The New Right: A Journey to the Fringe of American Politics

By Michael Malice

Overview of the landscape and sociology of the “New Right” written by someone who is at minimum a fellow traveller. Michael Malice (which I am assuming is a pseudonym since the author points out many times that he is a Soviet Jew). The book is interesting in that it is a look at the New Right from someone who is somewhat sympathetic to their worldview. Malice is himself an Anarcho-Capitalist in the tradition of Murray Rothbard so he at least has many of the same “enemies” (mainly the Progressive Left) as the New Right. Conceptually though, it is something of an incoherent mess. A mix of straw-manning (Some progressive somewhere tried to replace the terms mother/father on birth certificates with parent 1/parent 2! Was this something that was ever in danger of actually happening? Was the person proposing this someone with any actual influence or power? One can only wonder….), question begging and a refusal to engage with any sort of substantive issue. It is interesting to get a glimpse of the New Right worldview but it, I must say, doesn’t come off as any more compelling when not being straw-manned by the left. In many ways this book made me much more sympathetic to so-called “Horseshoe Theory,” the idea and the far right and far left end up converging into a single ideology. In the end both just seem like troll cultures. It is just a collection of (often incoherent and contradictory) grievances without any sort of constructive ideas of how to make things better on net.

Lines of Descent: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Emergence of Identity

By Kwame Anthony Appiah

Brief(fish) meditation on the life of W.E.B Du Bois and his conception of identity, black identity in particular. Du Bois did a significant part of his graduate education in early 20th century Berlin and Appiah does an admirable job tracing the lineage of his intellectual heritage from his teachers who were steeped in 19th century German romanticism. Moreover, Du Bois served as a sort of intellectual bridge from the essentialist notions of identity at a fundamentally biological construct, coming of age as he did during the height of so-called “scientific” racism, to the more modern concept of identity rooted in a shared set of cultural assumptions and norms. Du Bois never really took the last step in that intellectual evolution but he clearly seemed to grasp the idea at very basic level.

The Great Successor: The Divinely Perfect Destiny of Brilliant Comrade Kim Jon Un

By Anna Fifield

Washington Post Beijing bureau chief Anna Fifield’s take on North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un and life in North Korea more generally. Impressive in the amount of information about the regime and its inner workings (often based on interviews with various defectors both within and outside the regime’s inner circle). The narrative as a whole is both optimistic about the future prospects of diplomacy with North Korea and pessimistic about the commitment of Kim Jong Un to a gradual opening in the mold of China or Vietnam.

Mathematics Without Apologies: Portrait of a Problematic Vocation

By Michael Harris

The title is a riff on Cambridge mathematician G.H. Hardy’s “A Mathematicians Apology” and this is very much in the same spirit. Harris is a fairly renowned number theorist working on the Langlands program and this seems like his attempt to answer the question “what do mathematicians do?” Not so much in the narrow sense of the physical actions they take on a daily basis but more along the lines of “what is it that mathematicians produce that is of value and how is that value judged?” The answer turns out to be surprisingly nuanced. To really answer, Harris has to go down some fairly deep rabbit holes and wrestle with the relationship of mathematical truth to aesthetic and artistic beauty. And as such it ends up being less of an “answer” than an extended meditation on the topic.