Still job hunting here, it is an exciting time to be here, there will be a lot of people leaving the hill to work on campaigns soon enough so hopefully there will be some job openings coming up soon.
Played some basketball today down in DC, my first club lax game is Tuesday up in Howard County, it should be fun.
Just finished a few books; Friedman's The World is Flat, Amaryta Sen's Identity and Violence and Thomas Hoschild's King Leopold's Ghost.
Friedman's work was brilliant a decisive argument for the defense of globalization and free trade whilst not ignoring the negative aspects of the most shaping force of our young century.
Sen's work is a book I started a while ago and picked up again to finish it, a very quick read it does a great job challenging the close-minded belief that we are in a clash of civilizations, as many have put it. He argues that we must continue to define people less narrowly, once we begin to define someone by their religious identity or other's we lose all of their other identities. For instance, someone can be an African-American woman, a democrat, a soldier, a mother, a daughter, and a christian. When we narrowly define someone by one of these traits we overlook all of the others, which may be more important to understanding who they are.
King Leopold's Ghost is a comprehensive indictment of the colonial practices of the Belgian king, and the book's namesake, in the Congo in the early 20th century. The book also carries the more broad message of anti colonialism. A very great historical read on the history of the development of the Congo as a colony but is the same old (though correct) anti-colonial thought echoed in every dissection of the practice.
I am about to start Freakonomics, which I hear is quite an intriguing read.
Saturday, June 21, 2008
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