Ian Buruma and Yasheng Huang for PS Read More

I Am Homeless if This Is Not My Home, by Lorrie Moore; Berlin! Berlin!, by Kurt Tucholsky; and more. The PS Say More Newsletter [PS Read More]( In this week's edition of PS Read More, we share recommendations from author Ian Buruma, and highlight a new work by Yasheng Huang, Professor of Global Economics and Management at MIT Sloan School of Management. Ian Buruma Recommends... [I Am Homeless if This Is Not My Home]( By Lorrie Moore "I don’t read very much contemporary fiction, but Lorri Moore’s latest novel gave me enormous pleasure. It is the story of a kind of road trip taken by a man, whose brother is dying in hospital, and a corpse. If one can imagine Ingmar Bergman making an American road movie, this is what it might look like. The tone is melancholic, the subject macabre, and the humor utterly wonderful." [L’étrange défaite (Strange Defeat)]( By Marc Bloch "The great French historian Marc Bloch wrote this extraordinary book in 1940, after France fell to the German Blitzkrieg. Before joining the resistance – a decision for which he would pay with his life in 1944 – Bloch attempted to figure out why France had become such easy prey for Germany. He highlighted the complacency of French elites, France’s sclerotic armed forces, and the lack of trust in French political institutions. A great stylist, Bloch is worth reading just for his masterful prose. But his wisdom, though applied to a specific time and place, is for the ages." [Berlin! Berlin!]( By Kurt Tucholsky "While researching a book in Berlin this spring, I read this collection of short essays by one of the Weimar Republic’s great journalists. Like Bloch, Tucholsky writes about a place that no longer exists. His jokes, his criticisms, and his descriptions have the flavor of a city seething with artistic excitement, deep social divisions, and creeping political violence. But change does not obliterate everything. There is still much about Berlin today that one can recognize in the sparkling sentences of this master satirist." Don't miss Buruma's recent Say More interview, in which he suggests how the United States can defend democracy globally, warns that political violence could mar next year’s presidential election, highlights the imagined realities that increasingly pervade political life, even in democracies, and more. [Read now](. By a PS Contributor [The Rise and the Fall of the EAST: How Exams, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology Brought China Success and Might Lead to its Decline]( By Yasheng Huang Huang says: "Chinese society has long been shaped by the interplay among exams, autocracy, stability, and technology – the 'EAST.' From the Sui dynasty’s introduction of the civil-service exam, known as Keju, in 587 CE through the personnel-management system used by today's Communist Party of China (CPC), the country's autocratic governments have developed exceptional tools for homogenizing ideas, norms, and practices. But this uniformity came with a huge downside: stifled creativity. In The Rise and the Fall of the EAST, I describe how the implementation of Keju took China from dynamism to extreme stagnation, and show how China’s most prosperous periods, such as during the Tang dynasty (618-907) and under the reformist CPC, occurred when its emphasis on scale (the size of bureaucracy) was balanced with attention to scope (diversity of ideas). This carries an important lesson for China's current leadership. With the CPC under Xi Jinping again valuing conformity over new ideas, China is in danger of technological decline." [PS. Subscribe to PS Digital now.]( [Facebook]( [Twitter]( [LinkedIn]( Project Syndicate publishes and provides, on a not-for-profit basis, original commentary by the world's leading thinkers to more than 500 media outlets in over 150 countries. This newsletter does not entitle the recipient to re-publish any of the content it contains. This newsletter is a service of [Project Syndicate](. [Change your newsletter preferences](. Follow us on [Facebook]( [Twitter]( and [YouTube](. © Project Syndicate, all rights reserved. [Unsubscribe from all newsletters](.