In Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, Man-ning Marable examines Malcolm X’s life from several angles, which is necessary given the fact that he played many differ-ent, often contradictory, parts during his life. He started out as a smalltime crimi-nal, who became a self-made intellectual, who became a white-hating black nation-alist, who became a follower of The Na-tion of Islam.

Malcolm X does not offer any psychologi-cal insights as to why Malcolm became such a figure of many faces, but rather focuses on the way his different layers re-lated to each other, and how others per-ceived him. According to Marable, Mal-colm’s fickleness was precisely what gave him a broad appeal: “Malcolm’s journey of reinvention was in many ways centered on his lifelong quest to discern the meaning and substance of faith. As a prisoner, he embraced an antiwhite quasi-Islamic sect that nevertheless validated his fragment-ed sense of humanity and ethnic identity. But as he travelled across the world...Mal-colm came to adopt true Islam’s universal-ism, and its belief that all could find Allah’s grace regardless of race.”

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In Malcolm X: A Life of ReinventionManning Marable

Greece isn’t the only country struggling with a huge debt. According to Endgame: The End of the Debt SuperCycle and How It Changes Everything, we’re all in trou-ble. The book gives a detailed, easy to read overview of the world economy and its interacting financial systems.

What does the Debt SuperCycle entail? “Over a period of about sixty years,” au-thors John Mauldin and Jonathan Tepper explain, “debt levels grew faster than in-comes. By 2008 the burden of debt be-came too much to bear and the debt su-percycle came to an end. People started deleveraging and banks started collapsing due to low levels of capital and large loss-es from loans people couldn’t pay back.” Their book is built on the premise that the accumilation of debt today will affect your ability to spend money in the future. It’s not rocket science. However, applying this on a macroeconomic level has proven to be quite complicated. “We forsee rising inflation in many parts of the world,” the authors note, “reductions in real income as people lose purchasing power due to higher food and fuel prices and more mac-roeconomic volatility.”

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Book & Review

Endgame: The End of the Debt SuperCycle and How It Changes EverythingJohn Mauldin and Jonathan Tepper

‘Most Human Human.’ It was this title that author Brian Christian set out to win in 2009, when he enrolled in the Turing Test; a test which determines a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behavior. A human judge engages in a conversation with both a human and a machine, each of which tries to appear human.

Somehow, humans are becoming less hu-man, Christian argues, which explains why the computer Elbot fooled 30 percent of the judges in 2008’s competition. Chris-tian explores the depths of his degrees in computer science, poetry, and philosophy to unravel just what it is that makes hu-man thought unique. “One of the first win-ners [of the Most Human Human prize], in 1994, was the journalist and science-fic-tion writer Charles Platt. How’d he do it? By being moody, irritable, and obnoxious,” the author points out. Can machines re-place humans? Not according to Christian: “For everyone out there fighting to write idiosyncratic, high-entropy, unpredictable, unruly text, swimming upstream of spell-check and predictive auto-completion: Don’t let them banalize you.”

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The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive

Political order begins in ancient China, says political scientist and author Francis Fukuyama. By the time of the Chin dy-nasty in 221 B.C., some how 10,000 in-dividual chiefdoms had merged into one state. What happened? In short: the state evolved to allow for a more effective mak-ing of war. A strategy which proved to be successful in other countries as well.

Fukuyama is concerned mostly with the cultural, not biological, aspects of human society. But he explicitly assumes that hu-man social nature is universal and is built around certain evolved behaviors. For ex-ample, our propensity for warfare, and our desire to create and follow rules, are part of our wiring. In this book, Fukuyama at-tempts to understand how humans moved from tribal and familial connections to organized institutions of states and gov-ernments. “In the developed world,” he writes, “we take the existence of a govern-ment so much for granted that we some-times forget how difficult it was to create.”

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The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French RevolutionFrancis Fukuyama