Results for “best fiction” 355 found
What I’ve been reading
1. Bécquer Seguín, The Op-Ed Novel: A Literary History of Post-Franco Spain. I liked this book very much, as it gave me extremely useful background on the Spanish fiction I enjoy. It may make less sense to read if you don’t already know the relevant fiction, but in any case a fine work. Imagine, by the way, if America had an equally strong correlation between novelists and Op-Ed columnists.
2. Ken McNab, Shake It Up, Baby! The Rise of Beatlemania and the Mayhem of 1963. At the beginning of that year, John and Paul despaired of making it as a rock band, and expected to end up as songwriters for other people, much like Goffin-King at the time. By the end of the year however… This is the story of how that happened. Very well done.
3. Ian Frazier, Paradise Bronx: The Life and Times of New York’s Greatest Borough. An excellent, fun, and much-needed book. I liked the parts about the 20th century best. I am still longing for that cost-benefit analysis of the Cross-Bronx Expressway, though. We know the Interstate Highway system passes the cost-benefit test massively, but do all of its constituent parts?
4. Simon Morrison, Tchaikovsky’s Empire: A New Life of Russia’s Greatest Composer. My favorite book about Tchaikovsky, engaging but it also covers the music for the music’s sake as well. I liked this sentence from the book jacket: “His life and art were framed by Russian national ambition, and his work was the emanation of an imperial subject: kaleidoscopic, capacious, cosmopolitan.” The book does go relatively light on Tchaikovsky’s um…personal life.
There is Matt Grossman and David A. Hopkins, and their suitably titled and subtitled Polarized Degrees: How the Diploma Divide and the Culture War Transformed American Politics.
Pakistan is a drastically undercovered country, but now Lahore has some coverage, in Manan Ahmed Asif’s Disrupted City: Walking the Pathways of Memory and History in Lahore.
Marieke Brandt, Tribes and Politics in Yemen: A History of the Houthi Conflict had far more detailed than I was seeking. But I read about one fifth of it, and learned a great deal from that.
J.C.D. Clark, The Enlightenment: An Idea and its History, sounds smart but somehow stays too much at the meta-level of commentary on the commentary?
Victor Davis Hanson has a new book The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation.
My excellent Conversation with Philip Ball
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Tyler and Philip discuss how well scientists have stood up to power historically, the problematic pressures scientists feel within academia today, artificial wombs and the fertility crisis, the price of invisibility, the terrifying nature of outer space and Gothic cathedrals, the role Christianity played in the Scientific Revolution, what current myths may stick around forever, whether cells can be thought of as doing computation, the limitations of The Selfish Gene, whether the free energy principle can be usefully applied, the problem of microplastics gathering in testicles and other places, progress in science, his favorite science fiction, how to follow in his footsteps, and more.
Here is one excerpt, namely the opening bit:
TYLER COWEN: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today I’ll be chatting with Philip Ball. I think of Philip this way. We’ve had over 200 guests on Conversations with Tyler, and I think three of them, so far, have shown they are able to answer any question I might plausibly throw their way. Philip, I believe, is number four. He’s a scientist with degrees in chemistry and physics. He’s written about 30 books on different sciences. Both he and I have lost count.
He was an editor at Nature for about 20 years. His books cover such diverse topics as chemistry, physics, the history of experiments, social science, color, the elements, water, water in China, Chartres Cathedral, music, and more. But most notably, he has a new book out this year, a major work called How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology. Philip, welcome.
PHILIP BALL: Thank you, Tyler. Lovely to be here.
COWEN: What is the situation in history where scientists have most effectively stood up to power, not counting Jewish scientists, say, leaving Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union?
BALL: Gosh, now there’s a question to start with. Where they have most effectively stood up to power — this is a question that I looked at in a book (it must be about 10 years old now) which looked at the response of German physicists during the Nazi era to that regime. I’m afraid my conclusion was, the response was really not very impressive at all.
On the whole, the scientists acquiesced to what the regime wanted them to do. Very few of them were actively sympathetic to the Nazi party, but they mounted no real effective opposition whatsoever. I’m afraid that looking at that as a case study, really, made me realize that it’s actually very hard to find any time in history where scientists have actively mounted an effective opposition to that kind of imposition of some kind of ideology, or political power, or whatever. History doesn’t give us a very encouraging view of that.
That said, I think it’s fair to say, science is doing better these days. I think there’s a recognition that at an institutional level, science needs to be able to mobilize its resources when it’s threatened in this way. I think we’re starting to see that, certainly, with climate change. Scientists have come under fire a huge amount in that arena. I think there’s more institutional understanding of what to do about that. Scientists aren’t being so much left to their own devices to cope as best they can individually.
But I think that there’s this attitude that is still somewhat prevalent within science, that’s a bit like, “We’re above that.” This is exactly what some of the German physicists, particularly Werner Heisenberg, said during the Nazi regime, that science is somehow operating in a purer sphere, and that it’s removed from all the nastiness and the dirtiness that goes on in the political arena.
I think that that attitude hasn’t gone completely, but I think it needs to go. I think scientists need to get real, really, about the fact that they are working within a social and political context that they have to be able to work with, and to be able to — when the occasion demands it — take some control of, and not simply be pushed around by.
That, I think, is something that can only happen when there are institutional structures to allow it to happen, so that scientists are not left to their own individual devices and their own individual sense of morality to do something about it. I’m hoping that science will do better in the future than it’s done in the past.
COWEN: Which do you think are the power structures today that current scientists, say in the Anglo world, are most in thrall to?
Recommended, there are numerous topics of interest. I also asked GPT how much money it could earn if it had the powers of Wells’s Invisible Man.
*The Hidden Victims*
The author is Cormac Ó Gráda, the renowned Irish economic historian, and the subtitle is Civilian Casualties of the Two World Wars. This is a first-rate and also horrifying of a still underdiscussed topic. Here is one excerpt:
The death rate from famine in Greece was probably higher than in any other European country with the exceptions of the Soviet Union and Poland. Following its occupation by Axis troops in April-June 1941, the British Navy, which controlled the Mediterranean, blocked sea access to Greece. Greece was one of the few Nazi-occupied economies that depended on imports for much of its food. The theft of meat and dairy cattle in the area around Athens for army use quickly followed occupation. Very soon, essential foodstuffs became scarce, particularly in Athens, which led to a famine at its most intense in 1941-42. The capital and its port city of Piraeus and some of the islands were hit particularly hard. The context was one of hyperinflation, an Allied blockade, and state-sponsored theft by the occupation forces.
This important book will make my best non-fiction of the year list.
*Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Math Behind Modern AI*
By Anil Ananthaswamy, an excellent book, it will make the end of year best non-fiction list. It focuses on machine learning and its offshoots, and you can read it for the story even if you don’t followall of the matrix algebra and the calculus. It is also the best book I know on how science advances by laying different “bricks,” and later bringing them all together toward a practicable solution. Recommended.
*The Eastern Front: A History of the First World War*
That is the new book by Nick Lloyd, it will be making my best non-fiction of the year list. Reviews are very strong, and you can either pre-order and wait, or order it from the UK, or buy it in the excellent Hedengrens bookshop in Stockholm. Here is one short bit:
As always with the Russian army, squabbles between the generals quickly surfaced.
A bit later:
This lack of cooperation within the Russian high command would seriously undermine its operations throughout the war, preventing Russia from bringing all her strength to bear and forcing her commanders to spend precious time bickering amongst themselves.
About one-third of the way through the text of the book:
Tsar Nicholas II had come to a momentous decision: to take direct command of Russia’s armies.
How it started….how it’s going…
What should I ask Marilynne Robinson?
Yes I will be doing a Conversation with her. Here is from Wikipedia:
Marilynne Summers Robinson (born November 26, 1943) is an American novelist and essayist. Across her writing career, Robinson has received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2005, National Humanities Medal in 2012, and the 2016 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. In 2016, Robinson was named in Time magazine’s list of 100 most influential people. Robinson began teaching at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1991 and retired in the spring of 2016.
Robinson is best known for her novels Housekeeping (1980) and Gilead (2004). Her novels are noted for their thematic depiction of faith and rural life. The subjects of her essays span numerous topics, including the relationship between religion and science, US history, nuclear pollution, John Calvin, and contemporary American politics.
Her next book is Reading Genesis, on the Book of Genesis. So what should I ask her?
My Conversation with Rebecca F. Kuang
Here is the audio, video, and transcript, here is the episode summary:
Rebecca F. Kuang just might change the way you think about fantasy and science fiction. Known for her best-selling books Babel and The Poppy War trilogy, Kuang combines a unique blend of historical richness and imaginative storytelling. At just 27, she’s already published five novels, and her compulsion to write has not abated even as she’s pursued advanced degrees at Oxford, Cambridge, and now Yale. Her latest book, Yellowface, was one of Tyler’s favorites in 2023.
She sat down with Tyler to discuss Chinese science-fiction, which work of fantasy she hopes will still be read in fifty years, which novels use footnotes well, how she’d change book publishing, what she enjoys about book tours, what to make of which Chinese fiction is read in the West, the differences between the three volumes of The Three Body Problem, what surprised her on her recent Taiwan trip, why novels are rarely co-authored, how debate influences her writing, how she’ll balance writing fiction with her academic pursuits, where she’ll travel next, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Why do you think that British imperialism worked so much better in Singapore and Hong Kong than most of the rest of the world?
KUANG: What do you mean by work so much better?
COWEN: Singapore today, per capita — it’s a richer nation than the United States. It’s hard to think, “I’d rather go back and redo that whole history.” If you’re a Singaporean today, I think most of them would say, “We’ll take what we got. It was far from perfect along the way, but it worked out very well for us.” People in Sierra Leone would not say the same thing, right?
Hong Kong did much better under Britain than it had done under China. Now that it’s back in the hands of China, it seems to be doing worse again, so it seems Hong Kong was better off under imperialism.
KUANG: It’s true that there is a lot of contemporary nostalgia for the colonial era, and that would take hours and hours to unpack. I guess I would say two things. The first is that I am very hesitant to make arguments about a historical counterfactual such as, “Oh, if it were not for the British Empire, would Singapore have the economy it does today?” Or “would Hong Kong have the culture it does today?” Because we don’t really know.
Also, I think these broad comparisons of colonial history are very hard to do, as well, because the methods of extraction and the pervasiveness and techniques of colonial rule were also different from place to place. It feels like a useless comparison to say, “Oh, why has Hong Kong prospered under British rule while India hasn’t?” Et cetera.
COWEN: It seems, if anywhere we know, it’s Hong Kong. You can look at Guangzhou — it’s a fairly close comparator. Until very recently, Hong Kong was much, much richer than Guangzhou. Without the British, it would be reasonable to assume living standards in Hong Kong would’ve been about those of the rest of Southern China, right? It would be weird to think it would be some extreme outlier. None others of those happened in the rest of China. Isn’t that close to a natural experiment? Not a controlled experiment, but a pretty clear comparison?
KUANG: Maybe. Again, I’m not a historian, so I don’t have a lot to say about this. I just think it’s pretty tricky to argue that places prospered solely due to British presence when, without the British, there are lots of alternate ways things could have gone, and we just don’t know.
Interesting throughout.
What I’ve been reading
1. Steve Kaczynski and Scott Duke Kominers, The Everything Token: How NFTs and Web3 Will Transform the Way We Buy, Sell, and Create. Could the be the best book on NFTs? I think we should be genuinely uncertain as to whether NFTs have a future. In the meantime, I consider NFTs a good Rorschach test for whether an individual’s mind is capable of moving out of “the dismissive mode.” Do you pass or fail this test? The “snide, sniping” mode is so hard for many commentators to resist…
2. Christina Rossetti: Poetry in Art, edited by Susan Owens and Nicholas Tromans. Excellent text and also color plates, including paintings and sketches of her, a very good introduction to her work. Here is a good bit: “Rarely, if ever, has a major poet grown up so deeply embedded in an avant-garde visual culture. Yet she seems actively to have resisted the lure of the world of images, preferring to live and write, as Bell liked to think she did spontaneously, out of her own mind.” A wonderful chronicle of a very particular time, artistic and otherwise.
3. Peter Cowie, God and the Devil: The Life and Work of Ingmar Bergman. The author knew Bergman, and early on, so this is a useful biography in several regards, most of all for some background information and TV and theatre projects that never came to fruition. But it is not useful for converting the unconverted, nor does it have much more interpretative meat for the in-the-know obsessives.
4. Richard Whatmore, The End of Enlightenment: Empire, Commerce, Crisis. One of my favorite books on the British Enlightenment. For instance, the author captures the tenor of 18th century British debates about liberty very well. Very good chapters on Hume, Shelburne, and Macaulay. Whatmore somehow writes as if he is actually trying to explain things to you! If you read a lot of history books, you will know that is oddly rare. Recommended, for all those who care.
5. Anthony Kaldellis, The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium. So far I’ve read only 22 pp. of this one, and it clocks in at 900 pp. plus. It is obviously excellent and I wanted to tell you about it right away. I expect it to make the top few picks of the best non-fiction of 2024. The author’s main theme is that Byzantium built a “New Roman Empire,” and he details how that happened. The writing is also clear and transparent, for a time period that is not always easy to understand.
William Magnuson, For Profit: A History of Corporations is not a book for me, but it is a good and sane introduction for those seeking that.
Top MR Posts of 2023
This was the year of AI; including the top post from Tyler, Existential risk, AI, and the inevitable turn in human history but also highly ranked were my posts AGI is Coming and AI Worship and Tyler’s GPT and my own career trajectory. Also our paper, How to Learn and Teach Economics with Large Language Models, Including GPT has now been downloaded more than ten thousand times.
2. Second most popular post was The Extreme Shortage of High IQ Workers
5. *GOAT: Who is the Greatest Economist of all Time, and Why Does it Matter?*
6. Matt Yglesias on depression and political ideology which pairs well with another highly-ranked Tyler post, So what is the right-wing pathology then? and also Classical liberals are increasingly religious.
7. Can the SVB crisis be solved in the longer run?
8. Substitutes Are Everywhere: The Great German Gas Debate in Retrospect
9. My paean to Costco.
10. Is Bach the greatest achiever of all time?
11. The Real Secret of Blue Zones
12. SpaceX Versus the Department of Justice
13. What does it mean to understand how a scientific literature is put together?
14. In Praise of the Danish Mortgage System
15. Great News for Female Academics!
Finally, don’t forget Tyler’s posts Best non-fiction books of 2023, Favorite fiction books of 2023, and Favorite non-classical music.
What were your favorite posts/articles/books/music/movies of 2023?
What I’ve been reading
Rob Henderson, Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class. Yes, that is the Rob Henderson of Twitter and Substack. He was raised by foster parents and joined the Air Force at the age of seventeen. He ended up with a Ph.D. from Cambridge. This is his story, it covers class in America, and it is a paean to family stability.
There Were Giants in the Land: Episodes in the Life of W. Cleon Skousen. Compiled and edited by Jo Ann and Mark Skousen. If you are interested in LDS, one approach is to read The Book of Mormon. Another option is to read a book like this one. It is also, coming from a very different direction, a paean to family stability.
Thomas Bell, Kathmandu. There should be more books about individual cities, and this is one of them, one of the best in fact. Excerpt: “At its most local levels, of the neighbourhood, or the individual house, Kathmandu is ordered by religious concepts, either around holy stones, or divinely sanctioned carpentry and bricklaying techniques. The same is true of the city as a whole.” And how do they still have so many Maoists?
Out of Sri Lanka: Tamil, Sinhala & English Poetry from Sri Lanka and its Diasporas, edited by Vidyan Ravinthiran, Seni Seneviratne, and Shash Trevett. A truly excellent collection, worthy of making the best non-fiction of 2023 list. Or does this count as fiction? It’s mostly about things that happened.
Eric H. Cline, After 1177 B.C.: The Survival of Civilizations. A good sequel to the very good 1177 B.C.
Allison Pugh, The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World accurately diagnosing networking as a skill that will rise significantly in value in a tech-laden world.
Dorian Bandy, Mozart The Performer: Variations on the Showman’s Art shows how Mozart, first and foremost, was a showman and that background shaped his subsequent output and career.
My excellent Conversation with John Gray
I had been wanting to do this one for a while, and now it exists. Here is the audio and transcript, here is the episode summary:
Tyler and John sat down to discuss his latest book, including who he thinks will carry on his work, what young people should learn if liberalism is dead, whether modern physics allows for true atheism, what in Eastern Orthodoxy attracts him, the benefits of pessimism, what philanthropic cause he’d invest a billion dollars in, under what circumstances he’d sacrifice his life, what he makes of UFOs, the current renaissance in film and books, whether Monty Python is still funny, how Herman Melville influenced him, who first spotted his talent, his most unusual work habit, what he’ll do next, and more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: Do you think that being pessimistic gives you pleasure? Or what’s the return in it from a purely pragmatic point of view?
GRAY: You are well prepared for events. You don’t expect —
COWEN: It’s a preemption, right? You become addicted to preempting bad news with pessimism.
GRAY: No, no. When something comes along which contradicts my expectations, I’m pleasantly surprised. I get pleasant surprises. Whereas, if you are an adamant optimist, you must be in torment every time you turn the news on because the same old follies, the same old crimes, the same old atrocities, the same old hatreds just repeat themselves over and over again. I’m not surprised by that at all. That’s like the weather. It’s like living in a science fiction environment in which it rains nearly all of the time, but from time to time it stops and there’s beautiful sunlight.
If you think that basically there is beautiful sunlight all the time, but you’re just living in a small patch of it, most of your life will be spent in frustration. If you think the other way around, as I do, your life will be peppered, speckled with moments in which what you expect doesn’t happen, but something better happens.
COWEN: Why can’t one just build things and be resiliently optimistic in a pragmatic, cautionary sense, and take comfort in the fact that you would rather have the problems of the world today than, say, the problems of the world in the year 1000? It’s not absolute optimism where you attach to the mood qua mood, but you simply want to do things and draw a positive energy from that, and it’s self-reinforcing. Why isn’t that a better view than what you’re calling pessimism?
And:
COWEN: Under what circumstances would you be willing to sacrifice your life? Or for what?
GRAY: Not for humanity, that’s for sure.
Recommended, interesting throughout. John is one of the smartest and best read thinkers and writers. He even has an answer ready for why he isn’t short the market. And don’t forget John’s new book — I read all of them — New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism.
My Conversation with the excellent Jennifer Burns
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode description:
Jennifer Burns is a professor history at Stanford who works at the intersection of intellectual, political, and cultural history. She’s written two biographies Tyler highly recommends: her 2009 book, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right and her latest, Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative, provides a nuanced look into the influential economist and public intellectual.
Tyler and Jennifer start by discussing how her new portrait of Friedman caused her to reassess him, his lasting impact in statistics, whether he was too dogmatic, his shift from academic to public intellectual, the problem with Two Lucky People, what Friedman’s courtship of Rose Friedman was like, how Milton’s family influenced him, why Friedman opposed Hayek’s courtesy appointment at the University of Chicago, Friedman’s attitudes toward friendship, his relationship to fiction and the arts, and the prospects for his intellectual legacy. Next, they discuss Jennifer’s previous work on Ayn Rand, including whether Rand was a good screenwriter, which is the best of her novels, what to make of the sex scenes in Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, how Rand and Mises got along, and why there’s so few successful businesswomen depicted in American fiction. They also delve into why fiction seems so much more important for the American left than it is for the right, what’s driving the decline of the American conservative intellectual condition, what she will do next, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: What’s the future of Milton Friedman, say, 30, 40 years from now? Where will the reputation be? University of Chicago is no longer Friedmanite, right? We know that. There are fewer outposts of Friedmanite-thinking than there had been. Will he be underrated or somehow reinvented or what?
BURNS: Let me look into my crystal ball. I don’t think the name will have faded. I think there are still names that people read. People still read Keynes and Mill and figures like that to see what did they say in their day that was so influential. I think that Friedman has got into the water and into the air a bit. I do some work on tracing out his influence.
Within economics, no one’s going to say, “Oh, I’m a Friedmanite,” or fewer people are, but this is someone whose major work was done half a century or more ago, so I don’t think that’s surprising. It would be surprising if economics had been at a standstill as Friedman still called the tune. When you think about the way we accord importance to the modern Federal Reserve, of course, there were things that happened in the world, but Friedman’s ideas did so much to shape that understanding.
He’s still in policymakers’ minds. He’s still in the monetary policy establishment’s minds, even if they’re not fully following him. I think we’re in the middle of a big reckoning now. You saw all the debate about M2 and the pandemic and monetary spending. I don’t know where it’s all going to settle out. It’s a more complicated world than the one that Friedman looked at. I tend to think he is an essential thinker, that the basics of what he talked about are going to be known 50 years from now, for sure.
COWEN: Did Milton Friedman have friends?
Definitely recommended, and Jennifer’s new book Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative is one of my favorite books of the year. It will likely stand as the definitive biography of Friedman.
What I’ve been reading
1. Eric Ambler, The Night-Comers. (U.S. editions are sometimes titled State of Siege.) Think of Ambler as a precursor of Le Carré. I used to think he had one or two excellent works, now I am realizing his ouevre is much deeper than I had imagined. Just long enough at 158 pp., this novel uses the Sundanese setting very well. He was a favorite of Graham Greene’s, and I will read yet more by him.
2. Lydia Davis, Our Strangers, not on Amazon try these sources. Very very short fiction, sometimes as short as a single paragraph. With some periodic non-fiction (or is it?) thrown in. The best pieces are excellent, and many of the others are at least interesting. Here is my earlier CWT with Lydia Davis, I am a fan.
3. Alexandra Hudson, The Soul of Civility: Timeless Principles to Heal Society and Ourselves. Highly intelligent, and today much needed. Her opening sentence is: “Did you know there are at least four women named Judith who are internationally renowned experts on manners?” I would say that Alexandra is one of my “dark horse” picks to become a leading classical liberal influencer, except maybe she isn’t a dark horse any more.
4. Amitav Ghosh, Smoke and Ashes: Opium’s Hidden Histories. An extremely well-written, and also useful history of the opium trade, albeit with more than its fair share of left-wing jargon. And yes that is the novelist Ghosh. Due out in February.
The other books I’ve been reading I haven’t so much liked.
My excellent Conversation with Jacob Mikanowski
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Jacob Mikanowski is the author of one of Tyler’s favorite books this year called Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land. Tyler and Jacob sat down to discuss all things Eastern Europe, including the differences between Eastern and Western European humor, whether Poles are smiling more nowadays, why the best Polish folk art is from the south, the equilibrium for Kaliningrad and the Suwałki Gap, how Romania and Bulgaria will handle depopulation, whether Moldova has an independent future, the best city to party in, why there are so few Christian-Muslim issues in Albania, a nuanced take on Orbán and Hungarian politics, why food in Poland is so good now, why Stanisław Lem hasn’t gotten more attention in the West, how Eastern Europe has changed his view of humanity, his ideal two week itinerary in the region, what he’ll do next, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Why isn’t Stanisław Lem more popular in the West today as a writer?
MIKANOWSKI: That’s interesting. I grew up on Stanisław Lem like some people grow up on the Grimms’ Fairy Tales. My dad’s a computer scientist. His father set up one of Poland’s first computers. The world of Polish science and science fiction: he used to read the Tales of Pirx the Pilot and the Ijon Tichy stories — the robots, the short, fun ones — like they were fairy tales. I grew up with them.
I think — actually I have trouble going back to those. I’d go back to Solaris, and I think Solaris is a real masterpiece and I think it’s had lasting influence. But there’s something pessimistic about them. They don’t have that thing that Asimov does, or even Dune, of world-building and forecasting the human future far in advance. They are like Kafka in space, and that’s absurd situations, strange turns of events — I think a pretty pessimistic view of progress. Maybe that makes them hard to digest. Also a kind of odd sense of humor with the short stories. Almost a childlike sense of humor that maybe makes them hard to take.
I think there’s been a little bit of a Lem revival, though. I know technologists, some people like them; futurologists like him. I like him.
COWEN: Some of the cybernetics tales, they seem weirdly close to the current state of LLMs. And I think I’ve seen this mentioned once, but it’s not generally known: the idea that you use them to talk to, that they’re weird, they might be somewhat mystical, they serve as therapists or oracles — that’s very much in Lem, quite early.
MIKANOWSKI: I think people should go back to them. I think — I was just thinking of Solaris, which I always thought about as this story about contacting a truly alien alien. Now it’s like, well, this is a little bit of what we’re doing with virtual reality and AI. It’s like, what would happen if you could actually talk to your dreams, if you could revive people? You could have the mimicry of consciousness, the appearance of consciousness, without anything behind it — without a consciousness.
There’s something seductive about it, and there’s something monstrous about it. I think he was there way ahead of anyone else, and people should be going back to them. Maybe they will.
Of course we talk about the Suwalki Gap as well. And this: “Given all your study of Eastern Europe, what is it you feel you understand about the current war in Ukraine that maybe other well-informed people would not?”
Recommended, interesting throughout. Again, here is Jacob’s new and excellent book Goodbye Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land.
*War and Punishment*
The author is Mikhail Zygar, and the subtitle is Putin, Zelensky, and the Path to Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine. I have to tell you the subtitle put me off and I nearly didn’t buy this one, as too many books in this area repeat the same (by now) old material. But after some extensive scrutiny in Daunt Books, I decided it was for me. And I was right. It is by far the best book on the origins of the war, both historical and conceptual, and for that matter it gives the literary history as well. Here is one excerpt:
…the Clinton administration’s approach is even blunter: Washington will not discuss anything with Kyiv until Ukraine gives up its Soviet-inherited nuclear arsenal: 176 intercontinental ballistic missiles, able to carry 1,272 nuclear warheads and 2,500 tactical nuclear weapons. True, Ukraine cannot actually fire them: all the control systems are located in Russia. But Clinton and his diplomats echo the same mantra: any economic aid to Ukraine is contingent on all nuclear weapons being relocated to Russia. Kravchuk tries to resist, demanding compensation and security guarantees, in return. In the end, Kravchuk gets the promises he wants.
Among many other sections, I enjoyed the discussion of how revolutionary the 1770s were:
But an even more transformative decade is the 1770s, which sees the birth of the global political and geographical structure as we know it today, the start of the Industrial Revolution, and the laying of the foundations of the modern economy. James Watt invents the steam engine; Adam Smith writes An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations; Captain James Cook reaches the shores of Australia and New Zealand. Curiously at the same time a new type of political confrontation emerges — the struggle not for one’s homeland or monarch but also abstract values. It is the 1770s that give rise to both populism and the liberal idea.
Definitely recommended, this will make my best non-fiction of the year list.