Pun Salad

I put this book on my get-at-library list thanks to its "Best Novel" Edgar Award nomination. I surprised myself by liking it quite a bit. Some of my usual warning signs are here: damaged female characters, rotten male characters, "flowery" writing full of home decor descriptions, multiple POVs, jumping around in time, … What can I say, it turned out to work well for me anyway.

The mystery, such as it is: one day young girl Laika vanishes on her way to school. Leaving her younger sister, Willa, to wonder what happened. Laika's disappearance turns into an obsession for Willa; long after the tabloids have moved on to different lurid crimes, Willa keeps trying to find her. And thinks she keep seeing her, only to be disappointed.

But decades later, at a dinner party thrown by Robyn, Willa's friend and past lover, a stranger is invited, and (yes) Willa thinks it could be… But is it?

Another book for which I can't recall the reason I put on my get-at-library list. Doesn't matter much, I guess. I enjoyed it a lot.

If you plan on reading it, my suggestion would be to go in as cold as possible: don't read reviews, don't look at the cover blurbs, don't let your eyes wander down Amazon's book page. Just start reading.

It is (mostly) narrated by Demeter, an AI in charge of an interstellar spaceship, plying the route between Sol and Alpha Centauri. Her (I think I got the pronoun right) perspective is (literally) inhuman, but she has a strong sense of honor and duty. Which explains why she is more than a little aghast when she discovers that the ship's crew and passengers are all dead. (Don't worry, that is only a page-six spoiler.)

But you may recognize her name (I didn't), and get a small hint as to the identity of the culprit.

As the book progresses, there is much conflict, mostly gory. Unexpected characters show up, some antagonistic, some allies in the fight against murderous evil.

Nicholas Wade has had a long career as a science journalist, and in recent years has become a controversial science journalist. For details on the controversial stuff, I recommend his Grokipedia entry, which seems far more even-handed than Wikipedia's, which has an unrebutted anti-Wade bias.

I reported on one of his controversial works, A Troublesome Inheritance, back in 2014. In more recent years, he has written in favor of the lab-leak origin of Covid; my posts on that are here, here, here, and here.

This book looks at how humans have organized themselves into governing groups over their long existence; Wade feels (with much justification) that the role of our underlying genetic code has been given short shrift. To a certain extent this is ideology-driven: the notion that humans are born as "blank slates" and their cultural environment can mold them arbitrarily, shedding ancient ideas of sex roles, opening up a utopian vision of an egalitarian future.

Wade notes that blank-slatism has been thoroughly debunked. He details the experiment with kibbutzim in early Israel, where idealists set up communities based on collective ownership, sexual equality, child-rearing by the community instead of mom and dad, etc.; over the span of a relatively few years, this proved unstable, and the communities mostly reverted to more traditional ways.

Our original social organizations were tribal, similar in many ways to our chimp cousins, and they were a decent evolutionary "solution" to the problems of cooperation, defense, production, and cultural survival. They "worked" for many millennia, after all. And they still persist in some parts of the world. But cultural evolution has molded most of us into citizens of nation-states, a model that has more survival value in the modern world.

Wade argues that humanity is still constrained by the realities of our genetic heritage; ideologies that (for example) deny the fundamental differences between guys and gals are always going to wind up in disappointment, but not before causing a lot of misery along the way.

He also argues that the traditional bonds that hold nation-states together seem to be badly fraying today: common languages, religions, ethnicities. He points out increasing social stratification caused by assortive mating in our meritocracy.

So, Wade provides quite a bit to think about. Progressives aren't going to like his take on a number of contemporary issues. Even I am not convinced of the semi-determinism that his evolution/genetic insights seem to imply. Back in (say) 1750, a Wade-like essayist could have looked at the historic record of chattel slavery and concluded that it was destined to be with us forever as part of our genetic heritage. But it wasn't, thank goodness.

Declaring that science is under attack by partisans is a fertile field. Searching Amazon for 'war on science' brings up this book, but also a raft of others. I obtained this volume for free from the Reason Foundation earlier this year, which may give you a hint about its ideological positioning. (Full disclosure about my priors: I'm usually in agreement with that positioning.)

The book is a collection of 32 essays; enough are co-written to bring the author count to (see subtitle) 39. Most are written in academic style, with copious citations, footnotes, etc. (References are not included in the book itself, at least not the hardcover; they are available here.)

What makes this version of the "war on science" different is that the aggressors are often on the inside of "science" itself. We're not talking about a rerun of the Scopes trial. A lead essay by Richard Dawkins draws the historical parallel with Lysenkoism in the bad old Soviet Union; opposing Lysenko's batshit ideas about evolution could be at best career-ending, but often enough, life-ending.

This strikes (literally) close to home. One bad example mentioned in a couple places is Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, a (tenured) Associate Professor in the Physics Department of the University Near Here. She is cited for her tendentious argument in her published paper "Making Black Women Scientists under White Empiricism: The Racialization of Epistemology in Physics", which claimed (citations elided):

Yet white empiricism undermines a significant theory of twentieth-century physics: General Relativity. Albert Einstein’s monumental contribution to our empirical understanding of gravity is rooted in the principle of covariance, which is the simple idea that there is no single objective frame of reference that is more objective than any other. All frames of reference, all observers, are equally competent and capable of observing the universal laws that underlie the workings of our physical universe. Yet the number of women in physics remains low, especially those of African descent. The gender imbalance between Black women and Black men is less severe than in many professions, but the disparity remains. Given that Black women must, according to Einstein’s principle of covariance, have an equal claim to objectivity regardless of their simultaneously experiencing intersecting axes of oppression, we can dispense with any suggestion that the low number of Black women in science indicates any lack of validity on their part as observers. It is instead important to examine the way the social forces at work shape Black women’s standpoint as observers—scientists—with a specific interest in how scientific knowledge is dependent on this specific standpoint. As Jarita Holbrook notes, Black students have their capacity for objectivity questioned simply because their standpoint on racism is different from that of white students and scientists who don’t have to experience its consequences.

That article was published in Signs, a publication of the University of Chicago Press. In case you're unconvinced of its absurdity, a lengthy rebuttal came from Alan Sokal, published in the Journal of Controversial Ideas, available here.

The book is wide-ranging, covering issues all over the (campus) map: gender ideology, race-based hiring, diversity statements, "decolonizing" mathematics, and more. And, as sort of a unifying theme, the career-destroying efforts of today's censorious heirs of Lysenko.

A concluding section covers "what is to be done". Pun Salad Hero Steven Pinker is here with some good ideas, and I can also recommend Dorian Abbot, Geophysics prof at the University of Chicago. His article is a hoot, showing that he's retained a healthy sense of humor, despite getting cancelled at MIT back in 2021.

I put this book on my get-at-library list last April thanks to Kat Rosenfield's review at the Free Press: "Mel Robbins Has Two Words for America’s Control Freaks". Kat made the book sound more interesting than it actually turned out to be (at least for me). Note the book's official subtitle: "A Life-Changing Tool That Millions of People Can't Stop Talking About". I found myself adding "… Even If You Wish They Would."

Mel Robbins' answer to that wish would be, of course: "Let Them talk about my book."

Mel's Theory is kind of a big deal. Even though her book seems to have dropped off the NYT best-seller list (it was published last December), I noticed that it was prominently featured in a endcap display at my local Barnes & Noble earlier this week.

Anyway: "Let Them" is pretty much (as Mel briefly acknowledges) repackaged-for-today Stoicism. (Marcus Aurelius's Meditations is among the hundreds of entries in the book's bibliography.)

Paired with "Let Them" is "Let Me": which is "taking responsibility for what you do next."

Or more precisely quoting: "Take responsibility for what YOU do next." Mel is a heavy user of the caps lock key.

Mel's style is peppy and personal. Much of it sounds like direct transcriptions of (variously) motivational-speaker arm-waving presentations, one-on-one therapy sessions, and self-help podcasts. She tells (sometimes embarrassing) anecdotes about herself, friends, and family.

To be honest, the book has good advice aplenty. Unfortunately, the good advice is repeated over and over. Much of which I adopted on my own, years ago. The book is padded, roughly the entire last half, with specific advice about dealing with "relationship" problems. Ones, for better or worse, I don't have and don't plan on ever having.

And, probably unfairly, my mind went more than once to that old Monty Python sketch where John Cleese played Anne Elk: "Well, this theory, that I have, that is to say, which is mine,... is mine."

So: I wish I'd left this on the shelves of Portsmouth Public Library for someone who might have found it more useful.

I wasn't enraptured by the first book in this series by Deanna Raybourn, Killers of a Certain Age, but I thought it was OK enough to give this sequel a try.

Result: I was (even) less fond of this one, and I probably won't pick up book #3, if there is one.

The series' gimmick is that four women "of a certain age" form a closely-knit team of professional assassins, working for the "Museum", an organization dedicated to ferreting out villains worldwide, and delivering rough, very rough, justice. This entry has the foursome on the trail of an Eastern European gangster, the son of a previously-dispatched baddie. He is disposed of easily enough (page 92), but unfortunately the team finds itself in subsequent mortal danger from … whom? Well, that's a mystery.

Not to be sexist, but… OK, to be more than a little sexist: The book suffered from over-description of irrelevant details about clothing, food, scenery, architecture, interior decor, … I classify this as "Sue Grafton Disease", and it's just not my cup of tea. A lot of international travel, leading me to wonder if Raybourn was able to deduct her own travel as "research".

In addition, the "lighthearted wisecracks" I (kind of) liked in the previous book, just fell flat for me here, not working at all. The four teammates seem to spend a lot of time mean-spirited sniping at each other. Raybourn also seems to have doubled down on what I characterized as "explicit, sometimes gory, violence" in the first book. Lots of blood and detailed descriptions of rough altercations.

This was kind of a frustrating read for me. It's a mixture of very good observations and very poor recommendations. The authors, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, note that various roadblocks stand in the way of their imagined utopia (visions of plentiful housing, lots of green energy, affordable health care, high-speed rail, etc.) And the good observation is that a lot of those roadblocks have been set up by the Blue Team: endless environmental reviews, restrictive zoning, onerous regulation, nuclear energy phobia, diversity mandates, etc.) Klein and Thompson also steadfastly oppose the "degrowthers" on the left; they are all for increasing the size of the economic pie, spurring innovation, invention, and research, so good for them.

Ah, but Klein and Thompson are huge fans of hands-on good government directing all this. Just not bad government. I am unconvinced they can tell one from another. "Hayek" does not appear in the book's index. Neither does "Solyndra". They don't talk about incentives much. They are frustrated by the escalating costs, endless delays, and shrinking scope of California's high-speed rail project, but they never seem to draw the obvious conclusion that maybe it wasn't a good idea in the first place. They are also True Believers in Climate Change Catastrophe, something that even Bill Gates has moved away from.

There's a certain amount of selective amnesia involved, too. Back in the day, Klein was an enthusiastic cheerleader for ObamaCare. Memorably claiming that Joe Lieberman, a conscientious objector in the original debate, was “willing to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in order to settle an old electoral score.” Never mind the present-day reality that ObamaCare failed its goal of "bending the cost curve"; we've has moved on to designing the next Big Plan That Will Solve Everything. (And if you don't go along, it's probably because you want to kill hundreds of thousands of people.)

All this is accompanied by a lot of sweet, gauzy rhetoric. Designed (successfully) to appeal to "progressive" readers who push policy books onto the best-seller lists, while only making minor quibbles about their bankrupting philosophies. So: read for the good stuff, ignore the road-to-serfdom cheerleading for big government.

If you're looking for a laff riot, maybe you should look elsewhere. I thought Woody Allen's previous book, his autobiography, was funnier. (Some Amazon reviewers were more amused than I, though, so…)

It's a novel, his first and (so far) only. Like his autobiography, there are no chapters. It's just one page after another. And it kind of reads like a novelization of a movie, one that could be funny. But, alas …

"Baum" of the title is the neurotic Asher Baum, a writer of plays, novels, and non-fiction, all relatively obscure and tepidly received by critics. He is on his third marriage. He (literally) talks to himself, not always in private. (Something that might work better in a movie.) He's haunted by worries about his wife's (imagined) infidelity, and he's continually tempted to engage in infidelities of his own.

The plot driver doesn't show up until about 70% of the way through the book. Up to then it's all character study. And those characters are ones that work words like "egregious" into their most emotional dialogue. (Which is actually kind of funny in itself.)

In case you can't see the book cover from where you are sitting: this book by Jean Hanff Korelitz is a sequel to her 2021 thriller, The Plot. Which I reported on back in 2022.

At my age, I find myself starting sentences with "At my age…" more often. And this is no exception:

At my age, I don't retain memories of book plots all that well. But The Plot was kind of an exception, because its twists seemed unique, nasty, and (hence) memorable. I suppose I should recommend you read The Plot before you read this one, but I found myself wondering if that was really necessary.

Anyway, this book follows Anna, the widow of the first book's protagonist, best-selling author Jake. Who (spoiler, sorry) met his demise in that book. Anna is tempted into the writing game by Jake's agent and publisher; how hard could it be? So she writes The Aftermath, a seeming roman à clef based on Jake's sad end, inaccurately described. And, while not a blockbuster, her novel's respectable ghoulishness brings her immodest success.

Anna finds the writer's life pleasant enough, but an unexpected "gift" on her book tour threatens to ruin her career, and perhaps her cushy life. Anna turns detective in order to find the person or persons behind this anonymous danger; she's got to find the truth without revealing the truth, if that makes sense.

It's, yes, a page turner. And the plot is even darker and twistier than The Plot. I liked it a lot.

I've been a Charles Murray fan for quite awhile. He's well-known for his takes on controversial issues, like IQ, race, welfare, etc. He presses a lot of hot buttons. I really liked his In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government, a succinct description of the "proper" role of the state. Specifically, limited and laissez-faire, enabling people to chart their own courses in life, bearing responsibility for their own choices, good and bad.

This book is somewhat of a surprise topic, and very personal. Murray details his spiritual odyssey over the past years, how he became interested in, and finally persuaded by, evidence that we are more than just bags of molecules interacting according to the dictates of physics and biochemistry. And how he came around to a more-or-less Christian belief in God, Jesus, and miracles, including the resurrection.

So, yeah, that's a lot for a relatively short book. But Murray's argument is well-presented, not didactic at all. He lays out his research, all the while inviting his readers to make up their own minds. His initial discussion is very similar to that of Ross Douthat in his recent book Believe: the "fine-tuning" of a universe that makes stars, planets, life, and (most unlikely of all) human intelligence possible. Murray makes the additional point about trying to "understand" God: we are likely in the same relationship between my dog and calculus. We not only don't understand, we don't even understand what there is to understand.

Murray is impressed, as Douthat was, with the uniformity of "near death experiences", where people who have been brought back from the brink report uncannily similar observations of what it's like. Murray adds in the phenomenon of "terminal lucidity", where dying people thought to be irretrievably comatose have recovered briefly, but inexplicably, to communicate with people at their bedside. This, after their brains have stopped working!

In the book's second part, Murray looks specifically at Christianity, with an appreciation of the arguments made by C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity. He notes the effort made over the years to debunk the history depicted in the New Testament; he counters with his own scholars and their arguments. (If you are refuting a debunker are you ‥ a bunker?)

Bottom line: Murray makes good arguments. I'm not planning to become a churchgoer (again), though. That's on me, not him.

If you're interested. Murray's book has generated some pushback from people I also like. Jerry Coyne, bless his heart, seems to take any religiosity as a personal insult, and argued against his views here and here.

Steven Pinker, peace be unto him, also dislikes Murray's "terminal lucidity" explanation, and wrote a letter to the WSJ about it. Murray responded here. (I think those are both free links.)