Recently Mentioned Books

That is from Charles Seife’s new book Hawking Hawking: The Selling of a Scientific Celebrity .

One of my favorite CWTs in some time.  And here is Sarah’s book Archaeology from Space: How the Future Shapes Our Past .

5. Natsume Soseki, Kokoro .  From 1914, very retro in its aesthetic, it deals with modernization, the nature of friendship, and yes “the meaning of life.”  Simple and charming in a way that contemporary authors find difficult to match.  From 1984 to 2004 the author appeared on the Japanese one thousand yen note.

4. Christine Perkell, editor, Reading Vergil’s Aeneid: An Interpretative Guide , and David Quint, Virgil’s Double Cross: Design and Meaning in the Aeneid . Two books, excellent in their own right, and an antidote to the common view that everything in the humanities is bankrupt these days, or just “French theory,” or whatever.  Of course you have to read them at the same time you are studying The Aeneid.

4. Christine Perkell, editor, Reading Vergil’s Aeneid: An Interpretative Guide , and David Quint, Virgil’s Double Cross: Design and Meaning in the Aeneid . Two books, excellent in their own right, and an antidote to the common view that everything in the humanities is bankrupt these days, or just “French theory,” or whatever.  Of course you have to read them at the same time you are studying The Aeneid.

3. Eric Herschthal, The Science of Abolition: How Slaveholders Became the Enemies of Progress .  A good survey of the scientific arguments against slavery, covering Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Rush, the Lunar Society, and the technologists, among others.  The 2021 gloss would be “the Progress Studies people were especially anti-slavery.”  But why so little about the economists such as Smith, Malthus, and Mill, among others, all strongly opposed to slavery?

2. Jesse Singal, The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can’t Cure Our Social Ills .  An overdue and very well-executed look at how many of the problems in social psychology run deeper than just the replication crisis.  It covers topics of self-help books, posing and power, superpredators, bias tests, and much more.  It seems the core problem is that if the general public cares about an area, it is much harder to get accurate information about those same questions — I have noticed the same tendencies...

1. Cat Jarman, River Kings: A New History of the Vikings from Scandinavia to the Silk Roads .  An excellent history of what the title claims, starting from an archaeological point of view and incorporating many of the latest discoveries.  The book is especially good at telling the reader how we know what we know about the Vikings: “Sweden has the highest quantity of Islamic dirhams in the whole of Europe after Russia.”

By Julia Galef, forthcoming, pre-order here .

Here is the full post, ungated , Ross will be doing free Substack for a limited time.  Ross’s The Decadent Society is coming out soon in paperback , and it a new subtitle and Ross says plenty of new and original material.

Isaac Asimov’s New Guide to Science . I read that when I was 13 or 14 and thought it was just amazing. (I was an exchange student in Germany at the time. I didn’t learn much German but I did have my eyes opened to many aspects of science that I previously knew nothing about!) Some of John Gribbin’s books , like In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat , really inspired me. Douglas Hofstadter — especially Metamagical Themas . (I read GEB when I was a teenager but found it a bit of a slog.) But, honestly, I...

The question, then, is which prediction markets might prove most useful. Nobel Laureate economist Robert J. Shiller has promoted the idea of prediction markets in GDP, but most people face major risks at a more local, less aggregated level. One of the risks I face, for example, concerns the revenue of the university where I teach. This year enrollments rose slightly even though U.S. GDP fell sharply. So a GDP-based hedge probably is not very useful to me.

5. Ian Leslie, Conflicted: How Productive Disagreements Lead to Better Outcomes .  A good popular science book on exactly what the title promises: “In this book, we’ll learn from experts who are highly skilled at getting the most out of highly charged encounters: interrogators, cops, divorce mediators, therapists, diplomats, psychologists. These professionals know how to get something valuable – information, insight, ideas—from the toughest, most antagonistic conversations.”

4. Jason L. Riley, Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell .  I liked this book OK enough, and certainly read it with interest, but somehow it never brought Sowell to life for me (I have never met him), nor did it illuminate the work enough (what did Sowell claim about Say’s Law anyway?  And why?  Why is his book on late-talking children important for understanding his broader body of work?  Why was he so hawkish on foreign policy?  What might he have gotten wrong?).  The most interesting parts a...

3. Michel Foucault, Confessions of the Flesh, The History of Sexuality, Volume 4 , published posthumously just now.  I only pawed through this one a bit, but it really didn’t seem so interesting.  I still think of The Order of Things , Discipline and Punish , and The Birth of the Clinic as Foucault’s best and most enduring books.

2. Ruth Goodman, The Domestic Revolution: How the Introduction of Coal into Victorian Homes Changed Everything .  Most books of this ilk are good either on the super-micro or super-macro scale, but this volume succeeds on both levels.  Under Queen Elizabeth I, London became the first place to move away from burning peat, wood, and dung in homes to burning coal.  How did that supercharge the later Industrial Revolution?  How did it matter for household chores and for that matter recipes?  Recomme...

1. Kevin Donnelly, Adolphe Quetelet, Social Physics, & the Average Men of Science, 1796-1874 .  The Belgian Quetelet was one of the pioneers of applying statistics to the social sciences, and he had a long-running and fascinating career obsessed with astronomy, crime, opera, jokes, and short essays, among many other things.  He developed the notion of an “average man” in a statistical distribution, the error curve as a distribution formula, and much more.  The concept and measurement of BMI come...

Patricia Fara is a historian of science at Cambridge University and well-known for her writings on women in science. Her forthcoming book, Life After Gravity: Isaac Newton’s London Caree r , details the life of the titan of the so-called Scientific Revolution after his famous (though perhaps mythological) discovery under the apple tree. Her work emphasizes science as a long, continuous process composed of incremental contributions–in which women throughout history have taken a crucial part–rathe...

5. What I really had to teach was methods for hard work to improve your game consistently over time.  That might include for instance annotating a game or position “blind,” and then comparing your work to the published analysis of a world-class player, a’ la Alexander Kotov’s Think Like a Grandmaster .  I did try to teach that, but the demand for this service was not always so high.

7. For me at least the Andrew Farrant book on Hayek and Mill and liberalism was priced at zero for Kindle .

The author is Robert Paarlberg and the subtitle is Straight Talk About the Food We Grow and Eat .  This book is a refreshing change of pace from most of the other food books, which tend to be illiterate on the economic side.  Here is one excerpt:

I will be doing a Conversation with her, most of all about her forthcoming and very good translation of Virgil’s Aeneid .  She is a professor of classics at the University of Chicago, and here is Wikipedia :

That is from James Shreeve’s The Genome War , here is more detail from the NYT in 1999 , and for the pointer I thank Patrick Collison.  Of course that is the same Afeyan Noubar who co-founded Moderna and now chairs it, here is my earlier CWT with him .

Claire Lehmann of Quillette fame and others have edited the new Panics and Persecutions: 20 Tales of Excommunication in the Digital Age .

4. Margarette Lincoln, London and the 17th Century: The Making of the World’s Greatest City .  Is it so terrible to read another book about the world’s greatest city?  The emphasis is on London as a city of war, turmoil, and crime, rather than triumphalism.  It will be a shame when the English language of that era is no longer intelligible to us without a translation, because currently it is our very closest connection with a fundamentally different worldview.