What I'm Reading: Eclectic Edition

The fruits of a week of free reading were a fascinating book on China and a political science article which explains a quirk of far-right politics.

Some weeks, as I try to research a particular idea or understand a particular event, my lists of reading have clear themes: what to read understand three books about Y.

This is… not one of those weeks. Instead, I felt intellectual entropy, moving from one topic to another. I decided to look into it, letting my brain run wild and trusting that it will take me somewhere interesting.

I'm happy with the results : a fascinating new book about China, a new political science article that explains a quirk of far-right politics, and a puzzle-box detective novel set a few miles from my house. Here is my eclectic reading list:

Beijing Rules: How China Armed Its Economy to Take on the World, by Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian, proved particularly relevant this week. after reports that a British Parliament researcher was arrested in March on suspicion of working for the Chinese government. Allen-Ebrahimian, Axios' China reporter, cleverly combines analysis of China's efforts to infiltrate Western institutions via "authoritarian economic policy" with a look at why the West is vulnerable to such campaigns of influence. And although the book comes from a genre of nonfiction in which prose style tends to take a back seat to argumentation, "Beijing Rules" contains some fine writing, making it a pleasure to read.

“The enemy of my enemy is my friend” has long been a well-known saying, but now, thanks to this interesting new article from the American Political Science Review is also about political science. The authors study whether hostility toward immigrants, particularly Muslims, actually helped generate support for LGBT+ rights among otherwise conservative nativist voters.

They found that citizens “strategically liberalize” their position on LGBT+ rights when told that people from an external ethnic group – for example Muslim immigrants in Europe – oppose such protections. In one particularly high-profile example, after a Muslim man committed a mass shooting at a gay nightclub in 2016, Donald Trump gave a speech calling the attack "a strike at the heart and soul of who we are as as a nation” and “an attack on the ability of free people to live their lives, to love who they want and to express their identity. »

This likely means that public support for gay rights is lower than it appears, the researchers conclude, because some of the apparent support in favor of inclusion is actually a desire to exclude others. (Again, Trump is a useful example: although he embraced gay rights in the Pulse speech as a cudgel against Muslims, in practice his administration has dismantled LGBT protections, including repealing rules against discrimination in the workplace and banning transgender people from the military. )

“The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels,” a new mystery by Janice Hallett , was my lightest read. Hallett structures his novels as files of found documents, transcriptions, and other evidence, leaving the reader trying to find the...