Recently Mentioned Books

Francis Spufford, True Stories & Other Essays .  I have browsed this only selectively, but the essay on C.S. Lewis and the dangers of apologetics is superb.  He quotes Lewis:

For a good treatment of all of Yunnan, I recommend Jim Goodman, The Exploration of Yunnan .  Here is Wikitravel on Dali .

I’m calling this as one of the two or three best movies of the year, or indeed of any year.  Highly recommended on the big screen, though here you can find it on Amazon .  It goes without saying that the film is full of social science.

On the whole, said Mikhail Zygar, a political journalist and the author of “ All the Kremlin’s Men ,” a well-sourced insider look at the cloistered world of Russian politics, the way the U.S. media has covered the Russia scandal has made “Putin seem to look much smarter than he is, as if he operates from some master plan.” The truth, Zygar told me, “is that there is no plan—it’s chaos.”

The Three-Body Problem and The Dark Forest By Cixin Liu

The Three-Body Problem and The Dark Forest By Cixin Liu

Yes,I mean the book by James Fenimore Cooper .  I am reading it for the first time and it is much better than I had expected. Mark Twain’s mockery of Cooper led me wrong, as I let it turn me away from being an appreciator.  And for all the more recent talk of the book being archaic and racist, I am finding it surprisingly sophisticated, for instance:

First, we’ve learned that, even in this age of bits and bytes, materials innovation still matters. The iPhone is behind the scenes a triumph of mining science, with a wide variety of raw materials and about 34 billion kilograms (75 billion pounds) of mined rock as an input to date, as discussed by Brian Merchant in his new and excellent book “The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone.” A single iPhone has behind it the production of 34 kilos of gold ore, with 20.5 grams (0.72 ounces) of c...

An excellent book by Brian Merchant .  Two neat things I learned that I hadn’t known before.  First, when you are typing the software guesses which letters might be coming next and gives you extra latitude in hitting those keys.  (I believe this oddly makes the QWERTY keyboard efficient once again, also.)  Second, there are non-disclosure agreements for reading a possible non-disclosure agreement to sign (or not).  You have to sign one of those before you even get to see the non-disclosure agree...

That is a forthcoming volume edited by Cass Sunstein .  The contributors include Cass, myself, Timur Kuran, Duncan Watts, Martha Minow, Bruce Ackerman, Jack Goldsmith, Geoffrey Stone, and Noah Feldman, among others.  Self-recommending, if anything ever was…

5. Slavoy Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology .  While he is overrated by his trendy partisans, he is underrated by almost everyone else.  Might this be his best book?  Early Žižek is the best Žižek.  We have not escaped from the spectre of the Cartesian self, and what might a truly emancipatory political project have to look like?  2017 is not the worst time to be reading this book.  Here is one probably not very helpful review .  Usually the best five pages in ...

4. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment , Oliver Ready translation.  I hadn’t read this one since high school, so thought it was worth another try.  I can’t say I find Raskolnikov to be a convincing criminal, or a convincing character at all.  Maybe this story is better read as man’s struggle for freedom, and his inability to obtain it, due to the social processing of all his actions, rather than as a novel of crime per se.  I liked it, I didn’t love it.  If it were published today, it would...

3. Robert Bickers, Out of China: How the Chinese Ended the Era of Western Domination .  A very good book, substantive, readable, and full of information not readily available elsewhere.  Yet the title is misleading, as most of the book, including the best parts, covers the first half of the twentieth century and in particular the Western presence and control in China (not quite domination).  Later on, the author says plenty about the Cultural Revolution, but doesn’t seem to want to actually cond...

2. Frédéric Dard, The Executioner Weeps .  French noir, full of cheap tricks, suspenseful, fun.

1. Sarah Binder and Mark Spindel, The Myth of Independence: How Congress Governs the Federal Reserve .  I’ve only been reading the title of this one, as it came in the door just before I left for China.  But I like it already, and even if this book were nothing more than its title it still would be better than much of what is written on monetary policy.

The author is James Broughel and the subtitle is Applying Economic Theory to Public Policy .  I am biased, as James was my doctoral student and this is an adaptation of his thesis, but I think this is a great work and also well-written and fun to read.  It’s the single best piece written on how to think about how regulation impacts economic growth — in particular once-and-for-all effects vs. growth rate changes — and that is one of the most neglected economic policy questions today.

The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow’s World

I am of course excited about this, as his 1491 and 1493 are two of my favorite books:

I am of course excited about this, as his 1491 and 1493 are two of my favorite books:

It was a forty-minute chat (podcast, no transcript), most of all about the decline of liberalism, based around Ed’s new and very well-received book The Retreat of Western Liberalism .  We also covered what a future liberalism will look like, to what extent current populism is an Anglo-American phenomenon, Modi’s India, whether Kubrick, Hitchcock, and John Lennon are overrated or underrated, and what it is like to be a speechwriter for Larry Summers, among other topics.  Here is the opening bit:

Eminent Domain: A Comparative Perspective , edited by Iljoong Kim, Hojun Lee, and Ilya Somin

Guy Standing, Basic Income: A Guide for the Open-Minded

Barak D. Richman, Stateless Commerce: The Diamond Network and the Persistence of Relational Exchange

George Selgin, Money Free and Unfree

The author is Lenora Chu and the subtitle is An American Boy, a Chinese School, and the Global Race to Achieve .  It’s about what the Shanghai public school system really is like, from an American/Chinese-American point of view.  Here is one bit: