Jason Dittmer has a smart review of Robert Kaplan’s The Revenge of Geography. In atoning for what went wrong in Iraq, Kaplan is found flailing in the “shallows of geopolitics.”
Anthropologist Wade Davis has a smart review of Jared Diamond’s The World Until Yesterday. Davis critiques “the shallowness of the arguments” in the book “and it is this characteristic of Diamond’s writings that drives anthropologists to distraction.”
Speaking of shallowness: Like it or not—and as mad as it makes us—we’ve lost the war of position to the likes of Jared Diamond, Thomas Friedman, and Robert Kaplan… Sounds like the start of a bad joke.
Reinhold Martin at Design Observer ponders the contemporary significance of “Public and Common(s)”—major appearances by Arendt, Habermas, Hardt and Negri.
Meghan Flaherty’s has a smart review of Carlos Fuentes’ last novel: “Adam in Eden is a novel about drug-trafficking that doesn’t talk about drug-traffickers. It is a novel about the Garden of Eden that hardly acknowledges God. It is a political novel free of rants and rhetoric. And it is a funny novel, with a sort of hidden poignancy: it makes you laugh until, upon closing it, you find yourself no longer laughing.”
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