Results for “best fiction” 318 found
What is the most likely source of doomsday in 2012?
Alek has a request:
1) While I'm far from a doomsayer, I'm wondering what is the best way to bet in favor of the world ending in 2012? Betting against is pretty obvious.
I am taking this to ask what is the most likely cause of the destruction of all civilization, circa 2012, and not how to collect on the bet, in which case he should read Pascal. (If the 2012 end of the world won't be a total surprise, any leveraged short position should do, but spend the money quickly!)
Here are some hypotheses, but my answer is: destruction of the earth by space aliens.
Here are previous MR posts on The Fermi Paradox. Rampaging space aliens would explain why we don't see more civilizations out there, plus predatory ways imply that contact is short-lived, thereby making our current lack of contact more likely in the Bayesian sense.
We could be living in some kind of "branching/splitting" theory where the highest number of branches come right before everything ends and for Bayesian reasons we expect to be right up against that final point. Still, why should we think that maximum branching/splitting is coming in 2012? After a Lakers threepeat, are there no more possible worlds to create?
The overwhelming probability from a nuclear exchange, at least circa 2012, is that it would remain limited, albeit highly destructive. A pandemic is unlikely to kill more than a billion people. A very large asteroid or a super-volcano explosion can be considered other leading contenders for world-enders.
A few nights ago Natasha and I saw The Day the Earth Stood Still, 1951 version. It's more a tract on foreign policy than science fiction and Klaatu of course is a stand in for the United States. I hadn't seen it in over twenty years and I'm astonished how well the movie captures and presages today's current mix of paranoia and utter unpreparedness, vis-a-vis "aliens." It works poorly when Klaatu dons the rhetoric and tactics of the United States in galactic affairs, combined with equally clumsy implied threats, backed by no moral authority but superior hardware. It's one of the scariest, and best, movies to watch in 2010, with a superb Bernard Herrmann soundtrack and it also has good shots of WDC in 1951. I won't give away the ending but a careful listen shows it's as pessimistic about the aliens as anything. Supposedly the movie deeply influenced Ronald Reagan and brought him to the arms control table.
Comedy recommendations
Steve Hely writes to me:
I'm a real admirer of your blog. You offer such great recommendations. But it seems you rarely recommend any comedy. Are there any books, TV shows, movies, etc. that have made you laugh in recent years?
It's well-known that comedy hits don't usually export well to other countries, because comedy is so culturally specific and also so subjective. So these are not recommendations. What I find funny is this:
1. On TV: Curb Your Enthusiasm and the better ensemble pieces of Seinfeld and also The Ali G Show. The best Monty Python skits are very funny to me, although I find their movies too long and labored. I find stand-up comics funny only when I am there in person.
2. Movies: The last funny movie I saw was I Love You, Man. I like most classic comedies, though without necessarily finding them very funny. Danny Kaye's The Court Jester is a good comedy which most people don't watch any more. I enjoy the chaotic side of W.C. Fields in short doses. Jerry Lewis is funny sometimes, plus there is Pillow Talk. I like the first forty minutes or so of Ferris Bueller. Stardust Memories is my favorite Woody Allen film, though I like many of them.
3. Books: I don't find books of fiction funny, blame it on me. I do find David Hume, and other classic non-fiction authors, to be at times hilarious.
On YouTube, I find the economics comic Yoram Bauman funny. Colbert can be very funny.
I wonder how many dimensions are required to explain or predict a person's taste in comedy?
What is emblematic of the 21st century?
A recent reader request was:
What things that are around today are most distinctively 21st century? What will be the answer to this question in 10 years?
Here is what comes to mind and I think most of it will remain emblematic for some time:
Technology: iPhone, Wii, iPad, Kindle. These are no-brainers and I do think it will go down in American history as "iPhone," not "iPhone and other smart phones." Sorry people.
To read: blogs and Freakonomics, this is the age of non-fiction. I don't think we have an emblematic and culturally central novel for the last ten years. The Twilight series is a possible pick but I don't think they will last in our collective memory. Harry Potter (the series started 1997) seems to belong too much to the 1990s.
Films: Avatar, Inception (for appropriately negative reviews of the latter, see here, here, and here). Both will look and feel "of this time." Overall there have been too many "spin-off" movies. Keep in mind this question is not about "what is best."
Music: It's been a slow period, but I'll pick Lady Gaga, most of all for reflecting the YouTube era rather than for her music per se. I don't think many musical performers from the last ten years will become canonical, even though the number of "good songs" is quite high. Career lifecycles seem to be getting shorter, for one thing.
Television: The Sopranos starts in 1999, so it comes closer to counting than Harry Potter does. It reflects "the HBO era." Lost was a major network show and at the very least people will laugh at it, maybe admire it too. Battlestar Galactica. Reality TV.
What am I missing? What does this all add up to? Pretty strange, no?
p.s. Need to add Facebook and Google somewhere!
Very difficult questions
I have spoken at Jane St. Capital a few times and it is perhaps my favorite audience; everyone wants analytic content and everyone came prepared. All of the questions were tough, but two in particular I was not prepared for.
First, I was asked "Which is the most underrated statistic for judging the value of an NBA player?"
My attempted answer was the player's presence on a very good, consistently winning team. There are many players with impressive statistics, including unselfish statistics such as assists and rebounds, who are only of value on bad teams. We overvalue such players. Overall, really good teams don't keep bad players and really bad teams don't keep good players. If a player has never been on a really good team, he might not be so good, with apologies to the earlier Kevin Garnett.
Second, I was asked who is most likely to write a novel about the financial crisis which will stand the test of time. I do not see any such author around today, but if you have ideas leave them in the comments. "DeLillo, if he were thirty years younger" was the best I came up with. Or maybe something from genre fiction. There are notable works of fiction dealing with the Great Depression, but I can't recall that any of them focus on the financial side. It's a hard topic to be dramatic about, without being either too simplistic or overly technical.
*City on the Edge*
The author is Mark Goldman and the subtitle is Buffalo, New York. I loved this book. It is a splendid portrait of twentieth century America, the connection of industrialism and the arts, the decline of manufacturing and the resulting urban casualties, an applied study of the wisdom of Jane Jacobs, and on top of all that it is the best book I've read on how excess parking helped destroy an American downtown. I recommend this book to all readers of serious non-fiction.
Is multi-tasking and modern information technology bad for us?
Here is one litany of complaints. Nicholas Carr speaks to the issue and he recommends this summary piece, to defend his view that the internet is in some regards making our thoughts less focused and more superficial.
I've read the piece and I don't yet see the evidence. There are plenty of studies where the experimenter imposes his or her own version of multitasking on the participants and then sees their performance fall.
I'm simply not convinced or even moved in my priors by these studies. I can't operate a German Waschmaschine (imposed on me), and that's without an internet connection running in the background. Nor would I do well if confronted by, say, the open internet windows of Brad DeLong, or his devices, whatever they may be, and in the broader scheme of things surely he counts as intellectually close to me. Yet overall my life runs quite smoothly.
To sound intentionally petulant, the only multitasking that works for me is mine, mine, mine! Until I see a study showing that self-chosen multi-tasking programs lower performance, I don't see that the needle has budged.
I do see stronger evidence (as cited) that video games make people more aggressive. I also see overwhelming evidence that the internet gets people to read and write more. The latter is probably a good thing. I also believe the internet leads to less interest in long novels and more interest in non-fiction. I won't judge that one, but it's misleading to cite only the decline of interest in long novels and by the way don't forget Harry Potter, the form is hardly dead.
I do, by the way, ban laptops in my smaller classes. But that's paternalism, and the desire to produce a class-level publc good, not fear of my students' cognitive decline. I can well imagine that they are processing more information, and doing it more effectively, when they are not listening to me, and the other students, so intently.
For extensions of my argument, see my book Create Your Own Economy, soon to be released in paperback with the new and superior title The Age of the Infovore.
My favorite things Berlin
1. Movie, set in: One, Two, Three captures a bit of comedy from the Cold War and shows Jimmy Cagney to be a surprisingly versatile actor. Wings of Desire has stunning moments, most of all in the Staatsbibliothek with the angels and in the indie music club. Goodbye, Lenin! shows German movies can be funny, as does Run, Lola, Run!. I don't like films about either the rise or fall of the Nazis and I couldn't get through Berlin Alexanderplatz.
2. Essayist: Kurt Tucholsky. He is hardly read by Americans, and perhaps does not translate well, but is arguably one of the most eloquent and also funniest essayists of his century. Heinreich Heine also spent time in the city, although he is not a "Berliner" in the same way.
3. Painter: George Grosz and Otto Dix have lost their shock value. I'll pick Lucien Freud, who was born in Berlin, though he ended up in England. Käthe Kollwitz deserves consideration, as well as for sculptor.
4. Symphonic performance: Furtwängler's 1942 performance of Beethoven's 9th, recorded live. Has to be heard to be believed. Obviously there was a lot at stake and furthermore Hitler was in the audience. This performance will terrify you.
5. Sociologist: Georg Simmel, especially his book on the philosophy of money.
6. Political philosopher: Wilhelm von Humboldt, The Limits of State Action, which to this day remains one of the best statements of libertarian political philosophy.
7. Playwright: Lessing's Nathan the Wise is a beautiful plea for tolerance. Bertolt Brecht was a compelling writer despite his communist politics.
8. Architect: Walter Gropius or Erich Mendelsohn.
9. Philosopher: Schopenhauer and Hegel both taught in Berlin. Even Hegel, while he is full of gobbledy-gook, is brilliant on a frequent basis. Don't start with Phenomenology of Spirit. At the very least, read Schopenhauer's aphorisms.
10. Film director: Ernst Lubitsch was born there, and filmed silents there, though he later had to leave. His Trouble in Paradise (1932) is today an under-viewed movie, plus his later romantic features, such as The Shop Around the Corner, Heaven Can Wait, and To Be Or Not To Be, all merit attention.
11. Non-fiction book, about: Two that come to mind are Richard Grunberger's The 12-Year Reich and Anthony Beevor's The Fall of Berlin 1945. I do like books about the rise and fall of the Nazis; I just don't think the topic lends itself well to film.
12. Novel, set in: Uwe Johnson, The Third Book About Achim [Das dritte Buch über Achim] and John le Carré, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold.
13. Poet: Rilke.
Kurt Weill belongs somewhere, as does Christopher Isherwood, Gustav Grundgens, or for that matter E.T.A. Hoffmann. In popular music there is Ricardo Villalobos (born in Chile, but a Berliner), Einstürzende Neubauten (start with Halber Mensch), and Peter and also Casper Brötzmann. I confess that most Mendelssohn bores me.
The bottom line: How many countries could beat this line-up? And most of it comes in a relatively short period of time.
My favorite things Turkey
1. Novelist: Orhan Pamuk. My favorite books by Pamuk are the ones rooted most firmly in Istanbul and Turkey, namely The Museum of Innocence and Istanbul and also Snow. Those are some of my very favorite books, period.
2. Non-fiction book, set in: There is Runciman and Kinross and Stephen Kinzer. Is the Osman book good?
3. Movie, set in: From Russia With Love and Topkapi come to mind; my knowledge of Turkish cinema is weak.
4. Opera, set in: The Abduction from the Seraglio, maybe the Beecham recording, or Krips, plus I like the overture of the Harnoncourt version, much more Turkish-sounding than the others. And I don't have to tell you my favorite Rondo.
Uh-oh, suddenly there is too much Orientalism in this post. Reverse course!
5. Favorite recording showing the unities behind Turkish and classical music: Istanbul, Dimitrie Cantemir, by Jordi Savall. Quite the revelation and it makes you wonder how well we understand the true story of classical music.
6. Singer: Tarkan comes to mind and he is well represented on YouTube. There is an entire strand of Turkish popular song, in the direction of Sezen Aksu, YouTube here. But overall my pick is Edip Akbayram, imagine a Turkish version of Tropicalia.
7. Economist: Dani Rodrik, Daron Acemoglu, Timur Kuran, and Faruk Gul are the best-known Turkish economists I can think of. I believe Nouriel Roubini was born in Turkey but I don't think he counts as Turkish.
8. Music mogul: Ahmet Ertegun, founder of Atlantic Records.
9. Classical pianist: I still have mixed feelings about Fazil Say, who is very subjective with the score. Idil Biret has some good recordings of romantic music and piano transcriptions.
10. Cynic: Diogenes, who in a few ways was an early version of Robin Hanson, though I am not suggesting Robin is a cynic in the lower case sense.
The bottom line: Textiles and the decorative arts weigh in as strong additional positives, but I wish there were more Turkish writers I liked.
Assorted links
1. Who manages best?
2. Will Republicans cut spending?
3. ChurchRater.com.
4. Rules for being a writer (make sure you click through to the second part).
5. Are you better off winning a bronze medal than silver?
6. At what age do we learn to be sarcastic? 9 or 10, it seems.
7. Conversation with Garett Jones on macroeconomics, Twitter, and other matters.
Sentences to ponder
The topic is consumer protests over price hikes for eBooks and here is one response:
“The sense of entitlement of the American consumer is absolutely astonishing,” said Douglas Preston, whose novel “Impact” reached as high as No. 4 on The New York Times’s hardcover fiction best-seller list earlier this month. “It’s the Wal-Mart mentality, which in my view is very unhealthy for our country. It’s this notion of not wanting to pay the real price of something.”
Here is the article; I giggled when I read that. Here is a short biography of Douglas Preston.
Surrogates
Surrogates, the Bruce Willis movie, disappeared quickly but it was better than I expected, a B- (perhaps they should have called it Avatars). Worth a Netflix rental if you enjoy science fiction. Having said that, what I most liked about Surrogates was that it's clear exactly where it went wrong. What follows has no spoilers but it won't make a lot of sense unless you have seen the movie.
In the final second of the climax the key choice of the hero is revealed, even though the plot in no way requires this revelation. It would have been far better to have left the choice ambiguous (think Doubt, Memento and, of course, Blade Runner). Indeed, the script should have been written backwards from the ambiguous choice to all the earlier scenes which justify that ambiguity. (Some of this material is already in the movie but without the ambiguity of the choice it doesn't resonate, e.g. surrogacy would have saved the son but from early on the Willis character is skeptical of surrogacy thus the character's history provides a reason for him to be world weary but it doesn't drive tension as it should.)
The movie should also have been darker (bizarrely, many scenes take place in brightly lit exteriors). The best scene is the surrogate "drug" party where the noir element of surface and underlying reality–of things not being what they seem–does come through. Inexplicably, however, the wife does not partake even though we later learn this would have mirrored her true existence.
For the choices not taken, Surrogates would be a excellent movie to study in film school.
Temple Grandin’s theories on autism
As you probably know, the Temple Grandin biopic, starring Claire Danes, is showing this Saturday evening. Here is Temple on the movie. Grandin has done a great deal to benefit animals, by designing more humane slaughterhouses, stockyards, and encouraging other innovations. She also has promoted the idea of talented autistics and helped raise that notion to a very high profile. I have enormous respect for what she has done and I would gladly see her win a Nobel Prize if the appropriate category for such a prize existed.
That said, researchers disagree with Grandin's theories on autism in a number of ways and my own reading leads me to side with the researchers on some issues. Many non-autistics defer to Grandin on autism because of her life story, her remarkable achievements, and yes because of her autism. I thought it would be useful to offer a more skeptical view of a few of her claims:
1. Autistic individuals do not in general "think in pictures," though some autistics offer this self-description. Grandin repeatedly refers to herself in this context. I don't read her as claiming this tendency is universal or even the general rule, but the disclaimers aren't as evident as I would like them to be.
2. There is little evidence to support her view that autistics "think like animals." Here is one published critique of her theory: "We argue that the extraordinary cognitive feats shown by some animal species can be better understood as adaptive specialisations that bear little, if any, relationship to the unusual skills shown by savants." You'll find a response by Grandin at that same link. I'm not totally on board with the critique either (how well do we understand savants anyway?), but at the very least Grandin's claim is an unsupported hypothesis.
3. Grandin tends to brusquely classify autistic children into different groups. She will speak of "the nerds who will do just fine" (see the eBook linked to below) as opposed to the "severely autistic," who require that someone take control of their lives and pound a bit of the autism out of them. There's a great deal of diversity among autistics, and autistic outcomes, but I don't see that as the most useful way of expressing those differences. Autism diagnoses are often unstable at young ages, there is not any useful or commonly accepted measure of "autistic severity," her description perpetuates stereotypes, and Grandin herself as a child would have met criteria for "severely autistic" and yet she did fine through parental love and attention, which helped her realize rather than overturn her basic nature. That's not even a complete list of my worries on this point; for more see my Create Your Own Economy.
4. Grandin supports some varieties of intensive behavioral therapy for autistics. Many research papers support those same therapies but those papers do not generally conduct an RCT and furthermore many of the said researchers have a commercial stake in what they are studying and promoting. In my view we don't know "what works" but my (non-RCT-tested) opinion is that giving autistic children a lot of fun things to do — fun by their standards — and a lot of information to study and manipulate, gives the best chance of good outcomes. (In any case "spontaneous improvement" is considerable, so anecdotally many therapies will appear to work when they do not; nor is there a common control for placebos.) Many of the behavioral therapies seem quite oppressive to me and if we don't know they work I am worried that they are being overpromoted. Grandin has in some ways the intellectual temperament of an engineer and I am worried that she has not absorbed the lessons of Hayek's The Counterrevolution of Science.
5. Grandin refers to herself as more interested in tangible results and less interested in emotions. She is entitled to that self-description, but it is worth noting that most individuals in the "autism community" would not consider this a good presentation of their attitude toward emotions.
There is a recent eBook (selling for only $4.00), consisting of a dialogue between myself and Grandin, mostly on autism and talented autistics but not just. For instance we also talk about our favorite TV shows, including a discussion of Lost, and there is a segment on science fiction and the future of humanity. I try to draw her out on autism, cognitive anthromorphizing, and attitudes toward religion, but she is reluctant to offer her opinions on that important topic. I would describe the eBook as a good introduction to her thought on autism and society, while also giving an idea of how someone else (me) might differ from some of her basic attitudes.
*Replenishing the Earth*, by James Belich
How is this for a real estate bubble?
At peak in 1888, over 80 per cent of Victorian private investment went into Melbourne buildings. Expenditure on housing was even greater than that on rail, and many houses were built without people to live in them, or without jobs for those who did.
In the 1890s Melbourne was an impressive place. With 500,000 people, it was eighty percent bigger than San Francisco and nine hundred percent bigger than Los Angeles. Three hundred trains a day serviced the suburbs. The city had three hundred buildings with elevators and Melbourne was reputed to have more large public buildings than any British city outside of London. There were plans to build a replica of the Eiffel Tower.
That is all from James Belich's Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783-1939. I'll discuss this book more soon, but I'll tip my hand and say it is one of the very best non-fiction books of the year. Imagine Jared Diamond or Greg Clark (albeit more measured, in each case) but applied to the settlement of the colonies rather than to Europe itself. This book also has perhaps the best explanation as to why the Argentina growth miracle fell apart.
Simon Newcomb, the most important economist from Nova Scotia
Yes, Simon Newcomb (1835-1909). Newcomb was a polymath and he made important contributions to time-keeping, astronomy (most of all; he was arguably the most famous American astronomer of the 19th century), statistics, mathematics, and economics. He was especially good at coming up with new ways of calculating tables for almanacs and he was deeply interested in lunar and planetary tables. He sought to bring the scientific method to research on parapsychology. He even wrote a science fiction novel. In preparation for my Nova Scotia trip I have been rereading his Principles of Political Economy.
In economics Newcomb is best known for producing the earliest version of the equation of exchange as a means of representing the quantity theory of money. He had a remarkably good understanding of monetary velocity and the purchasing power of money, favoring a "tabular standard."
The most interesting part of the text are the questions at the end of each chapter. Many show that Newcomb knew more than the text itself let on. Others are bizarre and would not be found in 2009. How about this one?:
16. How does the modern system of production by large organizations operate upon the shiftless class who will never stick to a regular line of work? Show why, when this class really wants to work, it is harder to get it than it would be in a primitive economy.
Despite its possible inappropriateness, it is nonetheless an interesting question about fixed capital and unemployment. If you want insightful questions, here are a few picks, taken from a single page, chosen randomly:
Define what portion of the price paid for a coat goes to compensate the friction of exchange.
Does the proportion of the population engaged in intellectual pursuits tend to increase or diminish with the increase of wealth?
Is there any method of calculation by which we can approximate to the total population which the earth can sustain? If so, state the method, and show what data are necessary to apply it.
Has cheap transportation of passengers and goods across the ocean tended to retard or to stimulate emigration?
I have seen many worse questions in contemporary principles texts. He also formulated Benford's Law:
In 1881, Newcomb discovered the statistical principle now known as Benford's law, when he observed that the earlier pages of logarithm
books, used at that time to carry out logarithmic calculations, were
far more worn than the later pages. This led him to formulate the
principle that, in any list of numbers taken from an arbitrary set of
data, more numbers will tend to have the leading digit "1" than any
other leading digit
He was mostly self-taught. He suffered problems at the age of seven and was removed from school and it seems he never returned. Later his father tortured him with farm work to help improve his manual dexterity (it didn't seem to work). He was an expert chess player and could recite large amounts of poetry from memory. He started studying astronomy before he was ten. Next week I will read his autobiography, available on-line.
Here are quotations from Newcomb; I have read that the "anti-flight" remarks are ripped from context and are misleading. There is a crater, an asteroid, and a Canadian writing award named after him.
Here is Newcomb on libertarian ethics and wanting to be left alone.
If you have any interest in the history of economic thought, or in 19th century North American intellectual history, you should read Simon Newcomb. Here are some of his on-line works. When he died, President Taft and many foreign dignitaries attended his funeral. But today Newcomb is very much an underrated thinker and an underrated historical figure.
Newcomb's father once wrote to him: "You were an uncommon child for truth, I never knew you to deviate from it in one instance."
Assorted links
1. Is Viagra bankrupting Brazilian pensions?
2. The decline of the super-rich.
3. Markets in everything: North Korean restaurant comes to NYC.
4. Brahms Complete Edition, 46 discs for $62.
5. Via Chris Masse, Hal Varian on how the web challenges managers (for the video version click on "launch interactive" and "all videos"). Chris also refers us to the Avatar trailer, which he describes as the best science fiction movie ever.
6. The Singapore model: sign me up too.