The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver
excerpt from a review by Noam Scheiber ( Nov. 2, 2012 , N.Y. Times)
"It’s largely about evaluating predictions in a variety of fields, from finance to weather to epidemiology."
"What Silver is doing here is playing the role of public statistician — bringing simple but powerful empirical methods to bear on a controversial policy question, and making the results accessible to anyone with a high-school level of numeracy. The exercise is not so different in spirit from the way public intellectuals like John Kenneth Galbraith once shaped discussions of economic policy and public figures like Walter Cronkite helped sway opinion on the Vietnam War. Except that their authority was based to varying degrees on their establishment credentials, whereas Silver’s derives from his data savvy in the age of the stats nerd."
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George Lakoff:
2004. Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate.
- 2008. The Political Mind : Why You Can't Understand 21st-Century American Politics with an 18th-Century Brain, ISBN 978-0-670-01927-4
Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Ph.D.:
Presidents Creating the Presidency (University of Chicago Press, 2008), Echo Chamber: Rush Limbaugh and the Conservative Media Establishment (Oxford, 2008) and unSpun: Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation (Random House, 2007). Dr. Jamieson has won university-wide teaching awards at each of the three universities at which she has taught and political science or communication awards for four of her books. Her book, co-authored with Kate Kenski and Bruce Hardy, The Obama Victory: How Media, Money, and Messages Shaped the 2008 Election, was released in June 2010.
John Rawls:
John Rawls (February 21, 1921 - November 24, 2002) was an American philosopher and a leading figure in moral and political philosophy. He held the James Bryant Conant University Professorship at Harvard University.
His magnum opus, A Theory of Justice (1971), was hailed at the time of its publication as "the most important work in moral philosophy since the end of World War II,"[1] and is now regarded as "one of the primary texts in political philosophy."[2
Justice As Fairness: A Restatement, a response to criticisms of A Theory of Justice. (2002)
Rawls' contribution to political and moral philosophy
Rawls is noted for his contributions to liberal political philosophy. Among the ideas from Rawls' work that have received wide attention are:
- Justice as Fairness (comprising the Liberty Principle, Fair Equality of Opportunity, and the Difference Principle.)
- The original position
- Reflective equilibrium
- Overlapping consensus
- Public reason
- Veil of ignorance
Howard Zinn:
A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present (Paperback)
byHoward Zinn (shelved 57 times as political)
Naomi Klein:
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
Legacy of Ashes:
(A History of the CIA)
June 28, 2007
For the last sixty years, the CIA has managed to maintain a formidable reputation in spite of its terrible record, burying its blunders in top-secret archives. Its mission was to know the world. When it did not succeed, it set out to change the world. Its failures have handed us, in the words of President Eisenhower, “a legacy of ashes.”
Now Pulitzer Prize–winning author Tim Weiner offers the first definitive history of the CIA—and everything is on the record. LEGACY OF ASHES is based on more than 50,000 documents, primarily from the archives of the CIA itself, and hundreds of interviews with CIA veterans, including ten Directors of Central Intelligence. It takes the CIA from its creation after World War II, through its battles in the cold war and the war on terror, to its near-collapse after 9/ll.
Tim Weiner’s past work on the CIA and American intelligence was hailed as “impressively reported” and “immensely entertaining” in The New York Times.
The Wall Street Journal called it “truly extraordinary . . . the best book ever written on a case of espionage.” Here is the hidden history of the CIA: why eleven presidents and three generations of CIA officers have been unable to understand the world; why nearly every CIA director has left the agency in worse shape than he found it; and how these failures have profoundly jeopardized our national security.
The Building: A Biography of the Pentagon
Steve Vogel
The Pentagon: A History: The Untold Story of the Wartime Race to Build the Pentagon –and to Restore it Sixty Years Later