Category: Books
Stories Beyond Demographics
The representation theory of stories, where the protagonist must mirror my gender, race, or sexuality for me to find myself in the story, offers a cramped view of what fiction can do and a shallow account of how it actually works. Stories succeed not through mirroring but by revealing human patterns that cut across identity. Archetypes like Hero, Caregiver, Explorer, and Artist, and structures like Tragedy, Romance, and Quest are available to everyone. That is why a Japanese salaryman can love Star Wars despite never having been to space or met a Wookie and why an American teenager can recognize herself in a nineteenth-century Russian novel.
Tom Bogle makes this point well in a post on Facebook:
I have no issue with people wanting representation of historically marginalized people in stories. I understand that people want to “see themselves” in the story.
But it is more important to see the stories in ourselves than to see ourselves in the stories.
When we focus on the representation model, we recreate a character to be an outward representation of physical traits. Then the internal character traits of that individual become associated with the outward physical appearance of the character and we pigeonhole ourselves into thinking that we are supposed to relate only to the character that looks like us. Movies and TV shows have adopted the Homer Simpson model of the aloof, detached, and even imbecilic father, and I, as a middle-aged cis het white guy with seven kids could easily fall into the trap of thinking that is the only character to whom I can relate. It also forces us to change the stories and their underlying imagery in order to fit our own narrative preferences, which sort of undermines the purpose for retelling an old story in the first place.
The archetypal model, however, shifts our way of thinking. Instead of needing to adapt the story of Little Red-Cap (Red Riding Hood) to my own social and cultural norms so that I can see myself in the story, I am tasked with seeing the story play out in myself. How am I Riding Hood? How am I the Wolf? How does the grandmother figure appear in me from time to time? Who has been the Woodsman in my life? How have I been the Woodsman to myself or others? Even the themes of the story must be applied to my patterns of behavior or belief systems, not simply the characters. This model also enables us to retain the integrity of the versions of these stories that have withstood the test of time.
So if your goal is actually to affect real social change through stories, I would encourage you to consider how the archetypal approach may actually be more effective at accomplishing your aims than the representational approach alone (as they are not necessarily in conflict with one another).
What I’ve been reading
Michael Wachtel, Viacheslav Ivanov: A Symbolist Life. 615 pp. of what Russian/Soviet cultural life was like in the early 20th century. Focuses on broader strands, rather than just the most famous names. Ivanov today is largely forgotten, but he was at the time arguably the most influential figure of that period. “They were mostly a bunch of nuts” is one of my takeaways.
Herbert Breslin and Anne Midgette, The King and I: The Uncensored Tale of Luciano Pavarotti’s Rise to Fame by his Manager, Friend, and Sometime Adversary. Usually people tell me books like this are “delightful,” and then they bore me to tears. This one actually is fantastically fun. “To tell the truth, though, Luciano didn’t care about the money at the beginning. In the early years, he never asked me how much he was going to get paid for a recital. He had only one condition: it had to be sold out.”
Alan Manning, Why Immigration Policy is Hard and How to Make it Better is a thoughtful and balanced look at its topic, recommended.
Alex Mayyasi, Planet Money: A Guide to the Economic Forces that Shape Your Life is a useful introduction to economic concepts.
Nicolas Niarchos, The Elements of Power: A Story of War, Technology, and the Dirtiest Supply Chain on Earth is a good treatment of minerals issues as they relate to the Congo today. It will not make you more bullish on Rwanda, or for that matter the Congo.
Eve MacDonald, Carthage: A New History covers what we do know about those people. That isn’t much at the conceptual level, and I wonder why archaeology has not taught us more there.
I expect I will very much agree with Brink Lindsey, The Permanent Problem: The Uncertain Transition from Mass Plenty to Mass Flourishing.
What should I ask Henry Oliver?
Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with him. We will focus on our mutual readings of Shakespearer’s Measure for Measure, with Henry taking the lead. But I also will ask him about the value of literature, Jane Austen, Adam Smith, Bleak House, his book on late bloomers, and more.
Here is Henry’s (free) Substack. Here is Henry on Twitter.
So what should I ask him?
Dan Wang 2025 letter
Self-recommending, here is the link, here is one excerpt:
People like to make fun of San Francisco for not drinking; well, that works pretty well for me. I enjoy board games and appreciate that it’s easier to find other players. I like SF house parties, where people take off their shoes at the entrance and enter a space in which speech can be heard over music, which feels so much more civilized than descending into a loud bar in New York. It’s easy to fall into a nerdy conversation almost immediately with someone young and earnest. The Bay Area has converged on Asian-American modes of socializing (though it lacks the emphasis on food). I find it charming that a San Francisco home that is poorly furnished and strewn with pizza boxes could be owned by a billionaire who can’t get around to setting up a bed for his mattress.
And:
One of the things I like about the finance industry is that it might be better at encouraging diverse opinions. Portfolio managers want to be right on average, but everyone is wrong three times a day before breakfast. So they relentlessly seek new information sources; consensus is rare, since there are always contrarians betting against the rest of the market. Tech cares less for dissent. Its movements are more herdlike, in which companies and startups chase one big technology at a time. Startups don’t need dissent; they want workers who can grind until the network effects kick in. VCs don’t like dissent, showing again and again that many have thin skins. That contributes to a culture I think of as Silicon Valley’s soft Leninism. When political winds shift, most people fall in line, most prominently this year as many tech voices embraced the right.
Interesting throughout, plus Dan writes about the most memorable books he read in 2025.
What is the greatest artwork of the century so far?
That question is taken from a recent Spectator poll. Their experts offer varied answers, so I thought at the near quarter-century mark I would put together my own list, relying mostly on a seat of the pants perspective rather than comprehensiveness. Here goes:
Cinema
Uncle Boonmee, In the Mood for Love, Ceylan’s Winter Sleep, Yi Yi, Artificial Intelligence, Her, Y Tu Mama Tambien, Four Months Three Weeks Two Days, from Iran A Separation, Oldboy, Silent Light (Reygadas), The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, Get Back, The Act of Killing, Master and Commander, Apocalypto, and New World would be a few of my picks. Incendies anyone?
Classical music (a bad term these days, but you know what I mean):
Georg Friedrich Haas, 11,000 Strings, Golijov’s Passion, John Adams Transmigration of Souls, The Dharma at Big Sur, Caroline Shaw, and Stockhausen’s Licht operas perhaps. Typically such works need to be seen live, as streaming is no substitute. As for recordings, recorded versions of almost every classic work are better than before, opera being excluded from that generalization. So the highest realizations of most classical music compositions have come in the last quarter century.
Fiction
Ferrante, the first two volumes of Knausgaard, Submission, Philip Pullman, and The Three-Body Problem. The Marquez memoir and his kidnapping book, both better than his magic realism. The Savage Detectives. Sonia and Sunny maybe?
Visual Arts
Bill Viola’s video art, Twombly’s Lepanto series, Cai Guo-Qiang and Chinese contemporary art more generally (noting it now seems to be in decline), the large Jennifer Bartlett installation that was in MOMA, Robert Gober. Late Hockney and Richter works. The best of Kara Walker. The second floor of MOMA and so much of what has been shown there.
Jazz
There is so much here, as perhaps the last twenty-five years have been a new peak for jazz, even as it fades in general popularity. One could mention Craig Taborn, Chris Potter, and Marcus Gilmore, but there are dozens of top tier creators. Cecile McLorin Salvant on the vocal side. Is she really worse than Ella Fitzgerald? I don’t think so.
Popular music (also a bad term)
The best of Wilco, Kanye, D’angelo, Frank Ocean, Bob Dylan’s Love and Theft. How about Sunn O)))? No slight intended to those listed, but I had been hoping this category would turn out a bit stronger?
Television
The Sopranos, the first two seasons of Battlestar Galactica, Srugim, Borgen, and Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Assorted
Hamilton, and there is plenty more in theater I have not seen. At the very least one can cite Stoppard’s Coast of Utopia and Leopoldstadt. There is games and gaming. People around the world, overall, look much better than ever before. The Museum of Islamic Art in Doha and the reoopened Great Egyptian Museum in Cairo. The new wing at MOMA. Architecture might need a post of its own, but I’ll start by citing the works of Peter Zumthor. (Here is one broader list, it strikes me as too derivative in style, in any case it is hard to get around and see all these creations, same problem as with judging theatre.) I do not follow poetry much, but Louise Glück and Seamus Heaney are two picks, both with many works in the new century. The top LLMs, starting (but not ending) with GPT-4. They are indeed things of beauty.
Overall, this list seems pretty amazing to me. We are hardly a culture in decline.
What should I ask Kim Bowes?
Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with her. Here is Wikipedia:
Kimberly D. Bowes (born 1970) is an American archaeologist who is a professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She specializes in archeology, material culture and economics of the Roman and the later Roman world. She was the Director of the American Academy in Rome from 2014–2017.[2] She is the author of three monographs…
While she is continuously focused on the archaeology and material culture of the Roman and later Roman worlds, her research interests have shifted from late antiquity and the archeologies of religion and elite space to historical economies with a distinct focus on poverty and the lived experience of the poor. Her forthcoming study on Roman peasants in Italy reflects a greater attention to non-elites in the studies of Roman archaeology and economic history and a shift in her methodology, integrating archaeological and scientific data, anthropological theory and historical economics become.
I am a big fan of her new book Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent. So what should I ask her?
*38 Londres Street*
The author is Philippe Sands and the subtitle is
So recommended, and added to my own list. And yes I did buy another book by Philippe Sands, the acid test of whether I really liked something.
Harvey Mansfield on Rousseau and the dilemma of our age
Thus, it would seem that Rousseau compels us to choose either science or morality. If we choose morality ,we must enforce ignorance by maintaining political control over the sciences and the arts. We must believe in something like creationism because it says that nature was created for our good, and not believe in technology that exploits nature by exposing its disadvantages and hardships, such as cloning human beings to avoid the troubles of natural birth. But if we choose science, we run the risk of an explosion as human morals worsen as human power grows…There is hardly any issue today more fateful than the questison of whether modern science is the friend of politics and morality, as Hume says, or the enemy, as Rousseau says.
That is from Mansfield’s forthcoming book The Rise and Fall of Rational Control.
What I’ve been reading
1. I have been reading in the history of archaeology, and have profited from Eric H. Cline, Three Stones Make a Wall: The Story of Archaeology, which is a very good introduction to what the subtitle claims. There is also Toby Wilkinson, A World Beneath the Sands: The Golden Age of Egyptology, and Jason Thompson, Wonderful Things: A History of Egyptology, volume 2, The Golden Age: 1881-1914.
2. Elizabeth Alker, Everything We Do is Music: How 20th-Century Classical Music Shaped Pop. A very good and readable book on this interaction, with excellent discussions of Donna Summer, Stevie Wonder, La Monte Young, and Penderecki, among many others.
3. Arindrajit Dube, The Wage Standard: What’s Wrong in the Labor Market and How to Fix It. Dube notes his main theme is that employers have discretion in setting the real wage. A good overview of his work in labor economics. I would stress that if you think “tight labor markets” are good for workers, you should be obsessed with doing lots to favor capital.
4. Richard H. Davis, Religions of Early India: A Cultural History. A very useful background read for understanding later Indian history and religions, as well as the more general spread of religion throughout the southern regions of Asia. Avoids the common mistake of becoming too obscure on these topics.
For those interested in the longer term, there is Hilary Greaves, Jacob Barrett, and David Thorstad, editors, Essays on Longtermism: Present Action for the Distant Future.
There is Kevin Kelly, Colors of Asia: A Visual Journey, Photos and Design.
Alvaro Rivas, Marx in the Age of AI: How Artificial Intelligence Reshapes Value, Class, and Ideology is a short but serious look as to how Marxian concepts might apply to AI, for instance whether surplus value will be earned on the AIs, or for that matter on non-human animals.
You will find a different intersection of topic areas in Dominic Roser, David Zhang, and J.D. Bauman, All the Lives You Can Change: Effective Altruism for Christians.
*Central Asia*, by Adeeb Khalid
An excellent book, the best I know of on this region. Here is one bit:
The first printing press in Central Asia was established in Tashkent in 1870…
I had not understood how much Xinjiang (“East Turkestan”), prior to its absorption into newly communist China, fell under the sway of Soviet influence.
I had not known how much the central Asian republics had explicit “let’s slow down rural migration into the cities” policies during Soviet times.
The book is interesting throughout, recommended.
Nabeel on reading Proust
Yet not a word is wasted. It sounds paradoxical, but Proust is economical with his prose. He is simply trying to describe things that are extremely fine-grained and high-dimensional, and that takes many words. He is trying to pin down things that have never been pinned down before. And it turns out you can, indeed, write 100 pages about the experience of falling asleep, and find all kinds of richness in that experience.
And this:
…, a clear-sightedness on human vanity and a total willingness to embarrass himself. There are passages in the Albertine sections which are shocking – such as the extended stretch, around 50 pages long, in which he describes watching her sleep — and, reading them, you start to understand that this was written by a dying man who did not care about anything apart from telling the whole truth in as merciless way as possible.
Third, hypotaxis in sentences. The opposite of hypotaxis is parataxis, which you often find in Hemingway, as in: “The rain stopped and the crowd went away and the square was empty.” Each item here is side by side, simple, clean. The Bible often uses such types of sentences: “And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.”.
Hypotaxis, by contrast, describes sentences with many subordinate clauses, like nesting dolls.
Nabeel says In Search of Lost Time is now his favorite novel.
What should I ask Joanne Paul?
Yes I will be doing a Conversation with her. From the Google internet:
Joanne Paul is a writer, broadcaster, consultant, and Honorary Senior Lecturer in Intellectual History at the University of Sussex. A BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker, her research focuses on the intellectual and cultural history of the Renaissance and Early Modern periods…
She has a new book out Thomas More: A Life.
Here is her home page. Here is Joanne on Twitter. She has many videos on the Tudor period, some with over one million views.
So what should I ask her?
How harmful is the decline in long-form reading?
That is the theme of my latest Free Press column, here is one excerpt:
Oral culture, in contrast, tends to be more fluid, harder to evaluate and verify, more prone to rumor, and it has fewer gatekeepers. Those features have their advantages, as a good stand-up comedian will get louder laughs than a witty author. Or an explanation from YouTube, with moving visuals, may stick in our minds more than a turgid passage from a textbook. We also just love talking, and listening, as those modes of communication reach back into human history much further than reading and writing do. Speech is part of how we bond with each other. Still, if any gross generalization can be made, it is that oral culture makes objectivity and analytic thought harder to establish and maintain.
Given this background, both the good and the bad news is that the dominance of print culture has been in decline for a long time. Radio and cinema both became major communications media in the 1920s, and television spread in the 1950s. Those major technological advances have commanded the regular attention of billions, and still do so. Earlier in the 20th century, it suddenly became a question whether you take your ideas from a book or from the radio. And this was not always a welcome development, as Hitler’s radio speeches persuaded more Germans than did his poorly constructed, unreadable Mein Kampf.
The fact that books, newspapers, and reading still are so important reflects just how powerful print has been. How many other institutions can be in relative decline for over a hundred years, and still have such a hold over our hearts and minds?
The optimistic interpretation of our situation is that reading longer works has been in decline for a long time, and overall our civilization has managed the transition fairly well. Across history we have had various balances of written and oral cultures, and if some further rebalancing is required in the direction of the oral, we should be able to make that work, just as we have done in the past. The rise of television, whatever you may think of it, did not do us in.
A second and more pessimistic diagnosis is that print and reading culture has been hanging by a thread, and current and pending technological advances are about to give that thread its final cut. The intellectual and cultural apocalypse is near. Even if your family thinks of itself as well-educated, your kids will grow up unable to work their way through a classic novel. They will watch the Lord of the Rings movies, but never pick up the books. As a result, they are likely to have less scientific and analytic objectivity, and they will embody some of the worst and most volatile aspects of TikTok culture. They will, however, be able to sample large numbers of small bits of information, or sometimes misinformation, in a short period of time.
There is much more at the link.
Two more notable books from 2025
Ken Belson, Every Day is Sunday:
Tom MacTague, Between the Waves: The Hidden History of a Very British Revolution 1945-2016.
Both are excellent. I didn’t read the first one right off, because I do not care very much about the topic. The book is good enough to overcome that problem. I did not read the second one right off because I care about the topic a lot, but thought I already knew enough about it. The book is good enough to overcome that problems.
Gans and Doctorow on AI Copyright
Josh Gans had written what I think is the first textbook of AI. Instead of the “big issues” like will AI result in the singularity or the end of the human race, Gans treats AI as a tool for improving predictions. What will better predictions do in legal markets, economic markets, political markets? He generally avoids conclusions and instead explores models of thinking.
I especially enjoyed the chapter on intellectual property rights which maps out a model for thinking about copyright in training and in production, how they interact and the net costs and benefits.
Gans’s chapter usefully pairs with Cory Doctorow’s screed on AI. It’s a great screed despite being mostly wrong. I did like this bit, however:
Creative workers who cheer on lawsuits by the big studios and labels need to remember the first rule of class warfare: things that are good for your boss are rarely what’s good for you.
…When Getty Images sues AI companies, it’s not representing the interests of photographers. Getty hates paying photographers! Getty just wants to get paid for the training run, and they want the resulting AI model to have guardrails, so it will refuse to create images that compete with Getty’s images for anyone except Getty. But Getty will absolutely use its models to bankrupt as many photographers as it possibly can.
…Demanding a new copyright just makes you a useful idiot for your boss, a human shield they can brandish in policy fights, a tissue-thin pretense of “won’t someone think of the hungry artists?…
We need to protect artists from AI predation, not just create a new way for artists to be mad about their impoverishment.
And incredibly enough, there’s a really simple way to do that. After 20+ years of being consistently wrong and terrible for artists’ rights, the US Copyright Office has finally done something gloriously, wonderfully right. All through this AI bubble, the Copyright Office has maintained – correctly – that AI-generated works cannot be copyrighted, because copyright is exclusively for humans. That’s why the “monkey selfie” is in the public domain. Copyright is only awarded to works of human creative expression that are fixed in a tangible medium.
And not only has the Copyright Office taken this position, they’ve defended it vigorously in court, repeatedly winning judgments to uphold this principle.
The fact that every AI created work is in the public domain means that if Getty or Disney or Universal or Hearst newspapers use AI to generate works – then anyone else can take those works, copy them, sell them, or give them away for free. And the only thing those companies hate more than paying creative workers, is having other people take their stuff without permission.
The US Copyright Office’s position means that the only way these companies can get a copyright is to pay humans to do creative work. This is a recipe for centaurhood. If you’re a visual artist or writer who uses prompts to come up with ideas or variations, that’s no problem, because the ultimate work comes from you. And if you’re a video editor who uses deepfakes to change the eyelines of 200 extras in a crowd-scene, then sure, those eyeballs are in the public domain, but the movie stays copyrighted.
AI should not have to pay to read books any more than a human. At the same time, making AI created works non-copyrightable is I think the right strategy at the present moment. Moreover, it’s the most practical suggestion I have heard for channeling AI in a more socially beneficial direction, something Acemoglu has discussed without much specificity.