Recently Mentioned Books

1. Chemicals manufacturer : I think that one has to go to the Duponts, I enjoyed the Gerard Zilg biography of the Dupont family and history .

Bradley M. Gardner, China’s Great Migration: How the Poor Built a Prosperous Nation , is a good introduction to what the title promises.

Jesse Eisinger, The Chickenshit Club: Why the Justice Department Fails to Prosecute Executives , is a useful look at why so many cases are leveled against the company rather than the CEO. I found the book worthwhile, but don’t think he offered much of an argument as to why that should be bad.

Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman, A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age , is a quality treatment of its topic material.

Michael Vatikiotis, Blood and Silk: Power and Conflict in Modern Southeast Asia , a useful introduction to why that part of the world has not turned into paradise.

2. Hollis Robbins and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Portable Nineteenth-Century African American Women Writers .  Plenty of libertarian thought in here, and many historical tidbits of interest, for instance Julia Caldwell-Frazier, “The Decisions of Time” (1889) p. 486:

2. Samanta Schweblin, Fever Dream .  A well-known Argentinean novel, finally available in English.  A kind of ghost story, imagining wondering if the soul of your dying child really has been transferred to another person.  Short and very powerful.  Here is one very good review .

1. Robert Knapp, The Dawn of Christianity: People and Gods in a Time of Magic and Miracles .  Jews, Christians, and polytheists, mostly in the first century after the birth of Christ.  Strongly conceptual, rather than a string of hard-to-remember facts and citations.  Here is a useful summary review .

That is from the new and useful book by Allen J. Fromherz, Qatar: A Modern History , updated edition, recently published by Georgetown University Press.

Peter Brannen, The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth’s Past Mass Extinctions .

Scott E. Page, The Diversity Bonus: How Great Teams Pay Off in the Knowledge Economy .

Fall Down 7 Times Get Up 8: A Young Man’s Voice from the Silence of Autism , by Naoki Higashida, is a good autism memoir from Japan.

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...