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Dwight Garner (2023),The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.

Israel cannot continue its war on Gaza indefinitely—not so much owing to grueling moral quandaries or unbearable ethical qualms, but due to strictly fiscal and macroeconomic concerns, with all the political-economic consequences that an expensive war must have for both Israeli society and state in...

Jean-Pierre Dupuy (2023). The War That Must Not Occur (translated by Malcolm Debevoise). Stanford University Press.

What is the “war that must not occur” of which the French philosopher and Stanford professor Jean-Pierre Dupuy speaks? All wars are aberrations best avoided, of course, manmade errors in the universe’s (at times overlong) arc bending toward justice, but there is one impermissible mistake that stands above all others: the ever-present, ghoulish specter of nuclear war.

Since Hamas’s horrific October 7 attacks on Israel, Israel has responded by unleashing tremendous amounts of violence on the Gaza Strip. This violence, Israel claims, has been targeted at Hamas infrastructure, aimed at preventing a repeat of the October 7 attacks. But Israel’s warfare has come at a terrible, and untenable, human cost, with UN Secretary General António Guterres repeatedly calling for a ceasefire and determining that Israel was responsible for “clear violations of international humanitarian law” in Gaza.[1] After nearly a month of war, some 9,000 people have been reported killed in Gaza by Israeli attacks, largely involving a combination of airstrikes and mortar attacks, including white phosphorus artillery shells, according to Amnesty International, “which may be considered indiscriminate attacks and therefore unlawful.”[2]

Shadi Bartsch (2023), Plato Goes to China: The Greek Classics and Chinese Nationalism. Princeton University Press.

Shadi Bartsch, a Classics professor at the University of Chicago, has written an interesting, if uneven, book that starts as a study of the reception of the Western classical tradition in Chinese public discourse, before veering off into something far more ambitious and, perhaps as a result, hazy and ill-defined: A mapping out of what one might call contemporary Chinese ideology, the convergence of Confucianism and state socialism in the era of Xi Jinping, and its rhetorical appropriation of parts of the Western tradition.

Joseph Vogl (2022),Capital and Ressentiment: A Brief Theory of the Present.Cambridge: Polity Press.

Zachary Jonathan Jacobson (2023). On Nixon’s Madness: An Emotional History. Johns Hopkins University Press. https://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/12723/nixons-madness.

In a global system of (supposedly) rational international actors, could an irrational feint—pretending to mercuriality, slouching towards unpredictability—constitute a higher form of rationality than “pure reason” alone? In On Nixon’s Madness, the historian Zachary Jonathan Jacobson takes a closer look at the famed “madman theory,” and its apparent progenitor, President Richard Milhous Nixon.

Observers of Donald Trump’s presidency will recall similarities between DJT and Nixon’s apparent policy posture: Keep your enemies on their toes by faking a kind of absolute volatility. In Trump’s case, threatening to derail the special relationship with South Korea, or pull out of NATO (to extract concessions in defense spending from European member states), have been chalked up to the madman theory in action: Trump wouldn’t really have pulled the plug, so the conventional wisdom goes—or would he? This “X factor,” this uncertainty about the genuineness of the feint—in essence a question about authenticity, representation, and stagecraft—is what is supposed to make the madman theory’s corollaries such a powerful foreign policy instrument.

[First published on Critical Legal Thinking.]

Introduction

A sociodicy is a structured attempt to justify the social order in spite of its manifold injustices. Its conceptual lineage can be traced back to the notion of theodicy, or the justification of God despite the existence of evil and suffering, a term that was appropriated and “sociologized” by Max Weber; it was the French mid-20th century sociologist Raymond Aron who expressly coined the term sociodicy, even though it was his student and collaborator Pierre Bourdieu who became its most famous and frequent exponent. On Bourdieu’s usage, sociodicies are narratives that try to shield dominant social strata from criticism over inequalities, hierarchy, domination, and social suffering (that is, pain and distress originating from the social order rather than individual pathology). To take just one example: The idea of social mobility has functioned as a powerful sociodicy in U.S. society, as Bourdieu and Wacquant (1999: 51) point out, justifying the existence of significant inequalities on the grounds that any one individual has the (theoretical) possibility of climbing up the social ladder—even if this possibility is, in reality, largely illusory.

Lionel Barber (2020). The Powerful and the Damned. London: WH Allen.

If one wants to understand power today, one could do a lot worse than reading former Financial Times editor Lionel Barber’s memoir-esque book, The Powerful and the Damned (2020). Sociologists like to think they understand power, but it is all too liable to be a power in the abstract; Barber, though writing polished prose in the retroactive style of a “diary” (he admits in the preface that he was not in the habit of keeping a diary during his 15 years’ tenure as FT editor, so the book is a backdated construction of sorts), produces a tantalizing glimpse into the personal relations and institutional fabric that undergird what we might term, following Bourdieu, the transnational field of power, a web of interconnected organizations, groups, and individuals who make up the upper echelons of financial, political, media, and even ecclesial power around the world. (Churchmen make their appearance several times throughout the book, often in unflattering proximity to the heavy-handed wielders of temporal power.) Though perhaps unsurprising to savvy social observers, Barber shows how power finally relies upon dense webs of personal relationships, constituted in the last instance by the interaction of flesh-and-blood individuals who mobilize money and words (or economic capital and symbolic power) to promote an agenda that they are not always in control nor even conscious of. And these webs of relations both enable and ensnare the operators of power, posing particular risks to journalists, who are always at risk of becoming caught up in the heady social games of the powerful, thereby forgetting their mission: the ceaseless, remorseless critique of power in the service of reducing social domination. All too often, however, Barber’s memoirs reveal how the media becomes a willing participant in relations of domination, not merely a bystander to but a willing participant in and party to the field of power, entranced by its interior privileges, spellbound by the gifts of the dominant, sometimes material, but often wholly symbolic (a gesture, a sign of deferral at the right time, a flattering invitation or visit, a sense of “belonging” to the club of the wealthy and esteemed).

OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 is one of theconsummate promulgators of apparently meaningful nonsense on the Web today. Roughly speaking, it generates output on the basis of a predictive model, where each next word is probabilistically produced on the basis of preceding words. It joins together words that seem...