Intuition is an ultimate experience, beyond words: we know more than we can tell. This phenomenon upsets those who believe in rationality as a purely conscious activity. Its detractors tend to dismiss intuition as crazed superstition, while others have confused it with God’s voice. The Intelligence of Intuition extends the argument for the rationality of intuition made in my book Gut Feelings with a deeper scientific analysis. I locate intuition in its larger societal context and argue that intuition is based on the unconscious use of adaptive heuristics. These simple rules make intuition smart.

This chapter considers the reciprocal productivity between Beckett’s Endgame and Shakespeare’s romance The Tempest. It examines the settings of the two plays, their dialectics of making and unmaking, their dynamics of confinement and release, the materiality of air and earth, and the notion of ending. It looks at the insular dominions of Prospero’s island and the space inhabited by Beckett’s characters in Endgame, and argues that the imperfections and shortcomings of a medium are not an end in themselves but become the grounds on which plays such as The Tempest and Endgame transcend the finitude of their art and reflect back on it, asserting its very finitude as a condition of possibility.In both plays, the game of chess figures as a structural and thematic component and reflects on the art of the playwright. The chapter analyses the brief scene in which Prospero discovers Ferdinand and Miranda playing chess. The scene functions as a mise-en-abîme, as a play-within-the-play, and becomes a metaphor for the play itself. In the many references to chess in Beckett’s works, above all in Endgame, chess, as this chapter argues, presents a matrix of multiplicity that remains tied to form.

This chapter argues that the interest Middleton shows in the levelling power of mortality in A Game at Chess reveals a consistent attitude towards fame and the eternizing powers of theatre. Rather than transcending the cultural practices and preoccupations of his own time, Middleton’s works in general and A Game at Chess in particular demonstrate an insistent effort to immerse themselves within them. Instead of setting the play apart from the plays for which he is best known, Middleton furnishes A Game at Chess with similar theatrical and thematic interests, many of which bring issues involving memorialization to the surface. While the allegorical surface of the play seems to indulge the eternizing designs of the White House, the more theatrically compelling characters of the Black House, like the moving monuments they resemble, pursue the approbation of the moment over the possibility of a more enduring legacy. Representing the pursuit of fame as a game, A Game at Chess appears designed to gain Middleton the immediate notoriety of the public stage rather than the eternizing admiration of posterity, even at the cost of the future of his career.

The third chapter shows that Vladimir Nabokov, seeking to replace the superannuated form of national allegory, constructs a figure of supranational metonymy through chess. Critics have explained that the Bildungsroman is a novel of socialization that displays how an individual finds his place in a social world and projects a trajectory of collective progress. Like Beckett, though, Nabokov was a post-revolutionary expatriate who made his career in another language. One of Nabokov’s targets was the notion that novels offer national allegories. Reading Nabokov’s early novels, which feature Russian exiles who rove across the continent as if across a chessboard, I reveal the writer’s interest in crafting a “personal world” that travels well across borders. The figure of metonymy presents advantages over metaphor. First, elastic in scale, metonymy represents spaces smaller or larger than the nation. Second, where national allegories had to install generic template protagonists at their narrative centers, supranational metonymies stress individual idiosyncrasy, accommodating abnormalities; they reject the premise that there can be such a thing as a generic national character.

The caliphate of al-Mu'tasim continues the religious policies of al-Ma'mun but with a key military shift to reliance on a new cadre of Turkic and Central Asian troops. The new Abbasid capital at Samarra becomes a hub of new palaces for the next half-century (most famously the palace of Jawsaq al-Khaqani/Dar al-Khilafa).Abbasid society experiences a range of new trends in Arabic literature and lifestyle, mostly felt in the reign of al-Mutawakkil.The increasingly secluded caliphs at Samarra embolden domination by the Turkic soldiery, who make and unmake a series of caliphs. Recovery is achieved under al-Mu'tadid, who echoes the reign of al-Ma'mun, but the reign of the child caliph al-Muqtadir invites another phase of disarray. Ministerial rivalries, harem intrigue, expansion by the Byzantines, and challenges by millenarian Shi'i movements, such as the Qaramita and the Fatimids, lead to a weakened Baghdad. The rising Buyids of western Iran dominate the Abbasids from 945 to 1055, and the caliphs are reduced to a merely symbolic position.

A brief assessment of how artificial intelligence (AI) will change negotiation and the way in which we learn about it in the near future, and a note of optimism to conclude.