Category: Books
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.
Ford Madox Ford on Joseph Conrad
And, above all things else, as the writer has somewhere pointed out, Conrad was a politician. He loved the contemplation of humanity pulling away at the tangled skeins of parties or of alliances. Until, suddenly a strand gave, a position cleared up, a ministry was solidly formed, a dynasty emerged. He was, that is to say a student of politics, without prescription, without dogma, and, as a Papist, with a profound disbelief in the perfectibility of human institutions. The writer never saw Conrad read any book of memoirs except those of Maxime Ducamp and the Correspondence of Flaubert; those we read daily together over a space of years. But somewhere in the past Conrad had read every imaginable and unimaginable volume of politicians’ memoirs, Mme de Campan, the Duc d’Audiffret Pasquier, Benjamin Constant, Karoline Bauer, Sir Horace Rumbold, Napoleon the Great, Napoleon III, Benjamin Franklin, Assheton Smith, Pitt, Chatham, Palmerston, Parnell, the late Queen Victoria, Dilke, Morley…. There was no memoir of all these that he had missed or forgotten—down to Il Principe or the letters of Thomas Cromwell. He could suddenly produce an incident from the life of Lord Shaftesbury and work it into Nostromo: which was the political history of an imagined South American Republic. That was one of the secrets of his greatness.
But certainly he had no prescription. Revolutions were to him always anathema since, he was accustomed to declare, all revolutions always have been, always must be, nothing more in the end than palace intrigues: intrigues either for power within, or for the occupancy of, a palace. The journalists’ bar in the palace of the Luxemburg where sits the present Senate of the Third Republic was once the bedchamber of Marie de Medicis. That is not to say that Conrad actively desired the restoration of the Bourbons: he would have preferred the journalists to remain where[Pg 60] they were rather than have any revolution at all. All revolutions are an interruption of the processes of thought and of the discovery of a New Form … for the novel.
The short book, online and free, is interesting throughout. Ford knew Conrad well, and appreciated him at a deep level.
Innovations in Health Care
The latest issue of the journal Innovations focuses on health care and is excellent. It’s a very special issue–a double Tabarrok issue!
My paper, Operation Warp Speed: Negative and Positive Lessons for New Industrial Policy, asks what can learn from the tremendous success of OWS about an OWS for X? What are the opportunities and the dangers?
My son Maxwell Tabarrok’s paper is Peptide-DB: A Million-Peptide Database to Accelerate Science. Max’s paper combines economics and science policy. Open databases are a public good and so are underprovided. A case in point is that there is no big database for anti-microbial peptides despite the evident utility of such a database for using ML techniques to create new antibiotics. The NIH and other organizations have successfully filled this gap with databases in the past such as PubChem, the HGP, and ProteinDB. A million-peptide database is well within their reach:
The existing data infrastructure for antimicrobial peptides is tiny and scattered: a few thousand sequences with a couple of useful biological assays are scattered across dozens of data providers. No one in science today has the incentives to create this data. Pharma companies can’t make money from it and researchers can’t produce any splashy publications. This means that researchers are duplicating the expensive legwork of collating and cleaning all of this
data and are not getting optimal results, as this is simply not enough information to take full advantage of the ML approach. Scientific funding organizations, including the NIH and the NSF, can fix this problem. The scientific knowledge required to massively scale the data we have on antimicrobial peptides is well established and ready to go. It wouldn’t be too expensive or take too long to get a clean dataset of a million peptides or more, and to have detailed information on their activity against the most important resistant pathogens as well as its toxicity to human cells. This is well within the scale of the successful projects these organizations have funded in the past, including PubChem, the HGP, and ProteinDB.
Naturally, I am biased towards Tabarrok-articles but another important paper is Reorganizing the CDC for Effective Public Health Emergency Response by Gowda, Ranasinghe, and Phan. As Michael Lewis wrote in The Premonition by the time of COVID the CDC had became more akin to an academic department than a virus fighting agency:
The CDC did many things. It published learned papers on health crises, after the fact. It managed, very carefully, public perception of itself. But when the shooting started, it leapt into the nearest hole, while others took fire.
Gowda, Ranasinghe, and Phan agree.
The COVID-19 pandemic revealed significant weaknesses in the CDC’s response system. Its traditional strengths in testing, pathogen dentification, and disease investigation and tracking faltered. The legacy of Alexander Langmuir, a pioneering epidemiologist who infused the CDC with epidemiological principles in the 1950s, now seems a distant memory. Tasks as basic as collecting and providing timely COVID-19 data, along with data analysis and epidemiological modeling—both of which should have been the core capability of the CDC—became alarmingly difficult and had to be handled by nongovernmental organizations, such as the Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center.
A closer examination of the CDC’s workforce composition reveals the root cause: a mere fraction of its employees are epidemiologists and data scientists. The agency has seen an increasing emphasis on academic exploration at the expense of on the-ground action and support for frontline health departments. (Armstrong & Griffin, 2022).
The authors propose to reinvigorate the CDC by integrating it with the more practical and active U.S. Public Health Service. This is a very good suggestion.
For one more check out Bai, Hyman and Silver as a primer on Improving Health Care. The entire issue is excellent.
My Conversation with the excellent Dan Wang
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Tyler and Dan debate whether American infrastructure is actually broken or just differently optimized, why health care spending should reach 35% of GDP, how lawyerly influences shaped East Asian development differently than China, China’s lack of a liberal tradition and why it won’t democratize like South Korea or Taiwan did, its economic dysfunction despite its manufacturing superstars, Chinese pragmatism and bureaucratic incentives, a 10-day itinerary for Yunnan, James C. Scott’s work on Zomia, whether Beijing or Shanghai is the better city, Liu Cixin and why volume one of The Three-Body Problem is the best, why contemporary Chinese music and film have declined under Xi, Chinese marriage markets and what it’s like to be elderly in China, the Dan Wang production function, why Stendhal is his favorite novelist and Rossini’s Comte Ory moves him, what Dan wants to learn next, whether LLMs will make Tyler’s hyper-specific podcast questions obsolete, what flavor of drama their conversation turned out to be, and more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: When will Chinese suburbs be really attractive?
WANG: What are Chinese suburbs? You use this term, Tyler, and I’m not sure what exactly they mean.
COWEN: You have a yard and a dog and a car, right?
WANG: Yes.
COWEN: You control your school district with the other parents. That’s a suburb.
WANG: How about never? I’m not expecting that China will have American-style suburbs anytime soon, in part because of the social engineering projects that are pretty extensive in China. I think there is a sense in which Chinese cities are not especially dense. Indian cities are much, much more dense. I think that Chinese cities, the streets are not necessarily terribly full of people all the time. They just sprawl quite extensively.
They sprawl in ways that I think the edges of the city still look somewhat like the center of the city, which there’s too many high-rises. There’s probably fewer parks. There’s probably fewer restaurants. Almost nobody has a yard and a dog in their home. That’s in part because the Communist Party has organized most people to live in apartment compounds in which it is much easier to control them.
We saw this really extensively in the pandemic, in which people were unable to leave their Shanghai apartment compounds for anything other than getting their noses and mouths swabbed. I write a little bit about how, if you take the rail outside of major cities like Beijing and Shanghai, you hit farmland really, really quickly. That is in part because the Communist Party assesses governors as well as mayors on their degree of food self-sufficiency.
Cities like Shanghai and Beijing have to produce a lot of their own crops, both grains as well as vegetables, as well as fruits, as well as livestock, within a certain radius so that in case there’s ever a major devastating war, they don’t have to rely on strawberries from Mexico or strawberries from Cambodia, or Thailand. There’s a lot of farmland allocated outside of major cities. I think that will prevent suburban sprawl. You can’t control people if they all have a yard as well as a dog. I think the Communist Party will not allow it.
COWEN: Whether the variable of engineers matters, I went and I looked at the history of other East Asian economies, which have done very well in manufacturing, built out generally excellent infrastructure. None of these problems with the Second Avenue line in New York. Taiwan, like the presidents, at least if we believe GPT-5, three of them were lawyers and none of them were engineers. South Korea, you have actually some economists, a lot of bureaucrats.
WANG: Wow. Imagine that. Economists in charge, Tyler.
COWEN: I wouldn’t think it could work. A few lawyers, one engineer. Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, he’s a lawyer. He thinks in a very lawyerly manner. Singapore has arguably done the best of all those countries. Much richer than China, inspired China. Why should I think engineers rather than just East Asia, and a bunch of other accompanying facts about these places are what matter?
WANG: Japan, a lot of lawyers in the top leadership. What exactly was the leadership of Hong Kong? A bunch of British civil servants.
COWEN: Some of whom are probably lawyers or legal-type minds, right? Not in general engineers.
WANG: PPE grads. I think that we can understand the engineering variable mostly because of how much more China has done relative to Japan and South Korea and Taiwan.
COWEN: It’s much, much poorer. Per capita manufacturing output is gone much better in these other countries.
And:
WANG: Tyler, what does it say about us that you and I have generally a lot of similar interests in terms of, let’s call it books, music, all sorts of things, but when it comes to particular categories of things, we oppose each other diametrically. I much prefer Anna Karenina to War and Peace. I prefer Buddenbrooks to Magic Mountain. Here again, you oppose me. What’s the deal?
COWEN: I don’t think the differences are that big. For instance, if we ask ourselves, what’s the relative ranking of Chengdu plus Chongqing compared to the rest of the world? We’re 98.5% in agreement compared to almost anyone else. When you get to the micro level, the so-called narcissism of petty differences, obviously, you’re born in China. I grew up in New Jersey. It’s going to shape our perspectives.
Anything in China, you have been there in a much more full-time way, and you speak and read Chinese, and none of that applies to me. I’m popping in and out as a tourist. Then, I think the differences make much more sense. It’s possible I would prefer to live in Shanghai for essentially the reasons you mentioned. If I’m somewhere for a week, I’m definitely going to pick Beijing. I’ll go around to the galleries. The things that are terrible about the city just don’t bother me that much, because I know I’ll be gone.
WANG: 98.5% agreement. I’ll take that, Tyler. It’s you and me against the rest of the world, but then we’ll save our best disagreements for each other.
COWEN: Let’s see if you can pass an intellectual Turing test. Why is it that I think Yunnan is the single best place in the world to visit? Just flat out the best if you had to pick one region. Not why you think it is, but why I think it is.
Strongly recommended, Dan and I had so much fun we kept going for about an hour and forty minutes. And of course you should buy and read Dan’s bestselling book Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future.
*Liberal Worlds: James Bryce and the Democratic Intellect*
By H.S. Jones, an excellent book. For all the resurgence of interest in government and its problems, Bryce has received remarkably little attention. But his theory of low-quality, careerist politcians, combined with imperfectly informed voters, seems highly relevant to our current day. Public opinion is slow, and largely reactive, but potent once mobilized. Leadership can truly matter, and he stresses national character and civic education. In other words, Bryce’s The American Commonwealth is a book still worth reading.
I had not known that Bryce was born in Belfast, or that he was so opposed to women’s suffrage. Or that he was so interested in Armenia, climbed Mount Ararat, and was fascinated by the inevitability of interracial marriage and its consequences (no, not in the usual racist way). He was an expert on Roman law.
Recommended, and also very well written.
What should I ask Harvey Mansfield?
I will be doing a Conversation with him. So what should I ask?
Note he has a new book coming out early next year, namely
*FDR: A New Political Life*
From historian David T. Beito, here is one excerpt:
FDR gave unquestioning support to President Wilson’s crackdown on free speech during World War I, including his enforcement of the Sedition and Espionage Acts. According to Kenneth S. Davis, Roosevelt “went along with prevailing trends in the realm of the national spirit, uninhibited by any strong ideological commitment to the Bill of Rights.” After reading about the conviction of the publisher of an antiwar socialist pamphlet, for example, he sent a congratulatory letter to the federal prosecutor…
There is much more here than just the standard market-oriented “Roosevelt had bad economic policies” line, and the more left-leaning critique of Roosevelt on segregation and the southern coalition. For instance, Roosevelt supported policies that required the telegram companies to keep copies of all telegrams sent, and he used the FCC licensing process to help keep radio in his corner politically.
There is more. It can be said that this book offers a very negative view of FDR.
*Policing on Drugs*
The author is Aileen Teague, and the subtitle is The United States, Mexico, and the Origins of the Modern Drug War, 1969-2000. I had been wanting to read a book on this topic, and this manuscript covered exactly the ground I was hoping for. Excerpt:
…in 1965, only 4.8 percent of college students in the Northeast had ever tried marijuana. By 1970, that figure jmped to 48 percent of college students from Northeast schools having used marijuana within the last year.
Jim Buchanan was right? Blame the Beatles? Remember when so much of the drug trade was a Turkish-French thing?
If you are wondering, the Mexican drug cartels emerged during the 1970s. Perhaps the author blames more of this on U.S. policy than I think is correct? If Nixon had never cracked down and militarized the issue, I suspect the evolution of the matter would not be so different from current status quo? Unless of course you wish to go the Walmart route.
In any case a good book on a topic of vital importance.
Against We
I propose a moratorium on the generalized first-person plural for all blog posts, social media comments, opinion writing, headline writers, for all of December. No “we, “us,” or “our,” unless the “we” is made explicit.
No more “we’re living in a golden age,” “we need to talk about,” “we can’t stop talking about,” “we need to wise up.” They’re endless. “We’ve never seen numbers like this.” “We are not likely to forget.” “We need not mourn for the past.” “What exactly are we trying to fix?” “How are we raising our children?” “I hate that these are our choices.”
…“We” is what linguists call a deictic word. It has no meaning without context. It is a pointer. If I say “here,” it means nothing unless you can see where I am standing. If I say “we,” it means nothing unless you know who is standing next to me.
…in a headline like “Do we need to ban phones in schools?” the “we” is slippery. The linguist Norman Fairclough called this way of speaking to a mass audience as if they were close friends synthetic personalization. The “we” creates fake intimacy and fake equality.
Nietzsche thought a lot about how language is psychology. He would look askance at the “we” in posts like “should we ban ugly buildings?” He might ask: who are you that you do not put yourself in the role of the doer or the doing? Are you a lion or a lamb?
Perhaps you are simply a coward hiding in the herd, Martin Heidegger might say, with das Man. Don’t be an LLM. Be like Carol!
Hannah Arendt would say you’re dodging the blame. “Where all are guilty, nobody is.” Did you have a hand in the policy you are now critiquing? Own up to your role.
Perhaps you are confusing your privileged perch with the broader human condition. Roland Barthes called this ex-nomination. You don’t really want to admit that you are in a distinct pundit class, so you see your views as universal laws.
Adorno would say you are selling a fake membership with your “jargon of authenticity,” offering the reader membership in your club. As E. Nelson Bridwell in the old Mad Magazine had it: What do you mean We?
…If you are speaking for a very specific we, then say so. As Mark Twain is said to have said, “only presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms ought to have the right to use we.”
I could go on. But you get the drift. The bottom line is that “we” is squishy. I is the brave pronoun. I is the hardier pronoun. I is the—dare I say it—manly pronoun.
I agree.
What I’ve been reading
1. Thomas Meyer-Wieser, Cairo: Architectural Guide. A picture book, sort of. Reading a book on the architectural history of a place, while intrinsically interesting, is also usually the best way to learn the non-architectural history of that same place. Recommended.
2. Mary Hays, Memoirs of Emma Courtney. A late 18th English fictional memoir, still underrated and fairly short to boot. Very interesting on Enlightenment culture, what it meant to grow up in a reading culture, and the power of early feminism.
3. Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath. Usually journals bore me after the first fifty pages. But this lengthy volume is fascinating throughout, and arguably her greatest achievement? At the very least worth a try. She maintained an impossibly high level of writing across these years, plus you see (close up) the shifts in how her life was going, electroshock therapy and all. Recommended.
4. Somerset Maugham, Up at the Villa. Great fun at first, and very short. It ends up “overinvesting” in plot, but still for me a worthwhile read. It is best when at its most psychological.
5. Joel J. Miller, The Idea Machine: How Books Built Our World and Shape Out Future. A paean to reading and its importance, comprised of many historical anecdotes. I wish each part went into more detail, nonetheless this is an important book about a cultural transmission method that is in some unfortunate ways diminishing in its cultural centrality.
6. Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas. Why do so few people talk about this piece? It is Woolf writing on feminization and the prevention of war. The argument is dense, and I will give it a reread. She seems to attributing some of the worst aspects of militarized society to the approbational propensities of educated women? She also considers — well ahead of her time — how male and female philanthropy are likely to differ. In any case, there is more here than at first meets the eye.
There is also Keija Wu’s A Modern History of China’s Art Market.
My excellent Conversation with Cass Sunstein
Cass was in top form, and so we went on for almost two hours. In his Substack he described it as “The most fun interview I have ever done.” Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Tyler and Cass discuss whether liberalism is self-undermining or simply vulnerable to illiberal forces, the tensions in how a liberal immigration regime would work, whether new generations of liberal thinkers are emerging, if Derek Parfit counts as a liberal, Mill’s liberal wokeism, the allure of Mises’ “cranky enthusiasm for freedom,” whether the central claim of The Road to Serfdom holds up, how to blend indigenous rights with liberal thought, whether AIs should have First Amendment protections, the argument for establishing a right not to be manipulated, better remedies for low-grade libel, whether we should have trials run by AI, how Bob Dylan embodies liberal freedom, Cass’ next book about animal rights, and more.
I will reproduce the section Cass pulled for his own Substack:
COWEN: Now, we started with the topic of liberalism. How is it you think about or characterize the liberalism of Bob Dylan?
SUNSTEIN: Bob Dylan is a liberal. His liberalism is captured in the line, “He not busy being born is busy dying.” I hope he’s immortal, but if anything is on his epigraph, that would be a good candidate.
The notion of self-invention, of freedom, is central to basically everything. His refusal to keep singing the same song — you can hear him talking about it in some of the interviews. He said, “I could do that. I could just do that forever. I knew how they’d react.” He said, “What’s that about?” He said, “I needed to do something else.” But of course, the line, “I needed to do something else” — that’s my line. How he would put it would be much more vivid and surprising than that.
His “Like a Rolling Stone” is an anthem of freedom. I heard it, actually, in concert a few years ago. It was a great performance. It wasn’t young, but it was a great performance. The audience went wild when he did “Like a Rolling Stone.” That was the final song. It was the encore. It wasn’t just because it was the greatest rock song ever written. It was because of how he did it. I thought, “What’s going on in this song? Why is everyone exhilarated?” The song, which he described when he wrote it as vomit, hatred directed at somewhere that was real — it wasn’t that, or it was a little bit that, but it was a song of liberty.
“How does it feel to be on your own with no direction home, like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone?” Everyone felt like they were flying. He makes that — “Like a Rolling Stone” — be a song of freedom. If you look at his angry songs — “Positively 4th Street” — there’s a freedom in being, of course, uninhibited, able to say things, but also a freedom of disconnection.
When he’s asked why did he change his name, I have an account of why he actually did. I think he gave it exactly once, but in his more characteristic way, he said, “This is America. You can change your name.” Then he said, “I was born. I didn’t think I was born with the right name. I could make it up. I could say that sounds more like I was.”
Making rootlessness not be a curse, but instead something that is . . . the word joy is too clichéd for Dylan. If you look at his love songs, like “If You See Her, Say Hello,” which isn’t one of my favorites, but it’s good. There’s a connection with the one he loved, who got away, but you can feel the sense of freedom.
COWEN: “Visions of Johanna”?
SUNSTEIN: Yes, completely. He’s torn. That has the great opening line. “Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks When you’re trying to be so quiet?” Did Yeats write better lines than that? Probably, but he was Yeats.
COWEN: Blood on the Tracks — a liberal album?
SUNSTEIN: Oh, yes.
COWEN: How would you express that?
SUNSTEIN: Well, I’m thinking “Buckets of Rain” is the closing song. Right before that, there’s a song, “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go.” That’s it, which is, I think, one of his greatest songs. That’s a liberal song of freedom and separation, that she’s going, but he’s going to see her everywhere, and there’s smiling at impermanence. That is a big liberal theme — smiling at impermanence — because impermanence makes things not routine and also makes for freedom.
COWEN: “Idiot Wind” is the angry song of the batch, right?
SUNSTEIN: Yes, it’s pretty mad. He said about that song, “I don’t know why people like it. There’s so much sadness and distress in it.”
COWEN: Do you see your own liberalism or just yourself in the liberalism of Bob Dylan?
SUNSTEIN: I think so.
COWEN: Reinventing yourself, not quite wanting to be pinned down, doing a lot of stuff.
SUNSTEIN: He likes, I think, abandoning and going on to something that’s very different. I wish I’d gone electric or had some equivalent of that. But doing something quite different — I do share a little bit with him. I like it when I think something I thought was wrong. I now am very enthusiastic about the Austrian economists and Hayek. I’ve always admired them, of course, but I didn’t feel that they were on my team. Now I feel I’ve gone to their team. I don’t feel ashamed that I was wrong before. I feel excited that I’m less wrong now.
Definitely recommended, I could have pulled out many other parts as well. Again, I am happy to recommend Cass’s new book Liberalism: In Defense of Freedom.
What should I ask Arthur C. Brooks?
Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him. Here is Wikipedia:
Since 2019, Brooks has served as the Parker Gilbert Montgomery Professor of the Practice of Nonprofit and Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School and at the Harvard Business School as a Professor of Management Practice and Faculty Fellow.[2] Previously, Brooks served as the 11th President of the American Enterprise Institute. He is the author of thirteen books, including Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier with co-author Oprah Winfrey (2023), From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life (2022), Love Your Enemies (2019), The Conservative Heart (2015), and The Road to Freedom (2012). Since 2020, he has written the Atlantic’s How to Build a Life column on happiness.
Do not forget Arthur started as a professional French hornist, and also was well known in the cultural economics field during his Syracuse University days. And more. So what should I ask him?
Best non-fiction books of 2025
The year started off slow, but it ended up being a normally strong time for quality, readable non-fiction. Here is my list, noting that the links lead either to my reviews or to Amazon. These are roughly in the order I read them, not ranked ordinally. Here goes:
Caroline Burt and Richard Partington, Arise, England: Six Kings and the Making of the English State.
Tirthankar Roy and K. Ravi Raman, Kerala: 1956 to the Present.
Agnes Callard, Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life.
Amy Sall, The African Gaze: Photography, Cinema, and Power.
Michael Krielaars, The Sound of Utopia: Musicians in the Time of Stalin.
David Eltis, Rethinking the Atlantic Slave Trades.
Philip Freeman, In the Brewing Luminous: The Life and Music of Cecil Taylor.
Daniel Dain, A History of Boston. Short review here.
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Abundance.
Ian Leslie, John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs.
Benjamin E. Park, American Zion: A New History of Mormonism
Roger Chickering, The German Empire, 1871-1918.
Donald S. Lopez Jr., Buddhism: A Journey Through History.
Dan Wang, Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future.
Keach Hagey, The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future.
Joseph Torigian, The Party’s Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping.
Rupert Gavin, Amorous or Loving?: The Highly Peculiar Tale of English and the English.
Sam Tanenhaus, Buckley: The Life and Revolution that Changed America.
Erik Penman, Eric Satie Three Piece Suite.
Dwarkesh Patel, and others, The Scaling Era: An Oral History of AI, 2019-2025.
Jeff McMahan, editor, Derek Parfit: His Life and Thought.
Paul McCartney, Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run.
William Easterly, Violent Saviors: The West’s Conquest of the Rest.
Nicholas Walton, Orange Sky, Rising Water: The Remarkable Past and Uncertain Future of the Netherlands.
Ken Belson, Every Day is Sunday:
Tom MacTague, Between the Waves: The Hidden History of a Very British Revolution 1945-2016.
What else? I will give you an update on anything notable I encounter between now and the end of the year. And here is my earlier post on the best fiction of the year.
Do (human) readers prefer AI writers?
It seems so, do read through the whole abstract:
The use of copyrighted books for training AI models has led to numerous lawsuits from authors concerned about AI’s ability to generate derivative content. Yet it’s unclear whether these models can generate high quality literary text while emulating authors’ styles/voices. To answer this we conducted a preregistered study comparing MFA-trained expert writers with three frontier AI models: ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini in writing up to 450 word excerpts emulating 50 awardwinning authors’ (including Nobel laureates, Booker Prize winners, and young emerging National Book Award finalists) diverse styles. In blind pairwise evaluations by 159 representative expert (MFA-trained writers from top U.S. writing programs) and lay readers (recruited via Prolific), AI-generated text from in-context prompting was strongly disfavored by experts for both stylistic fidelity (odds ratio [OR]=0.16, p < 10^-8) and writing quality (OR=0.13, p< 10^-7) but showed mixed results with lay readers. However, fine-tuning ChatGPT on individual author’s complete works completely reversed these findings: experts now favored AI-generated text for stylistic fidelity (OR=8.16, p < 10^-13) and writing quality (OR=1.87, p=0.010), with lay readers showing similar shifts. These effects are robust under cluster-robust inference and generalize across authors and styles in author-level heterogeneity analyses. The fine-tuned outputs were rarely flagged as AI-generated (3% rate versus 97% for incontext prompting) by state-of-the-art AI detectors. Mediation analysis reveals this reversal occurs because fine-tuning eliminates detectable AI stylistic quirks (e.g., cliché density) that penalize incontext outputs, altering the relationship between AI detectability and reader preference. While we do not account for additional costs of human effort required to transform raw AI output into cohesive, publishable novel length prose, the median fine-tuning and inference cost of $81 per author represents a dramatic 99.7% reduction compared to typical professional writer compensation. Author-specific fine-tuning thus enables non-verbatim AI writing that readers prefer to expert human writing, thereby providing empirical evidence directly relevant to copyright’s fourth fair-use factor, the “effect upon the potential market or value” of the source works.
That is from a new paper by Tuhin Chakrabarty, Jane C. Ginsburg, and Paramveer Dhillon. For the pointer I thank the excellent Kevin Lewis. I recall an earlier piece showing that LLMs also prefer LLM outputs?