Results for “best fiction” 318 found
My Conversation with Neal Stephenson
Here is the transcript and audio, and here is the CWT summary:
If you want to speculate on the development of tech, no one has a better brain to pick than Neal Stephenson. Across more than a dozen books, he’s created vast story worlds driven by futuristic technologies that have both prophesied and even provoked real-world progress in crypto, social networks, and the creation of the web itself. Though Stephenson insists he’s more often wrong than right, his technical sharpness has even led to a half-joking suggestion that he might be Satoshi Nakamoto, the shadowy creator of bitcoin. His latest novel, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell, involves a more literal sort of brain-picking, exploring what might happen when digitized brains can find a second existence in a virtual afterlife.
So what’s the implicit theology of a simulated world? Might we be living in one, and does it even matter? Stephenson joins Tyler to discuss the book and more, including the future of physical surveillance, how clothing will evolve, the kind of freedom you could expect on a Mars colony, whether today’s media fragmentation is trending us towards dystopia, why the Apollo moon landings were communism’s greatest triumph, whether we’re in a permanent secular innovation starvation, Leibniz as a philosopher, Dickens and Heinlein as writers, and what storytelling has to do with giving good driving directions.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: If we had a Mars colony, how politically free do you think it would be? Or would it just be like perpetual martial law? Like living on a nuclear submarine?
STEPHENSON: I think it would be a lot like living on a nuclear submarine because you can’t — being in space is almost like being in an intensive care unit in a hospital, in the sense that you’re completely dependent on a whole bunch of machines working in order to keep you alive. A lot of what we associate with freedom, with personal freedom, becomes too dangerous to contemplate in that kind of environment.
COWEN: Is there any Heinlein-esque-like scenario — Moon is a Harsh Mistress, where there’s a rebellion? People break free from the constraints of planet Earth. They chart their own institutions. It becomes like the settlements in the New World were.
STEPHENSON: Well, the settlements in the New World, I don’t think are a very good analogy because there it was possible — if you’re a white person in the New World and you have some basic skills, you can go anywhere you want.
An unheralded part of what happened there is that, when those people got into trouble, a lot of times, they were helped out by the indigenous peoples who were already there and who knew how to do stuff. None of those things are true in a space colony kind of environment. You don’t have indigenous people who know how to get food and how to get shelter. You don’t have that ability to just freely pick up stakes and move about.
And:
COWEN: What will people wear in the future? Say a hundred years from now, will clothing evolve at all?
STEPHENSON: I think clothing is pretty highly evolved, right? If you look at, yeah, at any garment, say, a shirt — I was ironing a shirt today in my hotel room, and it is a frickin’ complicated object. We take it for granted, but you think about the fabric, the way the seams are laid out.
That’s just one example, of course, but you take any — shirts, shoes, any kind of specific item of clothing you want to talk about — once you take it apart and look at all the little decisions and innovations that have gone into it, it’s obvious that people have been optimizing this thing for hundreds or thousands of years.
New materials come along that enable people to do new kinds of things with clothing, but overall, I don’t think that a lot is going to change.
COWEN: Is there anything you would want smart clothing to do for you that, say, a better iPad could not?
STEPHENSON: The thing about clothing is that you change your clothes all the time. So if you become dependent on a particular technology that’s built into your shirt, that’s great as long as you’re wearing that shirt, but then as soon as you change to a different shirt, you don’t have it.
So what are you going to do? Are you going to make sure that every single one of your shirts has that same technology built into it? It seems easier to have it separate from the clothing that you wear, so that you don’t have to think about all those complications.
There is much more at the link, including discussions of some of his best-known novels…
*Fentanyl, Inc.*, by Ben Westhoff
The slightly misleading subtitle is How Rogue Chemists are Creating the Deadliest Wave of the Opioid Epidemic. Why misleading? So many substance abuse books are a mix of hysterical in tone and a disappointing “paint by numbers” in their execution, but this one really stands out for its research, journalism, and overall analysis. To give just one example, it is also a great book on China, and how China and the Chinese chemicals industry works, backed up by extensive original investigation.
Start with this:
Americans take more opioids per capita — legitimate and illegitimate uses combined — than any other country in the world. Canada is second, and both far outstrip Europe. Americans take four times as many opioids as people do in the United Kingdom.
And this:
For many years, Chinese organized-crime groups known as triads have been involved in the international meth trade. But experts familiar with triads say their influence appears to be waning in the fentanyl era. “They’re a shadow of their former selves,” said Justin Hastings, an associate professor in international relations and comparative politics at the University of Sydney…Though ad hoc criminal organizations continue to move drugs in China, major trafficking organizations are rare there, and cartels basically nonexistent. This leaves the market wide open for Chinese chemical companies, who benefit from an air of legitimacy.
As for marijuana and cocaine, they are used by only about one in every forty thousand individuals in China. But the book covers the entire U.S. history as well.
Definitely recommended, this will be making my year-end “best of” list for non-fiction. And yes I did go and buy his earlier book on West Coast rap music.
*Talking to Strangers*, the new Malcolm Gladwell book
Definitely recommended, talking to strangers is one of the most important things you do and it can even save your life. This book is the very best entry point for thinking about this topic. Here is a summary excerpt:
We have strategies for dealing with strangers that are deeply flawed, but they are also socially necessary. We need the criminal justice system and the hiring process and the selection of babysitters to be human. But the requirement of humanity means that we have to tolerate an enormous amount of error. That is the paradox of talking to strangers. We need to talk to them. But we’re terrible at it — and, as we’ll see in the next two chapters, we’re not always honest with each other about just how terrible at it we are.
One recurring theme is just how bad we are at spotting liars. On another note, I found this interesting:
…the heavy drinkers of today drink far more than the heavy drinkers of 50 years ago. “When you talk to students [today] about four drinks or five drinks, they just sort of go, “Pft, that’s just getting started,'” the alcohol researcher Kim Fromme says. She says that the heavy binge drinking category now routinely includes people who have had twenty drinks in a sitting. Blackouts, once rare, have become common. Aaron White recently surveyed more than 700 students at Duke University. Of the drinkers in the group, over half had suffered a blackout at some point in their lives, 40 percent had had a blackout in the previous year, and almost one in ten had had a blackout in the previous two weeks.
And:
Poets die young. That is not just a cliche. The life expectancy of poets, as a group, trails playwrights, novelists, and non-fiction writers by a considerable margin. They have higher rates of “emotional disorders” than actors, musicians, composers, and novelists. And of every occupational category, they have far and away the highest suicide rates — as much as five times higher than the general population.
It also turns out that the immediate availability of particular methods of suicide significantly raises the suicide rate; it is not the case that an individual is committed to suicide regardless of the means available at hand.
Returning to the theme of talking with strangers, one approach I recommend is to apply a much higher degree of arbitrary specificity, when relating facts and details, than you would with someone you know.
In any case, self-recommending, this book shows that Malcolm Gladwell remains on an upward trajectory. You can pre-order it here.
What I’ve been reading
1. Sarah A. Seo, Policing the Open Road: How Cars Transformed American Freedom. “The revolution in automotive freedom coincided with an equally unprecedented expansion in the police’s discretionary power.”
2. Allison Schrager, An Economist Walks into a Brothel, and Other Unexpected Places to Understand Risk. My blurb: “Allison Schrager’s An Economist Walks Into a Brothel is the best, most readable, most informative, most adventurous, and most entertaining take on risk you will find.”
3. Marlon James, Black Leopard Red Wolf. While the author of this new budding fictional series seems quite talented, this is more a book to admire than to enjoy. I can’t imagine that people will read it fifteen years from now. I’ve also read a bunch of reviews which try to praise it, without every telling the reader it will hold their interest.
4. Rachel M. McCleary and Robert J. Barro, The Wealth of Religions: The Political Economy of Believing and Belonging. A good overview of their work together on economics and religion, and also more generally a take on what the social sciences know empirically about the causes and effects of religion (not always so much, I should add).
5. The Bitter Script Reader, Michael F-ing Bay: The Unheralded Genius in Michael Bay’s Films. There aren’t enough enthusiastic, intelligent fanboy books, but this is one of them.
For prep for my Conversation with Knausgaard, I read a good deal of Ivo de Figueiredo, Henrik Ibsen: The Man & the Mask, and was impressed by how much new material he had uncovered.
Ben S. Bernanke, Timothy F. Geithner, and Henry M. Paulson, Firefighting: The Financial crisis and its Lessons: your model of this book is what this book is.
Arrived in my pile are:
Thomas Milan Konda, Conspiracies of Conspiracies: How Delusions Have Overrun America.
Uwe E. Reinhardt, Priced Out: The Economic and Ethical Costs of American Health Care. Uwe is gone but not forgotten.
Marion Turner, Chaucer: A European Life. This one may not please the Brexiteers.
Marie-Janine Galic, The Great Cauldron: A History of Southeastern Europe seems impressive, though I have not had time to read much of it.
Monday assorted links
1. “Costco is selling a $90 tub of mac-and-cheese that weighs 27 pounds and lasts 20 years.” Though it is sold out.
2. Good interview with Dana Gioia, including about his Catholicism.
3. Scott Sumner films and books of 2018 these are always among the best blog posts of the year.
4. Which famous aphorisms are false or unhelpful?
5. Gay supporters of Trump (NYT). And why are the Chinese supporting science fiction?
Friday assorted links
1. Critical claims about Amazon and the Amazon court system.
2. Ross Douthat on the problems of meritocracy (NYT).
3. The culture that is Finland: anonymized recruitment in academia. Cuts down on bias.
4. Thomas Edsall presents data (NYT).
5. My podcast with Ben Domenech, 1/3 of it about Star Wars and the Jedi.
Mostly returned books
I have thought about this question for at least twenty years, Elisa Gabbert spells it out (NYT):
My favorite spot in my local library — the central branch in Denver — is not the nook for new releases; not the holds room, where one or two titles are usually waiting for me; not the little used-book shop, full of cheap classics for sale; and not the fiction stacks on the second floor, though I visit all those areas frequently. It’s a shelf near the Borrower Services desk bearing a laminated sign that reads RECENTLY RETURNED.
This shelf houses a smallish selection of maybe 40 to 60 books — about the number you might see on a table in the front of a bookstore, where the titles have earned a position of prominence by way of being new or important or best sellers or staff favorites. The books on the recently returned shelf, though, haven’t been recommended by anyone at all. They simply limit my choices by presenting a near-random cross section of all circulating parts of the library: art books and manga and knitting manuals next to self-help and philosophy and thrillers, the very popular mixed up with the very obscure. Looking at them is the readerly equivalent of gazing into the fridge, hungry but not sure what you’re hungry for.
Is it better to spend time, at the margin, pawing through the “recently returned” cart, or the “New Arrivals” section or for that matter just the regular shelves? How about the books simply left on tables and abandoned?
The big advantage of the books on the carts is that they usually are not bestsellers. For bestsellers there is a waiting list, and they are held for another patron, never making their way to the cart. I say go for the carts.
*Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities*
That is the new and excellent book by Alain Bertaud, so many pages have excellent food for thought. Here is one simple bit:
Cities are primarily labor markets.
Or this:
…large cities are growing at about the same rate as medium and small cities in the same countries or regions. It seems that cities’ growth rates follow Gibrat’s law of proportionate effect, which states that the size of a city is not an indicator of its future growth rate — that is, cities’ growth rates are random, with the same average expected growth rate and same variance…The population of larger cities keeps growing, but on average, so do smaller cities. This seems paradoxical, given that larger cities are more productive than smaller ones. However, larger cities do not play the same economic role as smaller ones do. They complement each other’s activities. The increase productivity of larger cities is therefore linked to the existence and growth of smaller cities. In turn, smaller cities’ economic growth is dependent on larger cities’ innovations and inventions.
How about this:
In 1830…London’s population density had reached a very high density of 325 people per hectare. By 2005, however, the density of London had decreased to only 44 people per hectare. The larger decrease in London’s density has not caused a corresponding decrease in mobility. On the contrary…
I learned a great deal from the discussion (starts p.287) of Indonesia’s “kampungs,” and how the Indonesian has managed their integration with local infrastructure relatively well. In contrast, this is the common alternative procedure:
The predictable first reaction of governments has usually been to set minimum urbanization standards to prevent the legal construction of these unsanitary urban villages. The regulations made the situation worse, as they prevented these informal settlements from obtaining normal urban services from the municipality. They also created a risk of future demolition, which discourages housing improvement that the households would have naturally done themselves. Eventually, many governments slowly regularized the older informal settlements in a piecemeal fashion, as is the practice in India, for instance. But the regularization of informal settlements usually had been conducted with a provision that after a set date, no more informal settlements would be regularized.
The outcomes of these successive policies — first ostracism, then benign neglect followed by reluctant integration — has been disastrous. A significant share of the urban labor force, otherwise gainfully employed, live in large “informal” settlements often with unsafe water supplies, deficient sanitation, and sporadic solid waste collection.
But:
What made a difference [in Indonesia] was a decision taken in 1969 by the government of Indonesia to concentrate its resources on the improvement of the kampungs’ infrastructure without trying to remove or restructure the existing housing, however small or inadequate it was…And, even more exceptional, since 1969 to this day, the Indonesian government’s support for KIP has been unwavering…The government housing policy objective consists of allowing the poor to settle in and around existing villages at the standards of their choice, while the government concentrates its efforts not on housing construction but on gradually improving residential infrastructure and services to all residential settlements. The policy has proved largely successful.
Later in the book, pp.351-352 have a fascinating discussion of how relatively good urban/suburban policy, and also the fragmentation of municipalities, contributed to the early success of the tech community in Silicon Valley.
Definitely recommended, this is now one of my favorite books on cities, and it will be joining my “best non-fiction of 2018″ list. Again, you can buy it here.
Will the decline of galleries reshape art?
Heidi Mitchell reports (NYT):
“The gallery is a format that is struggling,” said the Argentine curator Ximena Caminos, formerly of the Malba museum in Buenos Aires and now chief creative officer of the Honey Lab cultural space in Miami’s Blue Heron hotel and residential project, which is now under development. “It’s transactional; the artist doesn’t have that much creative freedom, and there is a lot of pressure to make money in a short period of time.” Artists, she said, are seeking new places to showcase their work, especially if the pieces are large in scale.
If the number and relevance of galleries were to decline (continue to decline?), how might this affect artistic content? Here are a few hypotheses:
1. More artists will commission pieces for corporate lobbies and condominiums, as the article reports. That will tend to favor mainstream abstract art and disfavor political statements and obscenities.
Erica Samuels notes:
“There is a great responsibility on the real estate developers that maybe they don’t even realize, while at the same time, the stigma of an artist working with a rich developer is fading.”
2. Corporate-owned works are usually less liquid and may not be sold at all, short of bankruptcy or liquidity crunches, when they are sold under panic conditions. Artists therefore will be less likely to have dominant dealers who prop up their prices and cultivate markets for them. That will likely encourage greater artistic output, though also lower quality output, as might be defined by elites. The resulting art will have to appeal to buyers at first glance, as the artist cannot count upon “sophisticated” galleries to persuade or educate potential buyers.
3. Some artists will take their craft directly to the street, as is done in Belfast or Newark, New Jersey. They will paint for local community status, and for the joy of it, and for political self-expression, rather than for pay. They will use cheaper materials, brighter colors, and indulge in themes and images with strong local meaning. Political art and paid art will separate further.
4. Galleries pursue their own coherent reputations, which encourages carried artists to fit into slots which match gallery reputations. So there are “conceptual art galleries,” “Pop Art galleries,” and so on, and artists in turn target those styles, so as to achieve entry to galleries. When galleries are weaker, the slottable categories are created by some other set of intermediaries — might it someday be Instagram hashtags? eBay search terms? Something else? In any case, those new slots or styles might have to be less “you know it when you see it” and more “you can type those words into a search function.”
5. The decline of browsing has hit published books as well, especially fiction, which saw a big decline in sales over 2013-2017: “The most commonly shared view is that it has become extremely difficult to generate exposure for novels. Fiction, more than nonfiction, depends on readers discovering new books by browsing. Now, with the number of physical stores down from five years ago (despite a rise in ABA membership), publishers cannot rely on bricks-and-mortar stores providing customers with access to new books.” It is easier to type the topic of a non-fiction book into a search function. In this world it is harder to develop new authors [artists], and the link directly above, while about books, is a good way to start thinking about the galleries issue.
6. Most galleries, either intentionally or not, create a distinction between what is shown on the floor and what is held in the back room. Non-gallery art is less likely to be bifurcated in the same way, even if some pieces are more prominent on the home page than others. That may make internet-displayed art less “bubbly,” less subject to elite manipulations and prejudices and enlightenments, and also both fuzzier and lower in price.
7. If there are fewer galleries, perhaps more will be bought and sold at auction. The winning bidder will be less likely to be ripped off by say 3x on the price, so it will be easier to experiment with buying unfamiliar styles: “I liked the Persian carpet I saw at Sotheby’s, and figured the winning bid wouldn’t have too much winner’s curse in it.” You can’t say the same when you go to a gallery relatively uninformed.
8. Galleries offer high implicit returns to regular buyers, who end up getting a crack at the best works in advance, even before the show opens. That encourages buyer specialization, whereas internet and auction-based methods of selling do not.
9. What else?
*Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom*
Although it can never really be measured, he may also have been, along with Mark Twain, the most widely traveled American public figure of his century…It is likely that more Americans heard Douglass speak than any other public figure of his times. Indeed, to see or hear Douglass became a kind of wonder of the American world. He struggled as well, with the pleasure and perils of fame as much as anyone else in his century, with the possible exceptions of General Ulysses S. Grant or P.T. Barnum. Douglass’s dilemma with fame was a matter of decades, not merely of moments, and fraught with racism.
That is from the new David W. Blight biography of Douglass, outstanding in every way, appearing to rave reviews, and slated for the top tier of the year’s “Best of 2018” non-fiction list.
My Conversation with Paul Krugman
Here is the audio and transcript, here is part of the summary:
Tyler sat down with Krugman at his office in New York to discuss what’s grabbing him at the moment, including antitrust, Supreme Court term limits, the best ways to fight inequality, why he’s a YIMBY, inflation targets, congestion taxes, trade (both global and interstellar), his favorite living science fiction writer, immigration policy, how to write well for a smart audience, new directions for economic research, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: In your view, how well run is New York City as an entity?
KRUGMAN: Not very. Compared to what? Actually, I like de Blasio. I actually think he’s done some really good things. What he’s done on education, and even on affordable housing, is actually quite substantial. But the city is so big and the problems are so large that people may not get it.
I will say, it is crazy that you have a city that is so dependent on public transportation, and yet the public transportation is not actually under the city’s control and has clearly been massively neglected. I don’t suffer the full woes of the subway, but I suffer some of them, even myself.
The city could be run better than it is, but it’s certainly not among the worst-managed political entities in the United States, let alone in the world.
And:
COWEN: Will there ever be interstellar trade in intellectual property? You send your technology to a planet far away. It arrives much later, of course. Or you trade Beethoven to the aliens in return for a transporter beam? Can this work? You’ve written a paper that seems to indicate it can work.
KRUGMAN: I wrote a paper on the theory of interstellar trade when I was an unhappy assistant professor. Are there any happy assistant professors? [laughs] I was just blowing off steam. But it’s an interesting question.
COWEN: It could become your most important paper, right? [laughs]
KRUGMAN: We could imagine that there would be some way. We’d have to find somebody to trade with, although it’s the kind of thing — if you try to imagine interstellar trade for real in intellectual property — it’s probably the kind of thing that would be more like government-to-government exchanges.
It sounds like it would be really, really hard, although some science fiction writers are imagining that something like Bitcoin would make it possible to do these long-range . . . I don’t think something like Bitcoin is even going to work here.
Krugman also gives his opinions on Star Wars and Star Trek and Big Tech and many other matters. Interesting throughout…
Who has led the most interesting life?
In recent times, that is. Devon Zuegel asks:
Who would you name as a contender for having led the most interesting life in the last 100 years?
Keynes pops to mind as one contender. He was a top-tier intellect and economist, he was closely connected to the arts, had plenty of brilliant Bloomsbury people to chat with, married a ballerina, played a major role in politics several times, and he participated in several critical and indeed formative moments of history (Treaty of Versailles, fiscal policy, Bretton Woods). He experienced both world wars (no one said “interesting” has to be good!). Still, he didn’t travel enough to be a slam dunk (I can’t quite bring myself to write “nor did he have the internet.”)
How about Bill Clinton? He was president twice, oversaw the 1990s, has indeed traveled the world, and known many of the most interesting people of his lifespan. He also has had rather, um…diverse…experiences in one realm of life. And he married Hillary.
Paul McCartney was a Beatle, wrote amazing songs and hung out with John Lennon, had domestic bliss with Linda for a few decades, raised lots of kids, was successful as a businessman, and also has a history of…um…diverse experiences. But did he smoke too much pot?
This list of “best lives” includes Hugh Hefner, Tyra Banks, and Elon Musk. Here is one Quora answer for “most interesting”:
Personally, I find the following people intriguing: Jesus Christ, Martin Luther King, Sir Isaac Newton, Galileo Galilei, Marie Curie, Diego Maradona, Michael Jordan, Socrates/Aristotle/Plato, Samori Toure, Nelson Mandela, Michel de Nostredame. It’s a long list. There are even some historical figures that I do not admire, but would like to know more about – people such as Joseph Stalin, Napoleon Bonaparte, Judas Isacriot, among so many others.
I hope you are not offended if I rule some of those lives out on grounds of insufficient length, or too much time spent in prison. Here is a list of interesting writers’ lives, topped by Ernest Hemingway.
Contrarian but not crazy answers would cite the person who raised the greatest number of children, the person who lived the longest in decent health, “whoever you are,” and the person who has traveled the most, at least adjusting for the quality of the trips (working on an oil tanker may not count).
Is it possible for a very famous person to win this designation? Their very fame limits the possible range of experiences they have, and perhaps at some margin the consumption of additional status and adulation, however fun (?) it may be, just isn’t all that interesting. Can Paul McCartney or Bill Clinton go out in public much? Is the real answer someone most people never have heard of?
Who is your nominee?
My Conversation with Vitalik Buterin
Obviously his talents in crypto and programming are well-known, but he is also a first-rate thinker on both economics and what you broadly might call sociology. You could take away the crypto contributions altogether, and he still would be one of the very smartest people I have met. Here is the audio and transcript. The CWT team summarized it as follows:
Tyler sat down with Vitalik to discuss the many things he’s thinking about and working on, including the nascent field of cryptoeconomics, the best analogy for understanding the blockchain, his desire for more social science fiction, why belief in progress is our most useful delusion, best places to visit in time and space, how he picks up languages, why centralization’s not all bad, the best ways to value crypto assets, whether P = NP, and much more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: If you could go back into the distant past for a year, a time and place of your choosing, you have the linguistic skills and immunity against disease to the extent you need it, maybe some money in your pocket, where would you pick to satisfy your own curiosity?
BUTERIN: Where would I pick? To do what? To spend a year there, or . . . ?
COWEN: Spend a year as a “tourist.” You could pick ancient Athens or preconquest Mexico or medieval Russia. It’s a kind of social science fiction, right?
BUTERIN: Yeah, totally. Let’s see. Possibly first year of World War II — obviously, one of those areas that’s close to it but still reasonably safe from it…
Basically, experience more of what human behavior and what collective human behavior would look like once you pushed humans further into extremes, and people aren’t as comfortable as they are today.
I started the whole dialogue with this:
I went back and I reread all of the papers on your home page. I found it quite striking that there were two very important economics results, one based on menu costs associated with the name of Greg Mankiw. Another is a paper on the indeterminacy of monetary equilibrium associated with Fischer Black.
These are famous papers. On your own, you appear to rediscover these results without knowing about the papers at all. So how would you describe how you teach yourself economics?
Highly recommended, whether or not you understand blockchain. Oh, and there is this:
COWEN: If you had to explain blockchain to a very smart person from 40 years ago, who knew computers but had no idea of crypto, what would be the best short explanation you could give them, basically, for what you do?
BUTERIN: Sure. One of the analogies I keep going back to is this idea of a “world computer.” The idea, basically, is that a blockchain, as a whole, functions like a computer. It has a hard drive, and on that hard drive, it stores what all the accounts are.
It stores what the code of all the smart contracts is, what the memory of all these smart contracts is. It accepts incoming instructions — and these incoming instructions are signed transactions sent by a bunch of different users — and processes them according to a set of rules.
What I’ve been reading
Economic Science Fictions, edited by William Davies. I didn’t quite come away with a takeaway from this book, but still I feel obliged to pass knowledge of it along to you. It is a bunch of essays about economic themes in science fiction, and/or how the two “genres” might be more closely integrated, with a lead essay by Ha-Joon Chang.
Allen C. Guelzo, Reconstruction: A Concise History. Could this new book be the single best brief introduction to Reconstruction available? Recommended.
Emily Dufton, Grass Roots: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Marijuana in America. I loved this book, which I also consider a paradigmatic example of how to write a wonderful non-fiction work. Throughout it is clear, substantive, balanced, passes various ideological Turing tests, and it focuses on essentials, as well as framing everything in terms of broader theories of social change. It is sure to make my best books of the year list, and if she had ten other books I would buy them all sight unseen. Here is Dufton’s home page.
Bekelech Tola, Injera Variety from Crop Diversity. She explains where all the different types of injera come from. I hadn’t realized for instance that teff is sometimes mixed with maize, or sorghum flour, or cassava powder, all in the service of variety.
My advice for a Paris visit
This is for another friend, here are my pointers:
1. Find a very good food street/corner and take many of your meals there. I’ve used Rue Daguerre and around Rue des Arts (Left Bank) for this purpose, but there are many others. Spend most of your money in the cheese shop, asking them to choose for you, but supplement with bread, fruit, and of course chocolate. This beats most restaurant meals, noting it won’t be cheap either. And yes it is worth paying $8 for a bar of chocolate there.
2. Do track down medieval Paris, most of all the cathedrals. This will bring you by other delights as well.
3. Especially on the Left Bank, Paris is one of the very best walking cities. Avoid Champs-Élysées and environs, a broad-avenued, chain store-intense corruption of what Paris ought to be. Avoid Jardin Luxembourg and the surrounding parts as well, they are urban deserts.
4. Get a peek of the major bridges over the Seine, if only by traversing them.
5. You don’t in fact have to stand in line to see the Mona Lisa. It’s a lovely painting, but at this point in human civilization it is OK to skip it. You don’t need to hear “Bohemian Rhapsody” again either. But you should go to the top of the Eiffel Tower. And in the Louvre, don’t neglect the Poussin room, the Michelangelo sculptures, or the Flemish and 17th century works.
6. The Louvre, d’Orsay, Cluny, and Branly (ethnographic) are the essential museums in town. Check out Grand Palais and Petit Palais for possible exhibits. When walking around, keep your eye out for posters (yes, posters) advertising exhibits and concerts.
7. If you want to spend forty euros for a very good but not revelatory lunch, find a “cool” area with lots of restaurants and poke your head in at their opening, at 12:30, to ask for a table. By 12:45 it is too late and you are screwed and back to your favorite cheese shop. By the way, I don’t think Paris is the best city in which to spend $200 on a meal.
8. In most of the parts of Paris you are likely to frequent, do not try to eat any Asian or “ethnic” foods. The best restaurants of those kinds are in north Paris, on the way to the airport, but no one visits there. Couscous in Paris is boring.
9. Belleville is the gentrifying Brooklyn of Paris, with relatively few tourists, if that is what you are looking for. Avoid Montmartre. For practical reasons, I’ve spent a lot of my Paris time near Unesco, in a neighborhood that is a bit sterile but very beautiful and it gives you a decent sense of well-to-do residential Paris life. Develop your mini-Paris residential life somewhere, and make your time there more than just a tourist visit. The site I should not enjoy but do is Le Dôme des Invalides, also the tomb of Napoleon.
10. The essential Paris movies are lots of Godard (Breathless, Band of Outsiders, others), Jules and Jim, and Triplets of Belleville. Agnes Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7 for those with an experimental bent. Eric Rohmer for something light-hearted. Amélie and Before Sunset are both rewarding, though at the margin Godard usually is what Americans are lacking.
11. Carry along Hugo and Balzac to read. Flaubert and Proust are wonderful, but they are more “interior” authors and thus you can imbibe them anywhere. Do not forget Houllebecq’s Submission. I do not love most of the well-known non-fiction books on Paris; perhaps they become corrupted through the chance of being truly popular. Do read Graham Robb’s The Discovery of France and try to dig up a useful architectural guide to the city. I’m also a big fan of Hazel Rowley’s Tete-a-Tete: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre.
12. Don’t go expecting Parisians to be rude, I have never (well, once) found that to be the case in more than six months spent in the city.
13. My overall take is this: Paris today is fairly sterile in terms of overall creativity, or for that matter business dynamism. But Parisians have perfected the art of taste along a number of notable dimensions, like nowhere else in the world. If your trip allows you to free ride upon those efforts in a meaningful way, it will go very well.