First of all, I defer to Pete on all election predictions. A lot depends on the extent to which Obama repairs his commander-in-chief brand over the next few weeks by appearing to be and/or actually being resolute against the Islamic State (aka ISIL).

In Georgia, I will say, the Senate race is trending slightly toward the Democratic candidate, Michelle Nunn. Her victory would be a gain for the Democrats. She and David Perdue are equally decent candidates, and they’ve equally good attack commercials. The one against Nunn focused on her secret memo that was more than somewhat condescending about the credulity of the voters of Georgia. The one against Perdue accuses him of being a rapacious capitalist who laid off a whole town in North Carolina for personal profit. The candidates have fired their best shots; both commercials seemed more true than not.

Perdue is not the kind of candidate who inspires either enthusiasm or contempt. Nunn has been endorsed on TV by the renegade Zell Miller and has a little of that “I’m an old-fashioned Democrat like my statesman dad” thing going for her. She has succeeded some in separating herself from the president. More importantly, the Democrats are pretty darn energized, because they think this is a rare opportunity for a statewide victory. The main thing that can energize the Republicans, of course, is the thought that our guy may be the key to the Republicans running the Senate. And he may really be. So we’ll see whether anti-Obama energy will start to flow across the state in sufficient force by Election Day. Probably but not certainly. Turnout, which will depend some on factors not yet evident, will be the key.

One of those factors might turn out to be the ability of voters to separate the Senate election from the one for governor. More than one expert thinks that the Democratic candidate, Jason Carter, will upset the flawed incumbent, Nathan Deal. Carter is quite a competent and eloquent member of the state senate (and not much like Jimmy), and it is really easier to detach his campaign from anything having to do with the president. Experts can be wrong, and the polls on this race are pretty inconclusive. Deal’s strongest point is the high rating given to our state for attracting jobs. The corruption stuff is old news to Georgians; everyone assumes there’s some truth to the allegation that Deal was escaping from Congress by running for governor. Yet he was easily elected.

The takeaway: It’s not that I’m giving reasons to vote Democratic in Georgia this time. Unlike about everyone I know, I actually voted for Perdue in the primary. It’s also not that I’m predicting a Democratic victory in either race. As a card-carrying political scientist, I have to advise you, if you insist on betting the farm on these races, that almost all of the available quantitative evidence still suggests a Republican sweep, with the Senate contest influencing voting for governor more than the other way around. Still, there’s more uncertainty here than you would think by merely looking at recent voting patterns and presidential approval ratings.

On the list of authors who shaped me: There will be no retreat and no surrender. The premise of the exercise — which, I admit, is barely more interesting than a video of someone pouring a bucket of water on me would have been — was to write with as little calculation as possible.

The one punch I may have pulled: I didn’t list Marx. Speaking of Marx (and Christopher Lasch, Daniel Bell, et al.) applied to contemporary circumstances, you need to skip the long and boring Piketty (which has little to nothing to do with anything Marx actually said) and read the brief and exhilarating book by Joel Kotkin, The New Class Conflict. It brands itself as promoting capitalist (growth) as a means to achieve social-democratic ends. It really gets us up to date on the classless class of oligarchs of Silicon Valley and their project to rule America through masterful manipulation, and it’s the best polemic against the very idea of “sustainability” ever written. It’s equally hard on “progressives” and WSJ conservatives, and it makes great use of the cheerful dystopian predictions of Tyler Cowen.

One more thing. It wasn’t a list of thinkers I like. I like Russell Kirk and Harry Jaffa. I don’t like Hannah Arendt or Heidegger.

And yet another thing: Here’s my teaching on The Big Bang Theory applied to scientists and the humanities.