Happy Fourth of July! Not only is it time for America’s birthday, but also time for me to reflect on my reading, listening, scrolling, and writing activities over the last quarter. I started this recently as a way of keeping track of what has been of interest to me of late and as a way of collating and organizing these activities.
If you missed my last quarter’s update, it is here:
Reading and Listening (Books)
In the last quarter, my reading slowed a bit. I’ve completed 17 books compared to 27 in the prior quarter. Some of this is a function of the length of the books, the rigor of the reader experience (I’ve been working on doing closer reads), and the number of reviews/commentaries that I’ve written based on these reads. I’ve generally put together longer reviews of late and covered a greater proportion of my completed reading, 11 of 17 (~65%) in this latest quarter. Fortunately, all of the books have been enjoyable and edifying. I recommend almost all of them without reservation to any educated lay reader.
Book Reviews (Writing)
The median year of publication of the reviewed set is 2009 with a range of 2023 to 1922 (the average is left-skewed to 1998). So half the books in the set are published fairly recently (post-2010), and they’re overwhelmingly published in the 21st century (only 3 published before 2000). Only two the 11 reviewed are fiction, but two of the memoirs, Tokyo Vice and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, engage in a great deal of hyperbole and take lots of poetic license. This is more true of the latter memoir, which is consciously a creative work, whereas Tokyo Vice is meant to be fact-based reportage (check out my review for a deeper discussion of this).
I will usually try to assemble some sort of commentary on every book I read on Goodreads. It is hard to keep up with this as I’ve been doing longer pieces on Substack. Eight of the 11 reviews in the last quarter have been lengthened and polished into posts here. I try to connect the reviews I post here to bigger ideas relevant to the work and add more context and depth to my commentary.
List of book reviews from Q2 2023:
Making Sense (2020) by Sam Harris → Goodreads review
Every Love Story is a Ghost Story (2012) by D. T. Max → Substack review
The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) by Jane Jacobs → Substack review
Generations (2023) by Jean Twenge → Substack review
The Little Friend (2002) by Donna Tartt → Substack commentary
Tokyo Vice (2009) by Jake Adelstein → Substack review
The Aristocracy of Talent (2021) by Adrian Wooldridge → Substack review
The End of History and The Last Man (1989) by Francis Fukuyama - Substack review
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000) by Dave Eggers - Goodreads review
The Beautiful and Damned (1922) by F. Scott Fitzgerald - Substack review
Hate Crime Hoax (2019) by Wilfred Reilly - Goodreads review
Recommendations and Descriptions of the books not (yet) reviewed:
When the Heavens Went on Sale (2023) by Ashlee Vance
Vance’s simultaneously offers both rigorous and gonzo reporting on the new private space industry and its many unbelievably colorful characters. Vance’s work shows the motley private space industry emerged from a confluence of Silicon Valley VC, NASA attrition, and “great man” legacy/ego competition. Of course most readers are probably familiar with the impact SpaceX, but this work illuminates some of the amazing work from other players like Astra, Firefly, Planet Labs, and Rocket Lab.
Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (2011) by Amy Chua
In some ways this memoir is unbelievably extreme, it seems like a bit. In fact, I think it is great performance art. Chua’s memoir is a great kick-in-the-ass to complacent American parenting - a reminder to all of the benefits and costs of striving.
Traffic (2023) by Ben Smith
Traffic chronicles the rise of digital media through the story of a snowballing, head-to-head competition between characters like Jonah Peretti of HuffPost and BuzzFeed and Nick Denton of Gawker Media. The book examines how their pursuit of attention, the internet’s natural resource, at scale helped release the primal and tribal social forces that would overtake the internet and American public discourse. It is a gossipy origin story of new media’s rise and fall.
The Power of Geography (2015) by Tim Marshall
Although I expected this to be a bit more like Guns, Germs, and Steel, it ended up being more of a present and forward-looking book about geopolitics. It explores ten regions that are set to influential on the world stage in a new age of great-power rivalry (I’m not necessarily convinced by this prediction): Australia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the UK, Greece, Turkey, the Sahel, Ethiopia, Spain, and Space. The book examines how geographic features have influenced each area's development and how they will continue to shape global politics in the future.
Next (2001) by Michael Lewis
Next is one of the mid-career works of a legend in non-fiction book journalism, Michael Lewis, who argues that rapidly evolving technology will upend traditional power structures and distribute power to the youth, who are the “early adopters” without preconceptions and entrenched interests. This prediction, of course, hasn’t aged well. There has been some flattening but mostly in superficial sociocultural practices like corporate dress and work-from-home trends. It is also interesting to reflect that from the early tech years only one Millennial is actually is a CEO of a major public tech company, Mark Zuckerberg, and he’s no longer considered particularly visionary or impactful. However, the enduring value of this book rests in Lewis’s portraits of interesting early internet characters, e.g. a teenage day trader investigated by the SEC.
Sentient (2021) by Jackie Higgins
Sentient explores the sensory world of animals, their umwelts, as a window onto our human senses, which echo and in some cases even exceed wild counterparts. The book follows a menagerie of exotic fauna from land, air, sea and across the globe to understand what it means to be human. Every chapter in the book tackles a different sense through an exploration of a particular animal’s specialized skill, one that has arisen from a unique anatomy, and then explores what we can learn from this about humans. I think it is a more vibrant and engaging version of what Ed Yong did in An Immense World.
Podcasts (Listening)
Although I have several shows that are regular listens, I love to find new shows that I don’t regularly listen to and explore what they have to offer. So the following list represents some more finds that I have been smashing the play button lately.
Tandem hosted by a philosopher, Tamler Sommers, and psychologist, David Pizarro, Very Bad Wizards provides analysis of various items in cognitive science, pop culture, literature, and ethics. I really enjoyed their episodes on David Foster Wallace (For the links see my post on DFW).
Hosted by Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell of Dissent magazine, Know Your Enemy podcast covers right-wing thinkers and intellectuals, providing a leftist perspective on their history and impact. Although I don’t remotely share the politics of the show’s hosts, they’ve put together some interesting content on figures like Joan Didion, Christopher Lasch, Whittaker Chambers, and Norman Podhoretz.
Peripheral members of the Intellectual Dark Web (IDW), Meghan Daum and Sarah Haider cover cultural war topics from their heterodox perspectives on A Special Place in Hell pod. I’ve enjoyed their recent shows with Razib Khan and Katie Herzog.
Aporia is a new online magazine at Substack that provides heterodox perspectives on issues in social science. Their podcast covers controversial and interesting subjects with academics, social critics, intellectuals like Paul Bloom, Bryan Caplan, Amy Wax, Adrian Wooldridge, and Louise Perry.
A National Review podcast on financial and economic topics. Hosted by hedge fund financier David Bahnsen.
An Esoteric Academic Debate Playing Out on Social Media that’s Worth Your Time
Recently, economic historian Gregory Clark, known for his work on the stickiness of social stratification, published a highly anticipated study in the eminent journal PNAS titled “The inheritance of social status: England, 1600 to 2022.” This study has been colloquially been referred to as “For Whom the Bell Curve Tolls,” as a wry reference to Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s radioactively controversial yet influential The Bell Curve. Clark’s upcoming book is expected to use this title as well since he has a fondness for making titular puns of Ernest Hemingway novels.
Clark’s study argues, using a historical dataset of 422,374 English people (1600 to 2022), that there is a “strong persistence of social status across family trees” and that this model of status persistence can be explained well by a simple model that accounts genetic variation and assortative mating. Given the clarity, magnitude, and charge of these claims there have been many critiques leveled at the work from other academics like Sasha Gusev and Vince Buffalo. Contrastingly, there has been some qualified support expressed for Clark’s work from Alex Young and David Hugh-Jones. Additionatly, PNAS published a supportive commentary alongside the study by James J. Lee. Regardless of the various back-and-forth debates, which are interesting and ongoing but esoteric for many, the striking takeaway from the dataset, regardless of the modeling, is the stickiness and resilience of social status across generations. For whatever reason, social hierarchies do seem quite enduring even as societies are transformed by technology and political changes. Even if we set the hotly debated genetic claim aside, it seem quite probable that assortative mating plays an important role in this observed stratification.
I’m very interested in these topics and have written a little about them:
Stay tuned for next quarter’s update, and enjoy the holiday with family and friends!