Category: Books
Not your grandpa’s South Asia libertarianism
I did an Ask Me Anything for the South Asian chapter of Students for Liberty, based on their reading of my book Big Business: Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero.
By far the two most popular topics for questions were a) social media, and b) sexual harassment. Understandable, given South Asian circumstances, but not necessarily what you would hear in the United States, especially from an SfL group.
I think most Western libertarians and classical liberals still do not understand how much South Asia is going to redefine their discourse.
The new Elena Ferrante novel, up through p.138 (no spoilers)
Some surprises have come, and I am liking it more. Is it fair to judge it against the Neapolitan quadrology? This book has only one major character rather than two, so is it doomed to be only half as good? Can any current book manage to be half as good? Can we read this one fresh at all? (Is it better to view the Mona Lisa “fresh,” or not?) Should we be trying to discard prior expectations, or not be trying to discard expectations for a book such as this?
You’ll be getting another report soon, please note I am deliberately not reading the book too quickly. Here is my previous post on the book. I agree with the commentator who described the male characters as mostly flat.
*The Stakes: American at the Point of No Return*
That is the new book by Michael Anton, the famed then pseudonymous author of the “Flight 93 piece.”
I consider this to be the very best book for understanding where the current Intellectual Right “is at.” In that sense I recommend it highly. The opening chapter is a polemical fear that all of American will go the route of California, and then Anton keeps on digging further in on what has gone wrong.
To be clear, my vision is not the same as Michael’s. I would like to see more emphasis on economic growth, on individual liberty, to recognize the emancipatory strands within the Left, to move away from the current historical pessimism of the Right and of Anton in particular, to be more unabashedly cosmopolitan, think more about science, and to become more Bayesian. Nor do I agree that “…there’s little wrong with President Trump that more Trump couldn’t solve.”
Nonetheless this book serves a very valuable purpose and many of you should read it.
The new Elena Ferrante novel, up through p.63 no spoilers
It is a thrill to be dragged into her Neapolitan world of class and romantic intrigue and family strife once again, and the book is clearly Ferrante from the get go. Yet I have some doubts. The plot seems more accessible and less complex, and with fewer layers to be unpeeled. It has not yet moved out of “father-daughter cliché land.” Every page is engrossing, but I am still looking for the surprise.
They have been so stingy with advance review copies that there are still no Amazon reviews.
*The Rise of the G.I. Army, 1940-1941*
The author is Paul Dickson, and the subtitle is The Forgotten Story of How America Forged a Powerful Army Before Pearl Harbor.
For one thing, I enjoyed the examples of “fast action” in this book. For instance, the U.S. passed draft registration Sept.16, 1940. All men between 21 and 45 are supposed to register, and on a single date, Oct.16. Almost all of them do, including people in mental hospitals. Some stragglers register over the next five days, but the overwhelming majority pull it off on day one, and with very little preexisting infrastructure to draw upon, as draft institutions had been abolished right after the end of WWI.
I had not realized how instrumental George Marshall had been, before Pearl Harbor, in investing in building up America’s officer corps.
The famous movie star, Jimmy Stewart, was drafted but then rejected for being ten pounds too light at 6’3″ and 138 lbs. He then put on ten pounds so he could join the service.
The tales of poor morale, mental illness, and prostitution camps (no antibiotics!) in 1940 are harrowing.
Recommended.
What I’ve been reading
1. Daniel Halliday and John Thrasher, The Ethics of Capitalism: An Introduction. This book is reasonable, empirical, non-dogmatic, readable, and largely but not uncritically pro-capitalist. It is indeed “an introduction,” and not designed for say yours truly, but we need many more works like this.
2. Ken McNab, And in the End: The Last Days of the Beatlesxxx. I regularly opine that sports and entertainment books — provided you already have familiarity with the topic area — provide better management lessons than do management books. This volume, as I read it, presents the Beatles story as a tale of two sequential founders — first John (who had most of the early excellent songs), and then Paul, the turning point in my view being when Paul commandeered the engineering of “Tomorrow Never Knows,” otherwise very much a John song but in fact Paul did most of the actual work on it. Eventually the first founder rebelled against the ever-more-domineering second founder, and then the Beatles went poof.
3. Martyn Rady, The Habsburgs. Most books about the Habsburgs confuse me, this one confuses me less than those other ones, consider that a recommendation. I learned the most from the section about all of the early ties to what is now part of northern Switzerland.
4. Jeff Selingo, Who Gets In and Why: A Year Inside College Admissions. Most books about college admissions do not confuse me (the reality already is so absurd), but this one informs me, consider that a recommendation. Selingo has done actual extensive research, including a direct pipeline into the processes of several major institutions, and he puts informativeness above moralizing or exaggeration.
5. Richard E. Spear, Caravaggio’s Cardsharps on Trial: Thwaytes v. Sotheby’s. A surprisingly taut and suspenseful treatment of a dispute and then lawsuit over whether a supposed Caravaggio was in fact “real” or not. NB: if they have to ask whether or not it is real, most of the time it ain’t.
6. William C. Summers, Félix d‘Hérelle and the Origins of Molecular Biology. I wanted to read up on bacteriophages, in part as a broader proxy for abandoned lines of scientific inquiry (superseded by antibiotics, and did you recall they play a big role in Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith?), and it seemed this was the right book for that. Short enough and to the point, clear enough for the non-specialist, and it has plenty on the history of science more broadly. It also covers d’Hérelle being invited to Georgia, USSR, to pursue his research, a fascinating episode in his life. For a brief introduction, here is his Wikipedia page.
7. Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, The Discomfort of Evening. A few months ago I started reading this one, figuring it would win a Booker, and indeed it just did. I read up through p.102, and quite liked it, but also figured that a Dutch farm tale of mucky perversion, flapping meats, and a mordant, vibrant nature did not in fact fit into my broader life plan. Indeed it did not. But if you are considering this one, while likely I will not finish it, I still would nudge you slightly in the positive direction. Cumin cheese makes an appearance (ugh).
I have not had a chance to read Adrian Goldworthy’s Philip and Alexander: Kings and Conqueror, but it appears promising.
Steven Ozment, The Age of Reform, 1250-1550: An Intellectual and Religious History of Late Medieval and Reformation Europe is a reprint of a 1980 classic, with an emphasis on the roots of liberalism in European religious thought.
My Conversation with Jason Furman
Yes, the Jason Furman, here is the audio and transcript, please note this was recorded in January. Here is part of the summary:
Jason joined Tyler for a wide-ranging conversation on how monopolies affect investment patterns, his top three recommendations to improve American productivity, why he’s skeptical of place-based development policies, what some pro-immigration arguments get wrong, why he’s more concerned about companies like Facebook and Google than he is Walmart and Amazon, the merits of a human rights approach to privacy, whether the EU treats tech companies fairly, having Matt Damon as a college roommate, the future of fintech, his highest objective when teaching economics, what he learned from coauthoring a paper with someone who disagrees with him, why he’s a prolific Goodreads reviewer, and more.
And here is one excerpt:
COWEN: The US is losing some of its manufacturing capacity, and certainly a lot of its manufacturing workforce. Are there external benefits to keeping those activities more in the US? Significant benefits?
FURMAN: I don’t think that manufacturing itself should be an important objective of US policy. It’s one type of job. It’s been a good type of job, but there’s other good types of jobs as well. I wouldn’t focus on where physical things are being made as opposed to where services are being made. In fact, if anything, I think the error in policy is probably a little bit too much emphasis on manufacturing and a little bit less on services.
COWEN: What do you think of the national security argument? That, say, when building a ship, we might be dependent on South Korean components. If there were a war in Asia, those might be, for some reason, unreliable. We depend on China for rare earths. We depend on Taiwan, to some extent, for high-quality chips, even though we make our own. Is the supply chain extended too long, and it was a kind of economic fantasy, and it doesn’t make national security sense?
FURMAN: I don’t consider myself an expert in any of those national security questions, so I would be open to thinking about the national security concerns associated with the supply chain. I have an awful lot in specific cases — both when I was in government and just in the world more generally — heard people make national security arguments that I found tendentious and pretty unpersuasive.
There may be some that are persuasive and that are true. There’s an awful lot that aren’t. Our administration, towards the end, worried a bit about semiconductors. When I’ve looked at that, there’s enough of a diversified world supply, enough of an ability to scale up if necessary in the United States, that I don’t think on semiconductors — there, it was protectionism under the guise of national security.
So I think we should accept the possibility of national security, take it seriously, but be really, really wary that a lot of protectionist arguments use that trappings.
Economics throughout, with a touch of Dickens. Recommended.
What I’ve been reading
1. Fredrik deBoer, The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice. A well-written, highly intelligent book, inveighing against various aspects of the current meritocracy, and how they contribute to what the author calls “social injustice.” People who do educational policy, or who think about inequality should read this book. But ultimately what is his remedy? I would sooner attack homework, credentialism, and bureaucratization than testing. And yes, IQ is overrated, but the correct alternative view emphasizes stamina and relentlessness in a manner that I don’t think will make deBoer any happier. To lower the status of smarts, in the meantime, I fear is not going to do us any good.
2. Chris Ferrie and Veronica Goodman, ABCs of Economics (Baby University). Is this for a 5 or 6 year old? It seems good to me, though perhaps the part where they teach “Nash equilibrium” is a stretch. I say calculus should be available in the fifth grade, stats in the eighth grade, so full steam ahead.
3. Christopher I. Caterine, Leaving Academia: A Practical Guide. Did you realize that most of the supposed advantages of academia, such as control over your own time, do not exist to the extent they once did? The advice in this book, such as about how to prepare your resume, seems correct to me, although that it needs to be given does not convince me of the marketability of these academics in the private sector or indeed anywhere at all.
4. Robert D. Putnam, The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again. A fact-rich, well-reasoned and indeed reasonable take on numerous American trends, most of them related to social solidarity. A good book, provided you are not looking too hard for what the title and subtitle would seem to promise.
5. Greg Woolf, The Life and Death of Ancient Cities: A Natural History. A very useful introduction and overview to its chosen topic, a good and readable book for urbanists who are looking for general historical background.
Notable are two new books on liberalism abroad. The first is Ingemar Stahl: A Market Liberal in the Swedish Welfare State, edited by Christina and Lars Jonung, and The Hand Behind the Invisible Hand: Dogmatic and Pragmatic Views on Free Markets and the State of Economic Theory, by Karl Mittermaier, with other contributions, concerning South Africa, and free on Kindle at least for the time being.
*Collected Writings of Morton Feldman*
Feldman probably was the most important American composer of his generation, he interacted with the leading NYC painters of his time, and it turns out he is a splendid writer as well. His observations are to the point, often with a Nassim Taleb kind of sting. Here is one bit:
Recently in the Sunday papers an article about Messiaen appeared in which a great virtue was made of his political “disengagement.” Reading this article, we learn how deeply religious this composer is, how much he looks forward to his vacations in Switzerland, how proud he is of Boulez, and how involved he is with bird calls. Can we say man is really disengaged? His chief occupation seems to be this disengagement. There is something curiously official in the way his interests and views are described — as though nothing could now disturb all this.
Or:
But he has nothing to worry about, that chap in Tempo. He’s going to have it all. Pitch relationships, plus sound and chance thrown in. Total consolidation. Those two words define the new academy. You can tie it all up in the well-known formula, “You made a small circle and excluded me; I made a bigger circle and included you.” A kind of Jonah-and-the-whale syndrome is taking place. Everything is being chewed up en masse and for the mass…
It may seem strange to call Boulez and Stockhausen popularizers, but that’s what they are. They glamorized Schoenberg and Webern, now they’re glamorizing something else. But chance to them is just another procedure, another vehicle for new aspects of structure or of sonority independent of pitch organization. They could have gotten these things from Ives or Varèse, but they went to these men with too deep prejudice, the prejudice of the equal, the colleague.
More books should have sentences like: “[Virgil] Thomson disliked me on sight, as a youth, and it’s never changed.”
The full title is Give My Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman,” edited by B.H. Friedman.
I think Feldman two greatest works are For John Cage, and also String Quartet #2, which is about five hours long. This year I have been listening to the Philip Thomas 5-CD set of Feldman’s piano music more than just about any other CD. It is not the very best Feldman, but it is some of the best Feldman to listen to, if only because the pieces typically are shorter.
From the comments, on alien visitation
…it looks like Avi Loeb (Harvard astronomer) is writing a book that will argue that we have been visited by aliens.
Harvard’s top astronomer lays out his controversial theory that our solar system was recently visited by advanced alien technology from a distant star.
In late 2017, scientists at a Hawaiian observatory glimpsed an object soaring through our inner solar system, moving so quickly that it could only have come from another star. Avi Loeb, Harvard’s top astronomer, showed it was not an asteroid; it was moving too fast along a strange orbit, and left no trail of gas or debris in its wake. There was only one conceivable explanation: the object was a piece of advanced technology created by a distant alien civilization.
https://www.hmhbooks.com/shop/books/Extraterrestrial/9780358278146
That is from Josh P. And here is the Amazon link.
The lost colony of Roanoke was never lost, rather it integrated with Native Americans
The English colonists who settled the so-called Lost Colony before disappearing from history simply went to live with their native friends — the Croatoans of Hatteras, according to a new book.
“They were never lost,” said Scott Dawson, who has researched records and dug up artifacts where the colonists lived with the Indians in the 16th century. “It was made up. The mystery is over.”
…The evidence shows the colony left Roanoke Island with the friendly Croatoans to settle on Hatteras Island. They thrived, ate well, had mixed families and endured for generations. More than a century later, explorer John Lawson found natives with blue eyes who recounted they had ancestors who could “speak out of a book,” Lawson wrote.
The two cultures adapted English earrings into fishhooks and gun barrels into sharp-ended tubes to tap tar from trees.
Here is the full article, with other interesting details. Rising in status: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Robert Axelrod, Marx/Engels, theorists of agricultural productivity. Falling in status: Earlier colonial historians.
Via Ilya Novak.
What I’ve been reading
1. Christopher Tugendhat, A History of Britain Through Books, 1900-1964. Most of all a look at the “well-known in their time, and reflecting their age, but not read any more” books from the stated period, using short, capsule portraits of each work. It induced me to order some more Elizabeth Bowen, C.P. Snow, and other works. There should be more books like this.
2. Maggie O’Farrell, Hamnet. Perhaps my favorite novel of the year so far, noting this is from Northern Ireland and my #2 pick by Anne Enright is from Ireland proper. Usually I dislike stories with a “gimmick” — this one recounts part of the life of Shakespeare’s family during plague times — but this one was tasteful, subtle, and suspenseful.
3. Charles Freeman, The Awakening: A History of the Western Mind AD 500-1700. A gargantuan work at over 800 big pp., the size and the breadth and title all might seem to herald trouble. Yet it is really good. It has chapters on whether England really had a scientific revolution, what was actually published with the new printing press, and how medieval universities really worked. There were fewer tired summaries of “the usual” than I was expecting. The author is a specialist on the ancient world, and so there is coverage of Cassiodorus, and what Montaigne took from Plutarch, and numerous other “ancient world” sorts of topics. Which is a good thing.
4. Despina Strategakos, Hitler’s Northern Utopia: Building the New Order in Occupied Norway. What did the Nazis have planned for Norway after a supposedly successful conclusion of the Second World War? Lots of reformed urban townscapes, and with plenty of detail to boot. Sometimes it is books like this, rather than the recounting of atrocities, that make WWII seem like the truly bizarre event it was. I am still not sure if restructuring Norway is something fascinating to do, or still super-dull.
Thomas A. Schwartz, Henry Kissinger and American Power: A Political Biography is consistently good and readable.
I found David Broder’s First They Took Rome: How the Populist Right Conquered Italy to be a useful explainer of a complex situation.
Jacob Goldstein, Money: The True Story of a Made-up Thing is a good introduction to its chosen topic.
Claims about Richard Wagner
The truth is that Wagner’s popularity was already in relative decline during the Weimar Republic and simply fell further, more quickly, under the Nazis. During the last years of the Kaiser’s Germany (and despite the cost and privation of the First World War), the Master’s works were still hugely popular, accounting for over eighteen per cent of all opera performances, a share no other composer came to matching. By the mid-1920s, though, the figure had dropped to around fourteen per cent.
After Hitler took power, Wagner’s share plunged to well below ten percent.
The truth is that many Nazis, in high and low places, were bored to tears by Wagner.
That is all from Jonathan Carr’s excellent book The Wagner Clan.
What should I ask Edwidge Danticat?
I will be doing a Conversation with her, she is the famed Haitian author. Here is her extensive Wikipedia page. Or here is part of a shorter bio:
Author Edwidge Danticat was born on January 19, 1969 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti to André Danticat and Rose Danticat. In 1981, she moved to Brooklyn, New York, where she graduated from Clara Barton High School and received her B.A. degree in French literature from Barnard College in New York City in 1990; and her M.F.A. degree in creative writing from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island in 1993.
In 1983, at age fourteen, Danticat published her first writing in English, “A Haitian-American Christmas,” in New Youth Connections, a citywide magazine written by teenagers. Her next publication, “A New World Full of Strangers,” was about her immigration experience and led to the writing of her first novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory in 1994. In 1997, she was named one of the country’s best young authors by the literary journal Granta. Danticat’s other works include, Everything Inside, Claire of the Sea Light, Brother, I’m Dying, Krik? Krik!, The Farming of Bones, The Dew Breaker, and Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work.
Danticat has also taught creative writing at New York University and the University of Miami. She has worked with filmmakers Patricia Benoit and Jonathan Demme, on projects on Haitian art and documentaries about Haiti.
So what should I ask her?
Three areas where you never run out of great books to read
Those three areas are:
1. The history of the British Isles
2. The history of the Jews, and
3. The history of World War II
Each area has attracted remarkable talent, mostly in English I should add, and you can always read yet another great book in these areas, even if you already have consumed many stellar offerings.
Whether you should double down in these areas, or strike out and diversify into the many other areas with lower quality expected return, is in fact a key question when it comes to how to read.
(Of course, a small number of books cover all three areas, though I would not suggest that they get triple credit.)
Are there any other such areas I am missing? Somehow American history does not do it for me — too much stupidity, repetition, and needlessly “clampdown patriotic” perspectives.