Welcome to the club, guys.
Capsule reviews of books and events that our writers have enjoyed lately.
An issue of this magazine was published last fall in which we offered our interesting, erudite readers a collection of interesting, erudite content reviews. The review issue is back—and (conceptually, at least) it is better than ever. Why do we say that? Well, in our corner of the internet we dedicate many hours to consuming media. Whether the content in question is a short-form Substack (woot!) or X AI slop videos, our lives are often enriched by having so much information and so many perspectives at our fingertips. Certainly, Caravanserai has to draw up its discussion topics from somewhere!
But even the most inveterate poster and commenter ultimately runs up against the fundamental problem of internet space: However much you do to engage, the flow of information is mostly unidirectional. The overwhelming majority of people are silent consumers, participating as audience and observer rather than duking it out themselves in the ring. This is one of the great disjunctures between the virtual world and the real one. In terra tangibilis (if you can’t guess, we were not educated in Latin), nothing is ever one-way. The possibilities for engagement, and the tension born of being not just the seer but the seen, are what make life and argument to enlivening.
That’s why today we’ve invited our writers to review not just content, but scenes: their engagement with events in the real world, and what those interactions elicit. Neil Chiang writes from Mumbai Climate Week, contemplating the effectiveness of environmental shindigs cut off from their actual environments. Marshmallow fluff revisits Dan Wang’s Breakneck a year after its publication to focus on its human elements and its author’s life. And Gadfly reviews Ian Shapiro’s After the Fall for all of us recovering from our descent from the heady heights of 1989. Waah! Kya scene hai, indeed.
(Also, come to our launch party in Washington, DC, next Tuesday!)
Write a capsule review of any article, book, movie, or event you’ve been thinking about recently.
I. Neil Chiang
In February, I attended the inaugural edition of Mumbai Climate Week (MCW). I was there professionally, but also as a Mumbaikar, a resident of Mumbai. Professionally, the event was uplifting. In contrast to the gloom of New York Climate Week five months before—President Trump had informed the UN General Assembly that week that his administration was “getting rid of the falsely named renewables”—the mood in Mumbai was upbeat and purposeful. Officials from Madhya Pradesh discussed innovative clean energy financing mechanisms, while closed-door sessions highlighted the depth of activity building on COP30. MCW’s mere existence, and the fact that it had been co-organized by the Government of Maharashtra, demonstrated serious subnational attention to the challenge of climate change.
However, when I looked at the event as a Mumbaikar, my optimism gave way to pessimism. The event’s location, absences in the agenda and among attendees, and the overtly corporate-coded nature of events highlighted the distance that is to be covered when it comes to people-centric climate action.
MCW attendees congregated at the Jio World Centre, a flashy convention center in the otherwise-congested, recently-redeveloped Bandra Kurla Complex (BKC). BKC was built by landfilling hundreds of acres of the Mithi River, which directly contributed to the devastating 2005 Mumbai Floods. Anyone who has seen the incredible transformation of BKC into one of the premier business districts in India’s financial capital could point to how much more congested, expensive, and inaccessible the area has become. If MCW is to offer “frameworks that empower people,” it needs to be spatially open to the people—not only the chauffeured elite.
Indeed, there was a gap between rhetoric and reality when it came to the inclusion of local perspectives. As another MCW attendee (rightly) noted, there was “little to no representation from urban planners, tribal communities, fishing communities, informal settlement leaders, urban poor groups, or youth-led climate movements.” One would imagine that interacting with a local grassroots environmental leader would be much more pertinent to those who are invested in Maharashtra than hearing from Hillary Clinton. And it wasn’t enough that one of the big four consulting firms was a “strategic knowledge partner.” Almost every public-facing event at MCW had a representative from the consulting firm, even if the event stretched beyond six (!) panelists.1
It was heartening to hear Maharashtra’s Chief Minister, Devendra Fadnavis, explicitly call climate change “today’s greatest governance challenge” and highlight its tangible impacts to the city: “When Mumbai receives excessive rainfall, it is not simply a statistic; it is trains halted, homes flooded, livelihoods interrupted.” Subsequent editions of MCW would do well to keep emphasizing this. For now, though, the engagement of citizens affected by such disasters remains conspicuously absent.
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II. marshmallow fluff
Almost a year after its publication, Dan Wang’s Breakneck still stands atop the pop-economics genre. It is a supremely compelling, heartfelt romp of statecraft.
Wang offers an Abundance-aligned dichotomous framework: China’s mastery of building and economic miracle grew out of the “engineering state” (China’s central committee and provincial leaders are nearly all engineers), which contrasts with the United States’ “lawyerly society” and financialized economy. Politics and investment flow through the legal system in the U.S., while in China they are wielded by central planners and bureaucrat engineers.
Breakneck succeeds because Wang’s analysis of China is founded in the personal. He leads with the story of China’s building frenzy through a multiday cycling trip in Guizhou, replete with dazzling sights, comforting tastes, and kind people. The engineers behind China’s economic miracle, however, used the same playbook for social planning—to disastrous effects. Wang lays bare the human cost of the one-child policy and gamified reproduction, paying particular attention to the rural communities most brutally policed. He also implicates the engineering state in his personal story. Wang discusses his near-utopic life in Shanghai being upended by Xi failing to engineer his way to zero-COVID. He concludes with a heartfelt discussion of his parents’ “rùn” (emigration) story to North America, and a counterfactual examination of their family’s life in China through the book’s framework.
I was one of the students and faculty spilling out of a university lecture hall where Wang spoke in March. Like in the book, he captured the audience with an appeal to well-being. He argued for centering human flourishing in the U.S.-China competition, one measure being freedom of expression. The engineering state is a ruthless censor of artists, writers, comedians, filmmakers, media, and online influencers. And in the “Sid Meyer” model of geopolitics, no pop culture means no soft power means no global hegemony—means no culture victory. “Chinamaxxing” is symptomatic of widespread curiosity rather than a sea change in sentiment.
China prevents flourishing in other ways too: The ceaseless hours of “996” grind culture have mostly been left unrewarded with returns to labor, redistributive taxation, or loosened capital controls. Many young Chinese practice the only permissible form of protest: “lying flat.” Our audience was greatly amused by stories of 20-somethings dropping out of the rat race entirely—choosing to shun economic activity, becoming digital nomads or going on hallucinogenic benders in Thailand. Welcome to the club, guys.
Also in the audience for the talk were Wang’s parents. He asserts in the final chapter that he owes his personal success and family’s measure of autonomy to his parents’ emigration. However, the U.S. imposes costs and limits on their freedom to nearly the same degree as China: Their suburban domicile is characterized by a lack of community, total car dependency, a loose middle-class foothold, and the same decaying infrastructure as before their arrival. The lawyerly society has shut the door on constructing enough housing, transit, clean energy, and safe streets to allow their flourishing within our built environment. The Wangs’ personal experience is indicative of the tradeoffs faced under the juxtaposed policy regimes. He closes, “The ultimate contest between China and the United States will not be decided by which country has the biggest factory or the highest corporate valuation. This contest will be won by the country that works best for the people living in it.” Neither state has it right quite yet.
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III. Gadfly
Much of what has been written about the crisis of (il)liberal democracy, deglobalization, and the collapse of trust in institutions since 1989 is laden with abstractions about “populism” and “democratic backsliding.” Ian Shapiro’s After the Fall is more prosecutorial: What decisions, when and by whom, brought us to this moment?
His answer is that today’s crises are the cumulation of choices made by hubristic leaders running victory laps at the “end of history.” Each decision, defended individually as prudent, together corroded the legitimacy of the order it was intended to defend.
The West emerged from the Cold War rich, confident, and morally vindicated. They might have used the moment to fashion a new economic order, a fairer global development framework, an empowered mechanism for international justice, and a UN with teeth. Instead, they squandered those hopes. Its leaders imagined they could survive a hundred long centuries while taking decisions that would scarcely last a long weekend. They danced on the graves of their rivals, intoxicated by victory, and repeated the mistakes of Versailles.
The book complicates the black-and-white retelling of the post-cold-war order. Russia, Shapiro argues, was not simply a villain-in-waiting. After Gorbachev’s optimistic glasnost, Moscow wanted recognition, security, and a place in Europe. It even toyed with, and at times pressed for, NATO membership. Yet it was systematically and humiliatingly ignored. This is not an exoneration of Putin. But it does make the myth of the inevitability of the state of the world hard to sustain. The West did not sleepwalk into trouble. With agency and confidence, it took a hard right and ran straight into it. Dissenters to the toppling of Saddam, the unilateral reflexes behind Kosovo, and the carpet-bombing of already-battered bugbears were ignored and castigated as cranks. The Marshall Plan offered a precedent for rebuilding ruined societies after the violent, vengeful and largely counterproductive war on terror. After 2008, we might have forged a new settlement between markets and the state. Instead, Obama approved bail-outs for gamblers, entrenched moral hazard for financiers, and opened the door to a global politics of inequality and resentment. Modern America, with all its blemishes, its orange overlords and its polarized populace, is a symptom, not a cause. Shapiro, with a surgeon’s precision, diagnoses the body politic. Our condition is not an idiopathic disease. It is a zero-sum-game with a case-history.
Shapiro plays to his strengths as a formidable democratic theorist, connecting the hubris of foreign policy with the decay of domestic democracy. If the book errs, it is on the side of the “great man” theory of history. Decision-makers matter greatly here. The villains are leaders and advisers with briefing books, glittering resumes, personal incentives, and well-fed egos.
Shapiro reminds us that “things can get worse.” He recalls Keynes, who presciently warned in 1919 of the crises to come and was, in effect, “shouting at the wind” as the world around him collapsed into ruin. Keynes did not live to see the post-war peace, the conquest of the moon, and the great retreat of global poverty. Perhaps we are again at such a cusp, waiting for war, exhaustion and crisis to give way to another, better era. Let us just not squander it again.
Our next issue will be published on July 8.
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In The New Experts: Populist Elites and Technocratic Promises in Modi’s India, the author, Anuradha Sajjanhar, notes that while global consulting firms have been working on in government projects since the early 2000s, there has been a rapid growth in their involvement post 2019 (p. 99). In her book Sajjanhar interviews a high-ranking bureaucrat who notes “all major [government] schemes are being supported by Deloitte or Accenture, PwC and McKinsey. It’s entrenched” (p. 107). A 2023 media report highlighted the increased interface between consultants and the Indian government, noting that between 2017 and 2022, five consulting firms had received nearly INR 500 crore (approximately $52 million) for several key projects. A 2025 report on the government’s effort to “rein in rampant consultant appointments” noted that the central government was incurring an annual expenditure of INR 302 crore ($32 million) hiring consultants. There is no comparable coverage of the influx of consulting at the state government level, but an interesting media report from October 2025 noted Maharashtra’s IT minister saying that “the unmonitored use of private consultants at Mantralaya [the state government’s administrative headquarters] is leading to a loot that must be curbed” with new state-wide government guidelines on how consultants are to be engaged for official work.