I just finished reading "The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century," by George Friedman, and I hope he is wrong about nearly everything. His thesis is that we humans don't have much choice in our international politics, that we are guided by geopolitical considerations, and that armed conflict is inevitable. The book is an odd mix of plausible scenarios and wacky Star Wars fantasies.
Read MoreI happened to find myself in a Whole Foods store a week ago and noticed the wide coffee selection. Not being able to help myself, I picked up some single-source beans from Ecuador. For much of the week, I have been drinking it, mostly as espresso, alternating with the pricier Kenyan beans from an indie shop that I wrote about last week as part ofmy ongoing coffee quest. This has kept me alert through a few hours of an extracurricular project, listening to the audiobook version of "Shantaram," by David Gregory McDonald, a potboiler set in India.
Read MoreI'm happy to report that I finally finished the 900+ page "Anathem" by Neal Stephenson, just four months (!) after starting it. I have to admit that I took breaks to read a few other things. I previously posted about the difficult, otherworldly vocabulary that Stephenson made up for this book. (For example, the "Reticulum" is similar to what we call the Web or the Internet, though you have to figure that out based on the description of a narrator who is basically a cloistered monk who never uses technology. "Jeejahs" are smart phones or mobile devices of some sort. Videos are "speelies" recorded with "speelycaptors." Those are some of the neologisms that feel apt. Not all of them do.)
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