The books you should read, according to professors from Princeton, Harvard and Yale

The Books You Should Read, According to Professors from Princeton, Harvard and Yale

--  Maj Gen P K Mallick,VSM (Retd)

Now a days at the end of the year list of top books read/recommended by eminent people are published specially during the year end.

College professors dole out an incredible amount of required reading to their students.

But what if they could only choose one book?

When asked, professors at America's most prestigious colleges shared the single book they think every student should read in 2017. 

The topics of the books spanned issues from politics to social science to Shakespearean literature.

Read on to see what professors from schools like Princeton, Harvard, and Yale think you should read this year.

Jill Abramson, Harvard: 'The Paranoid Style in American Politics,' by Richard Hofstadter

Abramson, a former executive editor of The New York Times and current Harvard English lecturer, recommends students read Richard Hofstadter's "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," first published in 1964.

Abramson says the book is "everything you need to know about the root of Donald Trump's rhetoric and fake news."

James Berger, Yale: 'Orfeo,' by Richard Power

James Berger is a senior Lecturer in English and American Studies at Yale University. He recommends the 2014 novel "Orfeo," by Richard Powers.

He implores students to read the book, explaining that:

"It is a story of music and genetics in our contemporary age of terror and surveillance. An idiosyncratic retelling of the Orpheus myth, an elderly avant garde composer who feels he has tried and exhausted every possible musical experiment, returns to his first love, biology, and seeks to inscribe a musical score onto the mutating DNA of bacteria. Yup.

"But his efforts are mistaken to be acts of bioterrorism, and so he flees into the 'underworld' of contemporary America, returning also to the various Euridices of his past. Amazing book —and you'll learn a hell of a lot about music, science, politics ... and even about Life!"

Eric Maskin, Harvard, and Maurice Schweitzer, UPenn: 'The Undoing Project,' by Michael Lewis

Eric Maskin is a Harvard professor and received the 2007 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. Maurice Schweitzer is a professor of operations, information, and decisions at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

Both chose Michael Lewis' "The Undoing Project."

David B. Carter, Princeton: 'The Strategy of Conflict,' by Thomas Schelling

David B. Carter is a politics professor at Princeton University. He recommended "The Strategy of Conflict," by Thomas Schelling, especially given the author's recent death. He said:

"'The Strategy of Conflict' is both probably the best book ever written about conflict and still very useful and important for understanding strategic interaction among states (and individuals).

"It also happens to be a very well-written and readable book. I read it as a junior in college and it was instrumental in getting me interested in international relations more generally, and in understanding conflict behavior and strategy in particular. I know it is an old book, but think it is something that anyone would benefit from reading."

WJT Mitchell, U Chicago: 'A Theory of the Drone,' by Gregoire Chamayou

WJT Mitchell is an English and Art History professor at the University of Chicago.

He recommends a book by French philosopher Gregoire Chamayou called "A Theory of the Drone," which attempts to understand how drones have revolutionized warfare.

Mitchell describes the book as:

"A very intelligent assessment of the new conditions ofdrone warfare in their implications for just war theory and notions of military valor."

Kenneth Warren, U Chicago: 'Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life,' by Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields.Racecraft

Kenneth Warren is an English professor at The University of Chicago.

He recommends "Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life," by Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields saying, "given the resurgence of questions about race in American society I think everyone should take a look at the 2014 book."

Harold Bloom, Yale: Shakespeare

Harold Bloom, an American literary critic and Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale, kept it short and sweet saying students should read, "all of Shakespeare."

Have you read any of the above mentioned books?

Modi government is in office, but not in power The Congress has plenty of experience in exercising power. The BJP has relatively little.

MINHAZ MERCHANT 

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The BJP could win one of the four northeastern states on offer (Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland and Tripura) but could well lose at least one of the three big states (Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh) going to the polls later this year. Karnataka, in April 2018, is a toss-up.But the real worry for the BJP is 2019. In 2014, along with its NDA allies, it won 191 out of 208 Lok Sabha seats in five key states – Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra. That tally will not be repeated.The problem is the BJP’s wobbly economic, foreign and social policies as it enters the last year of its term. The government is in office, but not in power.

In These Exponential Times, Search For An “Indian Dream” Continues

by Sanjay Anandaram

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With India’s rich pool of scientific and engineering talent, the Fourth Industrial Revolution offers the real possibility for India to acquire and deploy “know-how” and “know-what” of the technologies that define this age. There are over two trillion search queries on Google a year, up about tenfold from 2006. It makes one wonder who responded to these questions in the Before Google era! In 1982 (no World Wide Web, no mobiles!), inventor and futurist Buckminster Fuller created the “Knowledge Doubling Curve” which theorised that human knowledge doubled every century till 1900, and every 25 years by the end of Second World War in 1945, but now with the advent of artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, genomics and a host of new knowledge with differential rates of growth, it is estimated that human knowledge is doubling every year. And according to IBM, the “internet of things” can accelerate the doubling of human knowledge every 12 hours!

Indian Foreign Policy And The Hafiz Saeed Problem – Analysis

By Abhijit Iyer Mitra*

On Friday, 29 December 2017, the Government of India faced a major public embarrassment, one that provides some insights into the failure of intelligence. What it shows is one of three things: a failure of gathering, collation and transmission of intelligence; a failure to archive, collate and assess foreign policy; or, possibly, a serial failure of both intelligence and foreign policy fronts and a diagnostics problem within the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO).

Pakistan, the Endlessly Troublesome Ally

Pakistan, the Endlessly Troublesome Ally

Pakistan has long posed a dilemma for the United States — should America provide it with aid and treat it as an ally because of its potential to help fight regional extremists, or should ties and funding be restricted, or even severed, because of its connections to those groups?

The Trump administration’s announcement on Thursday that it would freeze nearly all military aid to Pakistan, roughly $1.3 billion annually, is the latest of several times in the last 16 years that funding has been withheld or modified out of American frustration with Pakistan’s support for certain terrorist groups. But President Trump’s bombast and the precipitous way the decision seems to have been made have led to doubts that Mr. Trump has a serious plan for managing the ramifications of this move.

Pakistan's Dangerous Slide to Extremism

Adam WeinsteinMichael Kugelman

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Last month, a sit-in led by cleric Khadim Hussain Rizvi and his Tehreek-e-Labaik Ya Rasool Allah (TLY) political party brought the Pakistani capital of Islamabad to a two-week standstill. nWhile the event will eventually recede from memory, its implications will be far reaching and long lasting. Indeed, the sit-in barely mustered several thousand participants, but its impact can’t be overstated. Above all, it reflects the dangerous evolution of extremism in Pakistan. The protest, which occurred at the Faizabad interchange connecting the cities of Islamabad and Rawalpindi, was motivated by a change that Pakistan’s law minister, Zahid Hamid, had made to an oath that must be uttered by newly elected parliamentarians. The change (which was quickly reversed) pertained to the part of the oath declaring Muhammad as the final prophet. TLY denounced the move as a conspiracy to undermine the status of the Prophet Muhammad, and demanded Hamid’s resignation.

The Long History of Incredibly Fraught Relations Between the U.S. and Pakistan

by Amanda Erickson 

By Thursday, the State Department had announced that it would withhold up to $2 billion in U.S. aid until the country takes “decisive action” against the Taliban and an aggressive offshoot of the group, the Haqqani network. As The Washington Post reported, that number includes $900 million in Coalition Support Funds designated to reimburse Pakistan for fighting militants. “No partnership can survive a country's harboring of militants and terrorists who target U.S. service members and officials,” State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert told reporters. Pakistan responded with frustration and threats of its own, prompting fears that the two countries might become embroiled in an increasingly tense tit-for-tat. That could be a big problem for the United States, which relies on Pakistan as a key ally in its war in Afghanistan. Here's a look at what this latest fight between the two countries might mean…

Cutting Off Pakistan, U.S. Takes Gamble in Complex Afghan War

by Mujib Mashal and Salmon Masood 

Afghan officials have pleaded with several United States administrations now to reconsider their support for Pakistan, which was both receiving billions of dollars in American aid and harboring on its soil the leaders of a Taliban insurgency that the Americans have struggled to defeat. But when President Trump suspended nearly all American security aid to Pakistan on Thursday for what he has called the country’s “lies and deceit,” any jubilation in the halls of power in Afghanistan — and there was some — was leavened with worries over how the move might affect a complex war that has pushed the Afghan government to the brink. If there is one consensus among Afghan leaders and their American counterparts, it is that dealing with Pakistan is both vital and difficult.

Trump is right: Pakistan is a terrorist haven. But what will he do about it?

Bruce Riedel

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Pakistan’s generals, who run the policy supporting terrorism, believe Trump is all bark and no bite. And so far they look to be right, but there is much Washington can do if it is serious. For months the administration has spoken out clearly about the Pakistani army’s longstanding support for organizations like the Haqqani network in the Afghan Taliban and Lashkar e Tayyiba, focused on Kashmir and India. The army and its intelligence service, the Inter Services Intelligence directorate (ISI), has trained, equipped, advised and directed the Afghan Taliban and LeT for decades. The ISI was deeply involved in Taliban attacks in Kabul and the LeT attack in Mumbai in 2008. It facilitates their fundraising in the Gulf states. It provides safe haven and sanctuary for the leadership of these groups. LeT leader Hafiz Saeed operates openly in Pakistan, routinely denouncing America, India, and Israel.

Why Pakistan supports terrorist groups, and why the US finds it so hard to induce change

Vanda Felbab-Brown

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The Trump administration’s decision to suspend military aid to Pakistan is one of the most significant U.S. punitive actions against Pakistan since 2001. The United States has long been frustrated with Pakistan’s persistent acquiescence to safe havens for the Afghan Taliban and its vicious Haqqani branch in Pakistan (both of which benefit more from misgovernance in Afghanistan, but Pakistan’s aid helps a lot). Worse yet, Pakistan has provided direct military and intelligence aid to both groups, resulting in the deaths of U.S. soldiers, Afghan security personnel, and civilians, plus significant destabilization of Afghanistan.

Cutting Off Pakistan, U.S. Takes Gamble in Complex Afghan War

By MUJIB MASHAL and SALMAN MASOOD

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Afghan officials have pleaded with three American presidents to reconsider their support for Pakistan, which was both receiving billions of dollars in American aid and harboring the leaders of a Taliban insurgency that the United States has struggled to defeat. But when President Trump suspended nearly all American security aid to Pakistan on Thursday for what he called the country’s “lies and deceit,” any jubilation in the halls of power in Afghanistan — and there was some — was leavened with worry over how the move might affect a complex war that has pushed the Afghan government to the brink.

Pakistani Government Has No Idea How to Deal With the Growing Political Power of Muslim Extremists in Their Country

Adam Weinstein and Michael Kugelman

Last month, a sit-in led by cleric Khadim Hussain Rizvi and his Tehreek-e-Labaik Ya Rasool Allah (TLY) political party brought the Pakistani capital of Islamabad to a two-week standstill.

While the event will eventually recede from memory, its implications will be far reaching and long lasting. Indeed, the sit-in barely mustered several thousand participants, but its impact can’t be overstated. Above all, it reflects the dangerous evolution of extremism in Pakistan. The protest, which occurred at the Faizabad interchange connecting the cities of Islamabad and Rawalpindi, was motivated by a change that Pakistan’s law minister, Zahid Hamid, had made to an oath that must be uttered by newly elected parliamentarians. The change (which was quickly reversed) pertained to the part of the oath declaring Muhammad as the final prophet. TLY denounced the move as a conspiracy to undermine the status of the Prophet Muhammad, and demanded Hamid’s resignation.

The Geopolitics of the Beijing-Moscow Consensus

By Enrico Cau

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In the late 1950s the deterioration of Sino-Russian relations paved the way for the historic meeting between U.S. President Richard Nixon and Mao Zedong in 1972. The offspring of that meeting was the Shanghai Communiqué, and the onset of the Sino-American détente on one side and that Soviet containment in the Asia-Pacific on the other, a divide that would define the relations between the two communist countries for decades to come.

The Red Emperor

Roderick Mac Farquhar

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Tis fall, the Nineteenth Congress of the Chhinese Communist Party (CCP) gave proof that during his five years as general secretary Xi Jinping has become the most powerful leader of China since Mao Zedong died in 1976. Most observers, Chinese and foreign, who already knew this could only have been surprised at the manner in which it was displayed in public at the congress: in the choice of the new leadership team and the designation of an official ideology named for Xi.  The CCP’s Politburo Standing Committee (PSC) consists of the party’s top leaders, and it currently has seven members. In the past, the PSC has been the location of ferocious struggles for power. Mao forced out two deputies who might have succeeded him: 

Can China really take over Taiwan

By John Pomfret 

Chinese air force fighters have begun escorting bombers around Taiwan in “encirclement drills” and spokesmen for the Communist government have warned Taiwan to get used to it . On Wednesday, China’s president Xi Jinping, dressed in military fatigues, convened a military mobilization meeting— the first ever for the entire Chinese armed forces and commanded China’s military to become “battle ready.” Chinese officials are threatening that relations with Taiwan will turn “grave” because Taiwan’s government refuses to acknowledge that the island is part of China. A leading Chinese analyst predicts that China has accelerated its timetable to 2020 for taking over the island by military means. 

Iran’s Cyber Threat: Espionage, Sabotage, and Revenge

Colliin Anderson and Karim Sadjadpour

Incidents involving Iran have been among the most sophisticated, costly, and consequential attacks in the history of the internet. The four-decade-long U.S.-Iran cold war has increasingly moved into cyberspace, and Tehran has been among the leading targets of uniquely invasive and destructive cyber operations by the United States and its allies. At the same time, Tehran has become increasingly adept at conducting cyber espionage and disruptive attacks against opponents at home and abroad, ranging from Iranian civil society organizations to governmental and commercial institutions in Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the United States.

Many Americans have never heard of the Haqqani network, one of the world’s most lethal terror groups

Ann M. Simmonds

When the Trump administration announced this week it was suspending military aid to Pakistan until the country takes more aggressive action against terrorist organizations that have targeted Americans, one of the groups it named was the Haqqani network. Compared to other extremist groups, it is unfamiliar to many people in the U.S. So who is Haqqani? What is the network? And what are its links to Pakistan? Jalaluddin Haqqani was an Afghan warlord and a leader of the insurgency against Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the 1980s, when he formed his Sunni Islamist militant organization, which the U.S. government did not designate as a foreign terrorist organization until 2012.

Mapping a World From Hell 76 Countries Are Now Involved in Washington’s War on Terror

By Tom Engelhardt

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He left Air Force Two behind and, unannounced, “shrouded in secrecy,” flew on an unmarked C-17 transport plane into Bagram Air Base, the largest American garrison in Afghanistan. All news of his visit was embargoed until an hour before he was to depart the country. More than 16 years after an American invasion “liberated” Afghanistan, he was there to offer some good news to a U.S. troop contingent once again on the rise. Before a 40-foot American flag, addressing 500 American troops, Vice President Mike Pence praised them as “the world’s greatest force for good,” boasted that American air strikes had recently been “dramatically increased,” swore that their country was “here to stay,” and insisted that “victory is closer than ever before.” As an observer noted, however, the response of his audience was “subdued.” (“Several troops stood with their arms crossed or their hands folded behind their backs and listened, but did not applaud.”)

Agency Transformed, NSA Chief Rogers Set for Spring Departure

The Cipher Brief

The Cipher Brief spoke with its former NSA and cyber experts on their reactions to the news that NSA and Cyber Command chief Adm. Michael Rogers would be retiring in the spring. In his four years in the post, Rogers presided over a controversial reorganization of NSA that some hailed as rendering the top code-breaking agency as more efficient, but that roiled the workforce. Rogers was also central to the maturation of U.S. Cyber Command as it grew into its first unclassified mission against ISIS but encountered a number of damaging leaks of highly classified information over at NSA.

WHAT WOULD REALLY HAPPEN IF RUSSIA ATTACKED UNDERSEA INTERNET CABLES

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IT MIGHT SEEM like a nightmare scenario. A terrorist organization or nefarious nation state decides to derail the global internet by faulting the undersea fiber optic cables that connect the world. These cables, which run along the ocean floor, carry almost all transoceanic digital communication, allowing you to send a Facebook message to a friend in Dubai, or receive an email from your cousin in Australia. US Navy officials have warned for years that it would be devastating if Russia, which has been repeatedly caughtsnooping near the cables, were to attack them. The UK’s most senior military officer said in December that it would “immediately and potentially catastrophically” impact the economy were Russia to fault the lines. NATO is now planning to resurrect a Cold War-era command post in part to monitor Russian cable activity in the North Atlantic.

FRAGILE STATES AND THE TERRITORY CONUNDRUM TO COUNTERING VIOLENT NONSTATE ACTORS

Lionel Beehner 

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Abstract: The concept of controlling territorial space informs Western conventions of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism. The Islamic State surprised the West when it recently captured dozens of cities across Iraq and Syria. Eradicating failed states and ungoverned territories vis-à-vis more robust state-building also forms the backbone of U.S. efforts to reduce violence, provide order, and build stronger societies. I argue that clearing territory, while important, should be selectively employed. Greater stateness does not always correlate with reductions in violence, and conversely not all “ungoverned spaces” are terrorist safe havens. A number of these areas are natural, if non-integrated, parts of the international system. Second, I posit that state-building can have its own negative externalities, such as pushing nonstate actors across state borders and thereby externalizing internal conflicts. The policy implications of my theory are twofold: First, territory is often a poor metric to capture military progress in the fight against violent nonstate actors; second, fixing failed or fragile states does not always reduce the threat of violence but often just relocates it, as nonstate actors get squeezed out of areas of increasing stateness and move toward areas of weak stateness.

America Has Military Options for North Korea (but They’re All Bad)

Michael O’Hanlon

Is the Trump administration considering preventive military action of some sort against the North Korean regime of Kim Jong-un? With various U.S. officials saying that “time is running out” for a diplomatic solution to the nuclear and missile standoff with the DPRK, that may be the case—or at least the intended message. A review of the plausible military options available to the United States underscores two central points. First, the Trump administration is not alone in thinking about them. Previous U.S. administrations, including Democratic ones, have done so too. Second, however, none of those options really hold water. The risks of escalation are not worth the potential benefits. Consider these options:

57 New Unicorns In 2017

In 2017, there were 57 startups that crossed the unicorn threshold, and they range from well-known companies, such as Reddit or Quora, to rapid-risers like China’s Toutiao (now valued at $20 billion), which has seemingly come out of nowhere.Investors have conviction that these companies will provide the platforms and products of the future, and they are placing big bets on them to deliver.

Why A Cyberattack Could Cause Infrastructure To Fall Like Dominoes

BY CARL HERBERGER 

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In February of 2017, a strong windstorm knocked down power lines in Wyoming, forcing water and sewage treatment plants to operate on backup generators. The pumps that moved sewage from low-lying areas to the treatment plants on higher ground didn’t have backup power. As inclement weather prolonged the outages, the sewers backed up. Authorities cut water service to the area. The hope was simple: Without water, there’d be no waste. A strong windstorm in Wyoming can tell us quite a bit about the worst effects of cyberwar. While government officials tasked with disaster planning have long focused on the cascading effects of power outages from natural disasters, only recently have they realized the effects of cyber warfare could be quite similar. In fact, natural disasters serve as excellent examples of the unforeseen consequences that a cyberattack against infrastructure will have.

Air Force ISR ‘Flight Plan,’ Industry Day Coming: Stealth, Space, Cyber, & AI

By SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR.

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CAPITOL HILL: The Air Force is finalizing a high-tech “flight plan” for Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance investments, the deputy chief of staff for ISR said here. The service can’t keep buying more and more drones to collect more and more data and then hiring more and more human analysts to plow through it, Lt. Gen. Veralinn “Dash” Jamieson told a small group. So the new strategy will make better use of satellites, cyberspace, advanced aircraft like the F-35 and B-21, and even publicly available information on the Internet, as well as artificial intelligence to help analyze the vast amounts of incoming data.

THE CHAIRMAN THE PENTAGON NEEDS

PAULA THORNHILL AND MARA KARLIN

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There’s a new acronym that has taken hold across the Department of Defense over the last two years or so: TMM. It stands for trans-regional, multi-functional, and multi-domain; and, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joe Dunford, has made it a core element of the Joint Staff’s work. According to Dunford, the department’s “current planning and organizational construct” is flawed, impeding the secretary of defense’s ability to make decisions. To fight and win 21st century wars, the department should find a way to globally integrate below the secretary of defense. But to do so, the chairman’s role needs to evolve considerably. As Dunford explained to the Senate Armed Service Committee a few months ago, the chairman needs “limited authority for the worldwide reallocation of a limited number of military assets … on a short-term basis.” This authority builds on the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act that allows the chairman to advise the secretary on the allocation and transfer of forces for transregional, multi-functional and multi-domain operations. So, are these arcane developments of interest to a few pentagon staffers, or are they indicative of something more fundamental happening?