Recently Mentioned Books

Anton Howes, Arts & Minds: How the Royal Society of Arts Changed a Nation .

1. Anton Howes for his Substack Age of Invention .  He is a historian of invention, often but not exclusively focusing on the eighteenth century, here is Anton on Twitter .  As a separate matter, don’t forget Anton’s excellent recent book Arts & Minds: How the Royal Society of Arts Changed a Nation .

Recommended, you can order here .

5. Slavoj Žižek , Hegel in a Wired Brain .  How do transhumanism, Elon Musk/Neuralink, the Singularity, Book of Genesis, and Hegel all fit together?  There is only one person who could pull off such a book, noting this version is dense and not for the uninitiated.  Here is one squib: “Police is closer to civil society than state; it is a kind of representative of state in civil society, but for this very reason it has to be experienced as an external force, not an inner ethical power.”  If you t...

4. Ronald Bailey and Marian L. Tupy, Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know .  Lovely visuals, blurb from Pinker, the curves slope upward, get the picture?  Let’s hope they’re right!  Ultimately I find this kind of exercise less convincing than I used to, instead preferring a broader theory that also accounts for what I perceive to be a growing disorientation.  Which brings us to the next title…

3. Hermione Lee, Tom Stoppard: A Life .  So many pages, and perhaps this will not be surpassed soon.  Yet it never quite tells you how he got to be so smart, or how his intellectual development proceeded, or even what his smartness consists of.  So I can’t say I liked it.  By the way, for those of you who don’t know, it seems to me that Stoppard is one of the smartest people and also the most important living playwright, most of all for anyone interested in intellectual history.

2. Robert Townsend, Distributed Ledgers: Design and Regulation of Financial Infrastructure and Payment Systems . Bitcoin and crypto yes, but the more fundamental concept in this book is…distributed ledgers, which include Thai rice allocation schemes and Mesopotamia circa 4000 B.C.  It is highly intelligent and well done, but somehow I think books like this work better when they are more speculative and future-oriented.

1. Bruno Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climactic Regime .  Mostly not about climate per se, rather how we are failing at being true materialists: “In a sense, Trump’s election confirms, for the rest of the world, the end of a politics oriented toward an identifiable goal.  Trumpian politics is not “post-truth,” it is post-politics — that is, literally, a politics with no object , since it rejects the world that it claims to inhabit.”  Mostly interesting, as one expects from Latour, ...

You can pre-order here .  Here is Virginia’s adapted WSJ essay .

Jason Brennan, Good Work If You Can Get It: How to Succeed in Academia .  My blurb said “The one book to read about trying to become a professor.”

Adam Thierer, Evasive Entrepreneurs & the Future of Governance: How Innovation Improves Economies and Governments , extends the important idea of permissionless innovation.

4. Les Payne and Tamara Payne, The Dead Are Arising: the Life of Malcolm X .  I pawed through this book, and it gave off signals of being high quality.  But somehow reading it didn’t hold my interest.  I then googled to a few reviews, but I rapidly realized (again) that such reviews are these days untrustworthy.  Try this NYT review , starting with this sentence: “Les Payne’s “The Dead Are Arising” arrives in late 2020, bequeathed to an America choked by racism and lawlessness.”  The reviewer ma...

3. Donald W. Braben, Scientific Freedom: The Elixir of Civilization , Stripe Press reprint.  Here is the book’s home page .

2. Tobias S. Harris, The Iconoclast: Shinzo Abe and the New Japan (UK Amazon listing, I paid the shipping charge, here is the U.S. listing ). Yes a good biography of Abe, but most of all a book to make Japanese politics seem normal, rather than something connected to a country with a Kakuhidou movement .

1. Martin Amis, Inside Story: A Novel .  Except it is a memoir rather than a novel, definitely fun, and has received excellent reviews in Britain, less so in the U.S.  Does not require that you know or like the novels of Amis.  Christopher Hitchens plays a critical role in the narrative.  Idea-rich, but somehow I don’t quite care, and this one feels like it would have been a much better book twenty years ago.

Zachary is first and foremost the author of the New York Times bestselling The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes .  Here is part of a broader bio:

You can pre-order here .

I am very happy to recommend this book, especially to MR readers, the full title is The Polymath: A Cultural History from Leonardo da Vinci to Susan Sontag , by Peter Burke.

His Capitalism and the Permissive Society is now but a shell of a listing on Amazon, but I can recall Roy Childs excitedly telling me about the book.  Back then, it seemed like the way forward for liberalism, a way to develop a truly emancipatory vision of free market capitalism.  Now all that seems so long ago.

That is the new book by Kevin Davies, and the subtitle is The CRISPR Revolution and the New Era of Genome Editing .  So far I am on p.74, but it is one of the best science books I have read in some while, maybe the best this year.  Excerpt:

Here is Wilson’s book on non-linear pricing : “What do phone rates, frequent flyer programs, and railroad tariffs all have in common? They are all examples of nonlinear pricing. Pricing is nonlinear when it is not strictly proportional to the quantity purchased. The Electric Power Research Institute has commissioned Robert Wilson to review the various facets of nonlinear pricing.”  Yes, he is a business school guy.  Here is his survey article on electric power pricing , a whole separate directio...

That is from Paul Levy’s book Moore: G.E. Moore and the Cambridge Apostles .  Here is more on Titi , also known as Hortense, who studied with Bartok and received numerous letters from him.  And here is Scott Sumner on Hawtrey , one of the great monetary economists.

Overall, it is striking to me just how much substance there is in this book per page — a rarity to be treasured!  You can order it here .

First, I don’t think “liberals” is exactly the right word here, but I’m not going to relitigate that one now. Second, as I’ve argued in my The Age of the Infovore (and in some forthcoming writings you haven’t seen yet), I don’t think “mental health condition” is appropriate in this context.  Furthermore, what are called “mental health conditions” often are sources of insight and can be positively correlated with talent.

Due out November 17 , I am pleased I paid the extra shipping costs to get it from the UK .