Recently Mentioned Books

Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America’s Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite .  Remember how I used to say “The only thing worse than the Very Serious People are the Not Very Serious People?”  Well, you should have listened.  I have the same fear with the current critiques of meritocracy.  That said, this is the book that does the most to pile on, against meritocracy, noting that much less space is devoted to possible solutions.  Th...

I enjoyed Eric Foner, The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution .

Charles King, Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century , covers Boas, Mead, Benedict, and others.  Not enough of the material was new to me, though I expect for many readers this is quite a useful book.

6. Paul Rabinow, Making PCR: A Story of Biotechnology .  PCR is the polymerase chain reaction, and this is a genuinely good anthropological study of how scientific progress comes about, noting there is plenty of lunacy in this story, including love, LSD, and much more.  There should be more books like this, this one dates from the 1990s but I am still hoping more people copy it.  Via Ray Lopez.

5. Kirk Goldsberry, Sprawlball: A Visual Tour of the New Era of the NBA .  A highly analytical but also entertaining look at the rise of the three point shot, the history of Steph Curry, how LeBron James turned into such a good player, and much more, with wonderful visuals and graphics.

4. Jason Brennan and Phillip Magness, Cracks in the Ivory Tower: The Moral Mess of Higher Education .  Hard-hitting and courageous, and I can attest that much of it is absolutely on the mark.  Still, I did wish for a bit more of a comparative perspective.  Are universities more hypocritical than other institutions?  Might the non-signaling, learning rate of return on higher education still be positive and indeed considerable?  I am not nearly as negative as the authors are, while nonetheless fee...

3. Ethan Mordden, On Streisand: An Opinionated Guide .  Should there not be a fanboy book like this about every person of some renown?  Insightful and witty throughout, for instance: “…we comprehend Streisand from what she does — yet a few personal bits have jumped out at us through her wall of privacy.  One is the “Streisand Effect”…which we can restate as “When famous people complain about something, they tend to make it famous, too.”

2. Aysha Akhtar, Our Symphony with Animals: On Health, Empathy, and Our Shared Destinies .  An unusual mix of memoir, animal compassion, and childhood horrors, I found this very moving.

1. Robert W. Poole, Jr. Rethinking America’s Highways: A 21st Vision for Better Infrastructure .  Highways can and will get much better, largely through greater private sector involvement.  He is probably right, and there is much substance in this book.

Here is a Washington Post obituary .  Yes, he did write a bestselling tribute to Churchill, but more importantly he was one of the last representatives of a particular central European notion of history and culture.  I much prefer the Times of Israel obituary .  Here is Wikipedia . The Last European War and Budapest 1900: A Historical Portrait of a City and its Culture are two of my favorite books by him.

That is my recent essay , adapted in Foreign Policy , from my new book Big Business: Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero .  Here is the opening:

That is my new opinion piece for The Washington Post , derived from my Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero .  Here is one excerpt:

5. There is an extended response to Garett Jones on IQ which I do not feel I can summarize well.  Toward the end, it is noted that babies adopted from poorer countries into richer countries typically do very well later in life.

Caplan and Weinersmith, in their splendid forthcoming graphic novel , present some rebuttals to the “cultural critique” of open borders.  For instance (and here I am presenting their views):

It will be out in October, you can pre-order it here .

Those numbers are reproduced in “Productivity in Emerging-Market Economies: Slowdown or Stagnation?”, by José de Gregorio, in the new and interesting volume Facing Up To Low Productivity Growth , edited by Adam S. Posen and Jeromin Zettelmeyer.

Also in my pile is Julius Caesar, The War for Gaul , a new translation by James J. O’Donnell.  I can’t speak to this translation, but the book is a winner.

Emily Oster, Cribsheet: A Data-Driven Guide to Better, More Relaxed Parenting, From Birth to Preschool is in my pile, it may someday be revised to cover older children.

Joshua Specht, Red Meat Republic: A Hoof-to-Table History of How Beef Changed America .  A good economic history of the “cattle-beef complex”: “Abilene, Kansas was the first major cattle town.”

Ethan Pollock, Without the Banya We Would Perish: A History of the Russian Bathhouse , delivers what it promises.  The coup against Gorbachev was plotted in a banya, I learned.

4. Broken Stars: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation , translated and edited by Ken Liu.  I found the “hit rate” in this collection to be slightly over fifty percent, which is rare for a science fiction anthology, plus even the lesser stories give one some insight into China, so definitely recommended, at least if you think you might like it.  But don’t read this before The Three-Body Problem .

3. Samme Chittum, Last Days of the Concorde: The Crash of Flight 4590 and the End of Supersonic Passenger Travel .  An excellent book on why the Concorde was in fact abandoned.  I hadn’t realized it was never so safe in the first place:  “They soon learned that Concordes operated by British Airways and Air France had been involved in a range of tire failures over the years.  No fewer than 57 such incidents had taken place since Concordes began flying in 1976, 47 were either burst or inflated tir...

2. John L. Rudolph, How We Teach Science: What’s Changed, and Why It Matters .  I found this book boring , but it is the kind of book people should be writing and I suspect some readers and researchers will find it very useful.  A fact-rich, reference-laden history of American science education, still by the end I still was looking for more organizational principles.

1. Patrick Bergemann, Judge Thy Neighbor: Denunciations in the Spanish Inquisition, Romanov Russia, and Nazi Germany .  A very specific, useful, and interesting account of actual denunciation practices during the above-mentioned episodes.  During the Inquisition, there was general immunity given to most denouncers, you can imagine the resulting incentives.  This book is becoming more relevant than it ought to be.

That is from Walter Johnson, Soul By Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market .