Editor's Note: After this weekend's shocking news that J.K. Rowling thought it was a mistake to have Hermione end up with Ron in the Harry Potter books, Dan Drezner begged us to publish this excerpt from his forthcoming fanfic novel, Eat, Cast, Love. We have reluctantly acceded to his request.

The World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting -- aka Davos -- is upon us again. I, like all foreign policy fashion mavens, am looking forward to seeing which fleece vest Thomas Friedman will showcase on the ski slopes this year. But the substance of Davos is a different matter altogether. The cycle of reaction to it has yinged and yanged over the years. Some commentators take it very seriously and see the elite meeting as a threat to national identity or democratic politics. At the same time, it's been pretty hard to take the event seriously as of late. When the Arab Spring erupted while Davos was taking place in 2011, it signaled that perhaps the center of gravity in world politics wasn't necessarily on the Swiss ski slopes. Individual commentators also go through their own cycles, starting with fascination and then -- after repeatedly not getting invited -- turning to mockery of the confab of world leaders, multinational CEOs, and Bono.

Readers of Foreign Policy might be dimly aware that former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates published a memoir this week. Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War offers lots of grimy details about Gates's time serving both George W. Bush's and Barack Obama's administrations (there's also some good stuff in there about a few foreign leaders). In both the excerpts and Gates's publicity interviews this past week, he has expressed his central thesis loud and clear: The crafting of American foreign policy has changed, and not for the better. When Gates first came to Washington, politics was kept segmented from policy. During his term as secretary of defense, however, Gates found himself increasingly disgusted with Joe Biden the ways that partisan politics and blinkered strategic thinking affected policymaking.

As 2013 draws to a close, I am pleased to announce the 5th annual winners of the Albies, awarded for the best writing in global political economy for the past calendar year. The Albies are named for the late great political economist Albert O. Hirschman. I take great pride in choosing these 10 awards at the end of the calendar year, in no small part because, as you'll see, the winners vary from prestigious university press books to snarky blog posts. The important thing is that these 10 contributions forced the reader to think about the way the global economy works in a way that can't be un-thought. 

As 2013 draws to a close, it is not hard to find epitaphs for American hegemony. Perhaps the most recent and most articulate was Walter Russell Mead's claim that the "Central Powers" -- China, Iran, and Russia -- were acting like an "Axis of Weevils," burrowing in and hollowing out the U.S.-created order that has been in place for decades.