WHATEVER COMES CANNOT BE CONTROLLED

Eihei Dogen, Moon in a Dewdrop: Writings of Zen Master Dogen, edited by Kazuaki Tanahashi, translated by Robert Aitken, Reb Anderson, Ed Brown, Norman Fischer, Arnold Kotler, Daniel Leighton, Lew Richmond, David Schneider, Kazuaki Tanahashi, Katherine Thanas, Brian Unger Mel Weitsman, Dan Welch, and Philip Whalen (New York: North Point Press/Farrar, Straus & Girouz, 1985).

From "Only Buddha and Buddha": "Long ago a monk asked an old master, 'When hundreds, thousands, or myriads of objects come all at once, what should be done?' The master replied, 'Don't try to control them.' What he means is that in whatever way objects come, do not try to change them. Whatever comes is the buddha-dharma, not objects at all. Do not understand the master's reply as merely a brilliant admonition, but realize that it s the truth. Even if you try to control what comes, it cannot be controlled." Id. at 161, 164.

"THE LIFE OF THE MIND, AND . . . THE MINDFUL LIFE"

Tony Judt (with Timothy Snyder), Thinking the Twentieth Century (New York: The Penguin Press, 2012) (From the Snyder's "Foreword": "There is one truth that seeks us rather than the other way around, one truth that has no complement: that each of us comes to an end. The other truths orbit around this one like stars around a black hole, brighter, newer, less weighty. This final truth helped me to give this book its final shape. This book could not have arisen without a certain effort at a certain time, little more than a companionable gesture on my side, but an enormous physical campaign in Tony's. But it is not a book about struggle. It is a book about the life of the mind, and about the mindful life." Id. at xvii. "As it happens, I don't think neglecting the past is our greatest risk; the characteristic mistake of the present is to cite it in ignorance. Condoleezza Rice, who holds a PhD in political science and was the provost of Stanford University, invoked the American occupation of postwar Germany to justify the Iraq War. How much historical illiteracy can you identify in that one analogy? Given that we are bound to exploit the past in order to justify present public behavior, the case for actually knowing history is unanswerable. A better-informed citizenry is less likely to be bamboozled into abusive exploitations of the past for present errors." "It's terribly important for an open society to be familiar with its past. It was a common feature of the closed societies of the twentieth century, whether of Left or Right, that they manipulated history. Rigging the past is the oldest form of knowledge control: if you have power over the interpretation of what went before (or can simply lie about it), the present and the future are at your disposal. So it is simple democratic prudence to ensure that the citizenry are historically informed." Id. at 265. Also see Francis Fukuyama, "One Man's History," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 2/5/2012.).

FOUR PERSPECTIVES ON THE BLACK EXPERIENCE: BIOGRAPHICAL, TEXTUAL/HISTORICAL, POLITICAL and ECONOMICAL

Nadine Cohodas, Princess Noire: The Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone (New York: Pantheon, 2010) ("Don'tcha know that no one alive can always be an angel?").

Andrew S. Curran, The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U. Press, 2011) ("The Anatomy of Blackness has three overlapping narratives The first relates how eighteenth-century naturalists and philosophes drew from travel literature to discuss the perceived problem of human blackness within the nascent human sciences. The second describes how a number of now-forgotten anatomists revolutionized the era's understanding of the black African by emphasizing both the supposed liabilities of this group and the corresponding 'advantages' of whiteness. The third charts the shift of the slavery debate itself, from the moral, mercantile, and theological realms toward that of the black body itself." "Not unexpectedly, such an approach reveals more about European (and secondary construction of themselves) than it does about real Africans. Readers should bear in mind that this is not a book about black African agency, or about how Africans grappled with the realities of European aggression and mercantile exploitation in Africa. Nor is it a book about how men and women of African descent undertook their own revolution at the end of the eighteenth century, appropriating and deploying a series of republican ideals that certainly had not been imagined with them in mind. In a word, this study focuses on the textualization of the black African." Id. at ix. "[B]y freeing Enlightenment-era thinkers from what is often portrayed as a monolithic thought system, I hope to recover the eighteenth-century individual's ability not only to be a passive participant in Africanist discourse, but to absorb, react, and contribute to the overall representation of the African. In my opinion, this method has several advantages over more rigid genealogies or single-legacy histories. By examining the representation of Africans on the level of individual thinkers or groups of thinkers, one can more effectively chart the ambiguous relationships among Enlightenment universalism, the equally strong constrains of the era's proto-ethnography, and the economic imperatives of slavery. In contrast, by envisioning the writings of the philosophes--not to mention the most offensive pro-slavery thinkers--as nothing more than a linear and overdetermined set of ideas, we not only underestimate the intellectual autonomy of these writers or philosophers but mitigate the responsibility of the so-called Enlightenment-era mind While it may seem paradoxical, moving away from full-scale indictments of the era and focusing on the 'exquisite sophistication of the eighteenth-century writing' may actually be the best way of illuminating the obscure aspects of an era whose primary metaphor was one of light." Id. at xi.).

Michael C. Dawson, Not In Our Lifetimes: The Future of Black Politics (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2011) ("In one sense, the majority of whites are victims--victims of the same rapacious economic system that has ravaged particularly black and Latino communities for well over a decade. Instead, as would be rational, turning on an economic system that has abandoned them, many have taken the historic easy way out and have directed their anger at communities of color, including Muslim communities, and the state that is allegedly the ally of the colored undeserving. The economic crisis has produced feelings of fear, anger, displacement, and of no longer being in control, particularly among the white middle classes and the more advantages sectors of the white working class. These feelings when combined with Tea Party sentiments of xenophobia hysteria, a moral panic, that is the stuff out of which fascist movements have been built in the past, and out of which fascism could be built again." Id. at 183. My favor passage is the the first two sentences of the first paragraph of Dawson's "Prologue", as I could have written those lines to describe myself. "I am a barbarian, albeit an educated one. I have been aware of this status of mine for a very long time. But it was brought back to me with particular force during a class I was teaching when I came across a passage by the late Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington. 'Becoming 'white' and 'Anglo-conformity,' ' wrote Huntington approvingly, 'were the ways in which immigrants, blacks and others made themselves Americans.' " Id. at vii. (italics and color added) From the bookjacket: "In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, polls revealed that only 20 percent of African Americans believed that racial equality for blacks would be achieved in their lifetime. But following the election of Barack Obama, that number leaped to more than half. Did that dramatic shift in opinion really reflect a change in the vitality of black politics--and hope for improvement in the lives of African Americans? Or was it a onetime surge brought on by the euphoria of an extraordinary election?" "With Not in Our Lifetime, Michael C. Dawson shows definitely that it is the latter: for all the talk about a new post-racial America, the fundamental realities of American racism--and the difficulty of the problems facing black political movements--have not changed, He lays out a nuanced analysis of the persistence or racial inequality and structural disadvantages, and the ways that whites and black continue to see the same problems--the disastrous response to Katrina being a prime example--through completely different, race-inflected lenses. In fact, argues Dawson, the new era heralded by Obama;s election is in fact more racially complicated, as the widening class gap among African Americans and the hot-button issue of immigration have the potential to create a new fissures for conservatives and race-based exploitation. Bringing his account up to the present with a thoughtful account of the rise of the Tea Party movement and the largely successful 'blackening' of the president, Dawson ultimately argues that black politics remains weak--and that achieving the dream of racial and economic equality will require the sort of coalition-building and reaching across racial divides that have always marked successful political movements.").

Walter E. Williams, Race and Economics: How Much Can Be Blamed On Discrimination (Sanford, CA: Hoover Institute Press, 2011) (From the bookjacket: "The black experience in America naturally [?] gives rise to thinking of today's black experience in terms of racism and oppression. But the most [?] difficult problems black Americans face, particularly those who are poor, cannot adequately ["not adequately" or 'not completely'?; there is a difference] be explained by current racial discrimination. In Race and Economics, Walter Williams argues that many problems are a result of policies, regulations, and restrictions emanating from federal, state, and local governments. It is not free markets and the profit motives that have reduced opportunities, the author asserts; instead, it is the power of vested groups, as a means of greater wealth, to use the coercive power of government to stifle market competition." "William debunks many common labor market myths and reveals how the minimum-wage law has imposed incalculable harm on the most disadvantaged members of our society. He explains that the real problem is people are not so much underpaid as underskilled and that the real task is to help unskilled people become skilled. [And, I suppose, do this while we at the same time defund public education?] The author also reveals how licensing and regulation reduce economic opportunity for people, especially those who might be described as discriminated against and having little political clout. Using the example of the trucking industry before and after deregulation he illustrates how government regulation closes entry and reinforces economic handicaps, whereas deregulation not only has helped minorities enter an industry in greater numbers by also has benefited the consumer." "People will not engage in activities, including racial discrimination, says Williams, if it cost is too high. [DAH!!!!!; but what is "too high"?] In markets, because transactions are mostly an individual affair, it is unnecessary to win the approval or permission of others; the costs and benefits are a private matter. But in the political arena, each citizen has only one vote, meaning that, unlike the free market, a minority cannot register the intensity of his preferences. Further, increased concentration of political power at the national level handicaps minorities in the sense that their votes become diluted. The author ultimately shows that free-market allocation, not political allocations, is what is truly in the best interest of minorities." [No he does not!!] At the end of reading this polemic, those who already agreed with Williams when they opened the book will agree with him when they finish reading and put it down. On the other hand, those who were disposed to disagree with him when they pick up the book will be not only unpersuaded, but, I think, even more entrenched in their prior convictions. Williams has preached to his choir, and missed the larger audience.).

TRYING ANOTHER WAY

Thubten Chodron, Buddhism for Beginners (Ithaca: Snow Lion Publications 2001) ("Romantic love is generally plagued with attachment, which is why many marriages end in divorce. When people fall in love with an image they created of the person, instead of with the actual human being, false expectations proliferate. For example, many people in the West unrealistically expect their partner to meet all their emotional needs. . . . [W]e should avoid having such unrealistic expectations of our partners." "Each person has a variety of interests and emotional needs, Therefore, we need a variety of friends and relatives to share and communicate with. Nowadays, because people move so often, we may need to work harder to develop several stable, long-tern friendships, but doing so strengthens our primary relationship." Id. at 129).


Jean Smith, The Beginner's Guide to Zen Buddhism (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2000) ("9. Not Being Angry[;] This is an important precept for Americans because we are told that we need to express our anger, but we're also told not to express our anger as we grow up. It's a confusing and difficult precept for many people--perhaps the most confusing. It's important to acknowledge feelings of anger and to be really present to them. The aim is not to eliminate anger when it arises but rather to accommodate it, to create a space for it. In a very paradoxical Zen way, we say, 'Not being angry is being angry.' Not being angry is to allow what is occurring to be there but not to hold on to it or fan it. If you push anger down and deny it, it seethes underneath. Awareness of your state of mind, of anger, is important. Not being angry is being aware of what you're feeeling--and thus transforming the anger into wisdom." Id. at 119.).


Thich Nhat Hanh & Lillian Cheung, Savor: Mindful Eating, Mindful Life (New York: HarperOne, 2010).

THE UNITED STATES'S SUPPORT OF STATE TERROR IN CENTRAL AND SOUTH AMERICA

Greg Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War, updated edition,with a new Preface by Greg Grandin and an interview with Naomi Klein (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2004, 2011) ( From "Preface to the Updated Edition: A New Enlightenment": "What explains Latin America's seemingly inescapable reversion to violence? How to account for the weakness of its democratic culture? For over a half century, attempts to answer these questions have defined much of the writing produced in the United States on Latin America, as social scientists and intellectual historians have created an entire scholarly subfield dedicated to gently guiding--or, if gradualism failed, abruptly inducing through 'shock therapy'--the region's post-Cold War 'transition to democracy.' But these questions are exactly backward. The real challenge is not to answer why Latin American democracy is so fragile but to explain its inextinguishable strength." Id. at xi. From "Preface to the First Edition": "In Latin America, in country after country, the mass peasant and working-class movements that gained ground in the middle of the twentieth century were absolutely indispensable to the advancement of democracy. To the degree that Latin America today may be considered democratic, it was the left, including the Marxist left, that made it so. Empire, rather than fortifying democracy, weakened it. Launched first by domestic elites in the years after World War II and then quickly by the United States, the savage crusade, justified under the guise of the Cold War, against Latin American democratic movements had devastating human and political costs. In some countries, such as Uruguay, Brazil, and Chile, national security states carried out a focused, surgically precise repression. Other states, such as Argentina, El Salvador, and Guatemala, let loose a more scattershot horror. In all cases, terror had the effect of, first, radicalizing society to produce febrile political polarization and, second, destroying the more capacious, social understandings of democracy that prevailed in the years around World War II. One important consequence of the terror was the severance of the link between individual dignity and social solidarity, a combination that . . . was the wellspring of the old left's strength. During the transition to constitutional rule that occurred throughout Central and South America following the Cold War, democracy came to be defined strictly in the astringent terms of personal freedom rather than social security. This redefinition served as the qualification for the free market ideologies and policies that now reign throughout the continent and indeed most of the world. In other words, to make the point as crudely as possible, the conception of democracy now being prescribed as the most effective weapon in the war on terrorism is itself largely, at least in Latin America, a product of terror." Id. at xxii-xxiii. From the bookcover: "After decades of bloodshed and political terror, many lament the rise of the left in Latin America. Politicians and historians have long accused the left there of rejecting democracy, embracing totalitarianism, and prompting both revolutionary violence and a right-wing backlash. Through unprecedented archival researcch and grippiing personal testimonies, Greg Grandin mounts a powerful challenge to thise views in this classic work. In do so, he uncovers the hidden hiistory of the latin American Cld War: of hid-bound reactionaries hiolding on to their power and privilege; of Mayan Marxists blending indigenous notions of justice with universal id3as of equality; and of a United States supporting new stuyles of state terror throughout the region.").

UNREGULATED CAPITALISM IS NOT PRETTY. WE SHOULD HAVE SEEN IT COMING.

Edward Luttwak, Turbo-Capitalism: Winners and Losers in the Global Economy (New York: HarperCollins, 1999) (From the bookjacket: "In this incisive critical analysis of today's free-market capitalism, Edward Luttwak shows how it is vastly different from the controlled capitalism that flourished so successfully from the 1945 to the 1980s. Turbo-capitalism is private enterprise liberated from government regulation, unchecked by effective trade unions, unfettered by concerns for employeees or investment restrictions, and unhindered by taxation. It promises a dynamic, expanding economy and new wealth." "The winners--the architects and acrobats of techno-organizational change--become much richer; the loser, the majority, become relatively or absolutely poorer and are forced by downsizing to take the traditional jobs of the underclass, more and more of whom end up in prison. Edward Luttwak challenges the conventional wisdom that jobs lost in old industries will be replaced by jobs in new ones. If General Motors fires you, Microsoft will not hire you; instead you'll be working in 'services,' often poorly paid." "Led by the United States, closely followed by Britain, turbo-capitalism is spreading fast throughout Europe, Asia, and the rest of the world (only in France and Japan is there any resistance) without the two great forces that check its enormous power in the United States: a powerful legal system and the rules of American calvinism. Acknowledging the great efficiency of turbo-capitalism, Luttwak provides no solutions but describes in powerful detail the major societal upheavals and inequities it causes and the broad dissatisfaction and anxiety that may result. He suggests this is a high price to pay for this great dilemma of our times." In short, the global economic collapse that seemed to begin in 2008 (or late 2007), had been building for decades.).

GROUPTHINK

Mark Schafer & Scott Critchlow, Groupthink vs. High-Quality Decision Making in International Relations (New York: Columbia U. Press, 2010) ("Moving on in Janis's causal chain, the symptoms of groupthink include possessing an illusion of invulnerability, a belief in the group's inherent morality, the use of collective rationalizations, stereotyping the out-group, self-censorship, illusions of unanimity, directly pressuring dissenters, and the presence of self-appointed mind-guards. The symptoms of defective decision making include gross omissions in surveying objectives; gross omissions in the survey of alternatives; conducting a poor information search; processing information in a biased manner; failing to reconsider rejected alternatives; failing to examine the costs and risks of the preferred choice; and failing to work out detailed implementation, monitoring , and contingency plans. These behaviors increase the probability of low-quality decisions and outcomes ." Id. at 23-24 (citations omitted) Schafer and Crichlow go beyond Irving Janis, Victims of Groupthink: A Psychological Study of Foreign-Policy Decision and Fiascoes (1972). From the backcover: "Analyzing thirty-nine foreign-policy cases across nine administrations and incorporating both statistical analyses and case studies, including a detailed examination of the decision to invade Iraq in 2003, the authors pinpoint the factors that are likely to lead to successful or failed decision making and suggest ways to improve the process. Schafer and Crichlow show how the staffing of key offices and the structure of central decision-making bodies determine the path of an administration even before the topics are introduced. Additionally, they link the psychological characteristics of leaders to the quality of their decision processing. There is no greater work available on understanding and improving the dynamics of contemporary decision making." I found this book quite helpful as I try to assess and understand the entropy in legal education. The key: With a few exceptions at elite law schools, legal academia is locked into a dynamic of groupthinking. The result: A continued and steady race to the bottom.).

CAN WHITE AMERICA'S (SO-CALLED) EXCEPTIONALISM BE SAVED?

Charles Murray, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 (New York: Crown Forum, 2012) ("And so I am hoping for a civic Great Awakening among the new upper class. It starts with a question that I hope they will take to heart: How much do you value what has made America exceptional, and what are you willing to do to preserve it?" Id. at 305. From the bookjacket: "The top and bottom of white America increasingly live in different cultures, Murray argues, with the powerful upper class living in enclaves surrounded by their own kind, ignorant about the life in mainstream America, and the lower class suffering from erosions of family and community life that strike at the heart of the pursuit of happiness. That divergence puts the success of the American project at risk." "The evidence in Coming Apart is about white America, Its message is about all of America." Also see Nicholas Confessore, "Tramps Like Them," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 2/12/2012.).

"THE EVOLUTION OF MODERN CONSERVATISM AND THE POLITICS OF RACE IN AMERICA"

Christopher Bonastia, Southern Stalemate: Five Years without Public Education in Prince Edward County, Virginia (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2012) (From the bookjacket: "In1959, Virginia's Prince Edward County closed its public schools rather than obey a court order to desegregate. For five years, black children were left to fend for themselves while white children went to newly created private schools and the courts decided if the county could continue to deny its citizens public education. Investigating this remarkable and nearly forgotten story of local, state, and federal political confrontation, Christopher Bonastia recounts the tests of wills that pitted resolute African Americans against equally steadfast white segregationists in a battle over the future of public education in America. . . ." "Artfully exploring the lessons of the Prince Edward saga, Southern Stalemate unearths new insights about the evolution of modern conservatism and the politics of race in America.").

BEYOND THE MARKETPLACE OF IDEAS

Robert C. Post, Democracy, Expertise, Academic Freedom: A First Amendment Jurisprudence for the Modern State (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2012).

ANOTHER TAKE ON INDIA

Arundhati Roy, Walking with the Comrades (New York: Penguin Books, 2012) ("People who had come from the war zones, from Lalgarh, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Orissa, described the repression, the arrests, the torture, the killing, the corruption, and the fact that, in places like Orissa, the police seemed to take orders directly from the officials who worked for the mining companies. People described the dubious, malign role being played by certain NGOs funded by aid agencies wholly devoted to furthering corporate prospects. Again and again they spoke of how in Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh activists as well as ordinary people--anyone who was seen to be a dissenter--were being branded Maoists and imprisoned. They said that this, more than anything else, was pushing people to take up arms and join the Maoists. They asked how a government that professed its inability to resettle even a fraction of the fifty million people who had been displaced by 'development' projects was suddenly able to identify 140,000 hectares of prime land to give to industrialists to set up special economic zones, India's onshore tax havens for the rich. They asked what brand of justice the Supreme Court was practising when it refused to review the meaning of 'public purpose' in the Land Acquisition Act even when it knew that the government was forcibly acquiring land in the name of 'public purpose' to give to private corporations. They asked why, when the government says that 'the Writ of the State must run', it seems to only mean that police stations must be put in place. Not schools or clinics or housing or clean water, or a fair price for forest produce, or even being left alone and free from the fear of the police--anything that would make people's lives a little easier. They asked why the 'Writ of the State' could never be taken to mean justice." Id. at 28-29. From the backcover: "Arundhati Roy draws on her unprecedented access to a little-known rebel movement in India to pen a work full of earth-shattering revelations. Deep in the forests, under the pretense of battling Maoist guerrillas, the Indian government is waging a vicious total war against its own citizens. Allied with the mining and banking conglomerates, government soldiers are committing unspeakable atrocities daily, their actions undocumented by a weak domestic press and unnoticed by an indifferent world. "In Walking with t eh Comrades, Arundhati Roy chronicles the weeks she spent living with the forest guerrillas resisting these assaults taking us to the front lines of a conflict over whether global capitalism will tolerate any societies existing outside of its colossal control.").

STOP AND REALLY LOOK AROUND. REALLY!

Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity (New York: Random House, 2012) (From the "Author's Note": "In the age of globalization--an ad hoc, temp-job, fiercely competitive age--hope is not a fiction. Extreme poverty is being alleviated gradually, unevenly, nonetheless significantly. But as capital rushes around the planet and the idea of permanent work becomes anachronistic, the unpredictability of daily life has a way of grinding down individual promise. Ideally, the government eases some of the instability. Too often, weal government intensifies it and proves better at nourishing corruption than human capacity." Id. at 253. Also see Panka Mishra, "Fighting for Scraps," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 2/2/2012).).

AGAINST CONFORMITY, OR ON BEING WILLING TO LIVE WITH INSECURITY AND ERROR

John M. Barry, Roger Williams and The Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty (New York: Viking, 2012) ("William also saw conformity in a different way than did Winthrop and Cotton, or for that matter than did any of the members of the Westminster Assembly or of Parliament. Conformity is a function of the desire for certainty; the greater or lesser that desire, the greater or lesser the demand for conformity. This was the age both believing in and seeking certainty, certainty of everything from the infallibility of Scripture to one's place in God's plan. The very sense of society as a body, with each person in a fixed and place and performing a fixed task, reflected that view, and that view was not limited to Puritans. . . . " "Roger Williams had never conformed--not even as a child, for even his father had persecuted him for his beliefs as a young boy. Yet for all his conviction, for all his commitment to his own way, it was not certainty he had clung to much of his life. Quite the contrary, he had remarkable willingness to live with doubt and uncertainty. As he had told Winthrop so many years before, I desire not to sleep in securitie and dreame of a Nest wch no hand can reach." "His ability to live without security matched his willingness to live with error--including the possibility of his own error. He lived in a way that was the antithesis of Cotton's monstrous partiality, a partiality to one's own views that appalled him, that he found repulsive. By contrast, he urged the asking of questions and argued that without doing so a society could not advance. He warned that if 'it shall be a crime, humbly and peaceably to question . . . what ever is publickly taught and delivered, you will most certainly find your selves . . . enslav'd and captivated in the Chains of those Popish Darknesses, (to wit Ignorance, is the mother of Devotion, and we must believe as the church believes, &c.).' " Id. at 344-345.).

"I HAVE BEEN A VAGRANT MONK"

Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, Manual of Zen Buddhism (1935) (Charleston, South Carolina: Forgotten Books, 2007) (From Yoka Daishi's "Song of Enlightenment": "46. Since early years I have been eagerly after scholarly attainment, I have studied the sutras and sastras and commentaries, I have been given up to analysis of names and forms, and never known what fatigue meant; But diving into the ocean to count up its sands is surely an exhausting task and a vain one; The Buddha has never spared such, his scoldings are just to the point, For what is the use of reckoning the treasures that are not mine? All my past achievements have been efforts vainly and wrongly applied--I realize it fully now, I have been a vagrant monk for many years to no end whatever." Id. at 84, 95.).

THE NEW DEMOGRAPHIC!

Eric Klinenberg, Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone (New York: The Penguin Press 2012) (From the bookjacket: "In 1950, only 22 percent of American adults were single. Today, more than 50 percent of American adults are single, and 31 million--roughly one out of every seven adults--live alone. People who live alone make up 28 percent of all U.S. households, which makes them more common than any other domestic unit, including the nuclear family. In Going Solo, renowned sociologist and author Eric Klinenberg proves that these numbers are more than just a passing trend. They are, in fact, evidence of the biggest demographic shift since the baby boom: we are learning to go solo, and crafting new ways of living in the process.").

RELIGIOUS ROOTS OF JAPANESE CAPITALISM

Robert Bellah, Tokugawa Religion: The Cultural Roots of Modern Japan (New York: The Free Press, 1957, 1985) (From the bookcover: "Robert N. Bellah's classic study, Tokugawa Religion does for Japan what Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism did for the West. One of the foremost authorities on Japanese history and culture, Bellah explains how religion in the Tokugawa period (1600-1868) established the foundations for Japan's modern industrial economy, and dispels two misconceptions about Japanese modernization: that it began with Admiral Perry's arrival in 1868 and that it rapidly developed because of the superb Japanese ability for imitation. In this revealing work, Bellah shows how the native doctrines of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Shinto encouraged forms of logic and understanding necessary for economic development. Japan's current status as an economic superpower and industrial model for many in the West makes this groundbreaking volume even more important today than when first published in 1957. With a new introduction by the author.").

WHEN REAL, SHABBINESS DOESN"T MATTER

Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit; Or, How Toys Become Real: The Children's Classic Edition, illustrated by Don Daily (Philadelphia & London: Running Press 1997) ("Weeks passed, and the little Rabbit grew very old and shabby, but the Boy loved him just as much. He loved him so hard that he loved all his whiskers off, and the pink lining to his ears turned grey, and his brown spots faded. He even began to lose his shape, and he scarcely looked like a rabbit any more, except to the Boy. To him he was always beautiful, and that was all that the little Rabbit cared about. He didn't mind how he looked to other people, because the nursery magic had made him Real, and when you are Real shabbiness doesn't matter." Id. at 33.).

"EVERYTHING IS CHANGE HAPPENING"

Sylvia Boorstein, It's Easier Than You Think: The Buddhist Way to Happiness (New York: HarperOne, 1995) ("Since everything is change happening, there is no one who owns the changes and no one to whom the changes are happening. We are verbs, not nouns, experiences unfolding, stories telling themselves as sequels to other stories previously told. . . . Stories related to particular other stories ('conditioned' by them is what the Buddha would have said), but fundamentally related to all stories, totally empty of anything separate or unique or enduring." Id. at 122. "The energy of lust arises, we look around, and we say, 'Boom, this is what I want.' It's not really a problem--it's actually funny. It only becomes a problem if we forget to notice it, if we take it seriously." "None of this means that we shouldn't fall in love. Falling in love is wonderful. It probably means that when we fall in love we should wait a bit to make sure that the one we've fallen in love with is not simply an imagined person constructed out of our own desires." Id. at 77-78.).

SOFT LANDING??

Richard N. Bolles, What Color Is Your Parachute? A Practical Manual For Job-Hunters and Career-Changers: 2012, 40th Anniversary Edition (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 2012) ("We need to assume that nothing that worked before will necessarily work now.").

REST ROOMS

Shunryu Suzuki, Not Always So: Practicing the True Spirit of Zen, edited by Edward Espe Brown (New York: HarperOne, 2002) (From "The Zen of Going to the Rest Room": "Our culture is based on the idea of gaining or accumulating something. Science, for instance, is the accumulation of knowledge. I don't know that a modern scientist is greater than a scientist in the sixteenth century. The difference is that we have accumulated our scientific knowledge. That is a good point and at the same time dangerous. We are in danger of being buried under all our accumulated knowledge. It is like trying to survive without going to the rest room. We are already swimming in the pond of polluted water and air, and we talk about this pollution. At the same time we can hardly survive the pollution of our knowledge." "When you understand yourself better, you can just be yourself. . . . Fortunately or unfortunately, even though you don't like it, we need to go to the rest room, the stinky rest room. I am sorry, but I think we have to go to the rest room, as long as we live." Id. at 42, 43-46.).

"REGENERATIVE POWER OF DEATH"

James Vance Marshall, Walkabout, with an Introduction by Lee Siegel (New York: New York Review Books, 1959, 2012) (from the backcover: "On the surface Walkabout is an adventure story, but darker themes lie beneath. Peter's innocent friendship with the boy met in the desert throws into relief Mary's half-adult anxieties, and the book as a whole raises questions about what is lost--and may be saved--when different worlds meet. And in reading Marshall's extraordinary evocations of the beautiful yet forbidding landscape of the Australian desert, perhaps the most striking presence of all in this small, perfect book, we realize that this tale--a deep yet disturbing story in the spirit of Adalbert Stifter's Rock Crystal and Richard Hughes's A High Wind in Jamaica--is also a reckoning with the mysteriously regenerative powers of death.").

GHOSTS

Philip Kapleau, ed., The Three Pillars of Zen:Teaching, Practice, and Enlightenment (Updated and Revised): New York: Anchor Books, 2000) (" 'If you cannot pass through the barrier and exhaust the arising of thoughts, you are like a ghost clinging to the trees and grass.' Ghosts do not appear openly in the daytime, but come out furtively after dark, it is said, hugging the earth or clinging to willow trees. They are dependent upon these supports for their very existence. In a sense human beings are also like ghosts, since most of us cannot function independent of money, social standing, honor, companionship, authority; or else we feel the need to identify ourselves with an organization or an ideology. If you would be a person of true worth and not a phantom, you must be able to walk upright by yourself, dependent on nothing. When you harbor philosophical concepts or religious beliefs or ideas or theories of one kind or another, you too are a phantom, for inevitably you become bound to them. Only when your mind is empty of such abstractions are you truly free and independent." Id. at 89.).