Reading List
Anne-Marie Slaughter
Lawyer, Political Scientist and Former Director of Policy Planning, US State Department
Anne-Marie Slaughter is an American lawyer, political scientist and author. She taught international law at Chicago and Harvard, was dean of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School from 2002 to 2009, and from 2009 to 2011 served as director of policy planning at the State Department under Hillary Clinton, the first woman in either role. She then led the think tank New America until 2026.
Her books include A New World Order (2004), on the networks of officials that govern across borders, The Idea That Is America (2007), and The Chessboard and the Web (2017), on strategy in a networked world. Her 2012 Atlantic essay “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” became the book Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family (2015). Renewal followed in 2021.
Join the Club
by Tina Rosenberg
“These books are all linked, no pun intended. Tina Rosenberg had a column for The New York Times called “The Fix”, where she looked at how you fix social problems. One of her answers is that you basically harness peer pressure for good. She would use the example of Alcoholics Anonymous, too. If you want to break your addiction you surround yourself with other people who want to do the same and they will support you.” — via Interview, May 2018
Here Comes Everybody
The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
by Clay Shirky · 2008 · Non-Fiction
“It used to be much harder for people to organise. There was a lot of cost to it. But with social media you can organise a group of your friends instantly. So all sorts of phenomena that once would have been too costly to create suddenly emerged. It’s suddenly simple for human beings to come together simply because they share a common passion – it might be a political ideology, it might be the love of surfing.” — via Interview, May 2018
The Penguin and the Leviathan
How Cooperation Triumphs over Self-Interest
by Yochai Benkler
“In this book Yochai Benkler tells us how human beings can cooperate. He looks at research in many different disciplines – neuroscience, biology, sociology and computer science – to show how we can encourage self-organised cooperative behaviour.” — via Interview, May 2018
Linked
by Albert-Lázló Barabási
“Linked is about how to understand the world in terms of networks. To understand network science the first thing to do is to visualise the world the way you visualise the Internet or even the universe – hubs of infinitely intersecting networks. As the author says, everything can be reduced to links and nodes.” — via Interview, May 2018
Nonzero
by Robert Wright
“Wright sees human interactions as a Nonzero sum. While primitive systems might have run on dog-eat-dog or an-eye-for-an-eye zero-sum interactions, where I win means you lose, the story of human society is a story of people coming together and discovering it doesn’t have to be zero sum. Human interaction can be positive sum. We can cooperate in ways so that everybody wins.” — via Interview, May 2018