Recently Mentioned Books

2. Andy Grundberg, How Photography Became Contemporary Art .  How does a whole genre rise from also-ran status to a major (the major?) form of contemporary art?  This is an excellent history with nice color plates and it is also a causal account.  I liked this sentence, among others: “Surprisingly, the acceptance of color photography had happened earlier in the art world than in the so-called art photography world.”  Polaroid had a significant role as well.

1. Susan Bernofsky, Clairvoyant of the Small: The Life of Robert Walser .  I believe you need to have read Walser first, but if so this is a far better biography than what you might have expected the English-speaking world to have produced.  It is also an implicit portrait of where pre-WWI Europe went wrong, the history of micro-writing, and a paean to general weirdness, noting that Walser in both his life and writing is inexplicable to this day.

Definitely recommended.  And I am very happy to recommend Dana’s latest book (and indeed all of his books) Studying with Miss Bishop: Memoirs from a Young Writer’s Life .

It is called Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad , and so far it is very good.  Here is one bit:

A good book, recent winner of the National Book Award for non-fiction, the author is Tom Zoellner and the subtitle is The Revolt that Ended Slavery in the British Empire .  Here is one excerpt about Jamaica, the central theater for the book:

The new Peter Boettke book is The Struggle for a Better World , which is his best statement of classical liberalism to date.

5. Matthew E. Kahn, Adapting to Climate Change: Markets and the Management of an Uncertain Future .  I read this some time ago, it is just published, here is my blurb: “Are you looking for an approach that recognizes the costs of climate change, and approaches the entire question with an economic and political sanity?  Matthew E. Kahn’s new book is then essential reading.”

4. Eric Berger, Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX .  A fun and informative treatment of what the title promises.  I hadn’t know that Musk met personally with the first three thousand employees of SpaceX, to make sure the company was hiring the right kind of people.  He thought he could detect a good hire within fifteen minutes of conversation.

3. S.M. Ulam, Adventures of a Mathematician .  Memoir involving many of the 20th century’s top mathematicians and physics types, including von Neumann, Gamow, Banach, Edward Teller, and Ulam himself, among others.  Scintillating on every page, as a historical chronicle, as biography, and as a look into how a brilliant mathematician thinks.

2. Walter Isaacson, The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race .  This excellent book is exactly as you think it is going to be.

1. Devaki Jain, The Brass Notebook .  What is it like to grow up in a Tamil Brahmin family, be molested by relatives and Nobel Prize winners, and go on to be an economist?  Short and extremely readable.  The personal tale is very charming, the politics (Nyerere and Castro, never repudiated) are not.

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...