For students look for updates on the Spring 2021 plans:

(1). Am I teaching? Yes. I am going to go ahead and teach Gov. 50 and Gov. 65. I had the opportunity to be out on leave this spring (Spring 2021), but as the election returns came in… I thought, there is no way I am not going to teach public admin (with an incoming administration, which is always an interesting time) and public opinion (what just happened?) after an election like that. So I’m currently planning to be out on a research leave in Spring 2022. If you want to take these courses at any point over the next two years, now’s the time.

(2). Gov. 65 (public opinion) will include a lot of new material related to the 2020 election. I mean: how could it not? As I wrote in the CMC post-election questions, it is certainly worth waiting until the vote is actually counted to really start making pronouncements about what exactly happened this year with regard to polling and so on. Still, it seems that there is a lot of interest in understanding what actually took place — why the election seemed to be so much closer than expected in some of the key states. This is not the only material in Gov. 65, but it is going to be a big part of the course.

In general, Gov. 65 is a constantly evolving course because:

• I am frequently running new projects that I can use as examples in the course.

• There are great new publicly-available data sets for more recent events.

• The state of public opinion itself is changing.

• The state-of-the-art technology for data collection and analysis continues to change rapidly too.

This spring we’ll focus a fair amount on a couple of major themes:

• Understanding the 2020 election (I ran a pre-election survey this year, and we’ll look at other data too). This will involve both the technical aspects (how did the polling go? What should be done to improve it?) and the substantive interpretation (what does it all mean?).

• My continued interest in primary elections and within-party competition for office (and the implications for political accountability and the success or failure of particular political ideologies). I have a lot of new data for this.

• The intersection between public opinion and political institutions. This is a major theme of a project on the death penalty I’m working on currently with fellow CMC Professor Bessette. Included as part of this survey project is some interesting data on public attitudes towards “defunding the police” as well, and related topics.

I think it will be a lot of fun. At least in terms of material: a lot of what we will work with in class is directly related to current research projects of mine. This is stuff I really care about (and will argue you should too!).

I am still thinking about how best to manage teaching this material remotely, if that is what we end up doing. I’m still learning from my current students this term (Fall 2020) about what is working and not. Of course, we’ll also get some certainty before too long about whether there will be an on-campus component or not. What I wrote in the late October update is still true: there will be some synchronous and some asynchronous components of the course. I think this course in particular requires a lot of 1-on-1 (or at least very small groups) work, so I will build in a lot of opportunities for that.

This course is easier if you’ve already had a stats-related course (like Gov. 55), but a lot of this material is not directly covered in any great detail in those first-level courses, so it is not a requirement. I’ll teach a lot of this at the level of “hand-waiving” at some of the details; I am not going to try to teach you several semesters of stats all at once. We will also do this course using Stata, which I think is a nice balance between being professionally useful and being accessible.

This course will count as a Group A elective for the data science sequence and as an elective in the data science major. It also counts as an elective for the public policy major and the government major.

If you are interested in the course, feel free to send me an email to check in and ask whatever questions you might have.

(3). The material from Gov. 50 will be critical for understanding the coming conflicts in the Biden Administration. Whatever the final results of the 2020 election turn out to be — we won’t know the outcome of the two Georgia runoffs for U.S. Senate for some time — it seems likely that Democrats will not have an easy time passing legislation in the U.S. Senate. Additionally, with recent additions to the U.S. Supreme Court, the Biden Administration will face a skeptical judiciary. So several of the major themes of Gov. 50 will end up being important for the unfolding story of U.S. politics:

• How will the conflicts between the more moderate and more progressive Democrats play out within the administration, and how will that translate into action by federal agencies?

• What are the limits of executive power for action in periods of congressional gridlock?

• “Whose bureaucracy is this anyway?” Does it belong to Congress, or President Biden? To what extent for each, and for what purposes?

• And, in the presence of gridlock in Washington: what’s going on in public administration at the state and local level?

This should be a really fascinating time, with many events related to the course material actually occurring as the term unfolds.

As with Gov. 65, this is also a course I really enjoy teaching because it is close to my own research interests. Public administration is about a lot more than just learning what people do who run agencies (although that is quite interesting!). It’s about thinking through how anything gets done in a democracy, where the elected officials themselves aren’t going to do the actual work. Studying public administration helps to answer this question: “ok, the election is over… so… now what?”

As with Gov. 65, I wrote up some initial thoughts about how I will manage this in the spring (in October; see the previous blog post). The plan will continue to be developed as I get some more information back from my current students, get a bit more detail about CMC’s plans for the spring, and have a chance to think in some more detail about how I want to modify the course post-election.

These things will definitely be in the plan:

• I still think everyone interested in public affairs should read The Power Broker. This is a great extended example for this course. Frequently, students have mentioned to me after the class (in their evaluations, or just chatting later) that this was a highlight of the course. I love the book. We’re doing it. (PS: this makes a great audio book, so if you are tired of Zoom… this is something you can do while taking a walk. It’s great.).

• I like doing asynchronous podcasts for a lot of content delivery. I particularly like the idea that you can listen to these and get your eyes of a screen too — I know students are spending a lot of time in their chairs at their computers. I’ll try to liberate you from that as much as I can. Of course, there will be some synchronous components too, and plenty of opportunities for discussion and so on.

• Writing assignments that are intended to have you practice the actual skills you will need in for working in public affairs. (Lots of writing memos.)

• A focus on exploring careers in public affairs. I think this is one of the exciting parts about taking a course in public administration — you get a sense of what people actually do, and how they get those jobs, and whether or not you think those might be fun careers (they are!).

Gov. 50 satisfies the policy process requirement in the public policy major. It also satisfies the intermediate requirement in the government major.

Before closing this out: I do want to say ‘thank you’ to my current students in Gov. 20 and Gov. 116. I’ve been so lucky to have an outstanding group this fall, with all the challenges of teaching remotely, having the election, and all the other stuff. They’ve done a lot to help make clear what kinds of issues will be challenges for this spring. To the extent things will go well this spring, a lot of it will be to their credit - not mine.

Let me know if you have questions about the courses!

Andy Sinclair

For students looking for information on Spring 2021, here’s where things are now…

As of today, I’m scheduled to teach Gov. 50 (Public Admin) and Gov. 65 (Public Opinion).* So let’s talk about plans for those courses. We should know in early December — December 9th or so — whether there will be an on-campus option in Spring 2021. As with planning for Fall 2020, what makes sense is to plan for an online program while having some idea of how to shift some of it on campus in the event we are able to do some in-person things. We are, I think, getting better at this: remote teaching 2.0 this fall was a lot better than the hurried emergency-basis remote teaching 1.0 of Spring 2020. Of course, there is a lot to learn from our experiences this term too.

I am very proud, first of all, of my students in Gov. 20 (Intro American) and Gov. 116 (Public Policy Process) — they have done such a great job this term adapting to the challenging circumstances that come with Covid-19 and remote learning. As always, though, while I could not wish for better students, I can certainly think of some things to do differently in designing my courses. This outlines some of what I have learned so far.

What has gone well:

• Having some synchronous component for conversation. It’s nice to see people, and to see people in small groups. In general, I tried to schedule as much of the synchronous component in the regular course time slot as possible. In my Gov. 20 course, I had a number of students with significant time-zone differences; I am offering an alternative time for those students, and will consider doing so again next term if I have the demand for it.

• Using the Forum feature on Sakai. I think I will probably do even more of this next term, although I may change some things about how I do it.

• Producing my classes as “podcasts.” I think it is good for students to get out and away from their computers. The “lecture” component will really be something students can listen to while out taking a walk.

What needs the most work:

• Cutting down on the number of things, course components, tasks, buttons to click. I’ve heard this from a lot of students: many courses innovated by making a lot of neat stuff. Individually, this might be fine; as a whole, though, it is just too much. I’ll do my part to make the courses simpler and easier to manage.

• A slightly more realistic production schedule. The podcasts take a long time to make. Preparing each week of class is taking about twice as long as preparing to teach in person. So a more realistic schedule will be better for everybody.

So both courses will broadly have these components. I’ll get some more feedback from my current students before finalizing spring plans. Still: lecture delivered as podcasts; focused small-group discussions; and regular whole-group asynchronous discussion online that can include discussion of current events.

Gov. 50 and Gov. 65 are very different types of courses. Gov. 50 (public administration) is a very reading-intensive course; I ask students to read the whole of The Power Broker. It’s a real epic. Students have typically told me that this was their favorite part of the course, as well it should be: it is one of the greatest books of all time about politics. It’s a classic lectures-readings-discussion-papers course, and as such is well-suited to having significant asynchronous components. Gov. 65 (public opinion) is a course that includes (but is not limited to) learning a lot of technical material — more or less, how to analyze survey data in Stata. That course will operate on more of a “problem-set/project” basis. Students often need a lot more synchronous individual help (“what is wrong with my code?”) with that material. So the structure of each course will differ a little bit, while sharing many of the same common elements that seem to be part of a reasonable response to these circumstances.

I haven’t made a new syllabus yet for either one. I want to see a bit more of how this current term works, and to get a lot more feedback from my current students, before committing to a final plan for the spring. But that’s the basic idea, and I hope it will give you some general sense of my approach. If you have more questions, feel free to get in touch using my college email (asinclair at cmc dot edu).

Warm regards —

A.S.

* I may end up on a research leave in either Spring 2021 or Spring 2022. If I am teaching in Spring 2021, then I likely won’t be in Spring 2022 (and the reverse); if you want to take either of these classes, you may want to take that into account, and take it when it is available. If you have questions about this, just shoot me an email.

[UPDATE POSTED: SEE POST ABOVE FROM 11/8/20]

I have had a few students email me about plans for the Fall 2020 semester, so I thought I would write something for everyone.  I do not have any secret information about returning the campus, but I can tell you about my own course plans.  This term, I am signed up to teach Govt 20 (Introduction to American Politics) and Govt 116 (Public Policy Process).  I plan to teach Govt 50 (Public Administration) and Govt 65 (Public Opinion) in the spring term; I will focus these comments, though, on my two fall courses.

For those of you who have written to ask questions: thank you.  It is a delight to teach CMC students, and I’m sorry you’re going to college in the middle of this Covid-19 mess.  I very much appreciate your positive and enterprising spirits, though; I am sure we will get through this all together somehow.     

Intellectual Debate and Distance

In my Introduction to American Politics course, I ask my students to read a book chapter focused on the late-in-life exchange of letters between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.[1]  As I have thought about what teaching at Claremont McKenna will look like in the Fall 2020 semester, I have thought a lot about those letters.  Only July 15, 1813, Adams wrote to Jefferson, his old friend, and later bitter political rival: “You and I, ought not to die, before We have explained ourselves to each other.”[2]  Like many political and cultural leaders of their era, they carried on a lively intellectual exchange: the content of the exchange is interesting, of course, for what I teach; the existence of the exchange is inspiring for how I will teach in the era of Covid-19.

I’m going to be teaching my courses with an “online” backbone, with in-person components if possible.  Perhaps the right way to say that, though, is that I’m teaching them at a distance.  If productive intellectual exchange could be carried out over tremendous distances – across oceans crossed only at great hazard, over roads turned into seas of mud – with the technology of 1800, we ought to be able to do the same now with all of our modern conveniences.  It would be nice to be on campus and in person.  If we are allowed to – at the time I write this, CMC has not announced if there will be an in-person component or not – I would like to meet up in person with my students even this semester.  Still, the heart of political discussion and learning is the thoughtful formulation of intellectual arguments; the minimum requirements for productive exchange simply have not changed very much since Adams put quill pen to paper.  You need books, articles, news, and experiences for references, data, and all the raw materials of arguments.  You need some way to exchange information, to put forward your own views and test them against others, and to learn by seeing where your own ideas could be improved.  And that, really, is pretty much it.

I am genuinely quite enthusiastic about the fall term.  It has captured my own imagination, anyway; there is something authentic and challenging about this kind of intellectual exchange which really appeals to me.  Before the Covid-19 pandemic, I had not really thought about un-bundling the traditional classroom activities into component parts: like most professors, I taught in a fairly similar way to how I had been taught myself.  The product was reasonably good, I think (although I’m probably not the right person to make that assessment); at least, I’ve always had reasonably good teaching reviews both at NYU and (now) at CMC.  The crisis has generated a need to innovate, though, and it turns out I find the innovations to be pretty exciting.  What is perhaps most telling is that I think some of the changes I will adopt for the Fall 2020 semester will remain part of my teaching approach – even when we have returned to more normal operations.

My Fall 2020 Plan

My approach to teaching at this time involves unbundling the traditional classroom experience.  Before: in a particular class period, students could expect to get some lecture (interruptions and questions welcome), some peer-to-peer group interactions, and some general discussion.  In addition, there always was what my father calls “the meeting after the meeting” – standing around after class, or walking off to the next place, just having a general (and slightly less restrained) conversation about politics.  That was a class period: four different things.  A course also included other components; individual meetings in office hours, reading, writing different kinds of assignments, and really working to pull the material together to make a student’s own understanding of the course (in preparing for an exam – but the value is not in the exam, it is in the studying!).  Those are also four different kinds of activities, making eight in total.  In thinking about the term, I have been trying to figure out how best to accomplish these tasks in the current environment.

While I’m still working out the details, I’m leaning towards doing something like this:

Lectures.  The lectures are going to become something more similar to a podcast.  What had been a traditional lecture will be broken up into smaller podcast-sized parts and I will record and distribute these to be consumed asynchronously.  That is: students can listen at their own convenience.  This will be video lectures because it is often helpful to display stuff on the screen, but these are intended for listening.   

Conversations.  I have always liked including some component of peer-to-peer small-group discussion in my classes.  I will carefully organize groups for this that will take place synchronously – a live thing at a particular time, in which everyone is expected to participate.  The purpose of these groups is not to debate – to convince someone else to change their mind, or to convince an audience that one student is right and another wrong.  These are intended to do as John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson: to explain ourselves to each other.  Success in these conversations is fully coming around to understand what someone else thinks.  Of course, it is possible that someone will be convinced to adopt someone else’s point of view, but what typically happens is, through the process of explaining, students will refine and develop their own views, reflecting on the experiences and perspectives of others.  Students will have the opportunity to write letters to each other to start these conversations.

Special Sessions.  These will fill the roles of more general discussions, as well as the “meeting after the meeting” – those components were often dedicated to discussing the application of the course material to current events.  These may, or may not, fit with the ordering the main content of the theme of the course, so it makes sense to cover this material as it is relevant and in a different format than the standard lectures.  I’ll also talk a fair amount about my research in these. 

Assignments.  Many of the assignments will remain the same as they would be if we were in-person.  The ‘conversations’ piece will require some additional writing, so I will make space for it; that will, though, fill the part of the grading scheme traditionally reserved for ‘participation.’  The kinds of assignments that I give reflect my background, having taught in a public affairs school for some time: most are not traditional academic papers, but they are instead are simulated work products (op-eds, think pieces, memos, reports, etc.). 

Replacing the Exam.  I actually think in-person and closed-book exams are quite useful for making a good academic experience.  I didn’t believe this as a student: I expected to banish these as a professor.  Upon reflection, though, these are often efficient and useful ways to help students produce their own comprehensive intellectual view of a course.  I do not think, though, that exams are the only way to do this, nor are they the best way to accomplish this goal at this time.  So the final exam will be converted into a final paper assignment in both of my courses, focused on evaluating events related to the 2020 presidential election.

• Gov. 20: This will build off the “letters” for the Conversations, and focus on “what next?” for one of the two major American political parties, taking into account the election results. The focus here will be on how the party approaches separation-of-powers issues. I will argue over the course of the term that many of the fierce disputes we have seen over the last several years, and will likely see moving forward, involve the fundamental operation of the U.S. Constitution. Success in this course means thinking not only about what policies you want but also how the system of government operates.

• Gov. 116: The final assignment in my policy process class will be similar, although the perspective different; this assignment will focus on advancing a particular policy in this new environment.

• For both: my hope is that this will get you to look forward over the next four years, or out even further into the distance, and to think about what you expect to have happen and what particular people actually do. As you experience the results - whoever wins the presidential election, and whichever side you support - these assignments will allow you to compare the unfolding path of history with your own ideas of what participants should do. I want these assignments to stick with you, and for you to be still thinking about them several years from now. This really does happen: there are conversations I had, and papers I wrote as a college student, that I still actively think about today.

Office Hours.  Converting office hours to zoom hours is one of the simpler adjustments.  I have always thought that one of the benefits of in-person office hours is that students get to see “the bear in its natural habitat” – to get a sense of the place where a professor does their own intellectual work.  Whenever I’m in someone’s office, I always look around at their bookshelves.  It’s not just the intellectual content, but also the context.  So I’ll make sure to do this in a way that students feel like they get a sense of my office here at home.

Reading.  At the end of the day, all of my courses tend to have fairly deep reading lists, including optional supplemental readings.  As it was in 1800, it is today: an enormous amount of an education is simply spending time reading thoughtful books.  The value I add is in building the reading list and then helping to guide you through it – and from it onto “what’s next?”  While teaching at a distance does not alter the nature of reading very much, it does impact my ability to assess in real time how things are going.  The few minutes before class of getting to chat, and the ability to look around the room to see how students are feeling about the reading, can provide a lot of information for me about what students have understood – and what students have done or not done (“big weekend, was it?”).  I’m getting some before the term begins on the best way to implement friendly assessment strategies that will help keep everybody on track and give me a sense of how the term is going.       

Supplemental Activities.  I also plan on working to help facilitate some supplemental activities that are politics-adjacent.  Last spring I had a few students join an online Diplomacy game; I may organize that again, or something similar.  I will look for opportunities to help facilitate students talking to other students about politics concepts.  I have also been running a reading group in the summer of 2020 that has a fairly extensive email list of current students, former CMC students, and former NYU students too.  I hope to help to continue to build an intellectual community that spans both class years and geography. 

Note: if you have previously taken one of my courses and want to sign up for this email list, I’ll add you to the list I started building with my Summer Reading Group in 2020. The email form is here: https://tinyurl.com/yy86pfg9. If you signed up for the reading group, you don’t need to sign up again unless you’ve changed your email.

 In any event, we are all working to adjust our plans for the environment in which we’ve found ourselves.  I am optimistic that this will go well, actually.  CMC is already a small-scale place; with very small class sizes, strategies are available to us to address the challenges of distance.  I’m increasingly looking forward to the term.

Why study politics now?

I am, of course, also looking forward to the term because this is a great time to be teaching American politics.  Yes: there are a lot of stressful things going on in the world and, yes, I do find them concerning, stressful, and often heartbreaking.  But, also, yes, this is why I became a political scientist.  I want to learn about what we can do, as a society, to fix problems. 

The courses at CMC that I teach – Gov. 20, American Politics; Gov. 116, Public Policy Process; Gov. 50, Public Administration; and Gov. 65, Public Opinion – are all closely tied to my own research agenda.  By that I mean: I want to teach about the things that I actually think are important.  Fundamentally, I believe that there are choices we can make about how to design political institutions – the formal and informal rules of politics – that can get us to better outcomes.  That’s why I got interested in primary election reform and other electoral institutions.  That’s why I got interested in government reorganizations and agency termination.  Since all of this rests on the demands and capacity of voters, that’s why I got interested in public opinion.  I do not have all of the answers about the consequences of different choices – it is research because I don’t know what the answer is – and, of course, I approach my academic work as an analyst rather than an advocate.  Still, I care about this stuff because it is important.  It is important now.  In the famous words of Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 campaign commercials: the stakes are too high for you to stay home.

I am particularly excited about replacing the final exam in both Gov. 20 and Gov. 116 with (different, of course) projects related to the 2020 presidential election.  In both of these courses, students will have an opportunity to engage directly with the debates surrounding the most important issues of our day.  Learning about American politics side-by-side with a consequential presidential election, a national conversation about race, and an enormous public health and economic crisis ought to be about as engaging as politics can get.  I am looking forward to seeing how my students take what they have learned over the course of the term and turn it into a piece of analysis focused on what next.

As my teaching assignments and research work are very closely connected, I am also looking forward to sharing with my students ongoing work on these issues.  I am planning on using “special sessions” – lectures not tied to the sequence of readings in the course – to give students a sense of the frontiers of academic inquiry.  For example, I am currently working on a paper (coauthored with CMCers Maria Gutierrez-Vera and Maya Love) for the 2020 American Political Science Association conference on public administration and calls to “defund the police.”  I’m also planning on implementing a survey project before the 2020 election, so I will have new data to share.  There is just going to be a lot going on.  It should be fun.

Students should feel free to write with more questions.  I am always happy to answer them.  My inbox is a mess: if I miss you somehow, don’t be shy about emailing again.

Best,

Andy Sinclair

[1]  Ch. 6 in Joseph Ellis, Founding Brothers.  This is a neat little book.  Any fan of the musical Hamilton will appreciate that Ch. 1 focuses entirely on the Hamilton-Burr duel. 

[2]  Ellis cites this letter in Founding Brothers, pp. 223.  Here’s a link to the letter, which I recommend reading in full: https://tinyurl.com/y7kdmvro.  Jefferson noticed and repeated the phrase back to Adams, 28 Oct. 1813: https://tinyurl.com/ych2tywj.   

Welcome! This is Post No. 2.

Post No. 1 is a reading list for students for the unexpected vacation - a second week of spring break - created by the Covid-19 outbreak. Like many colleges and universities, CMC has a slight delay before classes resume online. The list of book suggestions can be found at this link: here.

This post covers some other activity suggestions, all of which can be done from home while practicing appropriate “social distancing.” As in: what would a political scientist do with free time, if that free time was not sucked up by writing papers and watching kids? Again, this is not an exhaustive list, but just a few suggestions.

• Use the internet archive to play the greatest civil war simulation ever made. For American politics nerds, this is great. It’s from 1991 and is called “No Greater Glory.” You will want to find - you can - a copy of the instructions as a pdf to defeat 1991-era security (“On the top of page 6, which is the first word?”). It’s a single-player game. You can play as either Lincoln or Davis. Unlike many military simulations, which focus on ordering around little people, this really is a politics simulation — you pick the cabinet officials, make proposals to Congress, and so on. You can issue broad orders to generals (“General McClellan will invade Northern Virginia”) but… they don’t always do what you tell them (“General McClellan reports his army isn’t ready.”). It’s a hoot. If you use the search feature on the internet archive for “No Greater Glory” you should be able to find it, or you can follow this link.

• Get some friends and play online diplomacy! This is a classic board game. You can play for free online at: https://www.playdiplomacy.com/. If you get a premium account, which is not very expensive, you have access to some more game variants and so on. This is a great game. College students with free time could easily advance the game at 1 turn per day. You can stab your friends in the back… when they are safely far away! Anyway, it’s a nice excuse to get to constantly talk to a group of several of your friends every day.

• You can use Amazon’s BritBox to watch all of Yes, Minister. This is a wonderful British TV show about public administration. It’s very funny and universally relevant, even though it is from some time back. I am on a quest to find a way to sneak a Yes, Minister quote into everything I write, which is not hard (“democratic accountability… requires a human sacrifice.”). If you want something else that is really reflective of the mood of a certain period of American politics (but, strangely, perhaps less accurate than Yes, Minister, which is deliberately a comedy), you can try to look up The West Wing. I believe West Wing is on Netflix.

• You can watch all of the original Jeeves & Wooster television series. This is assuredly wasting your time in possibly the best way to waste your time possible. I have the old DVDs, so I’m not sure where you would find this (other than buying them), but students seem very good at figuring this sort of thing out…

• If you are at home with your family, or in someplace safe with a small number of people, the board game Tammany Hall plays well with three people (or as many as five).

• The Claremont Colleges Library has access to lots of publishers that offer e-book editions, particularly on technical subjects. If you are stuck inside without much of a social life for a while, this is a good opportunity to look for resources to learn how to use R (free to download, statistics program), LaTex (for making documents), or any of the other skills you may wish you had and just haven’t had time to start acquiring.

If you are going to be at home, there are worse ways to spend your days than playing diplomacy, watching political-themed tv, and learning something about R.

Welcome! Here is post No. 1.

Claremont McKenna has joined many other colleges and universities by adjusting the Spring 2020 term on account of the COVID-19 virus. We’re extending spring break and going online (as you can see in this official announcement: here). Like most professors, I’m sad that this has happened, but also grateful to work in a place where the administrators, staff, and faculty members have responded quite well to this situation.

Shifting online impacts our courses directly — this term, I’m teaching Govt 50, Public Administration, and Govt 65, Public Opinion, as my regular courses; fortunately, both will adapt well (I think) once I figure out how to make Zoom work (“is this thing on?”). I would hope, though, that it is not just through my in-class teaching alone that I would have an impact on our campus. I will really miss having students I haven’t yet had in class, or students I’ve had in the past, just stop by my open door and chat. We do not have a great channel set up to facilitate that sort of interaction (at least, yet), so I thought I’d launch this blog as a way to be present in a community which really means a great deal to me. Since CMC has gone online, I’m going online too.

It is going to take a bit to fully start the flow of course content. Classes are set to resume on March 30th. In the meantime, though, many students are home, and likely not as busy as they planned. That got an idea going: a list of interesting books to read for the unexpected break.

Since my wife, Elissa Gysi (CMC ‘08), also loves books, these suggestions come from both of us. They are divided into two categories: (1) books somewhat on-topic for the crisis at hand and (2) books meant for an escape from the crisis at hand.

On-Topic-Ish

• Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror. Tuchman is a great writer, if not a great historian of the 14th century. A hilariously mean (I do not have enough knowledge myself to say “accurate”) academic review of her book described it as "... the result of her relative ignorance of medieval history combined with an unerring sense of what will be popular." I enjoyed it all the same, and suspect you might too.

• Lizzie Collingham, The Taste of War. This is a book about food in the Second World War. It’s fascinating... and puts waiting in line at Costco in some perspective. This book will change the way you think about the Second World War too.

• David Benioff, City of Thieves. It’s a surprisingly elegant novel written by one of the show-runners from (and this surprised me) Game of Thrones. The New York Times review of this book began: “I want to hate David Benioff. He’s annoyingly handsome. He’s already written a pair of unputdownable books…” I am not making this up. I think we both liked it. Put below The Taste of War because the opening involves WWII and a search for eggs.

• Mary Ann Shaffer Annie Barrows, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. Elissa has talked me into adding this to my own ‘to read’ stack. It’s a historical novel. I’m also sympathetic with one of the authors, who reportedly (by wikipedia kind of “reportedly”) said, “all I wanted was to write a book that someone would like enough to publish.” … speaking for every Assistant Professor…

• Charles Wheelan, Naked Statistics. This is, as far as it goes, a very readable introduction to statistics. At a time when we consume a lot of quantitative information, it can be helpful to have some way of putting that information into an intellectual framework for understanding it. Anyone can read this book; these are accessible explanations. I have often assigned it in courses that I teach; Elissa recommends it too.

• Emily St. John Mandel, Station 11. This is a work of fiction about a flu that wipes out a large part of humanity. Elissa must not be the only person recommending it, because sales are up.

Off-Topic-Ish

• Trevor Noah, Born A Crime. This autobiography (by the host of The Daily Show) goes into the category of something profoundly political… but also very funny. If you do the audiobook version, he also is the narrator, which is pretty cool. Elissa recommended adding it to this list.

• Elizabeth Wein, Code Name Verity. When we started talking about this list, I had no idea this book existed (with two small kids… it’s amazing we ever get to talk to each other). But I’ve added it to my reading list too. Elissa says it’s just a well-constructed plot; in that, she seems to agree with the NYT critic who wrote: “I’m in a bit of a predicament… I have to review a book in which even the hint of plot summary could ruin everything.” As I’m making this list, I’m also wondering if there is something about how WWII is to us as the age of sail was to an earlier generation — an earlier heroic age, close enough to our own, but still gone, and ready for fiction.

• Raymond Arsenault, Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice. My general rule was to avoid university press books on this list… but… this really is a book I wish I had a place to assign the entire thing for one of my courses (I use a bit in Govt 116, but only a small fraction). The problem: it’s roughly like War and Peace in size, and I’m already having my Govt 50 (Public Administration) students read The Power Broker. But this is a fantastic book, full of detail, about a great American epic story.

• J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (link to one-vol edition). This is a great and classic story, and appropriate for times when it may feel like you are going on your own epic journey. I read it for the first time when I was quite young, discovering my mom’s old and tattered paperbacks, which added to the sense of discovering some ancient manuscript. It holds up well when you are older, too, though. I actually re-read The Lord of the Rings during my first year of graduate school.

• Amor Towles, Rules of Civility. Another book Elissa found and talked me into reading some years back (this came out in 2011? Is it already 2020?) and it’s “just” a well-constructed novel. If you’re looking to escape into a piece of fiction, it’s a good choice.

• Ruth Reichl, Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise. A food critic. Wearing disguises. Another one of Elissa’s that I will have to put on my own list, just because the idea is so off-the-wall. (The NYT says: “Food Critic in Funny Hat.”)

• Louise Penny, Still Life. This is the first in a series of murder mysteries. Let me tell you: Elissa is the most frustrating person to watch or read these sorts of things with, because she is too sharp-eyed and always guesses the ending well in advance. We both like them; Elissa particularly recommends these.

• John le Carré, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Described on NPR as “the greatest spy story ever told.” I recently listened to this on audiobook, only set to a normal speed, and it was an awesome experience — it lends itself well to audiobook, but take your time and think about it. It is a subtle story.

• W.E.B. Griffin, Semper Fi. This recommendation actually comes from my grandfather; this is the first in a series of ten books, by an author who churned out something like 60. It’s not high-brow stuff (but, I’m honestly shocked this hasn’t been turned into an HBO series yet). My grandfather really enjoyed the books in part because he knew all the places; he had a long military career, and told me that Griffin would often capture the details of a place, at a point in time, that really rang true. Griffin had served in the military himself; he ended up as an official war correspondent in the Korean War, and there is a sense that he just told a lot of stories that were thinly fictionalized stories of ones he’d been told himself.

• P.G. Wodehouse. Any of the Jeeves and Wooster stories, a full list: here. To be clear, there are many of these, yet they are all basically the same. Can you really tell the difference between Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen and Joy in the Morning? I mean, sure, to some extent… but… it’s also just a mood, an expression of joy and innocence, when the worst thing is a rampaging aunt. There is also a splendid television adaptation, but the books, you see, capture the thing in a different way; the television series cannot do what the books do: tell the story from Wooster’s perspective. As the great bard once said, “it is a tale, told by an idiot… who hates to get up before 11.” These are some of the greatest works every written in the English language. They have also ruined my vocabulary (“what ho!”). I have saved the best for last.

This list is far from a complete guide to “things someone should read.” Looking over the list, there are some obvious gaps — I am sure “reviewer 2” will locate them. It’s funny that neither Elissa nor I thought to add any Dostoevsky (these translators!), given that we really got to know each other over a conversation about things we happened to be reading. So, there you go. Here’s a list of books. You never know where reading will take you.

Feel free to add your own suggestions below. I’m always up for a new book.

— Andy Sinclair

ps. If you can, order your books from Vroman’s Bookstore — an outstanding independent bookstore here in Pasadena.