I just finished the Francis Fukuyama edited Blindside: How to Anticipate Forcing Events and Wild Cards in Global Politics. I couldn't recommend it more highly. Contributors include David Landes, Richard Posner, James Kurth, Gregg Easterbrook, Walter Russell Mead, and others. It's an easy read about an important topic: the fundamentally unpredictable nature of politics and history. Of course, Fukuyama and friends argue, some things are predictable, especially in retrospect. The key is to plan for low-probability events that may happen, in order to foster one's ability to deal with all the low-probability events that do happen. Two contributors, Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall, actually attempt to gauge the predictability of unpredictable events for a living. It seems like a fun way to make a lot of money. Though the predictions they include in their chapter "Ahead of the Curve: Anticipating Strategic Surprises" aren't that, well, surprising. They predict, for example, an "anti-American world." Um, isn't that arguably what we have now? I suppose one has to assume that Schwartz and Randall save the really good stuff for their paying customers.