→ September 1, 2018
→ By

Stick to baseball, 9/1/18.

My one Insider/ESPN+ piece this week ranked the best tools among MLB players, which is probably my least favorite piece to write each year. And I held a Klawchat this week.

I reviewed the incredible new board game Everdell for Paste this week. It’s got a Stone Age vibe, but adds so much more to that worker placement framework, and the artwork is some of the best I have ever seen.

And now, the links…

  • Longreads first: There’s a new health scam out there, targeting desperate people like cancer patients, that claims that food-grade hydrogen peroxide can cure many ailments. There is no such thing as food grade hydrogen peroxide, which has never been proven to treat any disease and is very, very dangerous to consume at even moderate doses.
  • Esquire looks at the imminent global water crisis, caused by overuse, pollution, climate change, and unwise or even deleterious government policies. This, not Islamist terrorism, is the greatest threat to global stability for this century.
  • Alan Rusbridger, former editor-in-chief of the Guardian, has a new book coming out titled Breaking News, on how the business of news has broken the concept of news; his old paper has a lengthy excerpt that focuses on a major phone-hacking scandal within Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.
  • Recode’s Kara Swisher interviewed OB/GYN and GOOP debunker Dr. Jen Gunter, which you listen to as a podcast or read in a transcript. It’s funny and also very telling about how patients use “Dr. Google,” and how people like Gwyneth Paltrow take advantage of the gullible and the desperate to line their own pockets.
  • Mother Jones investigates the broken federal student loan forgiveness program, which has had problems for years but has taken a bigger dive off a cliff under Betsy DeVos.
  • A few weeks ago I posted a story about a female NYU professor accused of harassing a male graduate student, after which many women stood up for her, the predator, not the victim. A graduate student who studied with that professor writes in the Chronicle of Higher Education that she believes the accuser, saying that Professor Avital Ronell is a bully while questioning her academic and feminist bona fides.
  • Conservative writer, evangelical Christian, and Iraq War veteran David French and his wife adopted a two-year old girl from Ethiopia in 2010. He writes for the Atlantic how he has seen attitudes of Americans shift towards hate against his daughter, his wife, and himself for daring to cross racial lines in the name of love. He also covers some policy changes from the current and previous Administrations that have discouraged such adoptions from outside of the United States.
  • BlacKkKlansman includes a line from David Duke where he mentions being a friend of technology pioneer and Nobel laureate William Shockley, one of the inventors of the transistor and founder of Shockley Semiconductor (from which the Traitorous Eight left to found Fairchild Semiconductor). I had no idea that Shockley became an inveterate racist shitstain and eugenics proponent.
  • The “age of privacy nihilism” is upon us, although I’d argue nothing has really changed – we’ve given away our data for decades, in exchange for the occasional coupon for 50 cents off Nutter Butters.
  • Mollie Tibbetts was murdered by a man because she dared to say no; that man was Latino, possibly in the U.S. illegally, so within hours of her murder, the white supremacists in power chose to politicize her death (which, I was told, we’re not supposed to do when a white man shoots up a school or a church). Her family is having none of it, and her father came out to show his gratitude for and support of the Iowan Latino community.
  • The Nordic countries’ economies are often held up, with good reason, as exemplars of Western democracies that use broad social safety nets and other progressive policies to produce high employment rates with low rates of poverty, homelessness, and crime. They also tend to score very high on economic “happiness indices,” but the BBC points out that such rankings obscure increasing mental health issues in those countries, especially among younger citizens.
  • The collapse of the Venezuelan state and economy has led to a growing refugee crisis in neighboring countries, with this Washington Post article focusing on the Brazilian town of Boa Vista.
  • The ongoing European measles epidemic has killed 37 people and sickened 41,000 – and remember, children can survive measles only to die of the virus a decade later due to an incurable condition called subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE).
  • Roland’s Market, the new Phoenix restaurant and collaboration of Chris Bianco and the Holguins (Tacos Chiwas), earned a very positive review from the Arizona Republic.
  • The Arizona Republican Party packed its Supreme Court, and just got a big win from their efforts, as the Court blocked a ballot measure that could have funded state schools with an extra $690 million. The proposed question had over a quarter of a million signatures. The governor who stuffed the Supreme Court is facing a challenge this November from David Garcia, a Democrat, a veteran, and an education professor at Arizona State. If he wins, he’ll be the first Latinx governor of Arizona in 44 years.
  • A neuroscientist discusses how skimming rather than deep reading can alter our brains for the worse.
  • This is simply perfect.

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→ July 30, 2018
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The Emperor of All Maladies.

Siddhartha Mukherjee, an Indian-born American oncologist who trained at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, won the Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction for his 2010 tome The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, his first book and an enormous undertaking – an exhaustive attempt to chronicle the history of the disease itself and the ongoing scientific fight to cure it. Interspersed with anecdotes from his own oncology work, including several patients he treated – some who survived the disease, and many who did not – Emperor covers a truly incredible amount of ground, often with more detail than I needed to understand the story, and presents a sobering picture of how endless the efforts to treat and cure cancer will be, given the disease’s nature and ability to defeat our best weapons against it.

Mukherjee goes back to ancient Egypt and Greece to give us the earliest known examples of the disease’s appearance and explain how it got its name – it’s from the Latin word meaning ‘crab,’ and the word carcinoma comes from the Greek word for the same – but the bulk of the history in this book starts in the mid-19th century with the first real identification of a specific cancer, leukemia. The story wends its way through the late part of that century with the advent of radical mastectomies to remove breast cancer, disfiguring surgeries that would remove many muscles beyond the breasts and that were the brainchild of the coke-addicted surgeon William Halsted, who also conceived the modern residency program for new doctors that forces them to operate without sleep. We get the discovery that radiation causes cancer, and the related discovery that it might treat cancer as well, as would certain drugs that we now put under the umbrella of chemotherapy. Mukherjee takes the science thread all the way through what were, at the time, the latest developments in oncology treatment and research, including the ongoing identification of oncogenes (genes that, when switched ‘on,’ can produce cancer), proto-oncogenes (genes that become oncogenes with mutations), and anti-oncogenes (tumor-suppressing genes); and therapies that target specific cancer subtypes based on their genotypes – such as Herceptin, which has proven exceptionally effective against breast and other cancers cancer with the HER2 oncogene.

The science bits – my favorite, of course – are interspersed with much of the story of the American public policy fight over cancer, which led to a so-called “War on Cancer,” the passage of the 1971 National Cancer Act to boost the National Cancer Institute, and many breathless pronouncements that we were mere years away from finding a cure. The narrative lags at several points here – the origin story of the Jimmy Fund’s “Jimmy,” real name Einar Gustafson, is the big exception – although it serves as a reminder of how credulous the world was, including early researchers into oncology, about our ability to ‘beat’ or cure cancer. Cancer is not just one disease; it is many, probably hundreds, of diseases that all share the common characteristic of abnormal cell growth, but that can differ substantially by their origin in the body, and even for a specific source or organ can come in vastly diverse forms that require different, targeted treatments. The above-mentioned Herceptin works on HER2+ cancers, mostly breast cancer but sometimes appearing in gastric or ovarian cancers; it will be ineffective against HER2-negative cancers. Someone with ‘breast cancer’ can have any of several forms of the disease – each of which will respond in totally different ways to treatments. This is good news and bad news; the more we know about specific forms of cancer, the better that scientists can come up with targeted treatments to attack them, but there are also far more forms of cancer than we’d ever realized in the history of our fight against the disease. The single ‘cure for cancer’ is probably a chimera, because cancer is not just one thing, but a common attribute of many diseases, and stopping that attribute – rampant cell division – would kill regular cells too.

The Emperor of All Maladies is kind of a depressing read, between the awful outcomes for some of the patients described, but also because the outlook for the future of the disease is not that great. Yes, the medical world continues to search for and find treatments for specific cancers, some of which are the most effective drugs in the history of oncology, but it’s also clear that if your specific cancer isn’t one of those, the medical response is the same drug cocktail approach that has been the norm for decades – better than it was, and with the benefit of drugs to help combat nausea, but still an ordeal for the patient with modest success rates. And finding Herceptin-like advances for all cancers will take many years and billions of dollars that may not be available without a massive public investment. Dr. Mukerjee has put together a remarkable work of research and insight, written with great feeling for the individual patients fighting their cancers, but I left this book feeling worse about the war on cancer than I ever had before.

Next up: Dan Simmons’ The Fall of Hyperion.

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→ May 24, 2018
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A Brief History of Infinity.

Infinity is a big topic, to put it mildly. The mere concept of a limitless quantity has vexed mathematicians, philosophers, and theologians for over two centuries. The Greeks developed some of the first infinite series, some divergent (they approach infinity) and some convergent (they approach a finite number), with Zeno making use of these concepts in some of his famous paradoxes. Galileo is better known for his observations in astronomy and work in optics, but he developed an early paradox that he argued meant that we couldn’t compare the sizes of infinite sets in a meaningful way, showing that, although we know intuitively that there are more integers in total than there are integers that are perfect squares, you can map the integers to the perfect squares in a 1:1 ratio that appears to show that the two sets are the same size. Georg Cantor later explained this paradox in his development of set theory, coining the aleph terminology for infinite sets, and then went mad trying to further his theories of infinity, a math-induced insanity that later afflicted Kurt Gödel in his work on incompleteness. There remain numerous – dare I say infinite? – unsolved problems in mathematics that revolve around infinity itself or whether there are an infinite number of some entity, such as primes or perfect numbers, in the infinite set of whole numbers or integers.

Science writer Brian Clegg attempts to make these topics accessible to the lay reader in his book A Brief History of Infinity, part of the Brief History series from the imprint Constable & Robinson. Rather than delving too far into the mathematics of the infinite, which would require more than passing introductions to set theory, the transfinite numbers, and integral calculus, Clegg focuses on the history of infinity as a concept in math and philosophy, going back to the ancient Greeks, walking through western scholars’ troubles with infinity (and objections from the Church), telling the well-known story of Newton and Leibniz’s fight over “the” calculus, and bringing the reader up through the works of Cantor, Gödel, and other modern mathematicians in illuminating the infinite both large and small. (It’s $6 for the Kindle and $5 for the paperback as I write this.)

Infinity can be inconvenient, but we couldn’t have modern calculus without it, and it comes up repeatedly in other fields including fractal mathematics and quantum physics. Sometimes it’s the infinitely small – the “ghosts of departed quantities” called infinitesimals that Newton and Leibniz required for integration – and sometimes it’s infinitely large, but despite several millennia of attempts to argue infinity out of mathematics, there’s no avoiding its existence and even the necessity of using it. Clegg excels when recounting great controversies over infinity from the history of math, such as the battle between Newton and Leibniz over who invented the calculus, or the battle between Cantor and his former teacher Leopold Kronecker, who disdained not just infinity but even the transcendental numbers (like π, e, or the Hilbert number) and actively worked to prevent Cantor from publishing his seminal papers on set theory.

Clegg’s book won’t likely satisfy the more math-inclined readers who want a crunchier treatment of this topic, especially the recent history of infinity from Cantor forward. Cantor developed modern set theory and published numerous proofs about infinity, proving that there are at least two distinct sets of infinities (the integers, aleph-null, are infinite, but not as numerous as the real numbers, aleph-one; aleph notation measures the cardinality of infinities, not the quantity of infinity itself). I also found Clegg’s discussion of Gödel’s incompleteness theorems rather … um … incomplete, which is understandable given the theorems’ abstract nature, but also meant Gödel earned very little screen time in the book other than the overemphasized parallel between his own descent into insanity and Cantor’s. I was disappointed that he didn’t get into Russell’s paradox*, which is a critical link between Cantor’s work (and Hilbert’s hope for a resolution in favor of completeness) and Gödel’s finding that completeness was impossible.

Let R be the set of all sets that are not members of themselves. If R is not a member of itself, then it must be a member of R … but that produces a contradiction by the definition of R.

Clegg does a much better job than David Foster Wallace did in his own book on infinity, Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity, which tried to get into the mathier stuff but ultimately failed to make the material accessible enough to the reader (and perhaps exposed the limits of Wallace’s knowledge of the topic too). This is a book just about anyone who took one calculus class can follow, and it has enough personal intrigue to hold the reader’s attention. My personal taste in history of science/math books leans towards the more technical or granular, but I wouldn’t use that as an indictment of Clegg’s approach here.

Next up: I’m reading another Nero Wolfe mystery, after which I’ll tackle Michael Ondaatje’s Booker Prize-winning novel The English Patient.

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→ January 4, 2018
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On Immunity.

Eula Biss’ brief 2014 book On Immunity: An Inoculation takes a novel angle on the subject of childhood vaccinations by weaving the science around the subject into her personal experiences as a first-time mother hearing all of the nonsense anti-vaccine arguments out there and finding herself bombarded with information. Biss makes it clear that she is pro-vaccine and pro-science, and that she did get her son vaccinated, but her essay-like style puts the reader on the ground with her as she’s navigating the uncertainties and fears that come with parenthood, which may also give some readers a new window on how new parents get bamboozled by the many charlatans and frauds out there telling them not to vaccinate.

When my daughter was born, vaccinating was never a question for us … but we were shocked to learn that they vaccinate newborns for hepatitis B, a viral infection that is probably best known as a sexually transmitted disease but that can also be transmitted through many other bodily fluids, including blood, so it’s possible for a child to get an infection through exposure from another kid in school or day care. We made the mistake of looking online for information on the hep B vaccine, and found the website for the so-called “National Vaccine Information Center,” a dangerous anti-science group that spreads misinformation about vaccines and, of course, presented horror stories from parents who claimed the hep B vaccine harmed or even killed their babies. (We vaccinated anyway.)

Biss’ recounting of her own meanderings through the world of vaccine information and bullshit felt very familiar to me, as she obviously understands science – her father is a doctor, and she refers to him frequently in the text – but also gives real credence to the fears of the new parent, and how overwhelming all of the information coming at new parents can feel. Biss hits all of the notable cranks, from the NVIC to Andrew Wakefield to Bob Sears (who has been accused of selling medical exemptions for California kids) to well-meaning but clueless parents who talk about “toxins” or “natural” or “organic” as if those terms really mean anything when it comes to health. She walks back through the history of vaccinations, to Edward Jenner’s experiments with cowpox and previous awareness in non-European societies of inoculation techniques, and the associated history of anti-vaxers, a group that once at least had a legitimate complaint because vaccines weren’t regulated for safety or efficacy; in 1901, two separate batches of vaccines caused deadly tetanus outbreaks in St. Louis and Camden, New Jersey. Now, such groups just capitalize on the public’s science ignorance – and fear – to make a few bucks from selling books or “alternative” therapies. (Note: There is no such thing as “alternative medicine.” If it works, it’s medicine.)

Fear is just as much a theme of On Immunity as science, and Biss, unlike many writers (myself included), has quite a bit of empathy for parents who hear (bogus) horror stories of vaccine “injuries” or who see that vaccines contain aluminum (in adjuvants, which make the vaccines more effective) and waver on vaccinating their kids. Failing to vaccinate puts your kids at risk, but also the community as a whole; Biss discusses herd immunity, which was first identified nearly a century ago, and the societal cost of failing to vaccinate, as well as the risk posed to vulnerable populations who can’t be vaccinated, such as newborns, the elderly, or the immune compromised. This understanding tone makes it a better read, I think, for folks who are on the fence about vaccinations; she was essentially preaching to the converted with me, while hardcore denialists won’t bother with the litany of facts she includes or the blithe knockdowns of anti-vax tropes.

Biss is a “professor of instruction” in Northwestern’s English Department and has garnered praise both for On Immunity and her 2009 essay collection Notes from No Man’s Land; she writes here like an essayist, with a strong first-person perspective that allows her to bring the reader inside her head, so to speak, as she became a mother and experienced all of the typical anxieties and moments of panic that come along with new parenthood. It makes the brief book both readable and engrossing, almost as if Biss wanted to slip in a little education – a dash of history, a pinch of immunology – along the way. And the resulting work may do as much or more to address new parents’ fears of vaccines, fears that are unfounded, irrational, but still quite common, as direct attacks on anti-vaxer falsehoods.

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→ September 8, 2017
→ By

Half-Earth.

Biologist E.O. Wilson has won two Pulitzer Prizes for Non-Fiction, including one for, of all things, a textbook on ants, along with numerous other awards for his lengthy bibliography of popular and scholarly works on evolution, sociobiology, ecology, and conservationism. His 2016 book Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life falls into the last category while drawing on multiple fields of expertise to make his case that we should preserve half of the area of the planet for conservation to maintain biodiversity and fight climate change, but for a work by a great scholar and professor, Half-Earth feels half-hearted, as if Wilson knows what he wants to argue but couldn’t be bothered to support his side sufficiently to sway the unconvinced.

The idea of preserving half of the planet, land and sea, for conservation isn’t new nor is it Wilson’s; he credits Tony Hiss with coining the term “half-earth” to describe the concept in a Smithsonian magazine article in 2014. And there’s little doubt that man’s impact on the planet – its environment and the millions of other species on it – has been a net negative for everyone but man, with the pace of change only accelerating as we continue to alter the compositions of the planet’s atmosphere, soil, and water supply. Wilson does well when describing what we might lose or have already lost as a result of our mere presence or our industrial activities, talking about habitats we’ve razed or species we’ve driven to extinction deliberately, through the introductions of invasive species, or through other changes to the environment. But he assumes that the reader will see these losses as significant, or even see them as losses, without sufficiently detailing why it matters that, say, we’re wiping out the world’s rhinoceros population, or various island birds and rodents have been exterminated by the introduction of non-native snakes.

What’s missing even more from the work, however, is a consideration of the costs of an endeavor like the one Wilson is proposing. Man is fairly well distributed across the planet, and setting aside 50% of its land mass for conservation would require resettling hundreds of thousands of people, possibly millions, many of them members of indigenous populations who live in the least-altered environments on the planet. Crowding the planet’s seven billion people (and rising) into less of the space will trade some environmental problems for others, as various forms pollution rise with population density, and many large urban areas already struggle under the weight of their people, with third-world megacities paralyzed by traffic and its attendant problems. Relocating people is expensive, difficult, and traumatic. There’s also the very real question of feeding those seven billion people and supplying them with fresh water, which we’re already struggling to do; if you reserve half of the world’s land and half of its oceans for conservation, those tasks become more difficult and likely more expensive – a cost few people will be willing to bear directly. It might be necessary, but Wilson glosses over the practical problems his solution would create.

There is, however, one good reason to read Half-Earth right now, at least in the United States, where the current federal administration is rolling back environmental protections left and right, including cutting funds for wildlife area acquisition and management. But I thought Elizabeth Kolbert’s Pulitzer-winning book The Sixth Extinction made the same general case more powerfully and thoroughly, describing the current, anthropogenic mass extinction that could rival the K-Pg event for sheer number of species exterminated if we don’t do anything about it. Kolbert goes into greater depth with more concrete examples of how man’s activity has altered the planet and moved species around to extinguish some species and threaten others, including a lengthy discussion of chytrid fungus, a thus-far incurable ailment that is killing off tropical frog species with alarming speed.

I think Wilson also fell into the trap that William Easterley (among others) has identified in charitable and other “good intentions” efforts – aiming impossibly high, so that you can never meet your stated goal. You want to end world hunger? That sounds great, but it’ll never happen, and the only outcome will be the creation of a giant organization that absorbs donations without ever accomplishing much of anything. Micro-efforts yield more tangible results, and increase accountability for workers and donors alike. So while saying “let’s reserve half the planet to save it” is an admirable goal, and may even be the right strategy for the long term, it ain’t happening, and talking about it doesn’t get us any closer to solutions. If you want to help save the planet, work towards small, achievable goals. And right now, that probably means working for change in Washington.

Next up: Nina George’s 2013 novel The Little Paris Bookshop.

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→ July 27, 2017
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The Last Days of Night.

Graham Moore won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 2015 for his work on The Imitation Game, particularly impressive for a first-time screenwriter with just that and one novel under his belt at the time. His second novel, The Last Days of Night, came out last August and just appeared in paperback this spring, and is about as good a work of popular, contemporary fiction as I’ve come across.

Moore takes the term historical novel to a new extreme here, creating a coherent narrative around the War of Currents of the late 1800s – the public dispute over whether the nation’s power grid should run on direct current, favored by Thomas Edison, or alternating current, favored by Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse – by relying on the historical record as much as possible for descriptions of characters, scenes, and even dialogue. This type of novel typically makes me uncomfortable because it potentially puts words and thoughts in the mouths of real-life personages, potentially coloring or distorting our impressions of them; Moore includes an appendix explaining source materials for many of the depictions in the book, even explaining the origins of some of the dialogue, and also delineating which events and timelines in the book are real and which he created or rearranged to fit the narrative. I’ve read “non-fiction” books that played faster and looser with the truth than Moore does here in his work of fiction.

The War of Currents was kind of a big deal, and a lot more public than you’d expect a scientific debate to be, largely because the two figures at the center of it, Edison and Westinghouse, were both famous and powerful at the time – Edison the revered inventor and showman, Westinghouse the successful businessman and an inventor in his own right, the two embroiled in a public dispute over whether DC or AC was the safer choice for the nation’s emerging electrical grid. (AC was the inarguably superior technology, and eventually won out, but not necessarily for the ‘right’ reasons.) Moore wraps this battle, including the bizarre entrance of one Harold Brown, inventor of the electric chair, into the debate, in the larger one over who really invented the incandescent light bulb, spicing things up a little bit with some fictional details like the firebombing of Tesla’s laboratory and a hostile takeover of Edison’s company.

Told from the perspective of Paul Cravath, a young attorney who handled Westinghouse’s side of the various lawsuits back and forth between him and Edison and later founded the Council on Foreign Relations, The Last Days of Night manages to turn what could have been dry history into a suspenseful, fast-paced novel (aided by lots of short chapters) populated by well-rounded characters. Edison’s depiction might be a little too on the nose, but Westinghouse, Cravath, and even the enigmatic Tesla – whose Serbian-accented English is recreated in clever fashion by Moore, who explains his technique in the appendix – come to life on the page in three dimensions even with the limitations of their roles. Moore relied largely on historical information to flesh out the characters, with the main exception of Agnes Huntington, Cravath’s wife, on whom there was very little documentation, leading Moore (or perhaps simply allowing him) to create her backstory and eventual romance with Cravath out of whole cloth. The trick allows Moore to give the book its one proper female character, since the War of Currents was fought entirely by men in domains – science and the law – that were closed to women until the last century.

I found the pace of Last Days a little frenetic, definitely aimed more at the popular end of the market than the literary end; events move quickly, as Moore compressed almost a decade into about two years, and the book has short chapters and tons of dialogue to keep up the velocity. That meant I tore through the book but found it a little balanced towards action over meaning; there was just less to ponder, especially after the book was over, but I also never wanted to put the book down because there are so few points where the pace slackens. That makes it a rarity for me – a book I could recommend to anyone who likes fiction, regardless of what sort of fiction you like.

Next up: Still playing catchup with reviews; I’ve finished Grazia Deledda’s After the Divorce ($2 on Kindle) and Margaret Wilson’s The Able McLaughlins, and am now reading Anna Smaill’s weird, dystopian novel The Chimes.

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→ April 7, 2017
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I Contain Multitudes.

You are currently covered in bugs.

That’s the fact that drives Ed Yong’s book I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life, his highly acclaimed 2016 book about the microbiome, a relative neologism that refers to the interconnected world of microorganisms that exist in, on, and around all other life on earth. Without these bugs, we almost certainly wouldn’t exist, and the best estimates Yong has have bacteria and other microbes in and on our bodies outnumbering the cells of our actual bodies by a margin slighter over 1:1. You do not just contain multitudes, Yong quips (borrowing a line from Walt Whitman), but you are multitudes.

Yong spends as much time dispelling myths as he does explaining the new science of the microbiome because everyone who reads this has probably grown up believing one of two things about bacteria and other microbes: They’re dirty and bad and cause illness and death; or, some bacteria are good and we want lots of them but not the bad ones. Yong says neither is accurate; there aren’t “good” or “bad” microbes per se, but that the effect a microbe can have depends entirely on where it lives and thus what it’s able to do.

Microbes make the complexity of life on earth possible, sometimes serving as the difference between life and not-life, as in creatures that live in inhospitable, lightless environments at the bottom of the ocean near steam vents that bring geothermal heat out into the water. Scientists discovered creatures there that seemed to have no business existing in the first place, such as a worm that had no mouth or digestive tract. It turned out that the worm in question plays host to bacteria that provide it with all of the energy the worm needs by converting sulfur compounds found in that dark environment into chemicals the worms can use.

He also explains how evolution works differently – and apparently faster – in bacteria than it does in multicellular organisms, thanks to something called HGT, Horizontal Gene Transfer. (As opposed to, say, the Mariners moving Segura to second base if Cano is hurt; that would be a Horizontal Jean Transfer.) Bacteria have the ability to swap genes with other bacteria in their environment, meaning they can alter their genome on the fly while still alive, as opposed to humans, who are stuck with the genes that brought us to the dance.

Perhaps most relevant to the lay reader are the two chapters near the end of the book where Yong talks about how probiotics don’t work and how we might use bacteria, including their HGT superpowers, to fight diseases like dengue and Zika. Probiotic products are all the rage now, but there’s no evidence that swallowing these bacteria – which appear in tiny amounts even in products like yogurt – alters your microbiome in any way. Your gut flora are largely a function of what you were born with, meaning in turn what you got from your mother in birth (vaginal delivery exposes the infant to the bacteria in the mucosal lining) or via breast feeding (which contains more bugs plus compounds that encourage the growth of helpful bacteria in the cut), and what you eat now (more fiber, please). So skip the kombucha and eat more plants.

Mosquitoes that spread disease often do so with the help of bacteria they host, but there’s an effort underway in Australia – a country far less hostile to science than the United States is – to release mosquitoes of the same species that carries viruses like dengue or chikungunya, A. Aegyptes, that have been infected with a Wolbachia bacterium that renders the critters immune to the viruses. These mosquitoes would then move into the environment, mate with other mosquitoes, and thus spread the bacterial ‘infection’ through the population, thus dramatically reducing the number of bugs flying around with the disease in the first place. A separate but related endeavor aims to do the same with the mosquitoes that carry the parasite that causes malaria in people, a disease that has proven particularly obstinate to the development of a vaccine (in part because it’s neither viral nor bacterial).

Yong’s book seems comprehensive, although I came into it knowing extremely little about the subject. He gets into fecal transplants, including why they’ve helped people with deadly C. dif infections where traditional treatments failed. He discusses antibiotic resistance, of course. He provides copious examples of symbiosis and dysbiosis in the wild, and how many species, including animals, deprived of their normal microbiomes fail to thrive. And he gets into how climate change is altering microbiomes worldwide, leading to mass deaths on coral reefs and the spread of a fungus (also highlighted in Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction, the most recent winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction) that has already wiped out numerous species of tropical frogs.

Most important, however, is that Yong keeps this all so accessible. I find the subject interesting anyway, but his prose is readable and his stories quick and quirky enough that the audiobook held my attention throughout, including during some rather dreadful trips between spring training sites in Florida. Granted, it might make you think very differently about shaking hands or touching various surfaces, but I Contain Multitudes might also encourage you to eat better, get a dog, and throw out all your triclosan, while giving you a new appreciation for germs.

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→ September 15, 2016
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Gödel’s Proof.

My latest Insider post covers eight top 100 prospects who took a step back this year. I’ll also hold a Klawchat here at 1 pm ET.

I read Rebecca Goldstein’s biography of Kurt Gödel, Incompleteness, last summer, and I believe it was within her book that I read about James Newman and Ernest Nagel’s book Gödel’s Proof that attempts to explain the Austrian logician’s groundbreaking findings. The 114-page volume does a great job of building up to the final proof, but I have to concede that the 19-page section near the end that reveals the fatal blow Gödel delivered to Bertrand Russell, David Hilbert, and others who believed in the essential completeness of mathematical systems lost me in its nested language and ornate symbols. (The newest edition includes a foreword by Douglas Hofstadter, who wrote about the proof in Gödel, Escher, Bach, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Non-fiction.)

Gödel was himself a fascinating figure, a philosopher, mathematician, and logician who wrote a paper with two theorems at age 25 that stunned the world of mathematics in their method and conclusions, proving that any axiomatic system of arithmetic that is consistent cannot be complete. Completeness here means that every true formula that can be expressed within the system can be proven within the system. Gödel’s trick was to create an entire system of expressing logical formulas via what is now called Gödel numbering, and then to craft a formula that says itself that it is unprovable within the system. His proof further stated that even if you could add an axiom to this system of mathematics to cover this new exception, the formula could always be rephrased to pose a new exception, and thus the system is essentially incomplete.

Nagel and Newman do a great job of getting the reader – or at least in getting this reader – to the edge of understanding by building up the history of the question, giving a lay explanation of Gödel’s basic method of numbering and delineating what a simple axiomatic system like that of Russell’s Principia Mathematica (the system Gödel targeted in his proof) would look like. Russell and other logicians of the time were convinced that systems of mathematics were complete – that we could define any such system in terms of a finite number of axioms that would cover all possible formulas we could craft within that system. Any formula that could be proven true at all could then be proven true using only the axioms of that system. Gödel’s proof to the contrary was scarcely noticed at first, but when it spread and others in the field realized it might be true, it blew apart a fundamental assumption of number theory and of logic, while also making Gödel’s name as a major figure in the history of mathematics and logic.

All of which is to say that I just couldn’t follow the nested statements that constitute Nagel and Newman’s explanation of Gödel’s proof. I haven’t read Gödel’s original paper, because it is a truth universally acknowledged that you’ve got to have some serious math background to understand it, so I will accept the claim that Nagel and Newman made it much easier to grasp … but I still only get this at a superficial level. When the authors compare this to Richard’s Paradox, an earlier device that Gödel cited in his paper, I could understand it; these are all descendants of the “This statement is false” type of logical trick that causes an inherent contradiction. Gödel appears to have done the same thing for arithmetic. I just couldn’t quite get to the mental finish line on this one. I guess you could say my understanding of the topic remains ….

…incomplete.

Next up: I finished and will review Laurent Binet’s HHhH, and have begun Clifford Simak’s Hugo-winning novel Way Station.

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→ July 22, 2016
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Infinitesimal.

Amir Alexander’s Infinitesimal: How a Dangerous Mathematical Theory Shaped the Modern World is less a history of math (although there is quite a bit) than a history of the people and institutions who fought a protracted philosophical battle over something we now consider a trivial bit of precalculus. The idea of infinitesimals, at the time of their development called “indivisibles,” sparked vociferous opposition from the supposedly progressive Jesuits in the 1600s, becoming part of their vendetta against Galileo, leading to banishments and other sentences against Italian mathematicians, and eventually pushing the progress of math itself from Italy out to Germany, England, and the Netherlands.

If you’ve taken calculus at any point, then you’ve encountered infinitesimals, which first appeared in the work of the Greek mathematician Archimedes (the “eureka!” guy). These mathematical quantities are so small that they can’t be measured, but their size is still not quite zero, because you can add up a quantity (or an infinity) of infinitesimals and get a concrete nonzero result. Alexander’s book tells the history of infinitesimals from the ancient Greeks through the philosophical war in Italy between the Jesuits, who opposed the concept of indivisibles as heretical, and the Jesuats, a rival religious order founded in Siena that included several mathematicians of the era who published on the theory of indivisibles, including Bonaventura Cavalieri. When the Jesuits won this battle via politicking within the Catholic hierarchy, the Jesuats were forced to disband, and the work involved in infinitesimals shifted to England, where Alexander describes a second battle, between Thomas Hobbes (yep, the Leviathan guy) and John Wallis, the latter of whom used infinitesimals and some novel work with infinite series in pushing an inductive approach to mathematics and to disprove Hobbes’ assertion that he had solved the problem of squaring the circle.

Wallis’ work with infinitesimals extended beyond the controversy with Hobbes into the immediate precursors of the calculus developed by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz, including methods of calculating the area under a curve using these infinitesimals (which Wallis described as width-less parallelograms). Alexander stops short of that work, however, choosing instead to spend the book’s 300 pages on the two philosophical battles, first in Italy and then in England, that came before infinitesimals gained acceptance in the mathematical world and well before Newton or Leibniz entered the picture. Hobbes was wrong – the ancient problem of squaring the circle, which means drawing a square using only a straightedge and compass that has the same area as that of a given circle, is insoluble because the mathematical solution requires the square root of pi, and you can’t draw that. The impossibility of this solution wasn’t proven until 1882, two hundred years after Hobbes’ death, but the philosopher was convinced he’d solved it, which allowed Wallis to tear Hobbes apart in their back-and-forth and, along with some of his own politicking, gave Wallis and the infinitesimals the victory in mathematical circles as well.

Alexander tells a good story here, but doesn’t get far enough into the math for my tastes. The best passage in the book is the description of Hobbes’ work, including the summary of the political philosophy of Leviathan, a sort of utopian autocracy where the will of the sovereign is the will of all of the people, and the sovereign thus rules by acclamation of the populace rather than heredity or divine right. (I was supposed to read Leviathan in college but found the prose excruciating and gave up, so this was all rather new to me.) But Alexander skimps on the historical importance of infinitesimals, devoting just a six-page epilogue to what happened after Wallis won the debate. You can’t have integral calculus without infinitesimals, and calculus is kind of important, but none of its early history appears here, even though there’s a direct line from Wallis to Newton. That makes Infinitesimal a truncated read, great for what it covers, but missing the final chapter.

Next up: The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1966.

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→ June 21, 2016
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The Elegant Universe.

My latest column at ESPN looks at five potential callups for contenders.

Brian Greene’s 1999 bestseller and Pulitzer Prize finalist The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory is more like two books in one. The first half to two-thirds is a highly accessible history of the two main branches of physics, the macro world perspective that culminated in Einstein’s discovery of general relativity, and the micro (I mean, really micro) perspective covered by quantum mechanics. The two theories could not be unified until the advent of string theory, which Greene lays out in still somewhat easy to follow language. The last third of the book, however, delves into deeper topics like the nature of spacetime or the hypothesis of the multiverse, and I found it increasingly hard to follow and, unfortunately, less compelling at the same time.

String theory – more properly called superstring theory, but like the old basketball team in Seattle, the theory has lost its “super” somewhere along the way – is the prevailing theoretical framework in modern physics about the true nature of matter and the four fundamental forces. Rather than particles comprising ever-smaller subparticles that function as zero-dimensional points, string theory holds that what we perceive as particles are differing vibrations and frequencies of one-dimensional “strings.” String theory allows physicists to reconcile Einstein’s theories of general and special relativity with the explanations of three of those four forces (strong, weak, and electromagnetic) provided by quantum mechanics, resulting in a theory of quantum gravity that posits that that fourth force is the result of a massless quantum particle called the ‘graviton.’ Gravitons have not been observed or experimentally confirmed, but other similar particles have been, and all would be the result of those vibrating strings, open or closed loops in one dimension that, under the framework, are the most basic, indivisible unit of all matter and energy (which are the same thing) in the universe.

Strings are far too small to be observed, or to ever even be observed – you can’t observe a string with a particle, like a photon, larger than the string itself – but physicists believe string theory is accurate because math. And that’s one of the biggest challenges for Greene or anyone else writing about the topic: the proof isn’t in experimental results or great discoveries, but in equations that are too complicated to present in any text aimed at the mass audience.

In fact, the equations underlying string theory require a universe of not four dimensions – the ones we see, three of space and one of time, which Einstein treated simply as four dimensions of one thing called spacetime – but ten or eleven. These “missing” dimensions are here, at every point in the universe, but are tightly curled up in six-dimensional forms called Calabi-Yau manifolds, as if they exist but the universe simply chose not to deploy them. They must be there, however, if string theory is true, because the calculations require them. This is near the part where I started to fall off the train, and it only became worse with Greene’s discussions of further alterations to string theory – such as higher-dimensional analogues to strings called 2-branes and 3-branes – or his descriptions of what rips or tears in spacetime might look like and how they might fix themselves so that we never notice such things. (Although I prefer to think that that’s where some of my lost items ended up.)

The great success of this book, however, is in getting the reader from high school physics up to the basics of string theory. If you’re not that familiar with relativity – itself a pretty confusing concept – this is the best concise explanation of the theories I’ve come across, as Greene uses simple phrasing and diagrams to explain general and special relativity in a single chapter. He follows that up with a chapter on quantum mechanics, hitting all the key names and points, and beginning to explain why general relativity, which explains gravity in a classical framework, cannot be directly coupled with quantum mechanics, which explains the other three forces in an entirely different framework. Building on those two chapters, Greene gives the most cogent explanation of superstrings, string theory, and even the idea of these six or seven unseen spatial dimensions that I’ve come across. We’re talking about objects smaller than particles that we’ve never seen, and the incredible idea that everything, matter, energy, light, whatever, is just open and closed one-dimensional entities the size of the Planck length, 1.6 * 10-35 meters long. To explain that in even moderately comprehensible terms is a small miracle, and Greene is up to the task.

This was a better read, for me at least, than George Musser’s book on quantum entanglement, Spooky Action at a Distance, which covers a different topic but ends up treading similar ground with its descriptions of spacetime and the new, awkwardly-named hypothesis “quantum graphity.” Quantum entanglement is the inexplicable but true phenomenon where two particles created together maintain some sort of connection or relationship where if the charge or spin on on of the particles is flipped, the charge or spin on the other will flip as well, even if the two particles are separated in distance. This appears to violate the law of physics that nothing, including information, can be transmitted faster than the speed of light. How do these particles “know” to flip? Musser’s description of the history of entanglement, including Einstein’s objection that provided the title for this book, is fine, but when he delves into new hypotheses of the fabric of spacetime, he just completely lost me. Quantum graphity reimagines spacetime as a random graph, rather than the smooth four-dimensional fabric of previous theories, where points (or “nodes”) in space are connected to each other in ways that defy traditional notions of distance. This would provide a mechanism for entanglement and also solve a question Greene addresses too, the horizon problem, where disparate areas of the universe that have not been in direct physical contact (under the standard model) since a tiny fraction of a second after the Big Bang currently have the same temperature. I didn’t think Musser explained quantum graphity well enough for the lay reader (me!), or gave enough of an understanding that this is all highly speculative, as opposed to the broader acceptance of something like string theory or absolute acceptance of quantum theory.

Next up: Back to fiction with Eowyn Ivey’s Pulitzer Prize finalist The Snow Child.

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