Recently Mentioned Books

1. David Der-Wei Wang, editor. A New Literary History of Modern China .  Almost one thousand pages, and aren’t edited volumes so often poison?  Still, these short, collated excerpts provide one of the most useful and readable entry points into modern Chinese intellectual history; this will be making my “year’s best” list.  Every year you should be reading multiple books about China, all of you.  Here is a sentence from the work, from Andrea Bachner: “In a brothel in Singapore at the beginning of...

And Thomas W. Hazlett, The Political Spectrum: The Tumultuous Liberation of Wireless Technology, from Herbert Hoover to the Smartphone , is a very learned, market-oriented look at what the title promises.

Eric Barker, Barking Up the Wrong Tree: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Success Is (Mostly) Wrong .

Ulrich Boser, Learn Better: Mastering the Skills for Success in Life, Business, and School, or, How to Become an Expert in Just About Anything , and

5. The Great Inka Road: Engineering an Empire , assorted authors and editors and photographers.  One of the best and most readable introductions to Incan civilization.  I’ll say it again: you all should be reading more picture books!  They are one of the best ways to actually learn.

4. Franklin Foer, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech .  The title says it all.  I disagreed with almost everything in this book, still it is useful to see where the Zeitgeist is headed.

3. David J. Garrow, Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama .  So far I’ve only read bits and pieces of it, but I am surprised it is not receiving more positive attention.  It seems like one of the most thorough and smart and thoughtful biographies of any American president.  It has plenty of detail on Obama’s life and career, and you can learn what Obama’s ex-girlfriend says about how he was in bed at age 22 (“he neither came off as experienced nor inexperienced”, [FU Aristotle !])  Yes, at 108...

2. Ge Fei, The Invisibility Cloak .  This short Chinese noir novel, with a dash of Murakami, is one of my year’s favorites and also one of this year’s “cool books.”  I finished it in one sitting.  Set in Beijing, the protagonist sells audio equipment, and then strange things happen.  Here is a good interview with the author .

1. William Vaughan, Samuel Palmer: Shadows on the Wall .  Another first-rate Yale University Press book of art plates and art history, for this they are the best.  Get a hold of as many of them as you can.

The subtitle is The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst .  Sapolsky is tenured in biology and neuroscience at Stanford, and winner of a MacArthur genius grant.  This book is a very impressive compendium of what we know about the social sciences, as might be rooted in behavioral biology and related fields.  The topics include violence, altruism, cooperation, gene-environment interactions, and many more topics along the usual lines.  It’s not a “here is my big idea” book, but rather “here is h...

That is a splendid 1996 book on mathematics and mathematical researchers , by Gian-Carlo Rota.  I found philosophical, mathematical, and also managerial insights on most of the pages.  It is playful and yet earnestly serious at the same time.  Here is one bit:

Yes, the Garry Kasparov, here is the link to the podcast and transcript .  We talked about AI, his new book Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins , why he has become more optimistic, how education will have to adjust to smart software, Russian history and Putin, his favorites in Russian and American literature, Tarkovsky, his favorite city to play chess in, his match against Deep Blue, Ken Rogoff, who are the three most likely challengers to Magnus Carlsen (r...

3. I fear what I call “ the James C. Scott dead end ,” namely that many territories will develop strong enough “state capacity-resistant” units that further Chinas and Romes will be difficult to achieve in terms of the size of the political unit.  Imagine a world like Laos or northern Thailand.  You may think that is a “mountains effect,” but neither the Great Plains nor Africa developed a China or Rome equivalent in earlier times, or much in the way of a very large or effective political unit. ...

3. I fear what I call “ the James C. Scott dead end ,” namely that many territories will develop strong enough “state capacity-resistant” units that further Chinas and Romes will be difficult to achieve in terms of the size of the political unit.  Imagine a world like Laos or northern Thailand.  You may think that is a “mountains effect,” but neither the Great Plains nor Africa developed a China or Rome equivalent in earlier times, or much in the way of a very large or effective political unit. ...

The author is Richard Rothstein, and the subtitle of this excellent and important book is the apt A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America .  The upshot is that twentieth century segregation had a lot more to do with government restrictions — and not just government toleration — than many of us had thought.  Here is one bit of many:

Chris Twomey, XTC: Chalkhills and Children .

Johnny Rogan, The Byrds: Timeless Flight Revisited, The Sequel , get the full-length edition, not the much shorter 1980 volume.

1. My Cato podcast on The Complacent Class .  And Ben Sasse on how to raise an American adult .  I am excited to read Ben’s forthcoming book .

Shahab Ahmed, Before Orthodoxy: The Satanic Verses of Early Islam , “…the early Muslim community believed almost universally that the Satanic verses incident was a true historical fact.”  Ahmed, a brilliant scholar at Harvard, passed away in 2015, here is a short appreciation .  If they wrote books for me, someone would be working on “Islam and Strauss” right now.

After Piketty: The Agenda for Economics and Inequality , edited by Heather Boushey, J. Bradford DeLong, and Marshall Steinbaum, collects many essays on the Piketty book and also on the topic more generally.

Hugh Nibley, Approaching Zion , is a series of essays on society and theology from one of the Mormon “grandmasters.”

Stephen Ellis, This Present Darkness: A History of Nigerian Organized Crime , is one of the better books on that country: “…there are even private colleges in Lagos offering courses in credit card fraud and advance-fee fraud.”

4. Duff McDonald, The Golden Passport: Harvard Business School, the Limits of Capitalism, and the Moral Failure of the MBA Elite . “In the early 1920s, HBS was still without its own buildings at Harvard, faculty were crammed together in cramped offices, and classrooms were scattered around Harvard Yard.”  This is a remarkably clear and engaging survey of its subject matter, the main drawback being it never explains the rise of HBS in terms of…management, as HBS itself might do so.  There is thus...

3. Richard A. Posner, The Federal Judiciary: Strengths and Weaknesses .  This is a grumpy book , but I don’t mean that in a grumpy kind of way, as I like many grumpy books: “The dominant theme of this book has been judicial standpattism — more precisely, the stubborn refusal of the judiciary to adapt to modernity.”  By the end, Posner gives the federal judiciary a grade between B and B+, I was surprised it was so high.

2. W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice, Letters from Iceland .  More of a mutual travelogue, with alternating contributions, than a series of letters, one learns that even in 1936: “There is little stigma attached to illegitimacy.  Bastards are brought up on an equal footing with legitimate children of the family.”  Furthermore, “All chocolate or sweets should be bought in London.”  During the trip they run into Goering, yes the Goering.