My summer 2025 readings

Jaime Bayly, Los genios, Galaxia Gutenberg (2023). What caused the legendary quarrel between the Latin American literary giants Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel García Márquez? I picked up a copy of this wonderful work of historical fiction at a bookstore in Mexico City, and I was spellbound by every page! (in Spanish)
Randall Berry, et al., Spectrum Rights in Outer Space: Interference Management for Mega-Constellations, NSF White Paper (2022). As a follow-up to my 2023 paper Outer Space Auctions?, I am currently doing further research on the feasibility of orbit and spectrum markets in outer space, and this paper, in particular, is especially informative.
Arthur A. Goldsmith, Power Grabs from the Top: A Database of Self-Coups, International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 68, No. 4 (2024), https://doi.org/10.1093/isq/sqae147. At the beginning of my summer break (back in late April!), I began doing further research on “self-coups” to prepare for a talk I was invited to give in Mexico City as part of my series of papers on Gödel’s Loophole (see here, here, and here).
Geoffrey Hindley, A Brief History of the Magna Carta: The Story of the Origins of Liberty, Running Press (2008). I wanted to learn more about the “Great Charter” of 1215, so I picked up a copy of the first edition of this not-so-brief history (the book is 302 pp. long, excluding end notes and the index!) at my favorite bookstore in Los Angeles, Lost Books. (Here is a link to the second edition of this book.)
Michael Kempe, The Best of all Possible Worlds: A Life of Leibniz in Seven Pivotal Days, W. W. Norton (2024). I just ordered this work about the great Baroque polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, one of the most creative, original, and prolific men of letters of all time, on the strength of Tyler Cowen’s mini-review.
Werner Troesken, The Pox of Liberty: How the Constitution Left Americans Rich, Free, and Prone to Infection, University of Chicago Press (2015). There is no way I’m going to pay $120.00 for a book published by an extortionate academic press (see here), but fortunately for me, I was able to pick up a free examination copy of this excellent tome last weekend at the annual meeting of the History of Economics Society. Among other things, Professor Troesken’s review of Jacobsen v. Massachusetts on pp. 83-88 of his book is highly illuminating.
Rob Wesson, Darwin’s First Theory: Exploring Darwin’s Quest for a Theory of Earth, Pegasus Books (2017). The title of this book refers to Darwin’s theory of plate tectonics, a theory he developed years before he published his famous work on evolution in 1859. (For the record, I should disclose that Charles Darwin is one of my intellectual role models, and one of my first published papers was about Darwin’s travels through Tierra del Fuego; see here.)

In addition to the above works, I also want to single out an essay by the late Alasdair MacIntyre, On Having Survived the Academic Moral Philosophy of the 20th Century, that I had read soon after the death of the Scottish-American philosopher on 21 May 2025. As it happens, although this essay is directed mainly to moral philosophers, it is highly relevant to my field as well (law). I will therefore have more to say about MacIntyre’s essay in my next post …