What Would Machiavelli Do?

Stanley Bing is the second reason that I buy Fortune magazine at the airport (the first depends on what is on the cover). Bing writes a column on the last page and (even if the entire magazine sucks that month) his column makes it worth the price of a latte that you have to pay for it.

What Would Machiavelli Do? by Stanley Bing, like the column, is super funny (100 Bullshit Jobs and How to Get Them is also funny). And, while Bing makes it clear (even insists) that you shouldn’t have to bother with reading the actual Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli, I started to give it a try (owned it for years).

Before I even got to the text itself, I took a detour. In the foreword to the version published by “Everyman’s Library” the author writes:

The aim is to extract from observed events those recurrent features that provide a basis for practical action. If, as Machiavelli claims, politics can be a science comparable to medicine, then history is its pathology. The decline and fall of the Roman state has always had an obsessive interest for commentators; it could be called the shaping myth of western political thought. (xiii)

Of course, after reading that, I got distracted by Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America by Cullen Murphy. The Prince will wait, I think, a few more years (back to the shelf with Sun Tzu and The Art of War).

How Much Do I Love The Economist?

While I was an international relations student in the early 90s, the saying used to be that if you wanted to be a Foreign Service Officer, you had to read The Economist magazine or the New York Times every week for a year (every single printed word). If you did that, the conventional wisdom went, you were sure to have an FSO business card.

Since the New York Times has fallen on hard times, I suspect students today have dropped it from the list, but I am certain the belief in The Economist still persists.

Anyway, I never became an FSO (the Internet boom intervened), but I did start reading it every week and have never stopped. It is simply the best magazine published today. I could wax on and on about how great it is and why, but I will give one reason here:

The book review section is totally awesome. For example, the review of Alan Greenspan’s new book The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World in the most recent issue (here) is perfect.

Plus, how much do I want to read Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy by Eric D. Weitz? A lot. Not because the review (here) is glowing, but because it is a perfect review.