Recently Mentioned Books

Alan Manning, Why Immigration Policy is Hard and How to Make it Better is a thoughtful and balanced look at its topic, recommended.

Herbert Breslin and Anne Midgette, The King and I: The Uncensored Tale of Luciano Pavarotti’s Rise to Fame by his Manager, Friend, and Sometime Adversary .  Usually people tell me books like this are “delightful,” and then they bore me to tears.  This one actually is fantastically fun.  “To tell the truth, though, Luciano didn’t care about the money at the beginning.  In the early years, he never asked me how much he was going to get paid for a recital.  He had only one condition: it had to be s...

Michael Wachtel, Viacheslav Ivanov: A Symbolist Life .  615 pp. of what Russian/Soviet cultural life was like in the early 20th century.  Focuses on broader strands, rather than just the most famous names.  Ivanov today is largely forgotten, but he was at the time arguably the most influential figure of that period.  “They were mostly a bunch of nuts” is one of my takeaways.

Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with him.  We will focus on our mutual readings of Shakespearer’s Measure for Measure , with Henry taking the lead.  But I also will ask him about the value of literature, Jane Austen, Adam Smith, Bleak House, his book on late bloomers , and more.

Patrick : In 1925, Ortega y Gasset said “modern art, on the other hand, has the masses against it, and this will always be so since it is unpopular in essence; even more, it is antipopular.” Sagmeister and Walsh argue that we’ve stopped trying to produce beautiful work, and Nicholas Boys-Smith shows empirically that modern buildings are substantially less favored than designs that respect the specific character of the place. So, what are new directions forward? What is new and also beautiful?

The author is Philippe Sands and the subtitle is On Impunity, Pinochet in England, and a Nazi in Patagonia .  This book made many “best of the year” lists, but at first I resisted buying and reading it, fearing it was just more mood affiliation on Pinochet.  In reality it is highly substantive, not just deserving of a place on my best non-fiction of the year list , but likely in the top ten of that list.  It has the narrative sweep of a good novel, and is profound on the following topics: the na...

That is from Mansfield’s forthcoming book The Rise and Fall of Rational Control .

You will find a different intersection of topic areas in Dominic Roser, David Zhang, and J.D. Bauman, All the Lives You Can Change: Effective Altruism for Christians .

Alvaro Rivas, Marx in the Age of AI: How Artificial Intelligence Reshapes Value, Class, and Ideology is a short but serious look as to how Marxian concepts might apply to AI, for instance whether surplus value will be earned on the AIs, or for that matter on non-human animals.

There is Kevin Kelly, Colors of Asia: A Visual Journey, Photos and Design .

For those interested in the longer term, there is Hilary Greaves, Jacob Barrett, and David Thorstad, editors, Essays on Longtermism: Present Action for the Distant Future .

4. Richard H. Davis, Religions of Early India: A Cultural History .  A very useful background read for understanding later Indian history and religions, as well as the more general spread of religion throughout the southern regions of Asia.  Avoids the common mistake of becoming too obscure on these topics.

3. Arindrajit Dube, The Wage Standard: What’s Wrong in the Labor Market and How to Fix It .  Dube notes his main theme is that employers have discretion in setting the real wage. A good overview of his work in labor economics.  I would stress that if you think “tight labor markets” are good for workers, you should be obsessed with doing lots to favor capital.

2. Elizabeth Alker, Everything We Do is Music: How 20th-Century Classical Music Shaped Pop .  A very good and readable book on this interaction, with excellent discussions of Donna Summer, Stevie Wonder, La Monte Young, and Penderecki, among many others.

1. I have been reading in the history of archaeology, and have profited from Eric H. Cline, Three Stones Make a Wall: The Story of Archaeology , which is a very good introduction to what the subtitle claims.  There is also Toby Wilkinson, A World Beneath the Sands: The Golden Age of Egyptology , and Jason Thompson, Wonderful Things: A History of Egyptology, volume 2, The Golden Age: 1881-1914 .

1. I have been reading in the history of archaeology, and have profited from Eric H. Cline, Three Stones Make a Wall: The Story of Archaeology , which is a very good introduction to what the subtitle claims.  There is also Toby Wilkinson, A World Beneath the Sands: The Golden Age of Egyptology , and Jason Thompson, Wonderful Things: A History of Egyptology, volume 2, The Golden Age: 1881-1914 .

1. I have been reading in the history of archaeology, and have profited from Eric H. Cline, Three Stones Make a Wall: The Story of Archaeology , which is a very good introduction to what the subtitle claims.  There is also Toby Wilkinson, A World Beneath the Sands: The Golden Age of Egyptology , and Jason Thompson, Wonderful Things: A History of Egyptology, volume 2, The Golden Age: 1881-1914 .

The book is interesting throughout, recommended.

She has a new book out Thomas More: A Life .

Tom MacTague, Between the Waves: The Hidden History of a Very British Revolution 1945-2016 .

Ken Belson, Every Day is Sunday: How Jerry Jones, Robert Kraft, and Roger Goodell Turned the NFL into a Cultural & Economic Juggernaut.

Strongly recommended, Dan and I had so much fun we kept going for about an hour and forty minutes.  And of course you should buy and read Dan’s bestselling book Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future .

WANG: Tyler, what does it say about us that you and I have generally a lot of similar interests in terms of, let’s call it books, music, all sorts of things, but when it comes to particular categories of things, we oppose each other diametrically. I much prefer Anna Karenina to War and Peace . I prefer Buddenbrooks to Magic Mountain . Here again, you oppose me. What’s the deal?

WANG: Tyler, what does it say about us that you and I have generally a lot of similar interests in terms of, let’s call it books, music, all sorts of things, but when it comes to particular categories of things, we oppose each other diametrically. I much prefer Anna Karenina to War and Peace . I prefer Buddenbrooks to Magic Mountain . Here again, you oppose me. What’s the deal?

WANG: Tyler, what does it say about us that you and I have generally a lot of similar interests in terms of, let’s call it books, music, all sorts of things, but when it comes to particular categories of things, we oppose each other diametrically. I much prefer Anna Karenina to War and Peace . I prefer Buddenbrooks to Magic Mountain . Here again, you oppose me. What’s the deal?