Category: Books
My Conversation with Edwidge Danticat
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the CWT summary:
She joined Tyler to discuss the reasons Haitian identity and culture will likely persist in America, the vibrant Haitian art scenes, why Haiti has the best food in the Caribbean, how radio is remaining central to Haitian politics, why teaching in Creole would improve Haitian schools, what’s special about the painted tap-taps, how tourism influenced Haitian art, working with Jonathan Demme, how the CDC destroyed the Haitian tourism industry, her perspective on the Black Lives Matter movement, why she writes better at night, the hard lessons of Haiti’s political history, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Now, in all of these conversations, there’s a segment where I present to the guest my favorite Haitian proverbs, and he or she reacts. Are you ready for a few?
DANTICAT: All right. You’ve been sharing Haitian proverbs with your guests?
COWEN: Here’s one. “After the dance, the drum is heavy.”
DANTICAT: Oh my god.
COWEN: What does that mean to you?
DANTICAT: Aprè dans, tanbou lou. I actually have a book called After the Dance. It’s on Carnival. Yes, for me, it means that there are consequences to everything, even the most joyful thing. You have to be prepared for the consequences of things that you’ve done.
It’s something that my mom used to say quite a bit, too. If you have just had a really big celebration, or if you waited too late to do your homework because you’re having a good time watching a program you like, she was like, “Aprè dans, tanbou lou.” After the dance, the drum is heavy. It’s like the morning-after, hangover situation and the most joyful outcome, but really, that there are consequences to everything.
COWEN: Here’s another one. “It is the owner of the body who looks out for the body.”
DANTICAT: Oh, this one. You will not believe how much we hear that these days. Se mèt kò ki veye kò. It’s something that we say a lot now in the coronavirus era. You hear it on the radio. You hear people say it when they talk to their neighbors. Se mèt kò ki veye kò. That means that, really, you are the best person to take care of yourself.
If you’re saying, “Wear your mask when you go out during the coronavirus era.” “Wash your hands.” It’s like the best, the most qualified person to take care of you is you. It’s not the doctor. It’s not your loved one. Se mèt kò ki veye kò. It’s the owner of the body who takes care of the body. It’s like, “Watch out for yourself.” It’s very good advice these days.
COWEN: “When they want to kill a dog, they say it’s crazy.”
DANTICAT: Yes, that’s the dehumanization. I guess that’s fake news. [laughs] It’s connected to the fake news. If you want to diminish or slight someone, you call them names. So that’s also a timely one, I think.
COWEN: How about this one? “The constitution is paper; the bayonet is steel.”
DANTICAT: Yes. Again, back to our conversation about dictatorship, in a way. I believe that one was often cited by one of the generals, actually, during the ’90s, during the coup d’état, or it might have been even before. I think it speaks to the fragility of documents like the constitution. Yesterday was Constitution Day in the US, so that might also apply here.
It’s that whole thing with freedom. Freedom is something that we have to always keep watching out it doesn’t slip away because, sometimes, we think these documents or these rules are set in stone. I think this general who kept saying this was saying, “Well, I have the weapons.” It’s kind of paper, rock scissors. Which is stronger?
COWEN: “When the mapou tree dies, goats would eat its leaves.”
DANTICAT: Yes. This one, I think, is about humility because we have this expression that we say when someone has died who has contributed a great deal to our culture: we say that a mapou has fallen. A mapou is a soft cotton tree, it’s a kind of sacred tree, and it’s also a big tree that lasts forever. It’s a regal institution, a mapou.
What this one is saying, actually, the goat is a meager creature compared to a mapou, and there’s no way a goat would actually be able to access the leaves of a mapou, but when it dies, it falls. I’ve always heard that proverb as a way of encouraging humility, that all our leaves are vulnerable to the goat, if you will. [laughs]
COWEN: One more proverb, “Beyond the mountain is another mountain.”
DANTICAT: Yes. Dèyè mòn gen mòn.
COWEN: That’s a very famous one.
DANTICAT: Yes. I actually use that a lot myself. One of my neighbors just passed away, and she used to use that proverb a lot. I think it means that no matter what, we can see there is more. I think it’s about there’s more to everything than what we see.
It also speaks to the physical layout of Haiti because it’s a very mountainous place. Ayiti. The Arawak called it Ayiti. It actually means land of the mountains, and it’s physically true. If you’re traveling across Haiti, literally, there’s always a mountain physically behind a mountain, but in a spiritual sense, it also means that there’s always more.
Recommended. And I thank Carl-Henri Prophète for assistance with the transcription.
My favorite fiction of 2020
Emily St. John Mandel, The Glass Hotel.
Anne Enright, Actress: A Novel.
Susannah Clarke, Piranesi.
Maggie O’Farrell, Hamnet.
Elena Ferrante, The Lying Life of Adults.
Of those Hamnet was my clear favorite, then the Enright. Here is my non-fiction list, which also explains why the lists have come earlier this year.
Best non-fiction books of 2020
Usually I give this list much later in November, but shopping rhythms are off this year. Furthermore The Strand bookstore in NYC is rather desperately asking for your business, as is Shakespeare & Co. in Paris, and many other independent bookshops. Nor would it hurt Barnes & Noble if you spent your money there, and I hear Amazon is hiring and boosting the macroeconomy. I believe bookstores in England will be closing in a few days, so hurry now. Finally, I hope you will stay home and read these rather than traveling for Thanksgiving!
As usual, these are (roughly) in the order I read them, not ranked by preference or quality.
Anton Howes, Arts & Minds: How the Royal Society of Arts Changed a Nation.
Garett Jones, 10% Less Democracy: Why You Should Trust the Elites a Little More and the Masses a Little Less.
Bruno Macaes, History has Begun: The Birth of a New America.
Thane Gustafson, The Bridge: Natural Gas in a Redivided Europe.
Dietrich Vollrath, Fully Grown: Why a Stagnant Economy is a Sign of Success.
Ronald S. Calinger, Leonhard Euler: Mathematical Genius of the Enlightenment.
Ashley Mears, Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit.
Jay Belsky, Avshalom Caspi, Terrie E. Moffitt, and Richie Poulton, The Origins of You: How Childhood Shapes Later Life.
Hollis Robbins, Forms of Contention: Influence and the African-American Sonnet Tradition.
Ross Douthat, The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success.
Steven Levy, Facebook: The Inside Story.
Joe Henrich, The WEIRDEST People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous.
Oliver Craske, Indian Sun: The Life and Music of Ravi Shankar.
Zachary D. Carter, The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes.
Deirdre Mask, The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power.
Daniel Todman, Britain’s War 1942-1947.
Brent Tarter, Virginians and Their History.
Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our World, Change Our Minds, & Shape Our Futures.
Matt Yglesias, One Billion Americans.
Ed Douglas, Himalaya: A Human History.
Michael Wood, The Story of China: A Portrait of a Civilization and its People.
Kevin Davies, Editing Humanity: The CRISPR Revolution and the New Era of Genome Editing.
Nicholas McDowell, Poet of Revolution: The Making of John Milton.
Rebecca Wragg Sykes, Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art.
This is indeed a fantastic list, really strong, and apologies to those I have forgotten (there are always some). I will be doing a revised, updated, and last two months filled in list much later in December.
And here are the additions:
Darmon Richter, Chernobyl: A Stalker’s Guide.
*Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art*
By Rebecca Wragg Sykes, an excellent book, a very responsible treatment of what we do and do not know about Neanderthals, with a bit on Denisovans as well. It is a book full of sentences such as: “Micro-morphology has also provided proof that, far from being slovenly, Neanderthals were regularly disposing of their rubbish.” It seems they enjoyed mussels and also grubs, among many other foodstuffs. The hearth was the center of the home and they had fairly advanced systems for butchery. They used leather and deployed pigments.
I enjoyed this segment:
Parisians, Londoners or Berliners today with ostensibly European heritage have very little connection even to Mesolithic people just 10,000 years ago. The vast majority of their DNA comes from a massive influx of Western Asian peoples during the Neolithic. This means that many of the first H. sapiens populations are more extinct than the neanderthals; not a great sign of evolutionary dominance.
Recommended, you can order here.
New books needed on the NIH and NSF
A reader writes —
“Despite being the preeminent model for global science funding, and far more powerful than any single university, the workings of the NIH or NSF are surprisingly opaque to most people. These bodies shape who becomes a scientist, what science they pursue, and how they pursue it. I would therefore like to fund a book about how the institutions of US science actually operate, how they’ve changed, what the relevant surrounding incentives are, and how it is that they should likely evolve from here. It’s possible, perhaps even very likely, that a good version of this book would be picked up by a good publisher. Even if it isn’t, it should exist in the public domain. I will invest generously in anyone who seeks to write one.”
This reader is highly credible. If you’re interested and have relevant expertise, please email me. (Suggestions for good possible authors — people who genuinely understand the system but who could be sufficiently objective and where relevant critical — are welcome although not as useful.)
What I’ve been reading
1. Bruno Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climactic Regime. Mostly not about climate per se, rather how we are failing at being true materialists: “In a sense, Trump’s election confirms, for the rest of the world, the end of a politics oriented toward an identifiable goal. Trumpian politics is not “post-truth,” it is post-politics — that is, literally, a politics with no object, since it rejects the world that it claims to inhabit.” Mostly interesting, as one expects from Latour, but not exactly in the Anglo-American style either. It also shows a kind of convergence with the ideas of Bruno Macaes, reviewed here by John Gray.
2. Robert Townsend, Distributed Ledgers: Design and Regulation of Financial Infrastructure and Payment Systems. Bitcoin and crypto yes, but the more fundamental concept in this book is…distributed ledgers, which include Thai rice allocation schemes and Mesopotamia circa 4000 B.C. It is highly intelligent and well done, but somehow I think books like this work better when they are more speculative and future-oriented.
3. Hermione Lee, Tom Stoppard: A Life. So many pages, and perhaps this will not be surpassed soon. Yet it never quite tells you how he got to be so smart, or how his intellectual development proceeded, or even what his smartness consists of. So I can’t say I liked it. By the way, for those of you who don’t know, it seems to me that Stoppard is one of the smartest people and also the most important living playwright, most of all for anyone interested in intellectual history.
4. Ronald Bailey and Marian L. Tupy, Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know. Lovely visuals, blurb from Pinker, the curves slope upward, get the picture? Let’s hope they’re right! Ultimately I find this kind of exercise less convincing than I used to, instead preferring a broader theory that also accounts for what I perceive to be a growing disorientation. Which brings us to the next title…
5. Slavoj Žižek, Hegel in a Wired Brain. How do transhumanism, Elon Musk/Neuralink, the Singularity, Book of Genesis, and Hegel all fit together? There is only one person who could pull off such a book, noting this version is dense and not for the uninitiated. Here is one squib: “Police is closer to civil society than state; it is a kind of representative of state in civil society, but for this very reason it has to be experienced as an external force, not an inner ethical power.” If you take away all the people who quite overrate him, Žižek is in fact remarkably underrated.
*The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World*
The author is Virginia Postrel, and yes studying the history of textiles is one of the very best ways to better understand markets. This book does that.
You can pre-order here. Here is Virginia’s adapted WSJ essay.
What I’ve been reading
1. Martin Amis, Inside Story: A Novel. Except it is a memoir rather than a novel, definitely fun, and has received excellent reviews in Britain, less so in the U.S. Does not require that you know or like the novels of Amis. Christopher Hitchens plays a critical role in the narrative. Idea-rich, but somehow I don’t quite care, and this one feels like it would have been a much better book twenty years ago.
2. Tobias S. Harris, The Iconoclast: Shinzo Abe and the New Japan (UK Amazon listing, I paid the shipping charge, here is the U.S. listing). Yes a good biography of Abe, but most of all a book to make Japanese politics seem normal, rather than something connected to a country with a Kakuhidou movement.
3. Donald W. Braben, Scientific Freedom: The Elixir of Civilization, Stripe Press reprint. Here is the book’s home page.
4. Les Payne and Tamara Payne, The Dead Are Arising: the Life of Malcolm X. I pawed through this book, and it gave off signals of being high quality. But somehow reading it didn’t hold my interest. I then googled to a few reviews, but I rapidly realized (again) that such reviews are these days untrustworthy. Try this NYT review, starting with this sentence: “Les Payne’s “The Dead Are Arising” arrives in late 2020, bequeathed to an America choked by racism and lawlessness.” The reviewer makes a bunch of intelligent observations, interspersed with gushing about Malcolm X (“It is hard not to want Malcolm back, because his charisma is undeniable”), but I am never told why I should read the book. At the end I learn the reviewer is “…the dean of academic affairs and a professor of American studies at Wellesley College.” Signal extraction problem, anyone? I call the current regime a tax on my willingness to put more time into the book.
Adam Thierer, Evasive Entrepreneurs & the Future of Governance: How Innovation Improves Economies and Governments, extends the important idea of permissionless innovation.
Jason Brennan, Good Work If You Can Get It: How to Succeed in Academia. My blurb said “The one book to read about trying to become a professor.”
What should I ask Zachary Carter?
Zachary is first and foremost the author of the New York Times bestselling The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes. Here is part of a broader bio:
Zach Carter is a senior reporter at HuffPost, where he covers economic policy and American politics. He is a frequent guest on television and radio whose work has appeared in The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Nation, and The American Prospect, among other outlets. Zach began his career at SNL Financial (now a division of S&P Global), where he was a banking reporter during the financial crisis of 2008. He wrote features about macroeconomic policy, regional economic instability, and the bank bailouts, but his passion was for the complex, arcane world of financial regulatory policy. He covered the accounting standards that both fed the crisis and shielded bank executives from its blowback, detailed the consumer protection abuses that consumed the mortgage business and exposed oversight failures at the Federal Reserve and other government agencies that allowed reckless debts to pile up around the world. Since joining HuffPost in 2010, Zach has covered the implementation of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law, political standoffs over trade policy and the federal budget, and the fight over the future of the Democratic Party. His feature story, “Swiped: Banks, Merchants and Why Washington Doesn’t Work for You” was included in the Columbia Journalism Review’s compilation Best Business Writing.
So what should I ask him?
*Poet of Revolution: The Making of John Milton*
That is the new book by Nicholas McDowell, and it is one of my favorite non-fiction works this year. Milton is today more relevant than he has been in a long time, excerpt:
Milton’s political development is shaped by his evolving understanding of the ways in which ‘tyranny’ — defined initially in ecclesiastical and clerical terms but which grows to encompass political organization — retards the intellectual and cultural progress of a nation. This understanding was shaped not only by historical experience of the unprecedented political turbulence of mid-seventeenth-century Britain, but by the interaction between that experience and his intellectula life. Milton’s period of intensive and almost entirely orthodox reading in political and religious history in the mid-1630s, the record of some of which survives in the notebook that was rediscovered in 1874, revealed to him how clerical censorship and heresy-hunting had suppressed intellectual and literary life in other countries. Milton regarded the cultural decline of Italy under the Counter-Reformation and Inquisition from the glory days of Dante and Petrarch, two of his pre-eminent post-classical models of the poetic career, as the starkest instance of this process. His tour of Italy in 1638-9 confirmed the lessons of his reading: that in nations where ‘this kind of inquisition tyrannizes,’ as he put it in Areopagitica, learning is brought into a ‘servil condition’ and the ‘glory ‘ of ‘wits’ is ‘dampt.’
Recommended! Every page is enjoyable, and you can profit from this book no matter your prior knowledge of Milton may be. A sure thing for the year end’s “best of” list.
You can pre-order here.
Keynes on what is required to make a great economist
The study of economics does not seem to require any specialized gifts of an unusually high order. Is it not, intellectually regarded, a very easy subject compared with the higher branches of philosophy and pure science? Yet good, or even competent, economists are the rarest of birds. An easy subject, at which very few excel! The paradox finds its explanation, perhaps, in that the master-economist must possess a rare combination of gifts. He must reach a high standard in several different directions and must combine talents not often found together. He must be mathematician, historian, statesman, philosopher – in some degree. He must understand symbols and speak in words. He must contemplate the particular in terms of the general, and touch abstract and concrete in the same flight of thought. He must study the present in the light of the past for the purposes of the future. No part of man’s nature of his institutions must lie entirely outside his regard. He must be purposeful and disinterested in a simultaneous mood; as aloof and incorruptible as an artist, yet sometimes as near the earth as a politician.
That is from Keynes’s 1924 essay on Marshall, reprinted in Essays in Biography. Most of all, it is Keynes describing himself!
Thoughts on Peter Burke’s new book *The Polymath*
1. No one is really a polymath.
2. No one is really a unimath, for that matter.
3. Many supposed polymaths apply a relatively small number of learning techniques to many fields. They remain specialized, although their modes of specialization happen not to line up with how the academic disciplines are divided. Say you apply non-parametric statistics to five different fields — do you have one specialization or five?
4. What to make of the economist who can run experiments, use computational methods, build models, run regressions, find new data sources, has mastered machine learning, can speak fluently about macroeconomics, and popularize for a lay audience. Is there any such person? (No.) Would he or she count as a polymath?
5. The medieval polymaths Albert the Great and Ramon Llull seem especially impressive to me, because they had to learn before printing presses or easy travel were available.
6. One of my views in talent search is that extremely talented people are almost always extraordinarily good at one or more entirely trivial tasks. “I can tell exactly how much people weigh just by looking at them.” That sort of thing. What is your claim in this regard? Polymaths also must encompass the trivial!
7. How many “polymaths” are great at say only seven very trivial tasks, and fail to excel at anything important. Should the polymath concept be held hostage to Jeremy Bentham?
8. Is Leibniz — amazing philosopher, an inventor of the calculus, mastery of languages, theologian, diplomacy, legal reform, inventor, political theorist, and supposed expert on China — the most amazing polymath of all time?
9. Leonardo seems a little thin in actual achievement (though not imagination) once you get past the visual arts. And there are fewer than fifteen paintings to his name.
10. I think of the 17th century as a peak time for polymaths. Enough chances to learn and create things, and read lots, but not so much knowledge that you could stand on only one frontier.
11. John Stuart Mill is the most impressive polymath economist.
12. Alan Turing contributed to virtually every field, but in some sense he did only one thing. Von Neumann did more than one thing, did he do two? He too contributed to virtually every field.
13. I am very much a fan of Susan Sontag, but I think of her as having done, in essence, “only one thing.”
14. Here is a good piece Beware the Casual Polymath.
I am very happy to recommend this book, especially to MR readers, the full title is The Polymath: A Cultural History from Leonardo da Vinci to Susan Sontag, by Peter Burke.
Samuel Brittan has passed away
At the age of 86, he was one of Britain’s great liberals. He wrote columns for the FT for almost fifty years, defended capitalism, and also was an early advocate of an ngdp approach. From the FT:
Brittan had a wonderful, restless intelligence which made him an ideal, if demanding, companion…Peter Jay wrote that when he was economics editor of The Times, he was “haunted by the spectre . . . of Brittan endlessly at work, morning, noon and night, reading, reading, reading, while I tried ineffectually to reconcile the demands of work and family life”.
His Capitalism and the Permissive Society is now but a shell of a listing on Amazon, but I can recall Roy Childs excitedly telling me about the book. Back then, it seemed like the way forward for liberalism, a way to develop a truly emancipatory vision of free market capitalism. Now all that seems so long ago.
Here is Sam’s Wikipedia page, note the badly “off” and misrepresentative second sentence: “He was a member of the Academic Advisory Council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a non-profit organisation “restoring balance and trust to the climate debate” that has been characterised as promoting climate change denial.”
Here was Sam in the 2009 Spectator:
I have no expertise on the subject of global warming; nor do I have a strong view about it. But I do know attempted thought control and hostility to free speech when I see it; and I find these unlovely phenomena present among all too many of the enthusiasts for climate action. Words such as ‘denial’ are intentionally brought into the debate and recall those who deny the reality of the Nazi Holocaust.
Here is John McDermott’s Ode to Sam upon Sam’s retirement in 2014. And here is Cardiff Garcia on Sam.
*Editing Humanity*
That is the new book by Kevin Davies, and the subtitle is The CRISPR Revolution and the New Era of Genome Editing. So far I am on p.74, but it is one of the best science books I have read in some while, maybe the best this year. Excerpt:
…Cas9 normally takes about six hours to search through every PAM sequence in the bacterial genome, pausing at each prospective site for a mere twenty milliseconds to peer into the double helix to see if it has found the correct target. But the packaging of DNA in a eukaryotic cell nucleus is far more complex than bacteria. During lectures to his students at the University of Edinburgh, Andrew Wood shows a diagram of a bacterial cell alongside a winding, looping mammalian DNA fiber. “Cas9 didn’t evolve to work in the environment in which we now put it,” he says. “It’s mind-boggling that it is possible to interrogate hundreds of millions of nucleotides in a matter of hours.”
Recommended. Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna, the two Nobel winners from last week, are so far the central characters of the story.
Ralph Hawtrey was a Moorean
Hawtrey came from a family long associated with Eton, where he was educated himself, before coming up to Trinity in 1898. In 1901 he was 19th Wrangler; in 1903 he briefly entered the Admiralty, before going to the Treasury, where he found his vocation as an economist and remained for forty-one years. He was a very faithful Apostle, attending every annual dinner until 1954, when he was prevented from going by ill health. He was devoted to Moore, whose impassioned singing of Die Beiden Grenadiere made him realize how horrible war was for the soldiers who actually did the fighting: this constituted an epiphany for Hawtrey, and reinforced his life-long Liberalism. Moore was so much the most important influence on the life and career of Sir Ralph Hawtrey that he spent his last years working on a systematic philosophical treatise (inspired also by Robin Mayor), which was to have been a summa of his twenty-odd books and the hundreds of letters he published in The Times. He was married to the famous pianist Titi d’Aranyi.
That is from Paul Levy’s book Moore: G.E. Moore and the Cambridge Apostles. Here is more on Titi, also known as Hortense, who studied with Bartok and received numerous letters from him. And here is Scott Sumner on Hawtrey, one of the great monetary economists.