→ June 4, 2026
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Mood Machine.

Music journalist Liz Pelly has spent most of her professional life working and living in indie music circles, which gives her a distinct and important perspective on the consolidation of the music industry around just a few streaming services, with Spotify foremost among them. In her book Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, she explores the birth of Spotify, how it took over the streaming space, and how pernicious its effects have been on indie musicians and labels – as well as listeners who want to hear anything but the most anodyne music available.

Spotify began as an idea to sell ads, not as a way to save the music industry, or even just as a way for its founders, including the military-minded Daniel Ek, to get rich while working in music. Songs were just a vehicle for selling ads and collecting user data to do so more effectively. Ek and other Spotify execs have retconned their history to make Spotify out to be some kind of savior for music and musicians, even as their practices have proven predatory, including bringing back payola, and they’ve cracked down harder on musicians with tiny followings than they have on scammers posting fake music tracks and clips to try to deke Spotify’s algorithms and rack up streams from listeners who aren’t paying much attention to what’s playing.

Pelly spoke to over a hundred current and former Spotify employees, got access to internal Slack logs, and interviewed musicians, label executives, and others to research Mood Machine, and two consistent themes emerged (among many smaller topics). One is that Spotify’s entire structure, built largely around algorithmic playlists, which are made by machine-learning systems and are distinct from curated ones, assembled by humans, like the ones I post every month, is both corrupt and tends to funnel listeners to a small number of artists from major labels, while paying artists from outside of the big 3 labels a pittance (and paying no artists anything close to fair value). The second is that a huge portion of Spotify’s audience isn’t actually listening to the music: One of their main goals is to get listeners to stick on a playlist as some sort of background noise – similar to Netlix’s “second-screen” nonsense – and let it play for hours and hours, and if it runs out let Spotify’s algorithm just keep playing more songs, so they can serve more ads. Playing a song costs Spotify less than half a penny in royalties. Their dream scenario is The Lost Weekend except with some algorithmic chillwave playlist going in the background for 72 hours.

Harper’s excerpted a portion of Mood Machine in 2024 as a story called “The Ghosts in the Machine.” It exposed Spotify’s program to commission fake tracks from outside vendors under its “Perfect Fit Content” program, where those companies would supply songs by ‘ghost artists’ to pad Spotify’s playlists for deeply discounted royalty rates, allowing Spotify to deliver the same quantity of music to listeners for a lower cost. Spotify execs defended the practice, saying that listeners of those playlists were “half-listening anyway,” so why deliver them real music? Pelly spoke to a number of employees dismayed by the practice, saying it was unethical to deceive listeners and harmful to the music industry they were supposedly supporting. The few editors remaining who curated playlists themselves reported increased pressure to use these ghost artists on their playlists, even though that was antithetical to their mission (and, I would presume, their music fandom). Some of the companies Pelly cites as ghost-artist producers are now getting into AI-generated tracks, such as Epidemic Sound, which also sells royalty-free background music to video producers. It’s the most interesting chapter in a book that’s full of them, and the most overt explanation of why Spotify is harmful to the music industry.

Pelly wraps up with a chapter (not the epilogue) about how listeners can support artists better in the streaming era. The obvious answer – and I’m not criticizing Pelly here – is to buy music. You love an album? Pay for it, whether digitally or physically. Buy it direct from the label or from the artist. Going to shows and buying merch helps as well. Streaming an artist’s music barely makes a dent; you’d have to stream a song around 300 times to get them $1. She points out that while Spotify is generally presumed to have the worst payout rates to artists – no one knows because Spotify’s agreements with major labels are confidential and protected by NDAs, which seems like maybe a restraint of trade, but I’m not a lawyer – the other major streaming sites, like Apple and Amazon, aren’t that much better. I don’t believe she ever said not to stream music, but her message is more like “stream responsibly, and buy liberally.”

The book is so thoroughly researched, with citations as well as quotes from relevant sources, that it can bog down a little in the details, but I will gladly accept that tradeoff to get such an academic take on a popular topic. It is easy to find reasons to hate streaming and find people to tell you they hate streaming. It is a much harder task to explain just why streaming is bad for music, and culture, and explain why it’s also going to be hard to fix the problems streaming, and Spotify in particular, has created. Mood Machine does all of this, without once allowing you to forget that the reason you downloaded Spotify in the first place was because you, in fact, like music.

Next up: Susan Choi’s Flashlight. Dun dun, dun dun dun.

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→ October 11, 2025
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Make Me Commissioner.

Full disclosure here: I got a review (electronic) copy of this book from Jane Leavy’s publicist, but also contributed a little to the book, as Jane asked me a few questions and mentions me once in the text as well as in the acknowledgements.

Make Me Commissioner: I Know What’s Wrong With Baseball and How to Fix It doesn’t exactly deliver on its title, and it isn’t really about Jane Leavy asking to take Rob Manfred’s job – although I have little doubt she’d be an improvement, as she doesn’t just like baseball, she loves it. It’s a series of interconnected stories, reminiscent of George Will’s Men at Work, that explain a lot about where baseball is right now as a sport and a pastime. I disagree with large portions of it, both Leavy’s opinions and the opinions of many of the people she spoke with in researching the book, but I also tore through it.

Leavy has been a sportswriter for … let’s just say longer than I have, and prior to this she wrote three biographies of Hall of Famers, most notably her biography of Sandy Koufax called A Lefty’s Legacy. This is Leavy’s first book where she’s the main character, as we tag along with her to Cape Cod League games, spring training games, Savannah Bananas games, and a few big-league games as well, listening in on conversations with players, coaches, scouts, and executives about baseball in our era. There’s a lot about analytics, of course, as well as baseball’s attempts to capture the attention of younger fans, both by changing the game on the field and updating how the sport is presented when the players aren’t actually playing.

The stuff about the Bananas works the least, and the idea that baseball – Major League Baseball, specifically – has to be more like the Bananas is, well, bananas. (The book was published a week before Defector revealed that the Bananas’ charity is maybe not very charitable.) The Savannah Bananas are entertainment, not sport. They build on baseball to put on a show, the way that WWE builds on real wrestling to put on a show. You might like one, both, or neither. But turning MLB into something more like the Bananas, which Manfred floated when he brought up the idea of the “Golden At Bat” – never has it seemed more like the guy just doesn’t understand baseball culture or tradition – risks alienating everyone: Current and longtime baseball fans will think it’s a joke, while people who like the Bananas for what they bring aren’t going to suddenly embrace ‘real’ baseball for putting the pitcher on stilts.

The lesson of the Bananas, if there is one, is that the fans do matter. Leavy does not suggest, or agree with the idea of, adopting Bananas ideas into pro ball; she does suggest making the sport more family-friendly, with earlier game times (good), cheaper tickets in family-only sections (good, but owners don’t really like giving up money), and more in-stadium entertainment (not a long-term strategy).

What baseball really needs to do is improve the product on the field – without diluting it, or making it into something it fundamentally isn’t. The pitch clock, of which I think Leavy approves, has been game-changing, literally. We get the same amount of baseball in about 10% less time. The baseball density has increased. The baseball per minute ratio is at its highest in decades. And the predicted rise in pitcher injuries doesn’t seem to have happened, probably because every pitcher was already hurt anyway.

This is where Leavy gets into the conversations that prove more interesting, if not always enlightening. She talks to players (Alex Bregman, Chase Delauter), execs (Mike Rizzo, still head of the Nationals when this went to press), coaches, and scouts. She goes to Driveline, and wonders what the cost of all of this easy velocity is. She’s asking people in the trenches what they think baseball should do, and the answer is that they don’t have the answers. That’s fine, if perhaps not the most compelling hook for a book, but along the way, she also talks to Bregman about his struggles in 2024 and how he’s changed his swing over time, and talks to Rizzo and Red Sox hitting development director Jason Ochart about the rise of analytics, all of which rank among the best conversations in the book. Leavy is clearly more of a traditionalist and not a huge fan of analytics, but not to the point of refusing to learn or understand it, which puts her miles ahead of some our colleagues whose response is to make bad WAR puns or call people who cite advanced statistics “nerds” like this is Happy Days (a show that actually gets a mention in the book).

Leavy’s love of the game comes through on every page, even when she says things with which I completely disagree. I’d be fine with her as Commissioner, although at this point I think a potted plant might be an improvement over someone who wants to eliminate another 20% of the minors. The book doesn’t get much into the weeds about the revenue model in the sport, which is a major reason why the sport has remained strong despite the aging fan base, so as a prescription for how to ‘fix’ baseball, it falls short. It’s just an engaging read about baseball as it is today, when most baseball books – including my own two – don’t really give you the feel of the game, the way so many of the best baseball books of the 1980s and 1990s did. Make Me Commissioner does, and reminded me so much of the books on the sport that helped forge my own voice.

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→ September 25, 2025
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Two books about games.

In Playing with Reality: How Games Have Shaped Our World, neuroscientist Kelly Clancy examines how the frameworks of games have affected myriad aspects of human society, and how more recently game theory and related ideas have led to damaging and even ruinous policies that continue today with the mindless (pun intended) push to make everything AI.

Playing games leads our brains to produce dopamine, and games with uncertainty function as variable reward systems, increasing those dopamine surges and further encouraging us to keep playing. Thus we see evidence of games going back to ancient Babylon (the Royal Game of Ur), Egypt (Senet), and Africa (mancala), with games often used as tests of intelligence or readiness for a position as a leader or even as royalty. Such games often included substantial elements of chance, including the progenitors of dice, which led to early calculations of probabilities well before the Europeans started to figure this stuff out in the wake of the Renaissance. Games have evolved over time in complexity, and as they have developed, they have further permeated our non-playing world.

Clancy sets the stage by giving that history and an explanation of what happens in the brain when we play games, including games of chance and games of strategy, and then moves into the more sordid history of games affecting … well, history. She goes into the story of Kriegsspiel, an early wargame that was first developed by a Prussian nobleman two hundred years ago, and after several decades found its way into military leaders’ hands, where it became a tactical training tool for officers in the Prussian and later German armies. Clancy connects it to the Germans’ early successes in World War I and the use of the Blitzkrieg strategy in World War II, both as a way to explain how we can use games to learn and to think more flexibly, as well as how games can lead to unexpected and even tragic outcomes when used without guardrails.

Game theory ends up the main character of the second half of Playing with Reality, as Clancy points out that the way game theoreticians took over much of economic teaching, dovetailing as it did with the myth of the ‘rational’ man, led to decades of policy failures across the world that were based on a set of faulty assumptions about how people would act. (She did not, unfortunately, mention the “it’s time for some game theory” meme.) This idea of “economic man” or “rational man” had a stranglehold on economic instruction throughout the world for decades, well past the point where folks like Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky had published research showing that people are in fact not rational, and often fall prey to cognitive biases, leading to results you won’t predict if you’re stuck in the standard model.

Clancy saves some of her particular ire for the AI gold rush and the grifters pushing it, cautioning that these LLMs are not actually exhibiting ‘intelligence,’ and that there’s danger in treating “language like a game without meaning.” Much of what she says about these energy-devouring scams could have been written this week, even though the book itself was first published last year; she decries the lack of regulation or even common sense in many of the uses of so-called AI, and the history of the overapplication of games and game theory to real-life – often treating the world as a zero-sum game, when it is manifestly not – shows how easily we can destroy the world by thinking in those terms. (She cites a specific example from the Cold War, where one Soviet engineer decided to ignore an alarm that a U.S. ICBM was heading towards Russia; the alarm was false, of course, but that one person’s decision, against the ‘rules’ of the game, saved us from World War III.)

Clancy’s focus is on how games are intrinsic to humanity, how we’ve tried to model reality in our games and then taken the games and tried to apply them back to reality, with mixed results if we’re being kind. Mathematician Marcus du Sautoy takes a different approach in his book Around the World in 80 Games: A Mathematician Unlocks the Secrets of the Greatest Games, which may not actually get to eighty games (and certainly not the greatest ones) but does at least provide some interesting histories of games outside of the western canon, truly going around the world to explain the origins and uses of games in Africa, South America, and across Asia. The book offers some superficial looks at the math behind some of these games, but it’s scant, and it’s hard to get away from du Sautoy’s pie-eyed optimism around AI, which he seems to view as an unmitigated positive that will take drudgery from our lives and allow us to play more games.

Du Sautoy succeeds most when he gets a little deeper into the specifics of a game, such as the analysis of which properties are the best ones to buy in Monopoly (the orange ones above all), or the history of tarot cards (which had nothing to do with the woo for which various charlatans have adapted the game), or the stories of games from non-European cultures that were unfamiliar to me, like Sudan’s Dala – many of which have been ‘solved’ by mathematicians, for better or for worse. Du Sautoy writes very much like a mathematician, so when he’s in the weeds, he’s actually clearer and his passion is palpable, but when he starts veering off into philosophy or his almost religious belief that AI is going to save the world, not only is the prose harder to read, but he’s clearly out of his depth.

Both books quote many of the same sources on the philosophy of games, including Bernard Suits’s The Grasshopper and C. Nhi Nguyen’s Games: Agency as Art, which makes their tonal differences more stark. Clancy is the realist here, someone who certainly seems to like games but understands their limitations as models for society as a whole, while du Sautoy is the Panglossian dilettante whose life of relative privilege – his grandfather ran the publisher Faber & Faber and his godmother was T.S. Eliot’s wife Valerie – has perhaps blinded him to the realities of daily life for most people. Du Sautoy does cover more specific games, if that’s where your interest lies, while Clancy has much more to say about games as a whole.

Next up: Staying on a theme, I’m reading Philip K. Dick’s pulpy The Game-Players of Titan.

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→ 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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→ April 23, 2025
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Surely You Can’t Be Serious.

My favorite movie when I was a kid was Top Secret!, the third feature and second studio film from the writing team of Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker, who were, of course, responsible for Airplane! and the greatest television series of all time, Police Squad! I actually didn’t see the full Airplane! until much later, probably because my parents thought it was stupid … and it is stupid, gloriously so, and so much of it still holds up today.

Jim Abrahams died in 2024 at age 80, but not long before his death, the trio collaborated on Surely You Can’t Be Serious: The True Story of Airplane!, a hilarious recounting of the making of that movie and their lives and careers up to that point. A friend suggested I track down the audiobook, which you can get on Apple Books or Amazon, because it’s read by the authors with a huge cast of people reading their own reminiscences from working on the film – including stars Robert Hays and Julie Hagerty – and comedians who remember how influential the film was in their lives and careers. Even Michael Eisner and Barry Diller, both studio execs who were there as the film was greenlit and produced, chime in. It’s a blast, not just funny, but fascinating because of how the trio recall coming into the movie business as rank amateurs, having to figure it out as they went along while also convincing established actors to go along with a script many of them didn’t understand until they saw the finished product.

The three men were childhood friends from Wisconsin who naturally always gravitated towards comedy, and while in college in Madison they created a playhouse where they put on sketch-comedy shows, eventually settling on the name Kentucky Fried Theater. They took that show to Los Angeles and turned it into a movie called, of course, Kentucky Fried Movie, written by ZAZ and directed by a then-unknown John Landis, who went on to direct Animal House because of his work on this film. They’d already started work on the film that would become Airplane!, which was built around a spoof of a mediocre air-disaster film called Zero Hour, from which the trio cribbed not just the framework of the story but entire bits of dialogue. The resulting movie was like nothing else, packed with jokes, non sequiturs, sight gags, puns, wordplay, and an inexplicable shot of a topless woman, and it was both a huge box-office success and a turning point in the history of comedy.

I rewatched Airplane while about halfway through the book, and most of it is still pretty funny, probably because so many of the jokes are just silly, like the one that provides the title of the book, the “The hospital? What is it?” running gag, and several of the visual jokes that it would be pointless to describe. It’s hard to watch that film, then or now, and think that some of the main actors, like Leslie Nielsen, Lloyd Bridges, and Robert Stack, were seen as dramatic actors incapable of comedy. They all nail the deadpan style that ZAZ wanted, and it’s essential to the film that they do so. Only Bridges really does anything overtly funny, when he sniffs glue; the others are just reciting ridiculous dialogue like it’s Shakespeare. There are a few jokes that sound dated now because they refer to something contemporary to the film, and a few that you probably just couldn’t tell today due to changing norms, although I was pleasantly surprised to see how little in the film might truly be offensive by today’s standards. I’m sure someone could find offense with a lot of what’s in Airplane!, but it’s all pretty tame compared to modern comedy; maybe Captain Oveur’s lines to Joey wouldn’t make the cut, but they’re just so stupid I found it hard to see them in that light. (The movie was on Hoopla, available through my local library.)

I’ve never been anywhere near the movie business, so much of what the book describes is new to me, even though I’m sure much of it doesn’t apply now, forty-five years later. I also couldn’t get enough of hearing the actors describe what it was like reading the script and working on the set; the book still has quotes from some of the older actors who died well before the book came out from previous interviews, just read by a narrator, and they’re almost all interesting. Most of them didn’t get what the script was; several had to be convinced by a loved one just to take the offered parts.

I wish the main part of the book hadn’t ended with Airplane!, although we do get one Top Secret! Fact, around the origins of that film’s “skeet surfing” scene. (I didn’t know that film was a box-office bomb; I was eleven when I saw it, and I thought it was the funniest thing I’d ever watched.) There’s also a three-part epilogue where each of the writers talks about his career and life after Airplane!, which goes off the rails at several points, including one of them veering into some weird anti-science territory. You could probably skip that part, as none of it has much of anything to do with why you’re here. The rest of the book is either funny, interesting, or both throughout. The only catch is that if you haven’t seen Airplane! … well, what’s wrong with you?

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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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