Philip Short, Michael Beckley & Meenakshi Ahamed With Sebastian Mallaby: A Conversation

Sebastian Mallaby is the author of five books, including The New York Times bestseller More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite, and The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan. His work has been published in various publications, including Foreign Affairs, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and The Financial Times, where he spent two years as a contributing editor. In The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future (Penguin Press), Mallaby tells the story of Silicon Valley’s dominant venture capital firms, and how their strategies and fates have shaped the path of innovation and the global economy. It’s a story of iconic triumphs and infamous disasters, from the comedy of errors at the birth of Apple to the silly money that fed the hubris at WeWork and Uber. It is the nature of the venture-capital game that most attempts at discovery fail, but a few succeed at such a scale that they more than make up for everything else. That extreme ratio of success and failure is the power law that drives the VC business, all of Silicon Valley, the tech sector, and, by extension, the world.

Michael Beckley is an associate professor of political science at Tufts University and a non-resident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. In Dangerzone: The Coming Conflict with China (W. W. Norton & Company), co-authored with Hal Brands, he provides a provocative and urgent analysis of the United States-China rivalry. These superpowers are in a contest of clashing geopolitical interests and an ideological dispute over whether authoritarianism or democracy will dominate the 21st century. According to the authors, history and China’s current trajectory suggest that this rivalry will reach its moment of maximum danger in the 2020s. Rising powers become most aggressive when their fortunes fade and difficulties multiply, and they realize they must achieve their ambitions now or miss the chance to do so forever. China has already started down this path. Over the long run, the Chinese challenge will likely prove more manageable than many pessimists currently believe – but during the 2020s, the prospect of war will be frighteningly real. The U.S. needs a near-term strategy to navigate this danger zone ahead.

Philip Short has written several definitive biographies including Mao: A Life, Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare, and A Taste for Intrigue: The Multiple Lives of François Mitterrand. He worked as a journalist for the BBC for 25 years as a foreign correspondent in Moscow, Beijing, and Washington, D.C., and wrote for the Economist and the Times of London. His Putin (Henry Holt and Co.) is the first comprehensive, fully up-to-date biography of Vladimir Putin, woven into the tumultuous saga of Russia over the last 60 years. He is a dangerous man. Alone among world leaders, Putin has the power to reduce the United States and Europe to ashes in a nuclear firestorm and has threatened to do so. He invades his neighbors, most recently Ukraine, meddles in western elections, and orders assassinations inside and outside Russia. His regime is autocratic and deeply corrupt. But that is only half the story. Meticulously researched and drawing on almost 200 interviews conducted over eight years in Russia, the United States, and Europe and on source material in more than a dozen languages, Putin gives us the whole tale.

Meenakshi Ahamed is an Indian-born journalist. She has worked at World Bank and the Ashoka Society, and is a foreign correspondent for NDTV in London. Her op-eds and articles have been published in The Asian Age, Seminar, Foreign Policy, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. “I thought India was pretty jammed with poor people and cows wandering around the streets, witch doctors and people sitting on hot coals and bathing in the Ganges, but I did not realize that anybody thought it was important,” said President Harry S. Truman to Ambassador Chester Bowles in 1951. India-U.S. relations have come a long way since, but not without their challenges. In A Matter of Trust: India-US Relations from Truman to Trump (HarperCollins) Ahamed reveals the personal prejudices and insecurities of the leaders – and the political imperatives – that so often cast a shadow over their relationship. She draws on a unique trove of presidential papers, newly declassified documents, memoirs, and interviews with officials directly involved in events on both sides to put together an illuminating account of a relationship that has far-reaching implications for the changing global political landscape. Strobe Talbott, former deputy secretary of state and president of the Brookings Institution, considered that in A Matter of Trust, Ahamed “brings to life the leaders in both countries, with their views and prejudices. A masterpiece.”