Francis Fukuyama picks up from where he left off in The Origins of Political Order. He adds three more dimensions of socioeconomic development – social mobilisation, idea legitimacy, and economic development to show state, law and democracy evolved to their current state, with different countries following different paths. The book ends with a commentary on political decay and the effect on democracy.
An excellent graphic novel that is based on the life and work of Bertrand Russell, and includes the luminaries of the era. It operates at a meta level because we are also privy to the discussions and arguments of the creators of the comic. Deeply layered, with fantastic life lessons.
As the title suggests, the book is a collection of 28 works – some prose and some poetry, from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. I liked the premise of quite a few, but in many cases, it didn’t fulfil the promise. If you have a deep interest in science/speculative fiction from this region, go for it.
Cathy O’Neil does a great job of highlighting the dark side of “software is eating the world” as biases are being codified into systems as Weapons of Math Destruction. Multiple examples are used to understand the three characteristics of this phenomenon – scale, opacity and damage. “Algorithms are opinions embedded in code”, and right now, we’re not doing a great job of it.
Even as liberal democracy is broadly accepted as the best form of political order in this era, the threat of fascism looms large. Recent events in US, India, Myanmar etc show how vulnerable we are. Using the lessons from the past and viewing it through a contemporary lens, this book lays out the playbook that fascism uses to thrive.