Each week, the Sunday Post highlights just a few things we loved reading and want to share with you. Settle in with a cup of coffee, or tea, if that's your pleasure — we saved you a seat! Read an essay or an article online that you loved? Let us know at submissions@seattlereviewofbooks.com. Need more browse? You can also look through the archives.

My boyfriend and I spent Thanksgiving with my family in Texas, and I invited some long-time friends from graduate school. We had become friends due to timeliness and proximity to alcohol, but maybe not because we were agreeable people. In September of 2015, we had wound up in the same Japanese history seminar that ended at five in the afternoon, and the graffitied student bar peddling subsidized beer for £1.50 was only a poky cement courtyard away. They are now reading and teaching in their dream doctoral life, and we spent Thanksgiving bickering over political ideologies. Nobody came out ahead; in those debates, we are all losers. So in this Sunday Post, I’m allowing myself to be extra-pedantic and share some quite long, dry, but I believe, important reads given similar factors of timeliness and proximity.

These reads are about the institutions of our modern, Western, liberal world: the Constitutional Convention, the software of American policy-making, and the bastion of well-read affluence (or neo-liberal rag, depending on your sensibilities), The Economist. Maybe they’ll make you foam at the mouth with rabid approval. Or maybe you’ll make it through a paragraph or two before you roll your eyes and never read a Sunday Post by me again. In which case, five years from now I might invite you to Thanksgiving with my family.

Noah Feldman’s Prepared Statement

This first one you’ve likely already read, or heard and watched in any case. It’s Professor Noah Feldman’s opening statement to the House Judiciary Committee. I returned to Seattle just in time for Twitter to blow up with Benedict Cumberbatch trending (new Sherlock season?!), only to be rerouted to another impeachment testimony (worst crime novel adaptation ever). Since I was at work, I went straight for the text, linked above. And I’m glad I read it first as a transcription, and I urge you to read it as well. Academics, trained in long-form analytical articulation, shine in writing where they might otherwise falter. Call me old-fashioned, but seeing words on a page invites considered dissent; speaking invites interruptions.

Through the blandness of a typed document, you are less distracted by Feldman’s uncanny resemblance to Benedict Cumberbatch, his Franklin Pierce hair manicure, and his barely restrained smugness. I was able to admire the detail in his historical scholarship, the way he brings to life the minutiae of a centuries-old but weighty disagreement, and a precise turning point. I could also step back to consider the implications of this originalist interpretation, clearly in an attempt to pander to the Republicans in the room.

After Benjamin Franklin also spoke in favor of impeachment, something remarkable happened: Gouverneur Morris changed his mind. Morris had been convinced by the argument that elections were not, on their own, a sufficient check on the actions of a president who tried to pervert the course of the electoral process. Morris told the other delegates that he now believed that “corruption & some few other offences to be such as ought to be impeachable.”

To Regain Policy Competence: The Software of American Public Problem-Solving

While a long, detailed, and highly specialized read, this essay in the Texas National Security Review gives a hypothesis and solutions for something I believe a lot of us wonder about viscerally all the time, why is there such a generalized distrust in government? For Philip Zelikow, the answer is much more mundane than political flash or right-wing media or partisan stalemate. He describes the faltering not of politics but policy, of the actual craft and discipline of policymaking. He compares this craft to engineering — it works best when it is methodical, repeatable, and high-quality, and its agents highly-trained in assessment, analysis, problem-solving, and even the mundanities of rigorous record-keeping. We caught a glimpse of this distinction a few weeks ago listening to the testimonies of Fiona Hill and David Holmes versus Gordon Sondland. The battle of the notetakers and the phone-callers.

I learned so much from this highly competent piece about systematic incompetence, and left wishing this piece had a broader audience. It deserves it.

The software of substantive public problem-solving overlaps with the formal procedures of government, but it is really a different subject. The software of policy is about how policies are crafted within a given set of processes and constraints. Software includes methods or routines for the way the substantive work is done, at the level of the individual professional and the institution. At every stage, the software includes organizational cultures for getting and evaluating information, for doing analysis, and for recording what is being done.

How the Economist shaped the liberal mind

New Statesman commissioning editor Gavin Jacobson reviews Alexander Zevin’s Liberalism at Large: The World According to the Economist, an intellectual biography of not a person, but a weekly magazine that calls itself a “paper.” Its subscriber list is famous and wide-ranging, its circulation global, and style guide is summed up by this instruction: “Pretend you are God.”

But like the Constitution and the engine of our policies that make up a government, an icon is shaped not through omniscience, but through humans and what they know of the world, through their relationships (some quite literally married into the magazine), their priorities, their supporters, their convictions or petty rivalries, their taxes and their balance sheets. That’s why it’s story is written as a biography.

But it is at the level of ideas that the Economist has acquired its reputation as the lodestar of liberalism and as a guide to the doctrine of the age. This began in the mid to late 19th century under the editorship of Walter Bagehot, who Zevin rightly calls a “totemic figure” and “the name most associated with the paper”. Born in 1826, Bagehot became editor of the Economist in 1861 after marrying James Wilson’s daughter a few years before.

On capitalism, Walter Bagehot was less fanatical than his father-in-law, favouring a graduated income tax, state ownership of the railways and legislation to make factory work safer. But he was a firm believer in the nation’s imperial destiny – not only because colonisation is what the British did but also because it opened up new vistas for capital.