but really I'm just drilling deep into work I've been putting off for a while. I hope to make that work come to fruition in the new year. In the meantime, a lot of stuff has been interesting in the world:

Fukuyama on China and what the past few years—and past few months—tell us about the End of History.

Good interview with Bono, of all people.

A good piece on TS Eliot’s The Wasteland on its centenary. Unsurprisingly, I think my colleague and friend Jahan Ramazani has the most useful insights.

As far as columnists go, Carlos Lozada is a good one on books.  This, from October, is a pretty pedestrian explanation of A.O. Hirschman’s The Rhetoric of Reaction, but to be honest, absent this, I don’t think many people would be thinking about Hirschman and I think we all should, so thank you Mr. Lozada.

Weirdly, this seems hopeful to me:

“While some of the United States’ democratic struggles resonate with those of other countries, harping on perceived commonalities is counterproductive. Overstating the scope of democratic backsliding worldwide underestimates what an outlier the United States is relative to its peers.”

Don't despair--the rest of the world isn't doing as badly as we are!  Well, that's something, anyway.

A fascinating interview (with a friend of mine! But he’s a real scholar) about the complicated entanglements between Dungeons & Dragons and religion.

Secret Hegel papers have been found!  Or maybe lost and now recovered notes on Hegel lectures.  Anyway, pretty cool.

A pretty good reminiscence of Bruno Latour, by a reporter who once wrote a piece on him.

And another piece on Latour, this time by colleagues in the field he helped to create, “Science Studies.”

And, finally, a piece by Adam Tooze, that goes a bit deeper into the human Latour, and comes back with insights like this: “As he aged, Latour became more, not less radical.” 

Be well, radical or not.