Pun Salad

I got a bargain on the Kindle version: $4.99. My reader reports main text (not counting footnotes and references) is 1012 pages, so that works out to be slightly under a half cent per page! What a deal.

As you can deduce from that page count, however, it is a meticulously detailed biography. For example, at one point it reports: "From 1933 through 1938 the seminar met at 2:15 on Mondays…". And Hayek was only one of the three seminar conveners!

And the book only goes up to 1950. Volume II is apparently in process.

So I confess: I skimmed a lot along the way. Still, I got a pretty good picture of Hayek's life: his family and friends (and some enemies), his intellectual development, his professional odyssey, and ongoing controversies. And a lot of history, economic and otherwise.

I was especially taken by the book's description of the economic climate that caused Hayek to write his most popular book, The Road to Serfdom, a jeremiad against socialist central planning. I did not fully appreciate how many "men of science", especially in Britain, advocated strongly for a "planned economy" during and after World War II. (They were also pretty moon-eyed about Stalin and the USSR.) Hayek and a few others were pretty lonely in their advocacy of free markets, private property, and liberalism in general. Arguably, Hayek's book saved the US (and eventually other countries) from disaster. (At least until now.)

The book also discusses Hayek's troubled love life. His first marriage to Hella was continually roiled by his infatuation with his first love (and distant cousin) Lenerl. Who was married to someone else. Hella was adamantly opposed to divorce, which caused Hayek no end of professional, romantic, legal, and financial woes. Eventually, the divorce happened, but Hayek doesn't come off well, even in the book's sympathetic retelling.

In my youth, I was a physics major, and my graduate career, such as it was, was at the University of New Hampshire. (I got my Masters degree before flaming out pre-PhD.) I try to keep up with the field at a dilettante level, and pay some attention to the doings at UNH's Department of Physics. Which is how I became aware of Chanda Prescod-Weinstein (CPW); she is (now) a tenured Associate Professor in the department, and also in Women's and Gender Studies. I reported on her first book, The Disordered Cosmos, here.

Back in the day, physics "survey" courses were labeled, somewhat disdainfully, "Physics for Poets". (The geology version: "Rocks for Jocks".) Especially in the early going, this book reads like transcribed lectures from CPW's "Physics for Poets" course, if she had ever given one. (That hypothesis is strengthened by the book's subtitle.)

And there's nothing wrong with that! CPW is enthusiastic about the field, and she does a decent job conveying the mysteries and weirdnesses that abound in modern physics and cosmology. But one of the constraints of a "for poets" course (or book) is math: you can't write a freaking formula, lest >90% of your students (or readers) zone out (or stop reading). Alas, the only tool we have to describe such phenomena accurately is math. Without that, you're mostly handwaving, albeit in an entertaining way.

CPW's shtick is to interlace her physics with hard-left ranting; odd and irrelevant observations; plugs for her favorite authors poets, and TV shows; and occasional f-bombs (keeping it real!). This may work better for some readers than it did for me. Unfortunately, the rant/physics ratio seems to go up as the book moves along. Genocide, the Middle Passage, Colonialism, capitalism (with its associated evil, neoliberalism), etc., etc., etc. are continual targets of CPW's drive-by commentary.

She is a big fan of the late thug/poet Nikki Giovanni; this made me recall what I wrote about her back in 2009, when UNH invited her to keynote its 2010 Martin Luther King "celebration". (Which they stopped celebrating a few years ago.)

CPW does not like Erwin Schrödinger, avoiding terms like "Schrödinger's Cat" and "Schrődinger Equation". Even though she's complimentary about "queer" manifestations of sexuality, it seems that Erwin's type of queerness was a bridge too far.

Some things just made me wonder what point CPW was trying to make. She identifies Plato as "a philosopher from the Balkan peninsula of Asia." She's talking about Greece! (A couple pages later, Aristotle is "another Balkan peninsula philosopher.")

CPW refers throughout to the "nightmare global-warming scenario", seemingly unaware that even its past advocates have given up on its plausibility.

A trip to Dodger Stadium would not have been complete without the mention of the "mostly Mexican-American families" that Los Angeles kicked out of Chavez Ravine for its construction.

For same reason, CPW can't help but observe that John Stewart Bell (he of Bell's Inequality) "absolutely comes off like a bit of a queen."

Some outright bloopers seemed to have been missed. Ones I noticed: a footnote on page 80 uses the word "acceleration", which should have been "direction"; there's a missing minus sign on an exponent on page 86; the word "enormity" is misused on page 176; and this discussion of a plot point on Star Trek: Discovery on page 250 is truly mystifying:

But it turns out while Dr. Culber was dying at the end of set nonbreaking space between his husband—ship's engineer Paul Stamets (beautifully played by Anthony Rapp)—unintentionally transferred Culber's essence to a fungal network with a kiss.

Nonbreaking space: the final frontier!

Back in the 1980s I read the legal thriller/mystery Presumed Innocent by Scott Turow, his first novel. At the time, it was a blockbuster. It got made into a Harrison Ford movie!

I read maybe a couple more Turow novels after that, but kind of lost interest.

But a few weeks ago, I noticed that Turow's latest novel Presumed Guilty was nominated for a "Best Novel" Edgar Award. And (as it turns out) the protagonist from that first book, lawyer Rusty Sabich, is featured in it.

Ah, but (also as it turns out) this book, Innocent, came out back in 2010, also featuring Rusty. So I decided I'd better read this first.

[By the way, reader, if you're wondering if you have to read Presumed Innocent before Innocent, I'd say no, you don't have to. I don't think there are any spoilers for that book in this one. I recommend it though.]

Page one spoiler: Rusty finds his wife, Barbara, unexpectedly dead next to him in bed. Inexplicably, he waits for nearly a day before even notifying their (now grown) son, Nat about her death. Why? His explanations are poor. And it doesn't take long before suspicion falls upon him. You see, in that previous book, Rusty was put on trial for the murder of a different woman, but the prosecutors failed to make their case. Could he be trying to get away with murder again?

The book's style is tricky, some chapters written with a few different first-person narrators. And some chapters third-person. There's also some jumping back-and-forth in time. What is completely obvious is that Rusty isn't telling us all he knows in his narrative. (Geez, just like that first book.)

And there's a lot of (what I call) navel-gazing, even in the third person. We get to know a lot about everyone's motivations, flaws, opinions, etc. Just not everything.

Plot twists abound; there's always one around the corner. Just when you thought things couldn't get any more byzantine, another trap door opens under your feet. Turow is a master at that.

Reader, I thought I had a good idea about What Really Happened. I didn't.

I put this book on my get-at-library list thanks to a decent review at the WSJ. The reviewer, Judge Glock, deemed it "one of the best narrative histories I’ve read."

The author, Andrew Ross Sorkin, clearly performed a huge amount of research, much of it from primary sources. He concentrates on the people involved: folks who did stuff, and folks to whom it was done to. In the early going, he draws the well-known picture of ordinary Joes, and some Janes, getting swept up in a stock-buying mania. Not investing, but speculating. Making big bets that the market would keep going up, up up! Which worked out well, until it didn't.

Sorkin looks at dozens of characters (there's a dramatis personae list at the book's beginning), but there's a relative concentration on just a few. One major character is Charles Mitchell, who headed up New York's National City Bank (today's Citibank). He was also on the Board of Directors of the New York branch of the Federal Reserve. (I'm not sure whether such dual employment is legal any more.) He is the closest thing the book has to a villain, or maybe a scapegoat. Certainly he gathered some powerful enemies, most notably Senator Carter Glass. (Co-author of the Glass-Steagall banking law.) Eventually, some of Mitchell's sketchy deals wound him up court on a tax evasion rap; he was acquitted to the dismay of many.

So it's quite a ride. Despite the book's title, only the first part describes the events of 1929; the remainder covers efforts going up to 1933. (And then both an "Epilogue" and an "Afterword" describes what happened to everyone after that.)

Sorkin relies probably too heavily on John Kenneth Galbraith's The Great Crash for causal analysis of the Depression. In comparison, the Milton Friedman/Anna Schwartz book A Monetary History of the United States gets a brief nod on page 440 as "authors and academics" with an alternative explanation. Three pages from the end of the book's text! Sorkin also mentions, but doesn't really explain, why the recovery in the U.S. was relatively slow compared to other countries.

So, it's pretty good, but if you're interested, I'd recommend wider reading.

A couple months back I was sufficiently impressed with Mark Manson's rant about intellectuals to add his substack to my reading list and (eventually) to check out his 2016 book on the topic of …

Well, you can read the title as well as I can. Reader, the blotted-out word on the jacket is not asterisked or otherwise obscured anywhere else in the book. And Mark uses it a lot, usually gratuitously. In his defense, that's become kind of common these days, and the word has lost a lot of its power to shock.

Worse, the title does not accurately reflect Mark's main thesis. When he urges the reader to not give a you-know-what about something, he's asking you to not care strongly about that thing. There are broad classes of things like that: basically, things that are outside your control.

But he further observes that there are things you should care strongly about. Specifically, living in tune with your carefully selected values, like honesty, temperance, courage, justice, etc.

So a better title for the book would have been The Subtle Art of Knowing What to Care About, and What Not to Care About.

It didn't take me long to say: Hey, this sounds a lot like stoicism. I don't think Mark says that directly, though. To be fair, I might have missed it. Mark's prose style does not encourage careful reading; it comes across, at times, as a transcription of a slightly-drunken rant.

So an even better title for the book might have been Stoicism, Loosely Described With Dirty Words.

For what it's worth, one of the back-cover blurbs is from Ryan Holiday, who is an explicit Stoic advocate. I read his book Stillness Is the Key a few years back, and thought it was decent. If you're looking for self-help with a Stoic twist, I'd recommend Ryan over Mark.

I've become sort of a Kat Rosenfield fanboy. Although I didn't care for the book she co-authored with the late Stan Lee (A Trick of Light), I liked her next two adult novels, (You Must Remember This and No One Will Miss Her) quite a bit. And this one goes beyond "liked quite a bit" on my scale. I found myself torn between compulsive page-turning (gotta find out what happens next) and slow reading, savoring her prose.

Well, enough gushing. I encourage you to not read the blurbs on the book's Amazon page, nor the dust cover. Part of the enjoyment for me was the I-didn't-see-that-coming plot twists, and they are numerous.

I'll just skim over the prologue, going up to page 9 or so: the protagonist, Emma Sharp, is getting released from the hospital after a nearly-successful suicide attempt. Of all the unlikely coincidences, the Uber driver who's supposed to take her home is Logan, kind of snoopy and forward. Their relationship starts out dysfunctional. And gets worse.

The "woods" in the title are in Maine. Most of the action happens on and around the "Hundred Mile Wilderness" section of the Appalachian Trail, on the route to Mount Katahdin. It's risky enough all by itself (article: 5 Dangers that Could Kill You Hiking the 100 Mile Wilderness), and, well, those dangers aren't the only ones with which Emma needs to concern herself.

I've seen people talk about "hate-watching", consuming media (typically TV or movies) that you despise. For some reason. Well, this book by W. David Marx turned into a "hate-read" for me. And my "reason" is pretty lame: I have a self-imposed rule to read every book I check out of the library, bad or good.

The usual disclaimer: I'm not a reviewer. My only goal is to write a "book report", like the ones I used to write for Mrs. Kluska back in fifth grade. And I'm just reporting my personal reactions; I wouldn't be surprised if yours were totally different. (For example, the WSJ reviewer, Dominic Green, was just complimentary enough to put the book on my get-at-library list.)

Although I've lived through the same quarter-century, and lived in the same country, that Marx claims to be chronicling, the main thing I noticed from nearly page one was how little of the "culture" discussed had any lasting impression on me, one way or the other. Indeed, the pages are filled with names and events that I had never heard of. And, often, when I had heard of them, I hadn't actually partaken. (For example, I'd heard of the song "Old Town Road", but I've never actually listened to it.)

Mostly, I had to wade through stuff like this, about "SoundCloud rappers": "These tools launched a new wave of hip-hop stars-Lil Yachty, Lil Uzi Vert, Lil Pimp, Lil Peep, Playboi Carti, XXXTentacion, Juice WRLD, and 6ix9ine." And page after page about something called "streetwear". Which I think is some sort of clothing. Scanning the index for who and what Marx deems worthy of attention: Beyoncé, Justin Bieber, Lena Dunham, Facebook, Paris Hilton, Jay-Z, Taylor Swift, Kanye West, Pharrell Williams, … And many assorted Kardashians and Jenners.

The author's political biases occasionally show up: gratuitous swipes at "capitalism" and "neoliberalism" appear every so often. The "Steele Dossier" is simply described as "filled with unverified claims about Trump's ties to Russia". Unverified? I'm pretty sure a more accurate adjective would have been "fake". Kyle Rittenhouse is described as someone "whose entire life accomplishment was crossing state lines into Wisconsin with an AR-15—style rifle, killing two protesters and being acquitted." I (like the National Review editorialists) think the jury got it right.

To be fair, there are plenty of "right-wing" loons out there that deserve criticism.

On the other hand, I don't think Marx mentions Jussie Smollett at all.

And AI? Marx comes off as a kind of curmudgeonly Luddite: 'AI companies vowed to end the evil monopoly of pernicious creators who dared take the time to make things with a sense of craft and intention."

Marx winds up with some recommendations about how to improve the culture. I'm unsure about their efficacy.

A nasty little "psychological thriller" that made it onto the WSJ's best mysteries of 2024 list. (WSJ gifted link) It's a little gimmicky, but I found myself turning pages.

The narration is first-person, mostly from Dr. Caroline Strange. (She insists her patients call her "Dr. Caroline", so as not to be confused with the Marvel character played by Benedict Cumberbatch.) I admit that at first she comes off as honest and unsentimental about her patients. But slowly a couple of warning signs emerge: she lies to the cops on page 28; and then (worse!) lies to her husband on page 56.

Wait a minute! The cops? Yes, they have sought her out to ask about a missing journalist, Ellen Garcia. Which just might have something to do with a recent first-time patient, who mentioned that he might be killing someone, and that Dr. Caroline might know of that someone.

But we also get narration from Ellen, who has (indeed) been kidnapped, held in a storage facility. And also a guy named Gordon Strong, who's just been fired as a beer distributor. ("Without sales, we don't need distribution," he's told.) Gordon turns out to have a pivotal role in Dr. Caroline's story, but we don't find out what it is for a while.

As we go along all three narrators' flaws and foibles are revealed, leading up to (pardon the cliché) a pulse-pounding (and somewhat blood-soaked) climax. Well done.

A few days ago I read a WSJ article with a headline claim: Dad Books Are a Dying Breed (WSJ gifted link). Well, Father's Day is coming up, and if any of you sons or daughters are in a quandary, I can recommend this book for a Dad Book. I enjoyed it quite a bit, and I'm a dad. QED.

It's by Johan Norberg, a Cato Institute fellow, and the book is a paean to those historical societies that have managed, always imperfectly, to discover the wonders of liberty: free markets, free trade, and free minds. He looks at seven, in chronological order: (1) Athens; (2) Rome; (3) the Abbasid Caliphate; (4) Song China; (5) Renaissance Italy; (6) the Dutch Republic; (7) the Anglosphere. That last one is where I, and perhaps you, live today.

I was totally ignorant about (3) and (4). (They don't seem to come up much on Jeopardy!, whose writers instead seem to be fans of Those Darn Etruscans.) But Norberg told me a lot I didn't know about all seven, and his discussion was lively and informative, with occasional wry observations and interesting bits of trivia. And surprisingly timely in spots: you many have noticed that Xi Jinping mentioned the "Thucydides Trap" during President Trump's visit last month. That sent a lot of journalists scurrying to Google, but if you had read this book you would have known exactly what Xi was talking about! Norberg has a whole section about it.

A bit of trivia I picked up along the way: why the olive branch is a symbol of peace. After planting, olive trees take many years to grow and produce sellable fruit; their presence indicates the farmer has confidence that his property will not be ravaged by war or expropriation in the meantime.

And: after the fall of Rome, Western Europe essentially forgot the Greek language. That's where (I am not making this up) the phrase "It's Greek to me" comes from: a copyist hitting something written in that funny alphabet could only shrug his shoulders in helplessness.

And: it doesn't hurt to be reminded about #3's contributions to the modern world: their mathematicians gave us the decimal numbering system, with its zero. And their language gave us the words "algebra" and "algorithm". But also "assassin", so it's a mixed bag.

Well, there's more. Including the huge Song mural of everyday life Along the River During the Qingming Festival, which as a "combination of the Bayeux Tapestry and Where's Waldo".

So it's a lot of fun. But a somber note comes in at the end: you'll note that the "Golden Age" examples 1-6 eventually passed away, a combination of murder and suicide. And it's not difficult to detect analogous symptoms in our own privileged Anglospherical times. Will we be different? Norberg doesn't mention Trump much, but…

I read a previous book by the author, David T. Beito, The New Deal’s War on the Bill of Rights a couple years back; it detailed FDR's (and his Democrat co-conspirators) lousy record on civil liberties, concentrating on Japanese internment during WW2; warrantless snooping on political opponents; trumped-up "investigations" of critical newspaper and radio outlets. I enjoyed it … if "enjoyed" is the right word.

This book covers a lot of the same ground, but covers more of FDR's pre-presidential behavior, and also to his problematic behavior outside the civil liberty arena. As I said about the previous book: it's not a "warts and all" book: it's mostly just the warts. Beito's only unreserved praise is Roosevelt's brave handling of his polio affliction.

Beito finds that FDR's handling of the Depression was poor; although his policies were politically popular, they were ineffective in restoring the private economy. (And, as Milton Friedman taught us, the Federal Reserve also had a knack of making just the wrong monetary moves at the wrong time.) He was inexcusably indifferent to the ongoing abuse of Black America, not wanting to damage his political prospects in with white Southerners. He continued damaging protectionist policies, which probably caused ongoing economic misery in Europe, encouraging the rise of you-know-who. He thought he was good buddies with Stalin during the war, and encouraged see-no-evil policies toward the Soviet Union. Beito criticizes FDR's insistence on "unconditional surrender" of Germany and Japan, which (arguably) prolonged the war and caused additional American deaths, in addition to enemy soldiers and civilians.

And he was indifferent to the plight of European Jewry, passing up numerous opportunities to decrease their death toll.

So: a welcome addition to FDR bios, countering a lot of the usual hagiography.