Results for “ferrante” 52 found
My Conversation with Atul Gawande
Here is the podcast and transcript (no video), Atul was in top form. We covered the marginal value of health care, the progress of AI in medicine, whether we should fear genetic engineering, whether the checklist method applies to marriage (maybe so!), whether FDA regulation is too tough, whether surgical procedures should be more tightly regulated, Michael Crichton and Stevie Wonder, wearables, what makes him weep, Knausgaard and Ferrante, why surgeons leave sponges in patients, how he has been so successful, his own performance as a medical patient, and much more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: A lot of critics have charged that to get a new drug through the FDA, it takes too many years and too much money, and that somehow the process should be liberalized. Do you agree or disagree?
GAWANDE: I generally disagree. It’s a trade-off in values at some basic level. In the 1950s, we had no real FDA, and you had the opportunity to put out, to innovate in all kinds of ways, and that innovation capability gave us modern cardiac surgery and gave us steroids and antibiotics, but it also gave us frontal lobotomies, and it gave us the Tuskegee experiment and a variety of other things.
The process that we have regulation around both the ethics of what we’re doing and that we have some safety process along the way is totally appropriate. I think a lot of lessons about when the HIV community became involved in the FDA process to drive approaches that smoothed and sped up the decision-making process, and also got the public enough involved to be able to say . . . That community said, “Look, there are places where we’re willing to take greater risks for the sake of speed.”
People are trying to treat the FDA process as a technical issue. When what it is, is it’s an issue about what are the risks we are genuinely willing to take, and what are the risks that we’re not?
And:
COWEN: The idea of nudge.
GAWANDE: I think overrated.
COWEN: Why?
GAWANDE: I think that there are important insights in nudge units and in that research capacity, but when you step back and say, “What are the biggest problems in clinical behavior and delivery of healthcare?” the nudges are focused on small solutions that have not demonstrated capacity for major scale.
The kind of nudge capability is something we’ve built into the stuff we’ve done, whether it’s checklists or coaching, but it’s been only one. We’ve had to add other tools. You could not get to massive reductions in deaths in surgery or childbirth or massive improvements in end-of-life outcomes based on just those behavioral science insights alone. We’ve had to move to organizational insights and to piece together multiple kinds of layers of understanding in order to drive high-volume change in healthcare delivery.
Definitely recommended, this was one of my favorite “episodes.”
My pick for a summer beach read
The Three-Body Problem and The Dark Forest
By Cixin LiuChinese science fiction, or Chinese ghost story, or maybe even Chinese reinvention of the novel? These are the works of fiction I am most enthusiastic about since Elena Ferrante and Karl Ove Knausgaard. I say read a plot summary of the first volume before starting the book, unless you are inclined to read it twice, as I did. — TYLER COWEN
That is from Bloomberg, the link has picks from other regular contributorrs.
What I’ve been reading
1. Édouard Louis, The End of Eddy. LitHub wrote: “Even in the wake of Knausgaard and Ferrante it is hard to find a literary phenomenon that has swept Europe quite like the autobiographical project of Édouard Louis.” I don’t know that I enjoyed this book very much, but it was an effective fictional experience. Most of all it scared me that such a tale of poverty and abuse could be so popular in Europe these days. Recommended, but in a sobering way; I would rather this had been a bestseller in 1937.
2. Karan Mahajan, The Association of Small Bombs. A novel about the consequences of a Delhi terrorist bombing that is both deep and compelling to read, full of surprises as well. Here is a useful NYT review.
3. Edward T. O’Donnell, Henry George and the Crisis of Inequality: Progress and Poverty in the Gilded Age. This focuses more on George’s connection to social and labor movements, and less on George as an economist or land theorist, than I would have liked. Still, it is an information-rich narrative that most of all brings the times and movements surrounding George to life.
4. Andrew Marr, We British: The Poetry of a People. A good introduction to its topic, most of all for the mid-twentieth century, with plenty of poems reproduced. Here is a Louis MacNeice poem, Snow:
The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.
World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various
And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes —
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of your hands —
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.
My Conversation with Jhumpa Lahiri
I thought this was one of the very best of the conversations, Jhumpa responded consistently with brilliance and grace. Here is the link to the transcript, podcast, and video versions. In addition to discussing her books, we covered Rhode Island, Elena Ferrante, book covers, Bengal and Kolkaata and Bengali literature, immigrant identity, writing as problem solving, Italian authors, writing and reading across different languages, Indian classical music, architectural influences including Palladianism, and much more. Here is one excerpt:
TYLER COWEN: …You’ve written a great deal about not having a native country, about not having a language of your own that’s clearly yours, or even a culture. Having read or reread all of your work and surrounding works, and if I think, “How do I frame you?” I would say I think of you as a Rhode Islander because that’s where you grew up. You were born in England but came here when you were three, grew up in Rhode Island. How would you react to that?
JHUMPA LAHIRI: Uncomfortably.
[laughter]…
LAHIRI: I mean, with all due respect. It’s true.
LAHIRI: Well, I think what was helpful about it is that it opened up the setting of The Lowland, which is set in part in Rhode Island, but it’s the first of my books in which I can actually mention Rhode Island by its name. Whereas the other books, the preceding books, are set in these sort of fake Rhode Island slash Massachusetts, this area, this terrain that really is Rhode Island, just to boil it down. But I couldn’t mention it. I couldn’t name it as such. And I think that’s telling.
It was saying something, the fact that in the earlier books I was writing about the ocean. I was writing about this small campus, this little town, and describing these settings that I knew very well, the settings I had grown up in, but I couldn’t come out and say that it was Rhode Island. I kept calling it some suburb of Boston. So I think the writing of that piece unlocked something. Then in The Lowland, they’re in Rhode Island, and I don’t pretend anymore.
And:
COWEN: If you compare Interpreter of Maladies to your other short story collection, Unaccustomed Earth, do you think of the latter, more recent work as being more about reconciliation and there’s a greater role for children or families in at least some of the stories? Or do you think, overall, your fiction with time is moving in the direction of Hardy and becoming darker?
LAHIRI: I think it’s becoming darker and I think that’s usually the case as we get older, right?
Jhumpa on Kolkaata:
…it’s a city that believes in its poets, that believes in its politics, believes in humanity in some sense. And life is so extreme there, in so many ways. People are put to the test, and you see life being put to the test constantly around you. There’s nothing you can really accept easily or take for granted about yourself or about the universe if you’ve been there. It’s a jolt to your consciousness, but a fundamental one, an essential one, to shake us out of this, whatever takes over, if you protect yourself.
Do read (or listen to) the whole thing. Jhumpa’s last two books are excellent and highly underrated, both were written in Italian (!) and then translated. One is on writing and reading in a foreign language, the other is on book covers.
Best fiction of 2016
I was disappointed by most of this year’s well-known releases, and did most of my rewarding fiction reading in past classics. But these are the fiction or fiction-related works I found to be outstanding this year:
Eimear McBride, The Lesser Bohemians. A novel of an affair, with intoxicating Irish prose and a genuine energy on the page, though it is more a work of intensifying fervor than a traditional plot-based story.
Claire Louise-Bennett, Pond, more from Ireland, short, nominally fiction but more like a circular sensory experience of reading overlapping short stories, with a cumulative effect akin to that of poetry. I found this one mesmerizing.
Javier Marias, Thus Bad Begins. I have only started this, but so far I like it very much. I have enough faith in Marias to put in on the list.
Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Reputations, a short Colombian novel on memory — personal, historical, sexual, and otherwise, this was my favorite short work of the year.
The Complete Works of Primo Levi, in three volumes, edited by Ann Goldstein. By no means is all of this fiction, but I will put these books in this category. A revelation, as Levi has more works of interest, and a broader range of intellect and understanding, than I had realized. There is plenty of linguistics, economics, history, and social science in these literary pages as well as consistently beautiful writing and superb translations. This is technically from 2015, but I missed it last time around.
Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai. Review here. Strictly speaking, this is a reissue of an earlier published but neglected work. Maniacal, intense, super-smart, about a mother bringing up a prodigy.
Emily Dickinson’s Poems as She Preserved Them, edited by Cristanne Miller. The visual presentation of poetry matters too, plus she is one of the very best.
The Found and the Lost: The Collected Novellas of Ursula K. LeGuin, self-recommending.
Elena Ferrante, Frantumaglia. A revealing mismash look into the mind of the author, giving you an integrated picture of her world view, with carefully calculated feints thrown in. I should note this one works only if you know and love her novels already. Ferrante’s “children’s” story The Beach at Night is also worthwhile, very dark, you can read it in a small number of minutes. Here is a good NYT review.
Jean-Michael Rabaté, Think Pig! Beckett at the Limit of the Human. This work of criticism is grounded in literary theory, but informative and smart nonetheless.
Michael Orthofer, The Complete Review Guide to Literary Fiction. An amazingly comprehensive and informative work, mostly about literature in translation, from the creator of the Literary Saloon blog about fiction. I liked it so much I decided to do a Conversation with Michael Orthofer. If you could own only ten works on literature, this should be one of them.
If you give me only one pick, I opt for the Primo Levi, even if you think you already know his work.
A few I didn’t get to read yet, but have hopes for are Alan Moore’s Jerusalem, and Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk, caveat emptor in both cases, plus Invisible Planets, edited by Ken Liu, a collection of Chinese science fiction.
My post on best non-fiction of the year will be coming soon, plus I’ll do new entries for any excellent fiction between now and the end of the year.
What I’ve been reading
1. Ronald C. White, American Ulysses: A Life of Ulysses S. Grant. Grant is still underrated, this book is highly readable and to the point and not to fusty. Someone should get Paul Krugman (a Grant fan) to review this book.
2. Jeffrey Edward Green, The Shadow of Unfairness: A Plebeian Theory of Liberal Democracy. “There will always be some plutocracy, don’t get bent out of shape too badly” is my brief summary of this one. This book could be more readable, but it is highly intelligent.
3. Esther Schor, Bridge of Words: Esperanto and the Dream of a Universal Language. I hadn’t known that almost all Esperanto words are accented on the penultimate syllable (bad for poetry), the system of correlatives and “table words” can be quite difficult (“It also has nine groups of word endings, not only for place but also for time, quantity, manner, possession, entity, etc.”), and how much the entire movement was influenced by the intellectual climate of late 19th century Russian Jewish thought. Recommended.
4. Elena Ferrante, Frantumaglia. A revealing look into the mind of the author, but this one works only if you know and love her novels already. Ferrante’s “children’s” story The Beach at Night is worthwhile, very dark, you can read it in a small number of minutes. Here is a good NYT review.
5. Cao Xueqin, The Story of the Stone [Dream of the Red Chamber], Penguin edition, vol.I. I am not confident of my ability to follow along all of the longer plot lines, but it is more absorbing and readable than I had recalled from a much earlier attempt to read it. And overall it does make upper middle class life in 18th century China seem more civilized than its counterpart in Europe.
Sunday assorted links
1. Peter Boettke is now President of the Mont Pelerin Society.
2. Is it right to out Elena Ferrante? And here is the story of her (possible) mother.
3. “Here is how debt parking works.”
4. “Kolportiert wird, dass Daron Acemoglu vom Massachusetts Institute of Technology der erste Ökonomieprofessor sei, der ein siebenstelliges Angebot erhalten habe. Die Universität Chicago wollte ihn offenbar von Harvard abwerben.” That is Ernst Fehr on building up the University of Zurich.
Are workaholics a danger to society?
The Economist’s new 1843 periodical asked me to write a short theme on that question, here is the result:
Work? What is work anyway? I’m a writer on economics and thus also a reader. I don’t find writing to be so hard, but I need something to write about and that means reading. For me, working more means reading more. And you know what? Working less also means reading more. It does however mean reading different things.
If I worked less, I would read more fiction and less non-fiction. Is that such a bad thing? Perhaps the fiction enriches me more as a human being, but I enjoy reading the non-fiction (including The Economist) just as much, sometimes more.
Plus I get paid, usually indirectly, for absorbing non-fiction material, playing with the ideas, and converting them into content for others. I enjoy earning that money, and spending it.
Also, most fiction isn’t that good. In fact, it isn’t even true. Or if it is true, it is true by coincidence or accident. That’s not a complaint, but I don’t see why I should give up cash income for the privilege of giving up reality. Can it be such a winning bargain to give up cash and reality at the same time? It’s not, and I won’t. Unless it’s Star Wars or Elena Ferrante.
Otherwise, see you at work.
Tyler Cowen, George Mason University
Here is the whole symposium, which includes Diane Coyle and Daniel Hamermesh. This was all inspired by Ryan Avent’s excellent recent essay on work-life balance.
Tuesday assorted links
1. ““When economic development happens, metal scenes appear. They’re like mushrooms after the rain,” says Roy Doron, an African history professor at Winston-Salem State University.” Link here.
2. New interview with Elena Ferrante.
3. Who are the globally known famous people and what do they do?
4. When will global aging drive interest rates back up again? Hint: later than you might think.
5. Mesmerizing mass sheep herding (short video, drone, model this). And mesmerizing mass human herding (photo, recommended).
6. Economic Report of the President (big pdf).
7. Kareem on political correctness, a good piece.
“If you could recommend only one book for me to read…”
That is a question from a very smart person, over thirty years of age, who claims not to have read very much (I don’t know how much).
So which book should I recommend?
Conditional on the person knowing me, the idea of simply introducing economics is not going to win, even if that would be the correct recommendation for many others. And “Collected Works” are not allowed.
How about a broadly philosophical novel, such as Don Quixote or Homer’s Odyssey or In Search of Lost Time? Moby-Dick? A play of Shakespeare? A current favorite, such as Ferrante or Knausgaard?
How about a perfectly constructed travel book, touting the virtues of a new and magical place? But most travel books I find dull, unsatisfying, and too scattered with wasteful, overly subjective sentences about sunsets and train trips.
A didactic, moralizing book, perhaps on charity or Effective Altruism?
For many people music may be more powerful than the written word, so perhaps the recent Jan Swafford biography of Beethoven, or John Eliot Gardiner’s book on Bach, or any number of good books on Mozart. A critical guidebook to some of the best movies available? Almost everyone can glean new ideas for their Netflix queue, even if they already have seen lots of films.
I don’t know of a biography which is inspirational for everyone or even most people, and I figure an intelligent person older than thirty already has been exposed to the world’s major religions.
How about a book which is a compendium for a hobby, such as a bird watcher’s guide, a Sotheby’s auction catalog, or a Fuchsia Dunlop cookbook?
I keep finding myself drawn to recommend a book which leads the advice recipient away from books, rather than toward them. Is that a strength or weakness of the book medium?
Monday assorted links
1. The Hillary Clinton autism plan seeks to diagnose everybody: not a good idea.
2. “In June 2015, officials in Wisconsin changed the rules on therapy animals after a woman walked into a fast food restaurant with a baby kangaroo.” Link here. Photos you are not expecting, recommended, it’s not Thanksgiving.
3. David Warsh reports on the AEA meetings. Chris Bertram reports on Ferrante.
4. The European Commission will launch formal “rule of law” procedures against Poland. A sign of a broken system…both of them.
5. Claims about fraud in tennis (speculative), and pushback from Djokovic and Federer.
Best fiction of 2015
I thought it was a stellar year for fiction, even though most of the widely anticipated books by famous authors disappointed me. These were my favorites, more or less in the order I read them, not in order of preference:
Michel Houellebecq, Soumission/Submission. The correct reading is always a level deeper than the one you are currently at.
Larry Kramer, The American People. Epic, reviewed a lot but then oddly overlooked in a crowded year.
The Seventh Day, by Yu Hua. Perhaps my favorite of all the contemporary Chinese novels I have read: “Lacking the money for a burial plot, he must roam the afterworld aimlessly, without rest.”
Chris Adrian and Eli Horowitz, New World, “An innovative story of love, decapitation, cryogenics, and memory by two of our most creative literary minds.”
Vendela Vida, The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty. Fun without being trivial.
Elena Ferrante, volume four, The Story of the Lost Child. See my various posts about her series here, one of the prime literary achievements of the last twenty years.
The Widower, by Mohamed Latiff Mohamed. My favorite novel from Singapore.
The Meursault Investigation, by Kamel Daoud. I’ll teach it this coming year in Law and Literature.
Eka Kurniawan, Beauty is a Wound. It’s been called the Garcia Marquez of Indonesia, and it is one of the country’s classic novels, newly translated into English. Here is a good NYT review.
Nnedi Okorafor, Binti. Okorafor is American but born to two Nigerian parents, this science fiction novella is creative and fun to read. Ursula K. Le Guin likes her too.
Of those, Houllebecq and Ferrante are the must-reads, the others are all strong entries, with New World being perhaps the indulgence pick but indulgences are good, right?
And here are three other new books/editions/translations which I haven’t had any chance to spend time with, but come as self-recommending:
The Poems of T.S. Eliot, volume 1 and volume 2, annotated. Rave reviews for those.
Tale of Genji, by Murasaki Shikibu, translated by Dennis Washburn.
Homer’s Iliad, translated by Peter Green. Also gets rave reviews.
Sunday assorted links
Are we normalizing Hitler too much?
There are now websites dedicated to “kitlers” (cats that look like Hitler),YouTube videos that remix documentary footage to turn Hitler into a dexterous disco dancer, and innumerable parodic appropriations of Bruno Ganz’s psychotic rants in Oliver Hirschbiegel’s film Downfall that are refashioned to criticize a plethora of contemporary cultural discontents ranging from Kim Kardashian, traffic jams and Indian call centres to Rebecca Black’s song “Friday.” Disparate as they may sound, thse phenomena are, according to the American historian Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, all signs of a widespread “normalization” of Nazism in contemporary culture.
That is from Anna Katharina Schaffner’s review of Rosenfeld’s Hi Hitler! How the Nazi Past is Being Normalized in Contemporary Culture, September 11th issue of the TLS.
In that same TLS is this extraordinary Lidija Haas review of Ferrante, one of the best book reviews I’ve read in years.
And here is an interesting article on Nazi porcelain.
Sunday assorted links
2. Polar bears against Putin?.
4. A very good new survey article on neighborhood effects, by Leventhal, Dupéré, and Shuey, academic gate for Wiley. A nice complement to the recent work by Chetty and other economists.