→ April 30, 2025
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We Were Once a Family.

The 2018 murder-suicide of the Hart family became a national story, first because it seemed like a tragic accident, then because it was an unthinkable crime where the parents murdered their entire family. News coverage afterwards tended to focus solely on the women, asking why they had done it, with some bigoted attacks that argued against gay couples’ rights to adopt. What nearly all of the ensuing news coverage omitted was anything about the six children, all of whom were Black and came from Texas, while the mothers, both white, lived in Minnesota.

Roxanna Asgarian covered the story for The Oregonian and developed her work into the book We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America, which tells the stories of the six children before and after their adoptions, and then branches off into a broader examination of the dysfunctional child-protection systems operating in Texas and many other red states. Her efforts to know who the six children, two sets of siblings, were, and to get to know their surviving family members – including an older brother whose life has been defined and probably ruined by Texas Child Protective Services – make for an exceptional if gut-wrenching read, filled with grief and needless suffering. The second half of the book loses the narrative greed of the Harts’ story, with broader descriptions of the many failings of the foster industrial complex, including the reckless pace at which Texas separates children from their birth parents, often adopting them out of state, with the policy hitting Black families at a disproportionate level. Asgarian’s arguments are convincing, but her strength is in the human stories that fill the first half of the book.

The Harts, Jennifer and Sarah, had a checkered history even before they took in the first trio of children; they’d fostered a teenaged girl before, but a bizarre incident at a Green Bay Packers game led them to lie about the girl and kick her out. They adopted three siblings from Texas after the mother relinquished her parental rights following multiple arrests for cocaine usage and her violation of an order not to contact her children. Those three children were already showing some signs of neglect and abuse when the Harts rushed to adopt three more children, all half-siblings. Minnesota investigated them after a teacher reported possible abuse of Hannah, one of the children, but the Harts managed to talk their way out of it – the educated white women having their word accepted over that of a Black child – and then decamped for the west coast, first Oregon, and, when Oregon authorities came calling, to Washington. It appears that another possible investigation was the provocation for the women, particularly Jen, to decide to kill the entirely family, rather than face prosecution for the way they starved and abused the children.

These kids were deprived of their shot at a normal life by a Texas justice system that was already stacked against Black families, and that pursued a policy of pursuing potential adoptions simultaneous with efforts by the parents to meet criteria to reunite with their children. The parents in this case had the misfortune to run into a corrupt, racist judge named Pat Shelton, who later earned some notoriety when he helped his daughter escape serious charges for an accident where she was driving drunk at age 19 that killed her passenger; she somehow also got credit for finishing her community service hours while still in prison. The Houston Chronicle referred to his courtroom as “running a kind of adoption express,” and he also operated a crony system that rewarded lawyer friends of his who didn’t talk back or fight his wishes in court. It’s emblematic of the approach in Texas that sees taking children away from their birth parents and giving them to adoptive parents as the solution to a problem. Once the kids are with their new families, they’re off the books, so to speak. There’s little or no follow-up, and often those kids get trafficked out of state where the birth parents can’t even see them, let alone work to regain any parental rights. Asgarian doesn’t draw the comparison, but it’s analogous to Texas and other states claiming their abortion bans are somehow “pro-life,” when there are no life-supporting policies to help mothers and children after birth.

Asgarian avoids the salacious aspects of the murder, and is careful when discussing the fraught topic of interracial adoptions, discussing multiple evidence-based perspectives and research papers, while mentioning the imperfect parallel to the policy of removing Native American children from their homes in the U.S. and Canada until well into the 20th century. It’s a thoughtful approach, but it also means the resulting work loses much of its humanity as soon as she leaves the stories of the children or their birth families. Some of the strongest parts of the work are with the boy who lived, Dontay, who had been separated from his three younger siblings before the Harts adopted them; Asgarian worked for months to gain enough of his trust for him to talk about his experiences in foster care and in institutions. She paints empathetic portraits of the birth mothers, especially Sherri, Dontay’s mother and the mother of the first three children the Harts adopted, and her husband Nathaniel, who comes across as something of a saint in the telling. (Another of Sherri’s sons, Devontay, was the boy who hugged a cop in the so-called “hug heard round the world” photograph during protests after the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.) It’s a deep reminder that these six children died when there were people who loved them and never stopped trying to get them back; the government of Texas in particular chose to send them to a life of abuse rather than permit the possibility of reunion.

When Asgarian ties these two halves together, showing that the policies of the state of Texas began the collapse of dominoes that ended in the murders of the six children, the result is a cogent indictment of a system that purports to protect children while treating them like trash to be removed from the house, after which it’s taken away and no one ever has to see it again. It is angry, and it is infuriating, but at its best, it’s also a book of profound humanity. And maybe it’s a call to the rest of us to stop ignoring what is happening on our watch.

Next up: By the time this runs, I’ll likely have finished Alexei Panshin’s Rite of Passage.

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→ April 29, 2025
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A Day in the Life of Abed Salama.

Winner of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, Nathan Thrall’s A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy uses a single, devastating incident – an accident involving a school bus that killed six children and a teacher – to explore the nature of life in the West Bank under Israeli occupation back in 2012. The depiction of how a regime of apartheid – a word used by an Israeli official Thrall quotes in the book – makes life for ordinary Palestinians so much harder, and in this case probably resulted in more deaths and severe injuries than there otherwise would have been, comes across even more starkly today in light of the last eighteen months.

Abed Salama is a father living in the Palestinian town of Anata, on the ‘wrong’ side of the separation wall Israel built along the Green Line in the West Bank, whose only son, Milad, was on that bus at the time of the crash. An unqualified driver entered a busy intersection on a poorly-maintained road for Palestinian at high speed, slamming into the school bus, which then caught fire, burning several children and a teacher to death, although heroic efforts by several people rescued many children from the same fate. Thrall explains how the Palestinian-Israeli conflict shaped the lives of many of the adults involved, with many of them involved in Palestinian rights groups, some of them designated as terrorists by Israel, while Israel’s control of the West Bank and push to claim land through force and settlements has boxed Palestinians into tiny enclaves that often leave them without access to key public resources – like quality hospitals. Even the roads are segregated; Israel built a major highway to bypass the intersection where the accident occurred, but it’s off limits to most Palestinians.

Thrall, who is Jewish and lived in Jerusalem for several years, places blame for the accident and its aftermath squarely on the Israeli government – on several governments, really, dating back to Israel’s independence, the Naqba, and ethnic cleansing efforts like Operation Bi’ur Hametz, which wiped Palestinians out of the city of Haifa a few months after the UN partition order. Abed’s entire life has been shaped by the Palestinian-Israeli conflict; he was involved in the DFLP, a Marxist-Leninist group that was under the PLO’s umbrella, and was tortured and jailed for several months by a military tribunal. (Thrall notes that over 99% of verdicts by military tribunals against Palestinians are ‘guilty,’ and that at one point 40% of Palestinian men had been arrested during the occupation of the West Bank.) Abed’s extended family includes people working for the provisional government who maintain relationships with Israeli authorities – and get special privileges for doing so – and people who are or have been jailed for fighting Israeli forces, sometimes simply for throwing stones at Israeli officers. He explains how the Oslo accords presented Palestinians with a lopsided deal that they had little choice but to accept, creating concentric zones of control that limited Palestinian authority in the West Bank to those enclaves, where moving freely between them meant passing through checkpoints and facing possible arrest or detainment. It’s a brief history of the conflict from a side that isn’t as commonly presented here – I wasn’t aware, for example, of how little land the Palestinians truly controlled after Oslo, knew nothing of the Haifa operation, and have no memory of the mass murderer Baruch Goldstein, who killed 29 Palestinians and wounded over 100 more in a mosque during Ramadan, possibly a reaction to the first Oslo accords. The list goes on.

The main premise of the book is that none of this had to happen as it did, but that systemic and structural barriers made the accident more likely and its outcome far worse than it needed to be. The economy of the West Bank depended almost entirely on Israel, which tightly controlled the movement of people and goods within the territory and across the border into Israel. The Palestinian authorities – which are still rife with corruption, a point Thrall doesn’t address – lacked the funds and especially the power to build or maintain basic public infrastructure, including roads, hospitals, and firehouses, because of the garrote Israel has placed around its economy and territory. Thrall even quotes an Israeli official referring to the highway on which the accident occurred as the “apartheid road,” because Israel built its own highway (60) through the area and that portion of the road is forbidden to anyone with a Palestinian license plate. Several of the victims of the accident went to the local hospitals, which are understaffed and have inferior equipment, because getting them across the border into Jerusalem would have taken too long. Thrall even points to the ages of the bus and truck involved in the accident as the result of Israeli policies that have left Palestinians much poorer than their neighbors – although, again, corruption in the Palestinian Authority has to be a factor here.

I don’t think Thrall soft-plays the violence committed by some Palestinians against Israel, but it’s not his focus beyond implying that Israel’s response to any such attacks has been to tighten its grip on the West Bank and Gaza. They built the separation wall and argued it was to protect against terrorist attacks from Palestine. They have limited Palestinian movement even within the West Bank under the guise of preventing further attacks. Thrall doesn’t argue directly against Israeli security efforts, making no claims about their effectiveness or lack thereof, but presents evidence that the de facto police state that exists at least in the portions of the West Bank that abut Israel make daily life much harder for Palestinians who have nothing to do with any Palestinian terror groups. The result here is families devastated by the losses of their children, in several cases even unable to see their kids’ bodies, identifying them by scraps of clothing because their bodies were too burned for recognition. That is a tragedy that should affect every reader, regardless of one’s views on this particular conflict.

(I’m going to keep comments open here for now, but given the nature of the subject and the tendency I’ve seen for this topic to lead to personal attacks, I may close them at any point and will delete any comments that resort to insults or other invective.)

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→ March 24, 2025
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Fantastic Numbers and Where to Find Them.

Prof. Antonio Padilla is a theoretical physicist and cosmologist at the University of Nottingham who has also appeared numerous times on the Numberphile Youtube series, including this incredibly popular video where he shows how the sum of all natural numbers (1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + … ?) is actually -1/12. It’s ridiculous – Padilla concedes that it looks like “a bit of mathematical hocus-pocus”, but the pudding is in the proof, or something, and he points out that 1) this only works if you’re adding all of the natural numbers, which means you don’t stop at any point, and 2) this sum appears in physics, where we don’t see infinities (and if we do, it’s a problem).

Padilla describes the interplay between physics and some numbers at both extremes of the mathematical scale, both the very small and the very large, in his book Fantastic Numbers and Where to Find Them: A Journey to the Edge of Physics, an intense but mostly accessible book that runs through nine distinct numbers, from zero to a googolplex to 10-120 to infinity, and uses them to explain some key concepts or findings about the nature of everything. He waltzes through the history of math – just about every famous figure there makes an appearance at some point, which will make you realize just how many great mathematicians ended up losing their marbles – and just about always finishes up somewhere in the realm of quantum physics, whether it’s things we know or things we think we know, or occasionally things we still don’t know. There’s even a chapter on the cosmological constant, which was in the news just this past week with the revelations that dark energy isn’t as immutable as we believed, which implies that the cosmological constant is, in fact, inconstant.

When Padilla is talking physics and cosmology, at either end of the scale, he’s engaging and by and large easy to follow, other than perhaps near the end of the book when he’s introduced the panoply of particles that populate the quantum world – all the quarks, leptons, and gauge bosons that we know or think exist – where keeping any of them straight was a bit more than I could handle. It doesn’t end up mattering much to the narratives of those chapters, as Padilla’s point is the relevance of the numbers in question, although I ended up a little frustrated that I didn’t entirely know what was going on at some points.

It’s the mathy stuff where Padilla struggles to communicate in a way that a typical reader might follow, and perhaps that’s just a function of the size of the numbers he’s discussing. The chapter on the number TREE(3), which is so large that we can’t even notate it, let alone comprehend it, ultimately lost me not in its prose but in its sea of notation. TREE(3) is much larger than the number of atoms scientists believe exist in the entire universe (around 1080, itself a number that we can’t easily envision), a number so big that the universe won’t “allow” it to exist – according to the Poincaré recurrence theorem, at least, which says that the universe will “reset” before TREE(3) happens in any sense of the word. Padilla uses TREE(3) to explain that theorem and the possibility that the universe is a hologram, that we live in two dimensions and only think we perceive the third, but by the end of that chapter I didn’t understand why TREE(3) got us there in the first place. (It doesn’t help that Padilla discusses all of this several chapters before he gets into string theory, which underpins the holographic principle, so we’re walking without a net for a while.)

Padilla is a gifted communicator, clearly, and his enthusiasm for the subject comes through everywhere in the book – it’s just that the topic itself is abstruse and assumes some familiarity with physics and/or with some branches of math like infinite series and set theory. He’s better at explaining concepts like particle spin, which he points out isn’t spin like what we’re talking about in baseball but an innate characteristic of a particle (any more than red or green quarks have those actual colors), than at explaining concepts like the nested powers of TREE(3) or Gödel’s incompleteness proof. It all left me with the sense that I’d enjoyed the book, but that the audience for it might be very narrow – you have to know enough to follow him through his various rambles through math and physics, but not so much that you already know all of this stuff. I was at least lucky enough to mostly be in the first camp, even though I got lost a few times, but that’s just because I love these topics and have read a lot of books about them. It’s not the physics I learned in high school, and not really the math I learned there either.

Next up: Michael Swanwick’s Stations of the Tide, winner of the 1991 Nebula Award for Best Novel.

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→ February 21, 2025
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How to Be Enough.

On my dormant (hopefully not extinct!) podcast, I had Dr. Ellen Hendriksen on as a guest to discuss her first book, How to Be Yourself, about dealing with social anxiety and the penchant many of us have for self-doubt and self-criticism. Her second book, How to Be Enough: Self-Acceptance for Self-Critics and Perfectionists, shifts its focus to the perfectionist in most of us, if not all of us, running through enough facets of perfectionism that you’re very likely to find something in here that applies to your own life.

Full disclosure: I haven’t met Dr. Hendriksen, but I know her brother well enough that I have stayed at his house and discussed dinosaurs with his kids.

Perfectionism isn’t an actual diagnosis, although it can be a symptom of or just come along with some psychological conditions, including anxiety and depression. Hendriksen makes it clear up front that she is talking about a sort of small-p perfectionism here, the sort that can show up in just about anybody, whether or not you’re dealing with anything else at the same time. The little voice that won’t let you forget something you did that wasn’t perfect, or that won’t let you try something because you might not do it perfectly? That’s her target, with some easy to implement tips to get around that voice, since, if you’ve heard it, you know ignoring it doesn’t work. It’s a narrow focus that works in the book’s favor, especially since she still covers a lot of ground in a modest page count.

Hendriksen begins by comparing two iconic perfectionists, Walt Disney and Fred (as in Mister) Rogers. Both were successful in their lines of work because they were so exacting, with high expectations of others and perhaps even high expectations of themselves. The difference is that Disney was, by this account, a rather miserable person, and equally miserable to be around, while Rogers remains famous for his magnanimous and empathic nature, not just on air but in his everyday life. The argument here is that Rogers was a paragon of self-acceptance and self-compassion, while Disney never learned those skills.

I certainly recognized myself in several chapters of How to Be Enough, whether it was the way I am now or the way I was when I was younger. The way Disney and others in the book would lash out at others was definitely me earlier in my career and personal life; it took a lot of therapy and practice to accept that my own failings weren’t always someone else’s fault, and that others didn’t have to live up to my arbitrary and often ridiculous standards, nor was it right to be rude or unpleasant even if they did do something wrong. People make mistakes. It’s a platitude to say to err is human, of course, but it’s not a matter of divine forgiveness to brush it off and move on; it’s just being a decent person, whether it’s to your colleague or some random customer service person on the phone – or to yourself, which is just as much a focus of this book as how you treat others.

Perhaps the greatest value in How to Be Enough for me was to see that things I always thought were unusual about my brain are apparently pretty common. She cites many examples of people dealing with intrusive thoughts of ‘mistakes’ from earlier in life, even childhood, and often needing to clear those thoughts with a profanity or a shake of the head or something similar. I do that all the fucking time, often over things that happened 40 years ago. She also has several people describe how external pressures deterred them from pursuing whatever subject or skill they excelled at, whether it was straight burnout or the weight of expectations that they’d be perfect or else they failed. For me, it happened with math first, and then STEM as a whole – I was good at them at an early age, and so the spotlight was increasingly on me for that, and anything less than a perfect grade or score was a disappointment. I loved math, both applied and theoretical, and enjoyed almost all science (except biology, not mathy enough) and anything relating to coding. By the time I got out of high school, I was so over being the math kid, or dealing with everyone’s expectations that I’d become a scientist or a doctor, that I went completely the other way into the soft sciences – political science first (‘government’ at my college, which was more akin to political philosophy), then sociology and economics, which are about as soft as you can get. I took one math class, for fun, and of course I enjoyed it because it didn’t matter at all how I did. If I could do it all over again, I’d major in applied math, because I would have absolutely loved it and probably would have done really well as a result, but my experiences as a kid – especially those god damned math fairs they held in my county – made math very un-fun for a while.

How to Be Enough covers a lot of ground in only about 260 pages. There’s a chapter on why we procrastinate and how to get around it; on how perfectionism makes us take fun activities and turn them into tasks, even scolding ourselves for doing things that are fun and nothing more; and on how it’s okay to like doing something even if you’re not good at it. That last one is definitely aimed at me; I have a lot of hobbies, and when I pursue one, I go all in, because I want to keep getting better. I don’t like doing things I don’t do well. It’s why I seldom enjoy dancing (unless I’ve had a few), which of course is a very common condition and which Hendriksen covers in the book rather uncomfortably. Some of the problems she describes are inward-focused, where we judge ourselves to a ridiculous standard and thus lose pleasure or interest in something, while others are more outward-focused, where we believe others are judging us and thus we lose pleasure or interest in something. It all stems from the same source, and the result is the same: We are less happy, and we do less of the stuff we want to do. The way Hendriksen structured How to Be Enough should let anyone who deals with this issue, no matter how much or how specific, find something to help them break out of the perfectionism trap.

Next up: I’m halfway through W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, and I think I hate it. 

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→ October 8, 2024
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To End All Wars.

I read Adam Hochschild’s book King Leopold’s Ghost back in January of 2013. In hindsight, I’d have to say now it’s one of the most influential books I’ve read in my life, which I think is saying something. It is an incredible, detailed, horrifying work of historical writing, telling the story of how Belgium’s King Leopold destroyed the region of Africa that is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, exploiting its people and resources for personal gain while setting the stage for what has been sixty-plus years of bloody civil wars. It’s the most damning work I’ve read on colonialism. It provides a new and somehow even more excoriating view of western racism towards Africans. It changed how I think about the world.

For some reason, I had never sought out Hochschild’s other books until last year, when my daughter had to read his To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918. His approach here is to provide a history of World War I through a modest number of individual Britons, many of whom were connected by family, marriage/liaison, class, or cause, while telling the larger story of this bloody, pointless war through brief descriptions of military maneuvers and deadly battles. The result is a book that is quite readable despite the grim subject matter and that also sheds light on a number of historical figures, some famous and some who probably should be, while also delving into the war’s effects on women’s suffrage, the labor movement, and the Russian Revolution.

The choice to focus on British subjects allows Hochschild, who is American, to make many of the stories far more personal. Many of the people he follows, including Rudyard Kipling, end up losing a son on the battlefields, yet only in some cases does it change their perception of the war – Kipling was an ardent hawk whose racism on the page translated well into similar sentiments against the Germans. The women of the Pankhurst family were all ardent suffragettes, but they split when the war began, in part due to a disagreement over whether becoming war supporters might win them more support in Parliament, but primarily due to a fundamental disagreement over human rights. The cast also includes military leaders John French and Douglas Haig, Prime Minister Lloyd George, pacifist Charlotte Despard, Labour Party founder Keir Hardie, and philosopher Bertrand Russell, most of whose lives would intersect in myriad ways through their positions on the war, both official and unofficial.

Hochschild’s decision to follow all of these people also spares us some of the grisliest aspects of the war, although he doesn’t eschew them entirely, particularly in describing trench warfare and the various new ways in which it allowed soldiers to die. That makes for a book that’s just far more readable, and also means that when someone connected to one of his main characters does die, it sits larger on the page – one death is a tragedy, a thousand is a statistic, just in literary form.

In an ironic contrast to the callous way in which its various leaders and commanders sent millions of young men to their deaths or to life-altering wounds, World War I also brought out the largest antiwar effort we had seen, itself an outgrowth of a movement that began during the Boer War against Dutch colonizers in what is now South Africa. (In that war, white fought white, and the losers, as always, were the natives.) Hochschild steps back to tell that war’s history, both how it began and how antiwar sentiment crystallized and grew before and during its progression, tying it into the voices who spoke out against war in Europe even before it began, and to the conscientious objectors who rose in number during World War I and often faced harsh prison terms or even forced conscription.

What To End All Wars is not, and does not try to be, is a comprehensive history of the war. A few battles get the full treatment, while others receive little to no mention. Hochschild’s digressions on the Boer War, the pacifist movement, the fall of the Tsar and the Russian Revolution, British politics, and more mean that the look at the Great War itself is selective, albeit not superficial. He also doesn’t dedicate much time to exploring the causes of the war, a welcome decision given how much literature there is on that subject (I feel like that is all I ever learned about WWI in school, even if the whole topic remains open to debate). This is very much a story of one country’s role in the war viewed through maybe eight to ten people, with tendrils reaching out to cover some related topics – but only as they connect back to Britain.

Instead, we get some small character studies, several of them around people who aren’t well remembered (at least not in the U.S.) but have extremely interesting back stories. I was less caught up in the stories of the various military men, including French and Haig, who were terrible people happy to condemn thousands of soldiers to certain death and somehow even worse than that at military strategy; the civilians Hochschild discusses are all more compelling and three-dimensional on the page. The royalist Viscountess Violet Cecil saw the brutality of the Boer War, then lost her only son, George, in the first year of the Great War, yet remained a vocal hawk until its end, only to become an advocate of appeasement when she became the editor of her family’s conservative periodical The National Review (unrelated to the American publication). Emmeline Pankhurst cut off two of her own daughters over their political disagreements, as she became a jingoistic supporter of Britain’s war efforts, while daughters Sylvia and Adela remained true to their cause and became socialists and labor agitators, although Adela eventually flipped and became a right-wing nationalist during World War II. Charlotte Despard was also a suffragist and went to prison four times for her cause, later also fighting for Irish independence, yet also spent a large part of her time advocating for the poor and even lived in a small flat above one of her ‘shops’ to provide services for poor residents of one disadvantaged area of London. Bertrand Russell, quite a famous figure for his non-fiction writings in philosophy and math, is more human on the pages here too, with only mentions of his written opposition to the war but not his other work.

To End All Wars didn’t radicalize me the way that King Leopold’s Ghost did, but it is also an infuriating work in many ways because there is such broad, blind disregard for the value of human life, and in this case it comes from so many people. It’s a deeply humanist work at its core, even with all its depictions of callousness and suffering, and also a highly accessible work with a strong narrative that had me hooked despite my previously low degree of interest in its subject.

Next up: Naguib Mahfouz’s Midaq Alley.

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→ October 3, 2024
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Happier Hour.

I heard Dr. Cassie Holmes talk about her book Happier Hour: How to Beat Distraction, Expand Your Time, and Focus on What Matters Most and her approach to time management, making sure we get the most out of the limited free time most of us have, on the Hidden Brain podcast a month or so ago. She was an excellent guest, telling some great anecdotes and offering a superficial look at her recommendations for people to reorganize their time around the activities that give them the most joy or pleasure. The book, however, goes no deeper than that, and really could have been a pamphlet for all the insight it offers.

Happier Hour’s main advice is simple to understand and plan, albeit perhaps not to implement. Holmes asks readers to spend about two weeks tracking their time in small increments, writing down what they’re doing and how they felt while doing it. The goal is to identify the activities that give you the most happiness, however you may define that. That’s often social activities with family, friends, etc., but it will vary by person – you might enjoy solving a puzzle by yourself more than playing a game with friends, and if so, then you should enter that in your little journal.

Once you’ve gathered that information, you should then create a schedule of your week, filling in the activities that you must do before you get to anything else. Holmes distinguishes between types of required activities, however; for many people, there will be aspects of work that you enjoy, and aspects that you don’t enjoy but have to do anyway. (One recurring problem with Happier Hour, though, is that this is very much a book for privileged people. Here, you have to have a job that gives you some flexibility in when you perform required tasks, at the very least.) Her advice is to isolate the best parts of work – the ones that give you some positive feeling, however you wish to define that – and dedicate time to them at the time(s) of day when you feel best. She’s a morning person, and she likes the deep work parts of her job, so she sets aside a few hours each morning for it, delaying the lesser parts of the job, like answering emails, to the afternoon when she’s not at her best anyway.

She counsels the same approach to your leisure hours – some of which will, again, involve required tasks, like making dinner, chauffeuring children or other family members, or performing certain chores. As I write this, I just emptied the garbage and recycling bins in the kitchen, dealt with the cats’ litter, and took the trash bins to the curb, a required task I perform every Wednesday. That would be on my calendar, each Wednesday night, taking up maybe 15 minutes at most. Once those fixed tasks are in place, I would then fill I the remaining time with activities that give me the most joy and with required tasks that can be performed at any time, again prioritizing the good stuff for times when I feel my best. (This also would require that I know when I feel my best. It depends on the day.)

That’s all there is to the Happier Hour system, aside from some minor details. Beyond that, the book is fluff – a little research here and there on how social activities tend to make us happiest, how experiences beat acquisitions (no kidding), or how social media sucks, plus some mostly cute stories from Holmes’ own life (along with one pretty lousy one). I don’t mind hearing about the author’s experiences when they relate to the book; her decision to leave a prestigious but intense job that was cutting into her time with her young children is understandable, and there’s a straight line from that to the research she does now at UCLA. However, they also underscore how this book is only for a small sliver of the population: It is way, way easier to execute the program in Happier Hour if you’re either rich, or in a flexible job (like mine, come to think of it), or both. So many of her stories just scream wealth and privilege: oh, you have a weekly coffee-and-hot-cocoa date on Thursday mornings with your preschool-aged daughter? How nice for you, but most of your readers with kids that young will take them to day care or similar arrangements so they can go to their not flexible jobs.

I say this with full awareness that my job is flexible – I’m a writer, and as long as I hit my deadlines, I could write at any time of the day I wanted. I could do it from 2 to 4 in the morning if I wanted to. (I do not.) And I could write from anywhere; in the offseason, I don’t even need to be in this hemisphere, as long as I have a phone and an internet connection. I am in the target audience for this book. I just didn’t feel very moved by it, and by the time I was about 2/3 of the way through, I was just annoyed by how much extra verbiage there was around something that could be described in under ten pages. This book could have been a podcast, and in fact, it was.

Next up: Still reading Adam Hochschild’s To End All Wars.

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→ May 29, 2024
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Seven Games.

The title of Oliver Roeder’s book Seven Games: A Human History is a misnomer in two ways: It’s not really a book about games, and it’s far more a history of computers than of humans. It is, instead, a history of attempts to use what is now unfortunately referred to as “AI” to tackle the myriad problems posed by seven popular board and card games from human history, from chess to bridge. Each of these games presents the programmers with specific, novel issues, and while machine-learning techniques have succeeded in solving some games (like checkers), others have and may forever prove inscrutable (like bridge).

Roeder is a journalist for the Financial Times and clearly a gamer, and someone who loves the games for what they are beyond their competitive aspect (although it becomes clear he is a fierce competitor as well). He writes as an experienced player of all seven games in the book, even though he must have varying skill levels in each – I’d be shocked if he were much of a checkers player, because who on earth in the year of our lord 2024 is a great checkers player? His experience with the games helps infuse a book that could be a rather dry and grim affair with more than a touch of life, especially as he enters tournaments or otherwise competes against experts in games like poker, Scrabble, and backgammon.

What Roeder is really getting at here, however, is the symbiotic relationship between games and machine learning, which is what everyone now calls AI. (AI is itself a misnomer, and there are many philosophers who argue that there can be no intelligence, artificial or otherwise, without culture.) Games are perfect fodder for training AI modules because they tend to present short sets of rules and clear goals, thus giving the code and its coder targets for whatever optimization algorithm(s) they choose. In the case of checkers, this proved simple once the computing power was available; checkers is considered “weakly solved,” with a draw inevitable if both players play perfectly. (Connect 4 is strongly solved; the first player can always win with perfect play.) In the case of bridge, on the other hand, the game may never be solved, both because of its computational complexity and because of the substantial human element involved in its play.

In one of those later chapters, Roeder mentions P=NP in a footnote, which put an entirely different spin on the book for me. P=NP is one of the six unsolved Millennium Prize Problems* in mathematics, also called the P versus NP problem, which asks if a problem’s correct solution can be verified in polynomial time, does that also mean that the problem can be solved in polynomial time? The answer would have enormous ramifications for computational theory, and could indeed impact human life in substantial ways, but the odds seem to be that P does not equal NP – that the time required to solve these problems is orders of magnitude higher than the time required to verify their solutions. (For more on this subject, I recommend Lance Fortnow’s book The Golden Ticket, which I reviewed here in 2015.)

*A seventh, the Poincaré Conjecture, is the only one that has been solved to date.

You can see a thread through the seven chapters where the machine-learning techniques adjust and improve as the games become more complex. From there, it isn’t hard to see this as a narrow retelling of the ongoing history of machine learning itself. The early efforts to solve games like checkers employed brute-force methods – examining all possible outcomes and valuing them to guide optimal choices. More complex games that present larger decision trees and more possible outcomes would require more processing power and time than we have, often more time than remains in the expected life of the universe (and certainly more than remains in the expected life of our suicidal species), and thus required new approaches. Some of the attacks on games later in the book allow the algorithm to prune the tree itself and avoid less-promising branches to reduce processing time and power, thus leading to a less complete but more efficient search method.

Roeder does acknowledge in brief that these endeavors also have a hidden cost in energy. His anecdotes include Deep Blue versus Kasparov and similar matches in poker and go, some of which gained wide press coverage for their results … but not for the energy consumed by the computers that competed in these contests. We’re overdue for a reckoning on the actual costs of ChatGPT and OpenAI and their myriad brethren in silicon, because as far as I can tell, they’re just the new crypto when it comes to accelerating climate change. That’s nice that you can get a machine to write your English 102 final paper for you or lay off a bunch of actual humans to let AI do some things, but I’d like to see you pay the full cost of the electricity you’re using to do it.

I’ve focused primarily on one aspect of Seven Games because that’s what resonated with me, but I may have undersold the book a little in the process. It’s a fun read in many ways because Roeder tells good stories for just about all seven of the games in the book – I might have done without the checkers chapter, because that’s just a terrible game, but it is an important rung in the ladder he’s constructing – and puts himself in the action in several of them, notably in poker tournaments in Vegas. There’s also a warning within the book about the power of so-called AI, and I think inherent in that is a call for caution, although Roeder doesn’t make this explicit. It seemed a very timely read even though I picked it up on a friend’s recommendation because it’s about games. Games, as it turns out, explain quite a bit of life. We wouldn’t be human without them.

Next up: Dark Matter of the Mind: The Culturally Articulated Unconscious, a book by Daniel Everett, a former evangelical Christian missionary who became an atheist and turned to linguistics after his time trying to convert the Amazonian Pirahã tribe. He appeared at length in last year’s outstanding documentary The Mission.

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→ April 5, 2024
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This is the Story of a Happy Marriage.

I’m about as big a fan of Ann Patchett as you’ll find – I’ve read every one of her novels, including the Pulitzer Prize contender Tom Lake, made a pilgrimage to her bookstore Parnassus Books before the pandemic, and was even scheduled to do a talk and signing there in May 2020 that obviously never happened. Somehow in all my fandom, I’d never read any of her nonfiction, even though that’s where she got her start; I just loved her fiction so much that I couldn’t imagine reading her voice in a different milieu.

My wife recently got me a copy of Patchett’s 2013 essay collection This is the Story of a Happy Marriage, and, yeah, of course it’s great, because Patchett could write about a ham sandwich and make it interesting. It’s her first essay collection and includes works published from 1996 through 2012, including her essay “The Getaway Car,” which was also published as a separate book. That essay alone was worth the time spent reading the whole book, as it’s one of the best pieces I’ve ever read on writing as a craft and a career, although the book has many, many other highlights across a range of subjects.

One of the most frequent topics is her marriages – the current one, yes, which in her telling is a happy marriage, but also her first, brief marriage, which ended barely a year in and which turned her off the institution for some time. She married young and unwisely (I can relate), but to her credit, realized it early and got out, a history she describes in “The Sacrament of Divorce,” which makes what was probably a painful period in her life wryly funny. Karl, her current husband of many years (and partner of 11 years prior to that), comes up often in the book, both directly as in the title essay and “The Paris Match” (the story of a fight), but also in the two stories about their dog Rose, “This Dog’s Life” and “Dog Without End,” the latter about Rose’s death. Karl certainly comes off far better than husband #1, at the very least. Also, the stories of women throwing themselves at him after his own divorce are hilarious, as if they came from a bad made-for-Netflix film.

“The Wall,” one of the longest essays in the collection, tells of her abortive plan to go through the Los Angeles Police Academy and write a book about it. Patchett’s father was an LA cop for a long time, and derisive of the people who led the department during the aftermath of the assault on Rodney King and subsequent acquittal of the four cops who beat him. Patchett took and passed the test, but didn’t go into the academy, in part for fear of taking up a spot that would have gone to someone who really wanted to become a police officer, but the essay itself also shows us quite a bit about her relationship with her father without her ever addressing the topic head on. It’s a masterful piece of writing, with a bit of a humblebrag mixed in.

Two essays deal with Truth & Beauty, Patchett’s memoir of her friendship with the late author Lucy Grealy, whom she met when they were both 21. Grealy had cancer of the jaw as a child and was left disfigured by surgery to remove part of her jawbone; her own memoir, Autobiography of a Face, told of her life with the emotional and physical consequences of the cancer and surgery, and was met with wide critical acclaim. One of those essays here is about an attack on the book by religious zealots in/around Clemson, South Carolina, when that university assigned the book to its incoming first-year class. An alum named Ken Wingate, who was a lawyer, a member of the state’s Commission on Higher Education, and a Presbyterian Bible teacher, said the book was pornographic and launched a campaign to get the requirement removed. Ain’t a damn thing changed, folks: Orange County, Florida, banned two of her books, including her greatest novel Bel Canto, from its schools.

There’s some filler in here, like her intro to the edition of Best American Short Stories that she oversaw, and an essay from Gourmet called “Do Not Disturb” about what amounted to a staycation in the Bel Air hotel in Los Angeles, but they’re short and unobtrusive amongst the gems that litter the collection, not least of which is “The Getaway Car.” If someone told me right now they wanted to be a writer of any stripe, I would tell them to go read this essay. I don’t think it tells you how to write or how to be a better writer, nor does it try to dissuade the reader from writing (a cynical response I hear too often from journalists – our industry is a mess, but the world needs journalists, period). And, not to put words in Patchett’s mouth, she doesn’t seem to have that sort of concrete advice. She offers no dictums like “write every day” or “write what you know” or any of the other bromides that you hear from writers; if anything, she writes for the reason that I write – because she has to. She does describe a more arduous writing and editing process than I imagined for her, given how beautiful and lyrical her writing is; I just figured this was how she wrote, and how she speaks (which we get an example of in “Fact vs. Fiction,” a convocation address she gave at Miami of Ohio). It’s an essay about her life in writing, how she saw herself as a future writer, how her career unfolded, how she had to work at a lot of things unrelated to writing – including building her relationships in the writing world – to get to be a writer as a full-time profession. It’s a marvelous piece of storytelling that, if you have a writing bone in your body, will make you want to grab a notebook and start. What more could you want from an essay about writing? This is the Story of a Happy Marriage does indeed have that story in it, but more than that, it is the story of a brilliant writer over the first forty-odd years of her life, and it is beautifully told even in its disparate pieces.

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→ March 13, 2024
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Filterworld.

In his new book Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture, journalist Kyle Chayka details the myriad ways in which we are thrust towards homogeneity in music, television, movies, books, and even architecture and travel because, in his view, of the tyranny of the algorithm. The book is more of a polemic than a work of research, filled with personal anecdotes and quotes from philosophers as well as observers of culture, and while Chayka is somewhat correct in that a small number of companies are now determining what people watch, listen to, and read, that’s always been true – it’s just happening now by algorithm when technology was supposed to democratize access to culture.

Chayka’s premise is sound on its surface: Major tech companies now depend on maintaining your attention to hold or increase revenues, and they do that via algorithm. Netflix’s algorithm keeps recommending movies and shows it believes you’ll watch – not that you will like, but that you will watch, or at least not turn off – thus keeping you as a customer. Spotify’s auto-generated playlists largely serve you artists and songs that are similar to ones you’ve already liked, or at least have already listened to, as I’ve learned recently because I listened to one song by the rapper Werdperfect that a friend sent me and now Spotify puts Werdperfect on every god damned playlist it makes for me. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tiktok, and their ilk all use algorithms to show you what will keep you engaged, not what you asked to see via your following list. Amazon’s recommendations are more straightforward, giving you products its algorithm thinks you’ll buy based on other things you’ve bought.

Chayka goes one further, though, arguing that algorithmic tyranny extends into meatspace, using it to explain the ubiquity of Brooklyn-style coffee shops, with sparse décor, subway tiles, exposed wood, and industrial lighting. He uses it to explain homogeneity in Airbnb listings, arguing that property owners must determine what the algorithm wants and optimize their spaces to maximize their earnings. He is ultimately arguing that we will all look the same, sound the same, wear the same clothes, live in the same spaces, drink the same expensive lattes, and so on, because of the algorithms.

To this I say: No shit. It’s called capitalism, and the algorithm itself is not the disease, but a symptom.

Businesses exist to make money, and in a competitive marketplace, that’s generally a good thing – it drives innovation and forces individual companies to respond to customer demand or lose market share to competitors. These market forces led to the advent of mass production over a century ago, a process that depended on relatively uniform tastes across a broad spectrum of consumers, because mass-producing anything economically depends on that uniformity. You can’t mass-produce custom clothes, by definition. Companies that have invested heavily in capital to mass produce their widgets will then work to further expand their customer base by encouraging homogeneity in tastes – thus the push for certain fashions to be “in” this year (as they were twenty years prior), or the marketing put behind specific books or songs or movies to try to gain mass adoption. Coffee shops adopt similar looks because customers like that familiarity, for the same reason that McDonald’s became a global giant – you walk into any McDonald’s in the world and you by and large know what to expect, from how it looks to what’s on the menu. This isn’t new. In fact, the idea of the algorithm isn’t even new; it is the technology that is new, as companies can implement their algorithms at a speed and scale that was unthinkable two decades earlier.

Furthermore, we are living in a time of limited competition, closer to what our forefathers faced in the trust era than what our parents faced in the 1980s. There is no comparably-sized competitor to Amazon. Spotify dominates music streaming. Each social media entity I listed earlier has no direct competition; they compete with each other, but each serves a different need or desire from consumers. The decline of U.S. antitrust enforcement since the Reagan era has exacerbated the problem. Fewer producers will indeed produce less variety in products.

However, the same technology that Chayka decries throughout Filterworld has flattened more than culture – it has flattened the hierarchy that led to homogeneity in culture from the 1950s through the 1990s. Music was forced, kicking and screaming, to give up its bundling practice, where you could purchase only a few individual songs but otherwise had to purchase entire albums to hear specific titles, by Napster and other file-sharing software products. Now, through streaming services, not only can any artist bypass the traditional record-label gatekeepers, but would-be “curators” can find, identify, and recommend these artists and their songs, the way that only DJs at truly independent radio stations could do in earlier eras. (And yes, I hope that I am one of those curators. My monthly playlists are the product of endless exploration on my own, with a little help from the Spotify algorithm on the Release Radar playlists, but mostly just me messing around and looking for new music.) Goodreads is a hot mess, owned by Amazon and boosting the Colleen Hoovers of the world, but it’s also really easy to find people who read a lot of books and can recommend the ones they like. (Cough.) Movies, food, travel, television, and so on are all now easier to consume, and if you are overwhelmed by the number and variety of choices, it’s easier to find people who can guide you through it. I try to be that type of guide for you when it comes to music and books and board games, and to some extent to restaurants. When it comes to television, I read Alan Sepinwall. When it comes to movies, I listen to Will Leitch & Tim Grierson, and I read Christy Lemire, and I bother Chris Crawford. I also just talk to my friends and see what they like. I have book friends, movie friends, game friends, coffee friends, rum friends, and so on. The algorithms, and the companies that deploy them, don’t decide for me because I made the very easy choice to decide for myself.

So I didn’t really buy Chayka’s conclusions in Filterworld, even though I thought the premise was sound and deserved this sort of exploration. I also found the writing in the book to be dull, unfortunately, with the sort of dry quality of academic writing without the sort of rigor that you might see in a research paper. I could have lived with that if he’d sold me better on his arguments, but he gives too little attention to points that might truly matter, such as privacy regulations in the E.U. and the lack thereof in the U.S., and too much weight to algorithms that will only affect your life if you let them.

Next up: Angela Carter’s The Magic Toyshop.

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→ December 19, 2023
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The Ghost Map.

Our current understanding of the ways in which diseases spread goes back to a little-remembered cholera epidemic that devastated a London neighborhood in 1854, when a physician-scientist and a minister began working, first on their own and then together, to trace the outbreak’s origins. In a time of superstition and errant beliefs in “miasmas,” these two men realized through hard work, going door to door at one point to ascertain where each household obtained its water, that the agent causing the disease was spread through human waste that contaminated a particular water supply. In The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic – And How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World, author Steven Johnson tells this story in the fashion of a medical mystery – until a pointless epilogue full of speculation about the future of epidemics and treatments that has aged very poorly in the 16 years since its publication.

Cholera today is a disease of extreme poverty, and even more so of the lack of infrastructure that accompanies it; nearly all cholera outbreaks occur in desperately poor (or desperately corrupt) countries, or in those ravaged by war. Large outbreaks occurred in Syria during the early part of its civil war and Yemen during its endless civil/proxy war. In the third quarter of 2023, the hardest-hit countries, measured by cholera cases per capita, were Syria and Afghanistan, followed by Haiti, Bangladesh, and several countries in sub-Saharan Africa. The disease, caused by the bacterium Vibrio cholerae, first emerged in India in 1817 and then spread around the world, killing over 35 million people, with multiple pandemics affecting Europe and North America, until advances in sanitation and public health helped eliminate the disease in more affluent countries. Those advances, and the lives saved, all came about because of the work of physician and scientist John Snow and Anglian priest Henry Whitehead.

Snow was an avid researcher and experimented with ether and later with chloroform, developing more reliable methods of anesthetizing patients that brought him significant renown, to the point where Queen Victoria called on him to assist her with chloroform during the birth of her eighth child, Prince Leopold. He took a general interest in cholera’s spread during the pandemic that first reached England in 1848, publishing a paper that argued that the prevailing theory that it was spread via polluted air, the “miasma” theory, was wrong. That outbreak eventually petered out, but cholera returned to England in 1854, leading to a horrific outbreak near Broad Street in London’s Soho district. Snow created a dot map to track cholera cases in the neighborhood, gaining help from Whitehead in going door to door to ask families about cases in the house – including houses where the majority of family members had died – and, after Snow’s initial research identified the Broad Street pump as a possible link between nearly all of the cases, where they got their water.

When Johnson tells this history, which takes up about 80% of the book, it’s fantastic. He balances the historical details, the science, and the biographies of the two main characters in the story well enough to maintain the interest level without ignoring the significance of the effort or the context in the history of science. He also has quite a bit of detail on some of the families destroyed by the outbreak, and on the quotidian lives of the inhabitants of this overcrowded part of what was becoming a massively overcrowded city. It’s a great, brisk history of science book.

If he’d stopped there, around page 200, I’d be raving. Unfortunately, there’s a long, tacked-on epilogue that goes well beyond the scope of the book in both its historical and scientific aims. Johnson couldn’t have known that we’d have several epidemics and one global pandemic before 20 years were up, but the larger point is that this book is about history, not predictions, and his don’t hold up particularly well. I read the epilogue wondering if an editor had asked him to add it, because it’s so out of character with the rest of the book.

That’s not a reason to skip The Ghost Map – you can always choose not to read the last bit – and the story it’s telling remains extremely relevant. The work the CDC and the WHO did to track SARS-CoV-2 in 2020, or that they’re doing right now to track current epidemics like chikungunya in Burkina Faso or Mpox in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, is a direct ancestor of the work that Snow and Whitehead did in 1854. If the field of epidemiology has an origin point, it’s their efforts, and we have them to thank for all of the outbreaks of highly infectious diseases that never reach our shores.

Next up: I just finished R.F. Kuang’s Babel and started Tana French’s In the Woods.

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