Will > Books: books_of_the_year-2019‎ (14)

…now I knew there were so many ways to get hung from a cross—a mother’s love for you morphing into something incomprehensible. A dress ghosted in a

…now I knew there were so many ways to get hung from a cross—a mother’s love for you morphing into something incomprehensible. A dress ghosted in another generation’s dreams. A history of fire and ash and loss. Legacy.

Look closely. It’s the spring of 2001 and I am finally sixteen. How many hundreds of ancestors knew a moment like this? Before the narrative of their lives changed once again forever, there was Bach and Ellington, Monk and Ma Rainey, Hooker and Holiday. Before the world as they knew it ended, they stepped out in heels with straightening-comb burns on their ears, gartered stockings, and lipstick for the first time.

When she looked into her future, she saw college and some fancy job somewhere where she dressed cute and drank good wine at a restaurant after work. There were always candles in her future—candlelit tables and bathtubs and bedrooms. She didn’t see Aubrey there.

Every day since she was a baby, I’ve told Iris the story. How they came with intention. How the only thing they wanted was to see us gone. Our money gone. Our shops and schools and libraries—everything—just good and gone. And even though it happened twenty years before I was even a thought, I carry it. I carry the goneness. Iris carries the goneness. And watching her walk down those stairs, I know now that my grandbaby carries the goneness too.

…as we dance, I am not Melody who is sixteen. I am not my parents’ once illegitimate daughter—I am a narrative, someone’s almost forgotten story. Remembered.

“When you get old, you become invisible. It’s just the truth. And yet it’s freeing in a way…You go through life and you think you are something. No

“When you get old, you become invisible. It’s just the truth. And yet it’s freeing in a way…You go through life and you think you are something. Not in a good way, and not in a bad way. But you think you are something, and then you see that you are no longer anything. To a waitress with a huge hind end you’ve become invisible, And it’s freeing.”

“I think our job—maybe even our duty—is to—"Her voice became calm, adultlike. “Bear the burden of the mystery with as much grace as we can.”

Ever since I was a kid on that dirt road, I think that the biggest compelling engine in me has always been the desire to know what it feels like to be another person. I just always have been pulled through life by that deep curiosity to know. It’s a frustration for me to not even know what, like, these fingers touching the desk would feel like if it wasn’t me. As a result I have watched and watched and listened to people all the time. I’m always trying to absorb the tiniest detail that I can see or hear from them. - from the Guardian interview

You could see how at the end of each day the world seemed cracked open and the extra light made its way across the stark trees, and promised. It promised, that light, and what a thing that was. As Cindy lay on her bed she could see this even now, the gold of the last light opening the world.

I remember walking down the street one day and all of a sudden realizing, Oh! Jim and Helen Burgess could actually be in Crosby, Maine. They could have dropped their grandson off at camp. That’s what New Yorkers do, they send their kids to camp in Maine. So I thought, how fabulous. It was so fun, particularly because it gave me the chance to explore the enormous cultural divide between New York City and Maine.

I like driving a pickup and heating my house as much as the next person, and the through line between energy and economic growth and development is

I like driving a pickup and heating my house as much as the next person, and the through line between energy and economic growth and development is as clear to me as an electric streetlight piercing the black night. But the political impact of the industry that brings us those things is also worth recognizing as a key ingredient in the global chaos and democratic downturn we’re now living through.

Rachel Maddow didn't set out to write a book. But a nagging question led her there: Why did Russia interfere in America's 2016 presidential election, and why attack the United States in such a cunning way? Although the MSNBC host regularly devotes ample airtime to the topic of Russia on The Rachel Maddow Show, her digging led her to a thesis she thought was too long for TV.
- from the NPR interview

Russia's shaky economy, hampered by a reliance on oil and gas, helps explain the country's weakness, and "some of Russia's weakness explains why they attacked us in the way they did," Maddow argues. She says Vladimir Putin exploited Russia's lucrative oil industry to support his vision of making Russia a superpower again. "When you've got one resource that's pulling in such a big revenue stream, you tend to end up with very rich elites who will do anything to hold onto power who stopped doing the other things that governments should otherwise be doing to serve the needs of the people," she said in an interview with All Things Considered. - from NPR

Ruth knew what evil could befall a girl traveling alone. Especially now, when there were demons dressed in army uniforms on every corner. Ruth knew

Ruth knew what evil could befall a girl traveling alone. Especially now, when there were demons dressed in army uniforms on every corner. Ruth knew of them as mazikin, terrible creatures whose work was the misery of humankind. They had accomplished their work in Berlin…newspapers printed captions beneath photographs of Jewish businessmen and lawyers and professors. Here are the animals. Do you know this Beast? That was how evil spoke. It made its own corrupt sense; it swore that the good were evil, and that evil had come to save mankind. It brought up ancient fears and scattered them on the street like pearls. To fight what was wicked, magic and faith were needed. This was what one must turn to when there was no other option.

If you do not believe in evil, you are doomed to live in a world you will never understand. But if you do believe, you may see it everywhere, in every cellar, in every tree, along streets you know and streets you have never been on before. In the world that we knew, Hanni Kohn saw what was before her. She would do whatever she must to save those she loved, whether it was right or wrong, permitted or forbidden.

Partly, I felt it was my last chance to meet survivors and try to understand how they could go through something like that and continue to be in the world. That’s what I really wanted to find out. After all that has happened, can this still be the world that they knew? (The title alludes to that.) And how can they still want to be in it? - from the Moment Magazine interview

"I was writing about what hate does, the effects of the fear of people who are ‘other.’ I didn’t realize that so much of what was happening in France during World War II was anti-refugee, that it began not as a movement that was anti-Jewish but simply anti-refugee. So I found myself writing about how it’s really a choice, about how easy it can be to look in the other direction. These things happen slowly and then, all of a sudden, they have happened.” - from the Bookpage interview

I always start a novel with a question. With THE WORLD THAT WE KNEW, my question was How do survivors of tragedy manage to go on? I found my answer when speaking with survivors in this country and in France. Even those who had suffered enormous loss valued life, wanted to live, and found joy in their families, their work, their memories and their daily lives.- from the Moment Magazine interview

I am thinking of beauty again, how some things are hunted because we have deemed them beautiful. If, relative to the history of our planet, an indi

I am thinking of beauty again, how some things are hunted because we have deemed them beautiful. If, relative to the history of our planet, an individual life is so short, a blink of an eye, as they say, then to be gorgeous, even from the day you’re born to the day you die, is to be gorgeous only briefly…sunset, like survival, exists only on the verge of its own disappearing. To be gorgeous, you must first be seen, but to be seen allows you to be hunted.

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“Everything good is somewhere else, baby. I’m telling you.”

In the nail salon, sorry is a tool one used to pander until the word itself becomes currency. It no longer merely apologizes, but insists, reminds: I'm here, right here, beneath you. It is the lowering of oneself so that the client feels right, superior, and charitable. In the nail salon, one’s definition of sorry is deranged into a new work entirely, one that’s charged and reused as both power and defacement at once. Being sorry pays, being sorry even, or especially, when one has no fault, is worth every self-deprecating syllable the mouth allows. Because the mouth must eat.

As I plucked, the blank walls around us did not so much fill with fantastical landscapes as open to them, the plaster disintegrating to reveal the past behind it. Scenes from the war, mythologies of manlike monkeys, of ancient ghost catchers from the hills of Da Lat who were paid in jugs of rice wine, who traveled through villages with packs of wild dogs and spells written on palm leaves to dispel evil spirits.

Sometimes you are erased before you are given the choice of stating who you are.

Reading was particularly hard, and he suspects that dyslexia runs in his family, though he says now: “I think perhaps the disability helped me a bit, because I write very slowly and see words as objects. I’m always trying to look for words inside words. It’s so beautiful to me that the word laughter is inside slaughter.” - from The Rumpus

I am writing you from inside a body that used to be yours. Which is to say, I am writing as a son. If we are lucky, the end of the sentence is where we might begin. If we are lucky, something is passed on, another alphabet written in the blood, sinew, and neuron…

It’s in these moments, next to you, that I envy words for doing what we can never do—how they can tell all of themselves simply by standing still, simply by being.
Imagine I could lie down beside you and my whole body, every cell, radiates a clear, singular meaning, not so much a writer as a word pressed down beside you.

Freedom, I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter and the prey.
or
the past never a fixed and dormant landscape but one that is re-seen. Whether we want to or not, we are traveling in a spiral, we are creating something new from what is gone.
or
I want to insist that our being alive is beautiful enough to be worthy of replication. And so what? So what if all I ever made of my life was more of it?

It wasn’t complicated. Not more than an early morning call from a City grandee, a nurse who came across her neighbor dead or dying before dawn on C

It wasn’t complicated. Not more than an early morning call from a City grandee, a nurse who came across her neighbor dead or dying before dawn on Christmas Day, and the dead neighbor’s latchkeys in my hand. That and the voice that always whispers in my ear, soft as telling a rosary, that for every reason I might think I have for mixing in a murder, there are ten better reasons to walk away. I crossed the angle of the court, fitted one of the keys in its lock and gave it a quarter turn. As for the voice that whispers, I hear it every time I step uninvited into an unlit room. The trick is not to let it start a conversation.”

Fury. Pure Fury. The blood was up. Lost the head completely.

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Death looks like glory to a young man. Get a few

Fury. Pure Fury. The blood was up. Lost the head completely.

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Death looks like glory to a young man. Get a few more years on you, and glory starts looking a lot like death.

My original idea was to call the novel Fury. It’s the opening word of the first chapter, and chosen quite deliberately. The first word of the Iliad, the Trojan War epic that gives my novel its structure, is an ancient Greek equivalent, though often translated as "wrath" rather than "anger", because the word in question is normally used only of the gods.

But when I mentioned it to my editor, he shook his head. ‘The Brad Pitt film,’ he said, and of course he was right. Search for that title on Amazon, and the movie will always come up first. Unnecessary confusion. They’ll go off and buy something else. I probably would too. Back to square one. - from the RTE piece

"Growing up it's a bit like a Western," says the author of his own Troubles experiences. "You hear about people getting shot, but it's all a bit clean-cut if you don't actually witness it. There's no clean, 'nice' way of killing someone, whether it's by a bomb or a bullet."…Hughes returned to The Iliad as his 'way into' to writing about war and the Troubles."I realised I needed to write about men at war and my way of dealing with that was to try and read my way into it," he explains. The more he read the more he discovered uncanny parallels between the tail-end of the British/Irish armed conflict in 1990s Ulster and Homer's depiction of the Trojan war's twilight years. "I'd read The Iliad for the first time after I left university. One of the things I realised when I started re-reading is that there are a number of ceasefires in it. Then something happens and they have to decide if that breaks the truce, or if it gives them the chance to just pack up and walk away from it. That seemed to fit perfectly with the dynamics of Northern Ireland in mid-90s. - from the Irish Times interview

There was far too much at stake in the talks for a wee skirmish to bring it all down. The Three Monkeys was the word. Besides, most in the place took no real interest, beyond what they saw on the news. Oh, there’d be something at the tail end of a bulletin, reports of shots being fired in a certain area, but that was so much blah blah blah to these people. You wouldn’t even take it in, let alone wonder what it was.
And it wasn’t that the reporters were in on it, or very few of them. No, there was very little learning went on, though the odd thing would have to be spiked. It was the papers themselves, the higher-ups in the TV and radio. They lived here too, and they all wanted the ceasefire back in place. Good for business, good for families, gives everybody a nice warm glow, spend their money, keep the ads coming in. They were quite happy to tune out a bit of inconvenient unpleasantness, as long as it was down the country and out of the way. Nothing was ever said. Nothing needed to be. Wink wink nudge nudge say no more.

No one knows the worst thing they’re capable of until they do it.

I never would have done what they say I’

No one knows the worst thing they’re capable of until they do it.

I never would have done what they say I’ve done, to Madame, because I loved her. Yet they say I must be put to death for it, and they want me to confess. But how can I confess what I don’t believe I’ve done?

I really wanted to write a gothic novel because I feel that the gothic is an amazing form for writing about the hidden darkness beneath the surface of things and all the terrors that we’d rather not speak about. - from the Foyles video

“I wanted a Jamaican woman in Jane Austen territory,” she says. “I wanted to see what would happen to someone like Frannie making her presence felt in these sophisticated Georgian drawing rooms.” - from the Guardian interview

I really wanted to write a gothic novel because I feel that the gothic is an amazing form for writing about the hidden darkness beneath the surface of things and all the terrors that we’d rather not speak about. I found in the course of researching it there were all these sinister experiments that had been taking place since the early seventeenth century, starting with skin, but through the centuries moving to measuring skulls and brains and intelligence which seemed to me to reflect a lot of obsession of other races, and so I wanted to explore that but I also wanted to look at the ways in which many of the upper class women in Georgian society were oppressed as well, and marriage was one of the key tools for that.

As a student, realizing that my biology books were of little help explaining chimpanzee behavior, I picked up a copy of Machiavelli’s The Prince. I

As a student, realizing that my biology books were of little help explaining chimpanzee behavior, I picked up a copy of Machiavelli’s The Prince. It offered an insightful, unadorned account of human behavior based on real-life observations of the Borgias, the Medici, and the popes. The book put me in the right frame of mind to write about ape politics at the zoo.

We know our own inner states imperfectly and often mislead both ourselves and those around us. We’re masters of fake happiness, suppressed fear, and misguided love. This is why I’m pleased to work with nonlinguistic creatures. I’m forced to guess their feelings, but at least they never lead me astray by what they tell me about themselves.

The anthropomorphism argument [that we merely project our emotions onto the animals being studied] is rooted in human exceptionalism. It reflects the desire to set humans apart and deny our animality. To do so remains customary in the humanities and much of the social sciences, which thrive on the notion that the human mind is somehow our own invention…Modern neuroscience makes it impossible to maintain a sharp human-animal dualism.

We have trouble imagining fairness as an evolved trait partly due to how we depict nature. Using evocative phrases such as “survival of the fittest” and “nature red in tooth and claw,” we stress nature’s cruelty, leaving no room for fairness, only the right of the strongest. In the meantime, we forget that animals often depend on each other and survive through cooperation. In fact, they struggle far more against their environment or against hunger and disease than against each other.

The idea that we can achieve optimal sociality only by subduing human biology is antiquated. It doesn’t fit with what we know about hunter-gatherers, other primates, or modern neuroscience. It also promotes a sequential view—first we had human biology, then we got civilization—whereas in reality the two have always gone hand in hand.

We may not be in full control of our emotions, but we aren’t their slaves either. This is why you should never say “my emotions took over” as an excuse for something stupid you did, because you let your emotions take over. Getting emotional has a voluntary side. You let yourself fall in love with the wrong person, you let yourself hate certain others, you allowed greed to cloud your judgment or imagination to feed your jealousy. Emotions are never just emotions, and they are never fully automated. Perhaps the greatest misunderstanding about emotions is that they are the opposite of cognition. We have translated the dualism between body and mind into one between emotion and intelligence, but the two actually go together and cannot operate without each other.

I will only rarely refer to other species as “other animals” or “non-human animals.” For simplicity’s sake, I will mostly call them just “animals,” even though for me, as a biologist, nothing is more self-evident than that we are part of the same kingdom. We are animals. Since I don’t look at our species as emotionally much different from other mammals, and in fact would be hard-pressed to pinpoint uniquely human emotions, we had better pay careful attention to the emotional background we share with our fellow travelers on this planet. - Frans De Waal

Can you ever make a new world that properly addresses the wounds of the past? - from Lightspeed interview

Can you ever make a new world that properly addresses the wounds of the past? - from Lightspeed interview

[In medieval history] so many of these cities and civilizations were the products of waves of conquest. How does that shape the societies that survive them generations later? How do conqueror and conquered influence each other and how do their stories and legends of what happened get transmitted? Can you ever make a new world that properly addresses the wounds of the past? - from the Lightspeed interview

I wrote a lot of this while managing a large obstetrics & gynecology practice (while my husband went to medical school), and I really wanted to capture the messy reality of medicine. It’s not always glamourous and noble; it can be exhausting, the work is bloody and tiresome and challenging, and sometimes your patients are terrible. It requires a confidence bordering on arrogance to cut into a person for their own good, and I wanted to show how a character might grow into that. - from the QuilltoLive interview

Shannon Chakraborty didn’t want to be a writer when she grew up. “I wanted to be a historian, but I’ve been a bookworm since I was a kid,” she said. She originally wanted to be a historian, with a specialization in the Middle East. “That plan got a bit derailed for a variety of reasons, one of which was graduating in 2008 when the economy collapsed, so I figured I’d work while my husband went to medical school and keep my mind occupied with a little world-building/historical fan fiction,” she explains.

It’s that experience that led Chakraborty, who was born raised in New Jersey by blue-collar Catholic parents, to the seed that became The City of Brass. “It sprouted the day I set foot in the rare books library of the American University of Cairo,” she explains. There she lost herself in the stories and lore around her. “As a homesick, homework-laden, and rather wide-eyed new Muslim myself, I found in these stories a refuge; they spoke of a history that dazzled, a faith of breathtaking diversity in which my weird background was nothing new nor particularly noteworthy.”

I come from a pretty big family and always enjoy seeing well-done portrayals of complicated, messy, exasperating and yet also still loving relatives; I think it’s a thing many of us can relate to. And I’ve always had a particular fascination with rival princes. They’re fairly common in history, and yet I can’t imagine the emotions that go behind making a decision to war against your own brother.
There was certainly some inspiration from my own family. My twin brother and I are very close, and I was very protective of him, especially when we were younger, even when we were fighting. This was definitely an emotion and dynamic that I was trying to capture with Muntadhir and Ali. Though my brother isn’t a wealthy, libertine playboy destined to rule a shaky kingdom so the similarities end there!

I was born without a voice, one cold, overcast day in Brooklyn, New York. No one ever spoke of my condition. I did not know I was mute until years

I was born without a voice, one cold, overcast day in Brooklyn, New York. No one ever spoke of my condition. I did not know I was mute until years later, when I’d opened my mouth to ask for what I wanted and realized no one could hear me.

Isra cleared her throat. “But Mama, what about love?”
Mama glared at her through the steam “What about it?”
“I’ve always wanted to fall in love.”
“Fall in love? What are you saying? Did I raise a sharmouta?” [slut]
“No…no…” Isra hesitated. “But what if the suitor and I don’t love each other?”
“Love each other? What does love have to do with marriage? You think your father and I love each other?”
Isra’s eyes shifted to the ground. “I thought you must, a little.”
Mama sighed. “Soon you’ll learn that there’s no room for love in a woman’s life. There’s only one thing you’ll need, and that’s patience.”

“A Thousand and One Nights?” Sarah paused to think. “Isn’t that the story of a king who vows to marry and kill a different woman every night because his wife cheats on him.”
“Yes!” Isra said, excited that Sarah had read it. “Then he’s tricked by Scheherazade, who tells him a new story for a thousand and one nights until he eventually spares her life. I must have read it a million times.”
“Really?” Sara said. “It isn’t that good.”
“But it is. I love the storytelling, the way so many tales unfold at once, the idea of a woman telling stories for her life. It’s beautiful.”
Sarah shrugged. “I’m not a big fan of make-believe stories.”
Isra’s eyes sprung wide. “It’s not make-believe!”
“It’s about genies and viziers, which don’t exist. I prefer stories about real life.”
“But it is about real life,” Isra said. ”It’s about the strength and resilience of women. No one asks Scheherazade to marry the king. She volunteers on behalf of all women to save the daughters of Muslims everywhere. For a thousand and one nights, Scherehazade’s stories were resistance. Her voice was a weapon—a reminder of the extraordinary power of stories, and even more, the strength of a single woman.”

“Silence is the only option for Palestinian women suffering domestic violence, even here in America, and I hope to give voice to these women in my…novel.” - Etaf Rum

The wounds of her childhood—poverty, hunger, abuse—had taught her. That the traumas of the world were inseparably connected. She was not surprised when her father came home and beat them mercilessly, the tragedy of the Nakba [The 1948 Palestinian diaspora] bulging in his veins... She knew that the suffering of women started in the suffering of men, that the bondages of one became the bondages of the other. Would the men in her life have battered her had they not been battered themselves?

Earlier that week, when he was explaining that Maximilian Everard controlled more than a fifth of the votes in the state via his sway over his whit

Earlier that week, when he was explaining that Maximilian Everard controlled more than a fifth of the votes in the state via his sway over his white friends who in turn held sway over the Negro tenants farming their land, Paul Johnson had warned Montgomery about the evening they were going to spend at Bluest Heaven, noting, “Those boys there will be true Delta.” Monty had understood the phrase to refer to any white plantation owner from the “Valley of the Lower Mississippi” who was socially entitled, financially comfortable and, as if Zeno had devised a paradox concerning Kentucky bourbon, perpetually fixed halfway between sober and drunk. He knew those weren’t the only paradoxes of their breed. True Deltans were also, simultaneously, ostentatious and genteel, careful of debt but careless with risk, patrician planters and rugged frontiersmen, as hedonisticly liberal as they were politically conservative—the most Mississippian of Mississippians. In the main parlor, a semicircular room with ceilings eighteen feet high and alcoves built into the walls to exhibit marble statuary, Monty was introduced to a group of men who made him realize he’d barely understood the half of it.

The South has, to put it lightly, a fraught past, with slavery and the Civil War and, more recently, racism, misogyny, homophobia, and anti-intellectualism. We have a perpetual BOGO sale on social issues. In American Pop, I tried to grapple with those issues, not only as they relate to the South, but also as they relate to the country as a whole. There’s a reason I didn’t title the novel Southern Pop. The South’s problems are also America’s problems, and that’s never been clearer than it is in our current political situation. - from The Millions interview

Decades later, over drinks at The Brook one evening, William K. Vanderbilt II would jokingly ask, “What gave you the nerve to even try to land a Teague?” to which Houghton answered that it was the same thing that let their ancestors think about leaving the old country, the same thing that helped those first settlers wrest farmland from the wilderness, the same thing giving their waiter that look of defiance tempered with envy, but on August 6, 1890, the smell of honeysuckle flowers in the air and the taste of apple pulp on his lips, the most profundity Houghton could muster while kissing Annabelle was the thought, Thank God this happened sometime before I die.

Families are always rising and falling in America. But, I believe, we ought to examine more closely the how and why of it, which in the end revolves around life and how you live it.

Soda has always seemed to me such an American drink. It is to this country what wine is to France, tea to England, beer to Germany, or toilet water to misbehaving dogs. Soda is especially pervasive in the South, where I’m from and the region I love exploring, scrutinizing, praising, and criticizing in my work. As Nancy Lemann wrote in the sublime Lives of the Saints, “Southerners need carbonation.” Soda, I figured, would enable me to wed the national and the regional, America and the South, and examine the relationship between them. - from The Millions interview

My first conception of the book was for it to be the opposite of Capote‘s “nonfiction novel” In Cold Blood. I wanted American Pop to be fictional nonfiction. To achieve that effect, I used certain techniques of nonfiction, such as source citations, quotes from interviews, and the use of specific dates and times, similar to what Michael Chabon did in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and Susanna Clarke in Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. – from The Millions interview

On his way back downstairs, Robert passed a rare photograph from 1910’s notorious “PanCola Summit,” a weeklong motivational sales meeting. The photo featured hundreds of Panhandlers crowded in front of a platform. According to the expose “The Church of Pan, or the Cult of Pan?” written by a British reporter who infiltrated the event, it was less of a pep rally and more of an indoctrination, creating mindless automatons whose only goal in life was to sell sugar water. “This wasn’t the country I’d envisioned,” began the expose, if Robert remembered correctly. “It was the South, a country within a country. But which was more real, the exterior one or the interior, the body or the soul?”

…America seems to remain fearful of strategic adaptability in any setting. We are wedded to the notion that we shouldn’t change a policy until it h

…America seems to remain fearful of strategic adaptability in any setting. We are wedded to the notion that we shouldn’t change a policy until it has failed, unwilling to ask ourselves how we can do better. Clinging to the status-quo is, in the short-term, an easy course of action, but it is also a dangerous one.

Conflicts breed like tribbles, and the international community is proved powerless to stop them. This growing entropy signifies the emergence of a new global system that I call “durable disorder,” which contains rather than solves problems. This condition will define the coming age. The world will not collapse into anarchy; however, the rules-based order we know will crumble and be replaced by something more organic and wild.

Cyber is important, but not in ways people think. It gives us new ways of doing old things: sabotage, theft, propaganda, deceit, and espionage. None of this is new. Cyberwar’s real power in modern warfare is influence, not sabotage. Using the internet to change people’s minds is more powerful than blowing up a server, and there’s nothing new about propaganda…Weaponized information will be the WMD of the future, and victory will be won in the influence space.

From the weakening European Union to the raging Middle East, states are breaking down into regimes or are manifestly failing. They are being replaced by other things, such as networks, caliphates, narco-states, warlord kingdoms, corporatocracies, and wastelands. Syria and Iraq may never be viable states again, at least not in the traditional sense. The Fragile States Index, an annual ranking of 178 countries that measures state weakness using social science methods, warned in 2017 that 70 percent of the world’s countries were “fragile.” This trend continues to worsen…But the Westphalian Order is dying.

One can begin to see a medieval universe unfolding, in which nations, churches, and the wealthy each pursue global ambitions as world powers. They will all use force when necessary because it can be bought once again, as in the Middle Ages. The use of private force will expand in the decades to come, because nothing is in place to stop its growth, and in so doing, it will turn the super-rich into potential superpowers.

Stay where you are and simply feel the panic without trying to distract yourself. Place the palm of your hand on your stomach and breathe slowly and deeply. - recommendation from the NHS