Category: Books

1. Land of Plenty: A Treasury of Authentic Sichuan Cooking, by Fuchsia Dunlop.  The other night I made a sauce with five chopped green onions, blended to a smooth paste with one tablespoon sichuan peppers (first dunked into hot water).  Add three tablespoons chicken stock, one teaspoon light soy sauce, one and one half teaspoons sesame oil.  Apply to cooked chicken.  More generally, buy Chinese cooking wine and black (Chinese) vinegar and you are almost ready to go.

2. Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, seventh edition.  This is not just a reference work, it is also the best book on jazz, period.  The main drawback is a lack of material on Norwegian jazz, a recent interest of mine.

3. This NYT article on previously-covered Dana Schutz.  Or try this article on nuns and the origins of reggae.

4. Recent books by Julian Barnes and Zadie Smith, while entertaining enough, won’t attract interest thirty years from now.  Question: What is the optimal lag time before deciding a work of fiction is worth reading?  Few novels require urgent reading, so how about fifteen years?  Why do I violate this rule so regularly?

5. Swallowing Clouds: A Playful Journey Through Chinese Culture, Language, and Cuisine, by A. Zee.  This unique book lives up to its subtitle; it teaches you how to make sense of Chinese characters, how the Chinese think about food, and how it all fits into a bigger picture.

If you want to get recognition long-haul, it seems to me writing books is more contribution because most of us need orientation. In this day of practically infinite knowledge, we need orientation to find our way. Let me tell you what infinite knowledge is. Since from the time of Newton to now, we have come close to doubling knowledge every 17 years, more or less. And we cope with that, essentially, by specialization. In the next 340 years at that rate, there will be 20 doublings, i.e. a million, and there will be a million fields of specialty for every one field now. It isn’t going to happen. The present growth of knowledge will choke itself off until we get different tools. I believe that books which try to digest, coordinate, get rid of the duplication, get rid of the less fruitful methods and present the underlying ideas clearly of what we know now, will be the things the future generations will value. Public talks are necessary; private talks are necessary; written papers are necessary. But I am inclined to believe that, in the long-haul, books which leave out what’s not essential are more important than books which tell you everything because you don’t want to know everything. I don’t want to know that much about penguins is the usual reply. You just want to know the essence.

That is another bit from "You and Your Research," by Richard Hamming, do read this important piece.  Being an author of books, I am happy to hear this argument, but I can think of other strategies:

1. Influence the long-run by mattering now with specialized research; this is especially effective if social opinion has a "unit root" and persists (for purposes of contrast, imagine long-term mean reversion, in which case short-run victories wash out).  While you may get less long-term recognition, you will get more short-term recognition. 

2. Work on projects with the highest expected value of impact.

3. Build up a specialized field that will have long-run influence.  Take your pride in the progress of the field, not in how long your name sticks around.  What is so special about your name anyway?  (Analogy: would you rather your distant descendants know your name, know your contributions but not your name, or resemble you but not know either?  It is not obvious that the former option should win out.)

4. Do what you want.  If you don’t love your daily grind, it won’t matter for the scientific long-run anyway.

Comments are open…

A wonderful short story by Borges, appropriate for today, and it is much shorter than you might remember.  Thanks to Alina Stefanescu for the pointer.

He [Rotkopf] joked with the driver, asking if he was a porteño, a native of Buenos Aires, and if he too believed that Buenos Aires, that "simulation", really was a European city, and if, like all porteños, he considered himself to be "that physiological impossibility", a subequatorial Briton.  The driver was not amused.  By the look in his eyes when we got out of the car, it seemed to me that he too would gladly have seized the first opportunity to kill the German.

That is from Borges and the Eternal Orangutans, by Luis Fernando Verissimo, highly recommended.  How many excellent yet philosophical mysteries can you finish in an hour?

Read it here.

Here is Ariel Rubinstein.  Here are significant parts of the forthcoming Jean Tirole book on corporate finance.  Thanks to www.politicaltheory.info for the pointer.

Here is a New York Times list, no permalink yet.  The data are drawn from an automated survey of the top 5000 blogs.  Freakonomics, Harry Potter, Blink, and The World is Flat lead the list.  Jared Diamond has two in the top ten.  Surowiecki’s Wisdom of Crowds is #12.  The first work of fiction is The da Vinci Code at #10.  Orwell and Narnia are not far behind.  I conclude, tentatively, that the blogosphere is increasing the influence of non-fiction books, relative to fiction.

Addendum: Many of you wrote in to suggest that Harry Potter, number two on the list, is a work of fiction.  Spending some time with Wikipedia confirmed that this view is probably correct.  My apologies for the earlier mistake.

ABC just signed the pair to a one-year deal for recurring spots on Good Morning America, World News Tonight, and Nightline, including backing for their own documentaries…

Conventional wisdom says there’s more to come. Dubner says, "We’re working on another book: ‘Superfreakonomics.’ "

Here is the link.  Elsewhere on www.politicaltheory.info, here is a piece on the mathematics of Sudoku.

Last night I finished Philip Tetlock’s Expert Political Judgment:

…no matter how unequivocal the evidence that experts cannot outpredict chimps or extrapolation algorithms, we should expect business to unfold as usual: pundits will continue to warn us on talk shows and op-ed pages of what will happen unless we dutifully follow their policy prescriptions.  We — the consumers of expert pronouncements — are in thrall to experts for the same reasons that our ancestors submitted to shamans and oracles: our uncontrollable need to believe in a controllable world and our flawed understanding of the laws of chance.  We lack the willpower and good sense to resist the snake oil products on offer.  Who wants to believe that, on the big questions, we could do as well tossing a coin as by consulting accredited experts?

Daniel Drezner has two excellent posts on the book, here and here.  Here is Louis Menand’s glowing review from The New Yorker.  Here is Tetlock’s home page.  Here is a sample book chapter.

And yes Tetlock has data, drawing upon twenty years of observation of 82,361 forecasts.  Tetlock also finds that "foxes" forecast better than "hedgehogs" and that only the forecasts of foxes have positive value.

This is one of the (few) must-read social science books of 2005.

My caveat: Assume that the experts are usually wrong in their novel predictions.  The consensus views of a science still might be worth listening to.  Economists cannot forecast business cycles very well, but you should listen when they tell you that a deflationary shock is bad news.  Each new forecast or new theory is an example of individual hubris and in expected value terms it is stupid.  But the body of experts as a whole, over time, absorbs what is correct.  A large number of predictions creates a Hayekian discovery process with increasing returns to scale.  Social knowledge still comes out ahead, and in part because of the self-deceiving vanities put forward every day.  You can find that point in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.

Comments are open, most of all if you have read the book or other work by Tetlock.

Morales, who only months earlier had extolled True’s qualities when the Huichols were released from jail, now demonized him.  He was up to no good, she insisted.  The Huichols had issued an all points bulletin in their communities announcing that True was persona non grata because of previous forays into Huichol territory made without permission in search of agates and opals to enrich himself.  He had been caught trading in gemstones before, she assured me, and on one such trip had been detained and held in a crude Huichol stockades.

That is from the new and excellent Trail of Feathers: Searching for Philip True, A Reporter’s Murder in Mexico and His Editor’s Search for Justice, by Robert Rivard.

Here is The New York Times link, not gated, and thanks to John Palmer for the pointer.  Here is the printer-friendly version of the link.  In addition to what I have already covered, I recommend Bob Spitz’s The Beatles and Bob Stevens and Annalyn Swan, de Kooning: An American Master.  I’m now keen to read John Gimlette’s Theatre of Fish: Travels Through Newfoundland and Labrador, which somehow had slipped through my claws during the year.  Orhan Pamuk’s book on Istanbul is the obvious missing choice.  Comments are open for other book suggestions from 2005, or if you wish to take issue with the NYT list.

Among contemporary writers, perhaps no one deserves a retrospective anthology at midcareer as much as William T. Vollmann, whose staggering rate of production has made it all but impossible to keep up with him—just blink and it seems he has brought out yet another doorstop. Since his debut novel, You Bright and Risen Angels: A Cartoon, appeared in 1987, he has completed four outsize installments of his magnificent Seven Dreams project, a "symbolic history" related through novels that stretch back in time to the first Norse incursions into Greenland and Newfoundland, and portray the clashes of European colonizers and their descendants with indigenous North Americans. He has also published The Atlas, a collage of dispatches from some of the world’s riskiest locales; An Afghanistan Picture Show, or, How I Saved the World, a memoir of sorts recounting his 1982 trip in search of mujahideen at war with the Soviets; Europe Central, just out this spring, a collection of fictionalized portraits that explore the lives of intriguing and often morally ambiguous figures who lived under the twin totalitarian evils of Stalinism and Nazism, with emphasis on the war years; and five books, set in the present, that have emerged from his abiding fascination with prostitutes, mostly, along with a supporting cast of urban-underbelly types. Alternately hard-edged and lyrical, lurid and incandescent, Vollmann’s visions of contemporary life—especially in Whores for Gloria and the monumental Royal Family, in which he’s forged a phantasmagorical urban realism to chronicle San Francisco’s lower depths—are shot through with brutality, yearning, and fever-dreams that fuse squalor and transcendence.

As extensive as this listing of works is, it falls well short of encompassing the full cyclone of Vollmann’s creativity, which also includes poems, reviews, occasional pieces, and even numerous "book objects," which feature his own artwork along with contributions by collaborators such as photographer and friend Ken Miller. At the core of his oeuvre, though, is what he himself describes as his life’s work, some twenty years in the making, the seven-volume, 3,352-page treatise Rising Up and Rising Down: Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom, and Urgent Means, first published by McSweeney’s in 2003 and reissued in a single-volume abridgment last year by Ecco Press. Toiling in a sweatshop of his own devising, clocking up to sixteen hours a day at his desk, the forty-five-year-old Vollmann has exacted a considerable toll on his body at a relatively young age. In his 1998 essay "Writing," considering his "swollen and aching fingers," he tells how "sometimes the ache oozes up to my shoulders, sometimes only to my wrists; once or twice I’ve felt it in my back. Poor posture, they say, or ‘repetitive stress injury,’ or possibly carpal tunnel. . . . Writing is bad for me physically, without a doubt, but what would I do if I stopped?"

Here is the longer and fascinating story.  Here is my previous post on Vollmann, and do offer comments if you have read his works.

Steve Levitt in The Financial Times:

My favourite business book is A Whack in the Side of the Head by Roger Von Oech.  It certainly is not a traditional business book.  It is a book about how to generate ideas.  My view is that business people spend too little time trying to generate ideas and too much time making reports.  I always go back to this book when I am in a rut.

Stephen Dubner picked Thomas Schelling’s Choice and Consequence.

What will it go for?  Proceeds will be directed to charity.

Thanks to Tim Harford for the pointer, and of course use the comments to guess what it will go for, no sarcasm please!