Bestselling novelist Gary Shteyngart has spent the past 20 years predicting, with trademark pessimism and terrifying accuracy, the immediate future. His novel Super Sad True Love Story was written and published in the internet-as-savior optimistic early-2010s but predicts all of the negative consequences of technology that most of us failed to even remotely anticipate. The MySpaceification of formerly objective information, the concentration of influence, the factioning of identity groups -- he saw it all coming. How?? Can we also learn to see like this? Is it useful or terrible to have this kind of vision?

Further Reading - 

Vera, or Faith by Gary Shteyngart

Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shtyengart

Lake Success by Gary Shteyngart

The Russian Debutante's Handbook by Gary Shteyngart 

Confessions of a Watch Geek, The New Yorker

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Did you hear the one about the lady in Austin, Texas who bought a marble bust at a Goodwill for $34.99 and it turned out to be a Roman antiquity? Well. When she took it to an auction house to sell it, she learned it had been looted during WWII. Which meant it had all kinds of history. To untangle what to do, that lady called Leila Amineddoleh, a lawyer who works to repatriate art where it "belongs" — whatever that means.

FURTHER READING

Goodwill Sold a Bust for $34.99. It's an Ancient Roman Relic., The New York Times

Sotheby’s Just Lost Its Lawsuit Against Greece Over an 8th-Century BC Horse Statue—and the Decision May Have Lasting Implications for the Trade, ArtNet News

Alec Baldwin's Legal Tussle Over a Painting, The New Yorker

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Xochitl Gonzalez is a bestselling novelist, but, to me, she’s an economist. Her books are about collisions between economic classes; she captures precarity and luxury, access and scrappiness, often with gentrification as the site of these collisions. She has this freakishly astute lens because, she says, she herself has “changed economic classes,” not once but three times — an experience she’s now writing about in a forthcoming memoir. 

Further Reading:

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Al Roth won a Nobel prize for his work helping create a market for matching kidney donors with people who needed kidneys. You know what would really help people who need kidneys though? If they could just buy them. But almost no country allows that, because it feels like it would create bad outcomes, and because it feels gross. Al loves thinking about these awkward intersections of money and morality. He calls these “repugnant markets.” And he has pretty thoroughly convinced me that it would be GOOD to let people pay for organs.

Further Reading: 

Moral Economics: From Prostitution to Organ Sales, What Controversial Transactions Reveal about How Markets Work

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