I don’t know about you, but I frequently have the impulse to pause political speeches and do a point by point analysis of what’s being said. Without that pause, it feels like a lot of important meaning gets lost to the overall vibe of the speech. If you crave it too, there’s plenty of deep analysis like that in Masha Gessen’s book, Surviving Autocracy.

Using the backdrop of Gessen’s experience with Russia, the book provides an analysis of contemporary government for its autocratic tendencies. There is a lot of fascinating analysis. The book is framed by its time, which is that it came out shortly after the start of the covid pandemic. The critique around that falls a little flat to me because the pandemic was such a novel circumstance. I think this is the piece that seems most partisan as well. However, most of the rest of the book is full of other more common aspects of governing that feel endlessly timeless and relevant–the issues that we may very well be grappling with for all of human history.