umanity has used the written word to transmit knowledge and traditions across time and across space. Both writing and reading have become romanticized in our stories about who we are, where we came from, and where we’re going. Books of whatever medium are, in many ways, a kind of cultural treasure that give us unique insights into the state of given societies at different times.
As part of the knowledge economy, authorship and how we consume the written word have been disrupted already by AI, and that disruption is going to become more extreme before things settle. Yet the act of writing requires deep, contextual understanding of whatever your topic is—and that is doubly true when we think about books that consider the global affairs space. When it comes to provoking critical thinking and learning about new concepts, there is something special about the author-reader connection which AI cannot (yet, and perhaps ever) replicate.
Here at Diplomatic Courier, writing and reading are at the core of our identity—reading is also something that our staff is passionate about. So, in the spirit of honoring a long-standing human tradition which is treasured across cultural and temporal lines, we wanted to bring you some of our favorite reads from 2023. These aren’t necessarily books that were published this year, but they are books that impacted us in some personal way during 2023.
We hope you’ll find something that speaks to you in this list, and we hope something you’ve read is giving you things to consider as we head into the New Year and try to make 2024 better than 2023.
Automating Humanity
When I first met Joe Toscano, it was in between the hustle and bustle of hosting events during UN week in New York. A former experience design consultant for Google, he had won numerous international awards for his work so he piqued my interest. But it was during our Wellbeing Forum (WBF) in London this past October when I actually got to sit down with Joe properly and learn about his book Automating Humanity.
First released in 2018, the book is part manifesto/part dissertation on everything Big Tech. He begins by asking the question: WTF is happening? He might as well have asked that same question this past year. The book was released in 2018 but 2023 was the year it was written for; a year that will go down in history as the time AI captivated the world’s collective imagination.
How does this data economy really work? Who has our data and how do they use it? Most importantly, what can we do about it and what does it mean for how we love, live, work, and want in the not-so-distant future? What read like a sci-fi novel now reads like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Automating Humanity is a future foretold, which is now unfolding before us.
So, what can we do with this knowledge? Toscano quit his cushy job at Google to figure it out and the book has an entire section dedicated to building better (regulators should pay particular attention). The AI rocket ship is already taking off; we need to figure out how to make it work for all eight billion people, not just the same five guys at Silicon Valley.
-Ana C. Rold
On Wars
Conflict has become so common a part of our information diet that it feels as though war must be a natural enterprise among humans. Be that or not as it may, it begs the question—a question that has been asked by various international relations theories, always unsatisfyingly—of why humans fight wars. In this extremely ambitious book, UCLA Professor of Sociology Emeritus Michael Mann dives deep into the history of wars waged around the world. The book, “On Wars,” is worth a read for the sheer ambition and scope of the project, and for the way it makes you think. It is doubly worth the read for its effective takedown of prevailing theories of why we go to war.
Yet Mann’s conclusions are—perhaps inevitably, for such a complex and ambitious project—disappointing. He concludes that the logics behind why we go to war are too complex to categorize neatly, but broadly ascribes war to illogical decisions made by ruling elites. This feels both reductive and like a cop-out, because on some level this naturalizes the idea of war as inevitable. Ultimately this book is worth reading—Prof. Mann is diligent with his process. He upsets a lot of “settled” thinking on war and its causes. And he forces the reader to ask a lot of questions. That’s extremely useful, even if the answers Prof. Mann arrives at, for me at least, are rather unsatisfying.
-Shane C. Szarkowski
How Westminster Works... and Why It Doesn't
The politics of Great Britain today are far less stable and predictable than they once were. America’s closest ally has had five prime ministers in seven years, with four alone since the 2016 Brexit vote. While much of the turmoil is attributable to the outcome of that unexpected and decisive vote, the structural and systemic factors affecting British democracy run much deeper than one vote. Political journalist and author Ian Dunt diagnoses the challenges that have led to political dysfunction within the United Kingdom in his thoroughly enjoyable “How Westminster Works… and Why it Doesn’t”. Not content to serve as merely an English gadfly, Dunt prescribed a series of reforms to strengthen British democracy for the future. Deeply interesting to Anglophiles and political junkies alike, it offers novel insights into how America’s closest ally works (and doesn’t).
-Joshua Huminski
How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them
For what appears to be an academic tome, this book is emblematic of a personal journey for its author, Barbara F. Walter. Walter and her husband, who apparently hold multiple passports, considered (but ultimately decided against) leaving the United States before its 2020 election. This was an interesting and telling decision by the author, a political scientist and leading expert in how countries fall into political disunion and civil wars. The results of that election and the follow-on insurrectionist attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, powerfully shaped this book, which was initially planned, and is initially presented, as a wider-focus book built for understanding national crack-ups everywhere on earth.
This book is at its strongest yet most sterile when Walter is presenting a systemic way of understanding what underlies and drives a polity to civil war. When she shifts to examining the post-Jan. 6 landscape of the United States, the wording, anecdotes and recommendations narrow to Walter’s personal experience and specifically the future of the country in which she lives. The drift in focus is by turns frustrating and compelling.
Her recommendations won’t come as a surprise (i.e. something needs to be done about social media), and feel a bit tacked on to the larger work. But the takeaway message here from Walter, both professionally and personally, is a powerful one: Don’t give up hope … yet.
-Jeremy Fugleberg
Power and Protest
In this historical nonfiction, Jeremi Suri, a professor at UT Austin, examines the relationship between global social protest and diplomacy during the 1960s. From Charles de Gaulle to Martin Luther King Jr., he covers leaders and activists across three continents to illustrate the impact of social unrest while offering an analysis of how leaders have confronted geopolitical issues despite differences in socio-cultural influences. Suri outlines how Cold War sentiment led to, what he coins as, the “Global Disruption”—a string of movements that transcended borders and socio-political perspectives despite their shared affinity for condemning false promises associated with the Cold War zeitgeist. The Global Disruption eventually prompted global leaders to détente which Suri critiques as a catalyst for isolating the public from politics and, in turn, constructing political predictability. Though provocative, the argument Suri unravels is an increasingly timely and contemporary approach to utilizing a historical framework to approach international affairs in today’s society—particularly when it involves responding to protest movements and addressing the political power structure.
-Melissa Metos
She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement
“She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement” is a non-fiction book written by New York Times investigative reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey. Published in 2019, the book recounts the investigative journalism that exposed the sexual harassment allegations against Harvey Weinstein, helping spur the global #MeToo movement.
“She Said” offers a compelling account of the successes and challenges Kantor and Twohey faced while breaking the pivotal story in 2017. Written by the journalists themselves, the book truly goes “beyond the headlines,” offering a deep understanding of this groundbreaking investigation that helped accelerate a movement.
A 2022 movie of the same name, directed by Maria Schrader and featuring Zoe Kazan as Kantor and Carey Mulligan as Twohey, brings the book to a new medium, one of which is just as captivating as the book. I highly recommend both.
-Whitney DeVries
Demon Copperhead
This is a book full of emotional rawness and harsh realities that will linger in your mind for a long time. The desperate struggle our main character Damon faces through poverty, foster care and drug addiction will break your heart. Despite this, the determination and hope that eventually surfaces through this book is a lesson for all of us in these exceptionally difficult times. Born to a drug addicted mother, into intense poverty, with little childhood to speak of and living through the opioid crisis, it seems that there is little cause for hope. Oftentimes, the best books can be difficult to read. This book is no exception, although I very nearly gave up, I’m so glad I persevered. Through all the hardships Damon faced in his life, he still thought of others, helped his friends and learned to observe behavior first before responding sharply. The many lessons from this book include painful examples of how social and healthcare has failed so many struggling in America, the strain foster care systems are often under and the role schools need to play in drug education.
-Beki Adams
a global affairs media network
DC Staff Best Reads of 2023
Image by un-perfekt from Pixabay
December 30, 2023
Reading and writing are at the core of our identity at Diplomatic Courier. Our staff each suggested one book on global affairs they read during 2023 which we think you might enjoy, too.
H
umanity has used the written word to transmit knowledge and traditions across time and across space. Both writing and reading have become romanticized in our stories about who we are, where we came from, and where we’re going. Books of whatever medium are, in many ways, a kind of cultural treasure that give us unique insights into the state of given societies at different times.
As part of the knowledge economy, authorship and how we consume the written word have been disrupted already by AI, and that disruption is going to become more extreme before things settle. Yet the act of writing requires deep, contextual understanding of whatever your topic is—and that is doubly true when we think about books that consider the global affairs space. When it comes to provoking critical thinking and learning about new concepts, there is something special about the author-reader connection which AI cannot (yet, and perhaps ever) replicate.
Here at Diplomatic Courier, writing and reading are at the core of our identity—reading is also something that our staff is passionate about. So, in the spirit of honoring a long-standing human tradition which is treasured across cultural and temporal lines, we wanted to bring you some of our favorite reads from 2023. These aren’t necessarily books that were published this year, but they are books that impacted us in some personal way during 2023.
We hope you’ll find something that speaks to you in this list, and we hope something you’ve read is giving you things to consider as we head into the New Year and try to make 2024 better than 2023.
Automating Humanity
When I first met Joe Toscano, it was in between the hustle and bustle of hosting events during UN week in New York. A former experience design consultant for Google, he had won numerous international awards for his work so he piqued my interest. But it was during our Wellbeing Forum (WBF) in London this past October when I actually got to sit down with Joe properly and learn about his book Automating Humanity.
First released in 2018, the book is part manifesto/part dissertation on everything Big Tech. He begins by asking the question: WTF is happening? He might as well have asked that same question this past year. The book was released in 2018 but 2023 was the year it was written for; a year that will go down in history as the time AI captivated the world’s collective imagination.
How does this data economy really work? Who has our data and how do they use it? Most importantly, what can we do about it and what does it mean for how we love, live, work, and want in the not-so-distant future? What read like a sci-fi novel now reads like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Automating Humanity is a future foretold, which is now unfolding before us.
So, what can we do with this knowledge? Toscano quit his cushy job at Google to figure it out and the book has an entire section dedicated to building better (regulators should pay particular attention). The AI rocket ship is already taking off; we need to figure out how to make it work for all eight billion people, not just the same five guys at Silicon Valley.
-Ana C. Rold
On Wars
Conflict has become so common a part of our information diet that it feels as though war must be a natural enterprise among humans. Be that or not as it may, it begs the question—a question that has been asked by various international relations theories, always unsatisfyingly—of why humans fight wars. In this extremely ambitious book, UCLA Professor of Sociology Emeritus Michael Mann dives deep into the history of wars waged around the world. The book, “On Wars,” is worth a read for the sheer ambition and scope of the project, and for the way it makes you think. It is doubly worth the read for its effective takedown of prevailing theories of why we go to war.
Yet Mann’s conclusions are—perhaps inevitably, for such a complex and ambitious project—disappointing. He concludes that the logics behind why we go to war are too complex to categorize neatly, but broadly ascribes war to illogical decisions made by ruling elites. This feels both reductive and like a cop-out, because on some level this naturalizes the idea of war as inevitable. Ultimately this book is worth reading—Prof. Mann is diligent with his process. He upsets a lot of “settled” thinking on war and its causes. And he forces the reader to ask a lot of questions. That’s extremely useful, even if the answers Prof. Mann arrives at, for me at least, are rather unsatisfying.
-Shane C. Szarkowski
How Westminster Works... and Why It Doesn't
The politics of Great Britain today are far less stable and predictable than they once were. America’s closest ally has had five prime ministers in seven years, with four alone since the 2016 Brexit vote. While much of the turmoil is attributable to the outcome of that unexpected and decisive vote, the structural and systemic factors affecting British democracy run much deeper than one vote. Political journalist and author Ian Dunt diagnoses the challenges that have led to political dysfunction within the United Kingdom in his thoroughly enjoyable “How Westminster Works… and Why it Doesn’t”. Not content to serve as merely an English gadfly, Dunt prescribed a series of reforms to strengthen British democracy for the future. Deeply interesting to Anglophiles and political junkies alike, it offers novel insights into how America’s closest ally works (and doesn’t).
-Joshua Huminski
How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them
For what appears to be an academic tome, this book is emblematic of a personal journey for its author, Barbara F. Walter. Walter and her husband, who apparently hold multiple passports, considered (but ultimately decided against) leaving the United States before its 2020 election. This was an interesting and telling decision by the author, a political scientist and leading expert in how countries fall into political disunion and civil wars. The results of that election and the follow-on insurrectionist attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, powerfully shaped this book, which was initially planned, and is initially presented, as a wider-focus book built for understanding national crack-ups everywhere on earth.
This book is at its strongest yet most sterile when Walter is presenting a systemic way of understanding what underlies and drives a polity to civil war. When she shifts to examining the post-Jan. 6 landscape of the United States, the wording, anecdotes and recommendations narrow to Walter’s personal experience and specifically the future of the country in which she lives. The drift in focus is by turns frustrating and compelling.
Her recommendations won’t come as a surprise (i.e. something needs to be done about social media), and feel a bit tacked on to the larger work. But the takeaway message here from Walter, both professionally and personally, is a powerful one: Don’t give up hope … yet.
-Jeremy Fugleberg
Power and Protest
In this historical nonfiction, Jeremi Suri, a professor at UT Austin, examines the relationship between global social protest and diplomacy during the 1960s. From Charles de Gaulle to Martin Luther King Jr., he covers leaders and activists across three continents to illustrate the impact of social unrest while offering an analysis of how leaders have confronted geopolitical issues despite differences in socio-cultural influences. Suri outlines how Cold War sentiment led to, what he coins as, the “Global Disruption”—a string of movements that transcended borders and socio-political perspectives despite their shared affinity for condemning false promises associated with the Cold War zeitgeist. The Global Disruption eventually prompted global leaders to détente which Suri critiques as a catalyst for isolating the public from politics and, in turn, constructing political predictability. Though provocative, the argument Suri unravels is an increasingly timely and contemporary approach to utilizing a historical framework to approach international affairs in today’s society—particularly when it involves responding to protest movements and addressing the political power structure.
-Melissa Metos
She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement
“She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement” is a non-fiction book written by New York Times investigative reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey. Published in 2019, the book recounts the investigative journalism that exposed the sexual harassment allegations against Harvey Weinstein, helping spur the global #MeToo movement.
“She Said” offers a compelling account of the successes and challenges Kantor and Twohey faced while breaking the pivotal story in 2017. Written by the journalists themselves, the book truly goes “beyond the headlines,” offering a deep understanding of this groundbreaking investigation that helped accelerate a movement.
A 2022 movie of the same name, directed by Maria Schrader and featuring Zoe Kazan as Kantor and Carey Mulligan as Twohey, brings the book to a new medium, one of which is just as captivating as the book. I highly recommend both.
-Whitney DeVries
Demon Copperhead
This is a book full of emotional rawness and harsh realities that will linger in your mind for a long time. The desperate struggle our main character Damon faces through poverty, foster care and drug addiction will break your heart. Despite this, the determination and hope that eventually surfaces through this book is a lesson for all of us in these exceptionally difficult times. Born to a drug addicted mother, into intense poverty, with little childhood to speak of and living through the opioid crisis, it seems that there is little cause for hope. Oftentimes, the best books can be difficult to read. This book is no exception, although I very nearly gave up, I’m so glad I persevered. Through all the hardships Damon faced in his life, he still thought of others, helped his friends and learned to observe behavior first before responding sharply. The many lessons from this book include painful examples of how social and healthcare has failed so many struggling in America, the strain foster care systems are often under and the role schools need to play in drug education.
-Beki Adams
