What I’ve been reading

1. Greg Berman and Aubrey Fox, Gradual: The Case for Incremental Change in a Radical Era.  A good book for sane centrists, and they claim to have been partly inspired by our subheading “Small Steps Toward a Much Better World.”  Did you know that putting in the “much” was Alex’s idea?  At first I resisted but clearly he was correct.

2. Jerry Saltz, Art is Life: Icons and Iconoclasts, Visionaries and Vigilantes, and Flashes of Hope in the Night.  Art reviews from the New York magazine guy.  Fun to read, mostly sane, and helps the reader understand the ascent of Wokeism in the art world.  It is not that so many art buyers or curators are racist.  Rather, art is super-hierarchical in the first place (try telling the market that a great textile should go for as much as a famous painting), and that, in unintended cross-cutting fashion, that tends to produce apparent biases across both gender and race.  Black and women artists really have been undervalued, and many still are, though this is changing (yes Kara Walker sketches are overpriced right now).  A lot of people are just blind on this one, sorry people but I mean you.  As a side note, Saltz enjoys Rauschenberg more than I do, though I would not dispute the historical importance of his work.

3. Geoff Emerick, Here, There, and Everywhere: My Life Spent Recording the Music of the Beatles.  If you want a book sympathizing with Paul McCartney as the guy who made the Beatles tick, and portraying George Harrison as a suspicious, less than grateful whiner, this is for you.  And so it is.  By the way, contrary to some very recent accounts, Emerick affirms that “Yellow Submarine” is basically a McCartney composition.  He even notes that Lennon cut some demos of it, which has led some recent commentators to conclude it was Lennon’s composition.  The demos are quite raw, so maybe the song is joint?

4. Deborah E. Harkness, The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution.  A big and neglected piece of the puzzle for the breakthrough of the West, focusing on Elizabethan times, skill in symbolic manipulation, and the origins of the scientific revolution.  Recommended.

Philip Kitcher, On John Stuart Mill, is a nice short introduction.

And John T. Cunningham, This is New Jersey, from High Point to Cape May, dates from 1953 and thus is intrinsically interesting.  Hudson County really is remarkably densely populated, and back then it was a big deal that baseball was invented in Hoboken.