Category: Books
What should I ask Tom Holland?
I will be doing a Conversation with the author, not the actor:
Thomas Holland FRSL (born 5 January 1968) is an English author who has published best-selling books on topics including classical and medieval history and the origins of Islam.
He has worked with the BBC to create and host historical television documentaries, and presents the radio series Making History.
His Wikipedia page presents much more. So what should I ask?
The Center for Strategic Translation
The Center for Strategic Translation translates and annotates material of strategic and historical value that currently exists only in the Chinese language.
My Conversation with Ken Burns
Here is the transcript, audio, and video. Here is part of the episode summary:
Ken joined Tyler to discuss how facial expressions in photos have changed over time, where in the American past he’d like to visit most, the courage of staying in place, how he feels about intellectual property law, the ethical considerations of displaying violent imagery, why women were so prominent in the early history of American photography, the mysteries in his quilt collection, the most underrated American painter, why crossword puzzles are akin to a cup of coffee, why baseball won’t die out, the future of documentary-making, and more.
And an excerpt:
COWEN: Why are women so prominent in the early history of American photography — compared, say, to painting or sculpture?
BURNS: It’s interesting, I think, because at the beginning we’re recording ourselves, our families. The first one is a self-portrait. (Of course, being an American it would be a self-portrait.) But families are involved.
There’s so many ways in which we transcend — the Declaration of Independence did not apply to any women. It’s 144 years after the Declaration that women get the right to vote: basic thing. When the Declaration and the Constitution were there, they had no rights. But they were part of the landscape.
They are a majority of the population, and have been. What you have is the beginning of photographs being a much more democratic and accessible medium, that is going to be populated by the people who actually exist. I think it’s that that’s helpful to break down.
As you see in this book, there are lots of images of women from the earliest time involved in things like abolition, involved in things like slavery unions, involved in things like women’s suffrage, involved in just playing, having a good time on the beach in Massachusetts in your bloomer swimming suits dancing, or three gals stealing a cigarette in the early part of the 19th century.
This film is about darkness and light, about black and white — both in the photographic process but in the American dynamic: there are many Native Americans, there’s lots of landscapes of the beauty of the country. There’s lots of horrible signs of discrimination and war and death and suffering and grief.
And that’s us. That’s the story of us. I’ve been trying to tell that complicated history with my films, and this was an opportunity to stop and allow the viewer this time to be the director. That is to say, in most performance art, as film is, I set the time that you get to look at that photograph and you see what you’re able to see in that. If you want to spend an hour with one photograph in this book, you’re welcome to.
If you want to go through this over-amount of time, these photographs, and then hold your thumb in the back matter and go back and forth between the full page of the photograph, that might say “Gettysburg, 1863,” and then the description of people reading the list of the dead outside a newspaper in New York City just after the Battle of Gettysburg in July of ’63 — you can learn a lot more about the photograph, but in a different way. I first wanted the photographs to speak for themselves, un- . . . diminished — I guess, is the word — by words.
There is much more at the link. And I liked Ken’s new book Our America: A Photographic History.
*Love and Let Die*
The author is John Higgs, and the subtitle is Bond, the Beatles and the British Psyche. I loved this book, and reading it induced me to order the author’s other books, the ultimate compliment. It is not for everyone, nor is it easy to describe, but imagine the stories of The Beatles and James Bond films told as “parallel careers.” After all, “Love Me Do” and Dr. No were released on the same day in 1962.
It is striking that they have been making James Bond films for sixty years now, and every single one of them has made money. We are still talking about the Beatles too. Will anything from current Britain have such staying power?
From the book here is one excerpt:
Had Paul not then finally found success outside the band, it is possible they may have agreed to a reunion. The success of ‘Live and Let Die’, followed by the album Band on the Run, made Paul McCartney and Wings a going concern at exactly the point when a Beatles reunion looked most plausible. Bond didn’t kill the Beatles, but it is a strange irony that once they had split , he kept them dead.
I hadn’t known that the Soviet edition of the Band on the Run album replaced the title track with “Silly Love Songs” as the lead song, as the lyrics to the “Band on the Run” song were considered too subversive. There is for instance talk of a prison break in the song. And when Paul much later performed a short solo concert for Vladimir Putin, he chose to play “Let It Be.”
The book excels in its portraits of George Harrison, especially in his solo career. I enjoyed this tidbit about the Harrison family:
In 1978, George married Olivia Arias and in the same year they had a son, Dhani. Dhani only discovered his father’s past when he was at school. ‘I came home one day from school after being chased by kids singing “Yellow Submarine”, and I didn’t understand why,’ he has said. ‘It just seemed surreal: why are they singing that song to me? I came home and freaked out to my dad: “Why didn’t you tell me you were in the Beatles?” And he said: “Oh, sorry. Probably should have told you that.” It’s impossible to imagine, John, Paul or Ringo neglecting to mention they were in the Beatles to their children.
Recommended, for me at least.
*What Makes Us Human?*
The authors are Iain S. Thomas and Jasmine Wang, here is one excerpt:
What is the proper response to suffering?
If this life is all there is, then the proper response to suffering is to embrace it
and be transformed by it.
If there is more than this life, then the proper response to suffering
is to take the next step in your journey.
It’s not simply for punishment. Pain is an opportunity for spiritual growth.
We suffer from the growth that comes from suffering.
The subtitle of the book is An Artificial Intelligence Answers Life’s Biggest Questions.
*Edible Economics*
The author is Ha-Joon Chang, and the subtitle is A Hungry Economist Explains the World. This is an economics of food book with a Korean emphasis, and arguing in favor of protectionism and industrial policy, in line with the author’s earlier works. Here is one excerpt:
South Koreans went through a staggering 7.5kg of garlic per person per year between 2010 and 2017. We hit a high in 2013 of 8.9kg. That’s over ten times what the Italians consume (720g in 2013). When it comes to garlic consumption, we Koreans make the Italians look like ‘dabblers’. The French, ‘the’ garlic eaters to the British and the Americans, only manage a paltry 200g per year (in 2017) — not even 3% of that of the Koreans.
Chang does note that the Korean figure also includes a lot of garlic used to make stocks and then (in part) not consumed.
*Hayek: A Life, 1899-1950*, by Bruce Caldwell & Hansjoerg Klausinger
One of the best biographies of any economist, covers anything you might wish to know, and with conceptual understanding. This is a fantastic book and I am eagerly awaiting volume II. Mini-excerpt:
Hayek [at LSE] never really liked Mannheim, whom he spent some time with when he first arrived, trying to introduce him around and help him to get acclimated. This ended when, after listening patiently to Mannheim complain about the inadequacy of the English language for expressing his ideas, Hayek finally blurted out, “So much the worse for your ideas!”
You can pre-order here. Hayek, by the way, is an interesting polar case for any talent search algorithm. He was first interested in botany, and didn’t do anything in economics until he was 30 years old.
And I hadn’t known that Colette was the stepmother of Bertrand de Jouvenal (“On Power”), and had a five-year affair with him!
How young did the person start?
By the time he was in the sixth grade, Larry [Summers] had created a system to calculate the probability that a baseball team would make it to the playoffs in October based on its performance through the Fourth of July. In 1965 the Philadelphia Bulletin described Summers as the most qualified eleven-year-old oddsmaker in baseball.
That is from the new and very good Jon Hilsenrath book on Janet Yellen.
*The Philosophy of Modern Song*
Yes the author is Bob Dylan, and I give this one a thumbs up. You can buy it here. Here is one bit:
A-Wop-Bop-A-Loo-Bop-A-Wop-Bam-Boom. Little Richard was speaking in tongues across the airwaves long before anybody knew what was happening. He took speaking in tongues right out of the sweaty canvas tent and put it on the mainstream radio, even screamed like a holy preacher — which is what he was. Little Richard is a master of the double entendre. “Tutti Frutti” is a good example. A fruit, a male homosexual, and “tutti frutti” is “all fruit.” It’s also a sugary ice cream. A gal named Sue and a gal named Daisy and they’re both transvestites. Did you ever see Elvis singing “Tutti Frutti” on Ed Sullivan? Does he know what he’s singing about? Do you think Ed Sullivan knows? Do you think they both know? Of all the people who sing “Tutti Fruitti,” Pat Boone was probably the only one who knew what he was singing about. And Pat knows about speaking in tongues as well.
And:
The Grateful Dead are not your usual rock and roll band. They’re essentially a dance band. They have more in common with Arie Shaw and bebop than they do with the Byrds or the Stones…There is a big difference in the types of women that you see from the stage when you are with the Stones compared to the Dead. With the Stones it’s like being at a porno convention. With the Dead, it’s more like the women you see by the river in the movie O Brother, Where Art Thou? Free floating, snaky and slithering like in a typical daydream. Thousands of them….With the Dead, the audience is part of the band — they might as well be on the stage.
Or how about this:
Bluegrass is the other side of heavy metal. Both are musical forms steeped in tradition. They are the two forms of music that visually and audibly have not changed in decades. People in their respective fields still dress like Bill Monroe and Ronnie James Dio. Both forms have a traditional instrumental lineup and a parochial adherence to form.
Bluegrass is the more direct emotional music and, though it might not be obvious to the casual listener, the more adventurous.
This is one of the better books on America, and one of the best books on American popular song. But then again, that is what you would expect from a Nobel Laureate in literature, right?
*Yellen*
The author is Jon Hilsenrath, and the subtitle is The Trailblazing Economist Who Navigated an Era of Upheaval. I very much enjoyed this book and read it straight through without stopping, and so I am happy to recommend it heartily. Most of all it is a wonderful account of the economics profession and its evolution over the last few decades.
But we are here to be honest, right? I came away from the book with the impression that Yellen (whom, to be clear, I never have interacted with) is not all that interesting, and that the book worked because it was enlivened with other more colorful characters. Excerpt:
Yellen’s lectures had a slow, steady cadence. Her answers to student questions were always detailed, thought-out, and sometimes exhausting. She had a tendency to analyze questions from every possible angle. She differed from Tobin in one respect: where he was uniformly serious, she had a light side, one that included a disarming belly laugh that rose inside her and could stream out in tears and howls over drinks with the graduate students she was teaching.
One of her students in macroeconomics was a rising star in the field, a young man named Lawrence Summers…He didn’t stand out in Yellen’s class, perhaps because he already knew the material so well and didn’t see much to challenge or question in her carefully prepared presentations.
This part I found informative:
Elite visitors sometimes got the toughest treatment. Fischer Black, a mathematician whose theories about asset prices and stock options sparked wave of Wall Street innovation, visited in the early 1970s to challenge Friedman’s ideas about money and inflation. Friedman introduced Black by saying, “We all know that the paper is wrong.” We have two hours to work out why it is wrong.”
I very much hope there will be more books like this, definitely recommended. You can buy it here.
My excellent Conversation with Mary Gaitskill
Here is the audio and transcript. She is one of my favorite contemporary American writers, most notably in The Mare, Veronica, and Lost Cat. Here is part of the episode summary:
She joined Tyler to discuss the reasons some people seem to choose to be unhappy, why she writes about oddballs, the fragility of personality, how she’s developed her natural knack for describing the physical world, why we’re better off just accepting that people are horrible, her advice for troubled teenagers, why she wouldn’t clone a lost cat, the benefits and drawbacks of writing online, what she’s learned from writing a Substack, what gets lost in Kubrick’s adaptation of Lolita, the not-so-subtle eroticism of Victorian novels, the ground rules for writing about other people, how creative writing programs are harming (some) writers, what she learned about men when working as a stripper, how her views of sexual permissiveness have changed since the ’90s, how college students have changed over time, what she learned working at The Strand bookstore, and more.
It is perhaps a difficult conversation to excerpt from but here is one bit:
COWEN: You once quoted your therapist as saying, and I’m quoting him here, “People are just horrible, and the sooner you realize that, the happier you’re going to be.” What’s your view?
GAITSKILL: [laughs] I thought that was a wonderful remark. It’s important to note the tone of voice that he used. He was a Southern queer gentleman with a very lilting, soft voice. I was complaining about something or other, and he goes, “People are horrible. They’re stupid, and they’re crazy, and they’re mean, and the sooner you realize that, the better off you’ll be, the more you’re going to start enjoying life.”
I just laughed, because partly it was obvious he was being funny, and it was a very gentle way of allowing my ranting and raving and acknowledging the truth of it. Gee, I don’t know how anybody could deny that. Look at human history and some of the things that people do. It was being very spacious about it and just saying, “Look, you have to accept reality. You can’t expect people to be perfect or to be your idea of good or moral all the time. You’re probably not either. This is what it is.”
I thought that was really wisdom, actually.
I am very pleased to have had the chance to chat with her.
What I’ve been reading
Paul Scharre, Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. This book bored me, but here I mean that as a positive statement. It bored me because I knew a lot of the content already, and that is because this is such important content that I have put a lot of time into trying to know it. Both the author and I thought it was very important to know this material. AI and the military is right now is a critical issue, and this is the book to read in the area. Whether or not you are bored.
Perry Mehrling’s Money and Empire: Charles P. Kindleberger and the Dollar System is a definitive biography, and also a good look at the “rooted in academia but mostly in the policy world” branch of macro and finance that was so prominent in the postwar era.
I read only a small amount of Philip Short’s Putin, at more than 800 pages. It seemed entirely fine, and useful, and surely the topic is of importance. Yet I didn’t find myself learning conceptual points from it, or even new details of significance. In any case it is now the biography of Putin, and some of you will want to read it.
Katherine Rundell, The Golden Mole, and Other Living Treasures is a series of short, fun takes on strange animals including the wombat (runs faster than Usain Bolt) and the pangolin, among others. Good for both adults and children.
When I first saw the title of Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism, I thought it was some kind of satire, or perhaps GPT-3 run amok. Nonetheless some of the book is a serious economic history of the 1920s and its fiscal and credit policies, and you should not dismiss it out of hand. That said, mechanisms such as the supposed “logic of capital accumulation” are assigned too much explanatory power. The book also will convince you that “austerity” is almost always poorly defined.
There is Julian Gewirtz, Never Turn Back: China and the Forbidden History of the 1980s. Somehow this book felt naive to me. Yes, many Chinese paths were discussed in the 1980s, but the system nonetheless had an underlying logic which reasserted itself rather brutally…
Peter H. Wilson, Iron and Blood: A Military History of the German-Speaking Peoples Since 1500. I thought I would love this lengthy tome (913 pp.), and it is quite a catalog, and impressively objective to boot. Yet something is missing, and I skipped around and ended up putting it down with few regrets.
Michael Pritchard, FRPS, A History of Photography in 50 Cameras is very useful and very good, exactly what it promises, good photos too (better be good!) I think of photography as one of those innovations that started 20-30 years earlier than I might otherwise have expected, had I not known the historical record. 1839 for basic daguerreotype, that is impressive.
Roger D. Congleton, Solving Social Dilemmas: Ethics, Politics, and Prosperity is a good book on classical liberalism and how it is embedded in stories of the historical evolution of cooperation.
*Risky Business*
The subtitle is Why Insurance Markets Fail and What To Do About It, and the authors are the highly regarded Liran Einav, Amy Finkelstein, Ray Fisman. The level is a bit above what could make this book a bestseller, but I consider that a good thing. The book in fact is a classic example of how to present economic research in readable, digestible form and should be regarded as such.
I do have a few qualms, but please note these are outweighed by the very high quality of the core material:
1. I think the authors underestimate how rapidly “Big Data” is shifting the information asymmetries away from consumers/policyholders. This is related to my recent remarks on AI.
1b. For reasons stemming from #1, insurance/surveillance/control, including from employers, will rise in importance as an issue, and soon. I don’t get a sense of that from reading this book. We might alleviate selection problems, while creating other difficulties including ethical dilemmas.
2. I would like to see more on moral hazard.
3. I also would want to see more — much more — on the public choice reasons why government insurance markets so often fail — the authors should consider their own title! Should the Florida government really be propping up insurance contracts and insurance markets to protect homeowners against climate change-related losses? No matter what your view, this kind of issue is under-discussed. How about the FDIC? Bailout-related moral hazard issues? Those are hardly “small potatoes.” I get that isn’t “the book they set out to write,” but still I worry that the final picture they present is misleading when it comes to market failure vs. government failure. Adverse selection is really just one part of insurance markets, but this book doesn’t teach you that.
3b. Isn’t excess liability through our court system another major reason why insurance markets fail? We needed a Price-Anderson Act, where government assumes a lot of the liability, to support our nuclear power sector, even though coal alternatives were riskier and more harmful, both short run and long run. In terms of actual importance, hasn’t this been a major, major factor?
3c. Are restrictions on “boil in oil” contracts (no matter what you think of them ethically) another factor in institutional failure here? Maybe that is one way of making America safe for bungee jumping. Or we can follow New Zealand, and limit liability here altogether. The interaction of insurance and liability law is a major issue, and we have not been getting it right.
4. The authors absolutely do consider “positive selection” (e.g., it is the responsible people who buy life insurance, thus leading to a favorable customer pool), but I would give it more emphasis. If you believe that income inequality, “deaths of despair,” and educational polarization are growing problems, this phenomenon likely is becoming more important.
4b. How about more concessions in the Obamacare analysis? For years I read that a weaker mandate would cause the system to collapse. Yet the Republicans significantly cut back on mandate enforcement and the system seems to be getting along OK, at least from that point of view. (In fact, politically speaking Trump arguably saved Obamacare.) What did everyone miss? Did they overrate adverse selection arguments and underrate positive selection? It seems that was a major failing of the economics profession, which if anything was more insistent on “the three legs of the stool” than policymakers were. The authors do cover this all at length, but they can’t bring themselves to note “we got down to 7-8 percent uninsured, the whole thing actually worked out OK, and the economists didn’t quite get it right.”
5. There are plenty of cases when expected “insurance” markets do not exist, and we cannot boil those down to adverse selection. Why don’t all those Bob Shiller proposals happen? (Is it really inside information about gdp? That seems doubtful.) Why aren’t there more prediction markets? Why have so many proposed futures contracts on exchanges failed? These all would seem to serve insurance-like purposes, among their other functions. Yet their supply seems skimpy, at least relative to an economist’s expectations. Why? Perhaps there is more to failed insurance markets than meets the eye.
I know authors can fit only so much into a book, but if I can fit this much into a blog post…I would like to see more! And I think that would result in a more realistic policy balance as well, and draw attention to major issues other than adverse selection.
*A Man of Iron*
The author is Troy Senik and the subtitle is The Turbulent Life and Improbably Presidency of Grover Cleveland. Here is one excerpt:
At the age of forty-four, the only elected office Grover Cleveland had ever held was sheriff of Eric County, New York — a role he had relinquished nearly a decade earlier, returning to a rather uneventful life as a whorkaholic bachelor lawyer. In the next four years, he would become, in rapid succession, the mayor Buffalo, the governor of New York, and the twenty-second president of the United States. Four years later, he would win the popular vote but nevertheless lose the presidency. And in another four, he’s become the first — and to date, only — president to be returned to office after having been previously turned out.
His normal work hours were from 8 a.m. to 3 a.m. (p.31). And he was broadly libertarian:
He would be the final Democratic president to embrace the classical liberal principles of the party’s founder, Thomas Jefferson. Cleveland believed in a narrow interpretation of the Constitution, a limited role for the federal government, and a light touch on economic affairs. To casual observers, such an approach is often mistaken for do-nothing passivity…that epithet, however, represents a fundamental misunderstanding of his presidency.
…Over the course of his two terms, this led to an astonishing 584 vetoes, more than any other president save Franklin Roosevelt…In his first term alone, Cleveland vetoed more bills than all twenty-one of his predecessors combined.
I am happy to recommend this book, you can buy it here. I am also happy to recommend the new book by Stacy Schiff, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams, New Yorker coverage here.
My Conversation with Reza Aslan
On a bunch of normal issues, I disagree with him rather vehemently, but overall I thought this Conversation worked out quite well. Here is the audio and video and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
He joined Tyler to discuss Shi’a and Christian notions of martyrdom, the heroism of Howard Baskerville, the differences between Sunni and Shi’a Islam, esoteric vs. exoteric expressions of religion, how mystical movements arise more organically than religion, the conflicts over Imams in the Islamic world, how his upbringing as an Iranian immigrant shaped his view of religion, his roundabout spiritual journey, the synthesis of Spinoza and Sufism, the origins of Wahhabism, the relationship (or lackthereof) between religion and political philosophy, the sad repetition of history in Iran, his favorite Iranian movie, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: In your understanding, can Sufism stand alongside the prophetic structure of Islam as something separate? Or is it synthesized with it into one consistent picture?
ASLAN: That’s a hardcore, brilliant theological question because it’s been debated for generations. What I will say is this: that Sufism is, like all mystical traditions, incredibly eclectic. It comes in thousands of different forms.
There are some Sufis that are very traditionalist, very hard to even, sometimes, tell the difference between them and your basic Sunni. And there are some Sufis that take part in the spectacular displays, sometimes displays that involve putting swords through their bodies, taking part in painful acts, ways of trying to deny the self and the body in a way that most Muslims would look at and say, “That looks nothing like Islam.” Sufism is what a Sufi says it is, basically.
COWEN: If I go to Albania and I chat with the Bektashi, how is their version of Sufism different?
ASLAN: Then say the Naqshbandi? Absolutely. What’s great about Sufism — and again, this is a standard description of all mystical movements — is that they absorb themselves into local cultures and local practices. When you have these kinds of deeply spiritual, mystical movements, they most often arise from the culture. They’re not so often brought in from the outside.
Religion, in its most orthodox sense, is usually introduced to a culture or to a people. Somebody shows up and says, “This is Islam, this is Christianity, this is Buddhism.” Sufism, like much of mystical movements, is something that comes out of the ground itself and then starts to marry itself to that dominant religion.
We see Christian mysticism all around the world that in some places looks like paganism, and in some places looks like traditional nature worship. It uses some of the symbols and metaphors of Christianity, and it becomes an indigenous version of Christianity. That’s exactly the same thing with Sufism and Islam. It depends on where you go —
Interesting throughout.