→ 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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→ October 6, 2023
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The Sum of Us.

Heather McGhee was the head of Demos, a think tank that aims to “power the movement for a just, inclusive, multiracial democracy,” for four years before stepping aside in part to work on her first book, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Prosper Together, which came out in March of 2021. It’s a clear-eyed, evidence-based argument that public policies that aim to reduce racial or gender inequity actually benefit society as a whole, including white people and men, even though political opponents of those policies will try to paint them as anti-white or anti-male.

McGhee’s topic might seem incendiary, and in her rhetoric about modern conservatives, the Republican Party as a whole, and the race-baiting Trumpists and MAGA adherents in particular, she does not shy away from calling out the racist attitudes behind their arguments and beliefs. When making her arguments about the societal benefits of these policies, however, she sticks to the facts, and allows the shock value of just how much white conservative Americans are voting against their own self-interest to speak for her.

There are plenty of arguments, and quite a bit of evidence, that diversity in and of itself brings broad benefits to communities and companies, such as the way demographic diversity leads to increased creativity and productivity in the workplace. McGhee largely avoids that line of thinking in favor of more tangible benefits from particular policies that conservatives tend to oppose, such as Medicaid expansion. The states that have rejected expanded Medicaid funds from the federal government have lower life expectancies than the states that have accepted it. There are actual lives in the balance, and the excess deaths in the states that refuse to take the extra Medicaid money, declining it for political gain only, are not limited to people of color, although of course those communities are more adversely affected than white communities are. McGhee uses example after example to show why policies that are often depicted as favoring people of color would in fact be beneficial for substantial portions of the white populations of states or the country as a whole.

The first full chapter of The Sum of Us is titled “Racism Drained the Pool,” a fantastic bit of wordplay that has a literal meaning, referring to the closing of public pools across the country, even outside of the South, after courts required them to integrate. The results are still evident today; cities and towns filled in their old pools rather than allow Black kids to swim there, or converted those pools to private “swim clubs” that Black residents were less likely to be able to afford, but public pools never came back, so now everyone suffers. Where I live in northern Delaware, most people who have the means belong to some sort of private pool, and I can say from experience, as someone who has belonged to two different pools, that they’re not exactly integrated affairs. If you’re poor, you don’t get to swim – or to learn to swim, which is a life skill, not just a matter of recreation. The visible segregation is racial, but the invisible sort is economic.

McGhee explores these policy questions across most of the major spheres of public-economic life, including health, education, real estate, and the environment. Environmental racism and real estate redlining might be the best known examples, but McGhee points out, with data and research, that these inequities do not only affect people of color, regardless of what politicians who oppose stronger environmental regulations or greater controls on banks and lenders. Most of the policies she covers end up adversely affecting all poor people, regardless of race or ethnicity, but politicians and pundits try to sell these policies as somehow good for white people because they’re supposed to be worse for people of color. This is the ‘sum’ of the book’s title: These aren’t zero-sum policies, and in all of the cases she covers, the rising tide will lift all races. If we tighten environmental regulations, everyone benefits from cleaner air and water, with better health outcomes, better education outcomes, and so on. If we improve access to education with greater public investment, lower tuition, or greater reimbursements or grants, then we get a more educated populace, which improves the economy as a whole through increased productivity while also reducing crime.

The book goes through example after example of policies that would benefit wide swaths of the population but that die at the state or federal level through opposition from so-called “fiscal conservatives” who depict public aid or other public spending (e.g., infrastructure) as wasteful, as well as from politicians and activists who lean more into the language of white grievance by painting such government spending as “handouts.” They try to cut it completely, as the extreme right wing of the House is doing right now with the federal budget, or tie it to so many criteria that it’s difficult or impossible for people in need to benefit from it. McGhee points to the medieval Medicaid policies in Texas, where adults are not eligible at all for this need-based health coverage if they don’t have kids, and a family of four can’t have household income over $3900 a year to remain eligible. That’s not a typo – if you work 40 hours a week for the minimum wage in Texas (which is $7.25 an hour, the lowest legal amount, of course) for 14 weeks, you lose eligibility for Medicaid in Texas. Over three quarters of a million people in Texas go without health insurance because of these restrictions, and that population is not limited by race or gender or national origin or party affiliation. The Sum of Us makes a compelling argument to rid ourselves of the zero-sum thinking that says a gain for non-white people is a loss for white people, and recognize that in many, if not all, areas of the economy, raising the tide will lift all boats.

Next up: I just finished Martin Amis’s book The Zone of Interest, although I understand the upcoming film of that name has a very loose connection to the novel.

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→ October 9, 2022
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Wired for Love.

Dr. Stephanie Cacioppo spent her early career researching the neuroscience of love, even as she privately doubted that she’d ever find it in her personal life. Then she did, in a whirlwind romance with Dr. John Cacioppo, an esteemed researcher on the effects of loneliness who happened to be 20 years her senior. They married inside of a year, and spent almost seven years together before a rare salivary cancer took his life in 2018. Her new book Wired for Love: a Neuroscientist’s Journey Through Romance, Loss and the Essence of Human Connection is part memoir, part popular science tome, a brief but engaging look at the subject of her research, interspersed with the story of her life with John.

The Cacioppos’ story together is bittersweet, wonderful at first until it turns tragic, even more than you might expect from a marriage of two people separated by over twenty years. John even warns her before they marry that they’re not likely to have that many years together, and he worries about ‘leaving’ her too soon, but that can hardly prepare them for what’s about to befall them. It would seem like the plot of a Nicholas Sparks novel if it weren’t someone’s actual life: Their areas of research were already similar, and they met and fell in love despite the huge age gap and the fact that they lived on different continents, after which they published several joint papers in a field that needed more attention, only to have him die of a rare, aggressive cancer before he turned 70.

The real interest in the book is her work on the neuroscience of love, and if anything, I wish there were more of it. Some of the content revolves around how little interest there was in the topic when she began her academic career, with almost no research on the subject, and substantial institutional and individual objections to her attempts to undertake this research. (I’m sure much of it was worse because she was a young woman trying to research this, which I’m sure elicited eyerolls from the men who ran the neurology departments and IRBs who had to support and approve those proposals.)

Eventually, she did get published, and her research came to more public notice, earning her the moniker “Dr. Love,” which I couldn’t read without hearing Paul Stanley’s voice. Her published papers include works on the “toxic effects of perceived social isolation,” an fMRI analysis on the interactions in the brain between sexual desire and love, and multiple papers on the neurology of loneliness that she co-authored with her husband. It’s important work that has helped highlight the large health cost of loneliness, or perceived loneliness, which others, including current Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, have identified as an “epidemic” with large medical and social costs.

Wired for Love only scratches the surface of Cacioppo’s work, to the detriment of the book; it’s not a book about loneliness or the neuroscience of love, per se, but it could have used more in the science half to balance out the tragic romance story of her personal life. It’s even more powerful knowing that her story starts and ends with her being alone, which could have led to some discussion of the neuroscience of grieving, or how to cope with the loneliness after the death of a loved one. The half of the book about her whirlwind romance and too-brief marriage with John Cacioppo was beautiful, but it didn’t educate readers as much as it could have given her body of work as a researcher and the importance of the subject. I was left wanting a good bit more on the science side.

Next up: I’m three books down the road already, but right now I’m reading Hervé Le Tellier’s novel The Anomaly, winner of the prestigious Prix Goncourt, France’s equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, in 2020.

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→ September 29, 2022
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Neurotribes.

Steve Silberman’s 2015 book Neurotribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity is a history of autism, but one told through anecdotes of people with the neurodevelopmental condition or the scientists who studied it. It’s also an education, and an attempt to set the record straight that we are not, in fact, in the middle of an autism “epidemic,” but that the condition has always existed, even if doctors at those times didn’t realize what they were seeing.

Much of the history of autism is one of tragedy, as people with the condition were often treated as insane, or as imbeciles, and stuck in institutions or otherwise abandoned by their families. The condition was seen as incurable – meaning it was seen as something you’d want to try to cure – and that an autistic child was nothing more than an animal. This view persisted, at least in the west (there’s no discussion here of views of autism outside of the U.S. and Europe), until the early 20th century.

That’s when two researchers working independently* had their Newton/Leibniz moment, as both Leo Kanner, working in the U.S., and Hans Asperger, working in Vienna, both published key papers identifying autism as a condition with a specific, and in both cases narrow, set of symptoms. Asperger’s name has lived on beyond Kanner’s, but at the time, Vienna was under Nazi control, and Kanner’s work and views took precedence on the larger stage.

*I got a kind note from Steve Silberman via Twitter, saying: “The biggest historical scoop in NeuroTribes is that Kanner and Asperger were NOT working independently, but shared two assistants, Anni Weiss and Georg Frankl.”

If you know of Asperger, it’s through the now-deprecated “Asperger’s syndrome,” which has been subsumed into the larger diagnostic term autism spectrum disorder. One of the most enlightening parts of Neurotribes is Silberman’s explanation of that entire process, although its roots are horrifying: Because the Nazis were murdering any children held in institutions for health or mental reasons, Asperger’s work focused on the socially awkward prodigies he found. This spurred the still-extant stereotype of the autistic savant, which was further cemented in the public mind by the film Rain Man, the history of which Silberman details at great length and with significant empathy for everyone involved in the film.

Kanner viewed Asperger much as Newton viewed Leibniz, and we’re all quite a bit the worse for it, as the rivalry meant Kanner worked to “own” the definition of autism for some time. He claimed the disorder (a term still in use in the technical literature) only affected young children – if they were older, they had schizophrenia or something else – and that the cause was parental indifference. The idea of the “refrigerator mother” who failed to love her child enough, thus giving the kid autism, persisted for decades, at least into the 1980s. When that finally started to crumble, parents began looking for other explanations, landing on environmental toxins and, with the help of a fraudster named Andrew Wakefield, vaccines.

All the while, parents and researchers were looking for a cure, in no small part because Kanner’s definition of autism excluded all but the most serious cases. Some attempts were well-intentioned, while others were (and still are) quackery, and even dangerous. There’s still an institution in Massachusetts that uses shock therapy on autistic residents, despite no evidence that it works (and ample evidence that it’s torture). The FDA has had to issue warnings about so-called “miracle mineral solution,” which is bleach by another name, and which Youtube for one has banned but refuses to remove instructional videos about. (MMS does not cure autism, or anything else, but it can kill you.) Silberman gets into some of this, although I think the bleach stuff largely postdates his book.

It took some substantial efforts by later researchers and especially by activist parents to bring about changes. Those parents demanded changes in how the medical establishment viewed and treated their autistic children, and lobbied for changes in the definition of autism so that school districts would be forced to provide accommodations for autistic students who were previously left behind or even told that they had to attend school elsewhere. The passage of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act in 1975 and again in 1990 as well as the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990 allowed autistic children to stay in public schools and required the districts to provide them with individualized education programs (IEP) to determine what accommodations and modifications the child needs to succeed in school. It shouldn’t have been that hard, but Silberman makes it clear that Kanner’s narrow definition and the stranglehold he had on the definition of autism, helped by a small number of others who seemed to profit from their work with autistic kids, made this process far more difficult.

There’s far more to Neurotribes than just a history, however. Silberman discusses a few notable historical figures who almost certainly were autistic, including chemist and physicist Henry Cavendish, the discoverer of hydrogen; and Nikola Tesla, inventor of an overpriced electric car. (Hold on, I’m getting a note here that that isn’t correct.) Temple Grandin makes several appearances on these pages as well. There’s also a deep dive into the correlation between autistic people and sci-fi fandom, including Claude Degler, a key early figure in spreading the gospel of science fiction (until his views on eugenics caught up with him), and perhaps an autistic person himself. Silberman argues that sci-fi fandom was one of the first safe spaces for autistics, as personality “quirks” were less important than one’s passion for the subject – and perhaps because those quirks were more common among the fan base anyway.

There’s a wealth of information within Neurotribes, even though the book is now seven years old and it seems like the medical community knows even more about autism now than it did then. It’s a well-researched and well-argued work, one that encourages empathy for autistic people but not pity, and if anything gives more respect to Wakefield, the NVIC, and other cranks than they deserve, presenting the views of people who seek to find non-genetic causes for autism fairly before explaining that the evidence says they’re wrong. And Silberman makes it very clear that autism isn’t what history tells us it is, or even what many people probably still think it is, thanks to Rain Man or, worse, Music. It’s a deeply humanistic work of non-fiction, and that alone makes it worth a read.

Next up: Dr. Stephanie Cacioppo’s Wired for Love.

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→ September 19, 2022
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An Immense World.

Ed Yong won the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Writing last year for his articles in the Atlantic (not my employer) about the COVID-19 pandemic, which I called way back in May of 2020, over a year before the award announcement. I was already a fan of his work after reading his tremendous first book, I Contain Multitudes, a thoughtful, detailed look at the importance of the microbiome, and how so many of our actions and policies work against our own health because of our fear of bacteria. (He also described the experiment to infect male Aeges aegypti mosquitos with the Wolbachia bacterium, which makes the eggs that result from their mating activity fail to hatch. It has since been used to reduce mosquito populations in areas where dengue fever is endemic.)

Yong’s latest book, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, is a big departure from anything he’s written before, although he retains both his commitment to scientific accuracy and the sense of wonder that permeated his first book. This time around, he’s exploring an area I would guess most readers have never contemplated: How animals sense the world, often in ways that are beyond the reach of our senses, or even rely on senses that humans don’t have.

Yong begins with some discussion of the erroneous historical view, one that still persists today on a smaller scale, that non-human animals are less cognitively capable than we are, because we have evolved consciousness and they haven’t. It’s a view that fails on its face, as just about everyone who’s been around a dog knows that canines can hear sounds we can’t – hence the dog whistle, at least in its literal sense. It turns out, unsurprisingly, that there are examples across the animal world, and in some cases in other biological kingdoms as well, of senses more powerful than our five senses, and examples beyond those.

One of the best-known colloquial examples, although I would say probably not a well-understood one by laypeople, is echolocation in bats. Bats are nearly blind, but their powers of echolocation, using what we now call sonar to determine not just where objects are around them, but to find food and distinguish, say, something to eat from the leaf on which it’s sitting, involve a mental processing speed that is hard for us to comprehend. And it turns out humans are capable of echolocation as well, although evolution hasn’t advanced our skills in that area to the same extent because we haven’t needed it.

Yong also describes the handful of species that can sense the Earth’s magnetic field, a sense humans do not have at all, to find their way back to the beach where they were born, in the case of some turtles. There are animals and insects that can see parts of the infrared spectrum that we can’t, but there are also substantial portions of the animal kingdom that don’t see the world in the same colors we see – which is why waving a red cape in front of a bull is just a silly tradition, as bulls don’t have the red cones in their eyes to detect that color. Indeed, few animals see the world in the same colors that we do, which comes down to the fact that color isn’t something inherent in nature; it is how our eyes perceive vibrations of molecules in nature, because we have red, green, and blue cones in our retinas that send signals that our brains convert to color. (And some people, almost all women, have a fourth cone, making them “tetrachromats,” which Yong also discusses.) If you don’t have those cones, you see the world completely differently.

Yong ends with what is probably the most important part of An Immense World ­– an examination of how humans are screwing all of this up. You’re probably aware of how climate change and overdevelopment are already threatening habitats around the world. Light pollution threatens many species that rely on natural light sources to find food or shelter, or to migrate; noise pollution interferes with many species’ ability to communicate with each other, to find mates or identify predators. Humanity’s rapid rise in the last 200 years has been an unmitigated disaster for everything else on the planet, and Yong points to even more threats to biodiversity than those we already know about (e.g., those explained in The Sixth Extinction). There are also some examples of species adapting to these changes – birds that have learned to hang out near streetlights to eat the moths attracted to the illumination, for example – but they’re too few to make up for the losses. We have to be the ones to adapt, to live with less light, less noise, less everything, so that we don’t lose any more than we’ve already lost, especially not before we’ve learned more about it.

Also, Ed will be my guest this week on the Keith Law Show. The episode should be up on Tuesday, 9/20.

Next up: Steve Silberman’s Neurotribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity.

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→ May 27, 2022
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Eating to Extinction.

Dan Saladino’s Eating to Extinction: The World’s Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them makes its important point – that declining biodiversity will impact our food supply in multiple ways – in unusual fashion: Rather than arguing the point in a straight narrative, Saladino gives the reader a tour of many of the rare foods at risk of extinction from environmental degradation, globalization, even over-regulation in some cases, presenting the scientific case for preserving them but relying more on emotional appeals. We’ll miss these foods if they’re gone, or maybe we’ll want to try them more for knowing they exist and might disappear.

The strongest arguments here come in the various sections on plants, because of the evolutionary case Saladino offers. Take the banana, probably the best-known sustainability problem in our food supply: Most of the bananas sold in the world are Cavendish bananas, every plant of which is genetically identical, because the plants themselves are sterile and must be propagated via clones. This deprives the plants of the opportunity to develop new defenses to pathogens or environmental changes via evolution; mutations are discouraged in monoculture farming. The Cavendish itself is now defenseless against a real threat to its existence: Panama disease, which previously wiped out Gros Michel banana plantations, has mutated and is in the process of wiping out Cavendish plantations as well. The banana you know and love is, to put it bluntly, fucked.

Saladino offers examples from the other side of the evolutionary equation, identifying rare fruits, vegetables, and other plants like wild coffee that offer both the genetic diversity these plants will need to survive – forever, even after our species is gone – and more immediate benefits to us, such as unique flavors or cultural legacies. Coffee is struggling in the face of climate change that is driving it to higher altitudes and pests like the fungus that causes coffee-leaf rust; the wild coffees of Ethiopia may provide genetic solutions, at least until the next crisis comes along. There’s a wild maize plant in Mexico that fixes its own nitrogen through a symbiotic relationship with a bacterium, a crop that could help address the world’s growing need for food. The wheat we’ve selected for easy harvesting and processing is close to a monoculture, and it wouldn’t take much to collapse the annual crop, even though there are hundreds of thousands of known varieties of wild wheat, like the wild emmer wheat of eastern Turkey known as kavilca.

He explores the impact that even so-called ‘sustainable’ solutions often have on wild populations, and how what works for our food supply in the short term leaves it even more vulnerable in the long term. We’ve nearly wiped out wild Atlantic salmon and are well on our way to doing the same in the Pacific, while farmed salmon fill our stores and plates, but when those farmed salmon get loose from their aquaculture pens, they interbreed with wild populations and can reduce genetic diversity, leaving those fish more vulnerable to diseases.

Some of these endangered foods are more closely tied to culture than to global food needs or biodiversity, such as the honey gathered by the native Hadza people in Tanzania, where local bee and bird populations are threatened both by habitat destruction and the loss of symbiotic relationships they’ve developed with humans. Certain birds would identify hives in baobab trees that contained honey, and humans would hear their calls and bring down the nests. The humans would eat the honey and parts of the honeycomb, while the birds would wait nearby to consume what the humans did not. This entire way of life is disappearing as native populations lose their land and become assimilated into urban life and dependent on processed foods.

Along the way, Saladino explains (several times) the presence of various seed banks around the world, including the critical one on the island of Svalbard in the Arctic Ocean, and the two great success stories of the Haber-Bosch process of fixing nitrogen in artificial fertilizer and the Green Revolution – the post-WWII adoption of high-yielding varieties of cereal and grain crops, notably dwarf wheat and rice, along with scientific methods of increasing yields through those artificial fertilizers and massive monocultures. (Not mentioned is how Haber’s research, which has helped accelerate climate change, also led to the development of Zyklon-B.) There’s quite a bit of science in here, which does help move things along in what amounts to a series of mini-essays on dozens of foods.

Saladino’s reference-work approach isn’t entirely successful for that last reason; sometimes, it’s like reading an encyclopedia. It’s often an interesting one, and Saladino went to all of these places to try the endangered foods and eat them with the locals who grow or gather or develop them. But such a broad look at the subject guarantees that some essays will be duds, and by the time we get to the end, Saladino’s epilogue, “think like a Hadza,” is so far removed from the opening essay on those people and their honey-gathering that the throughline connecting all of these foods has started to fray a bit. It works best as a call to action – we need to find and value these products, to keep them alive and protect those habitats or those cultures, and to stop relying on these monocultures to feed ourselves. You can find other wheat flours even at Whole Foods and similar stores, while there might even be local mills or growers near you offering unconventional (and thus genetically distinct) flours and grains and beans. Our diets will be richer for it, and we’ll be taking a small step towards protecting the future of humanity before we scorch the planet growing the same five crops.

Next up: I just finished Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom.

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→ January 26, 2022
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This is Your Mind on Plants.

Michael Pollan made a name for himself, or perhaps a bigger name, for his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which came off like such an attack on our modern diets that he wrote a brief companion book called In Defense of Food. In defense of Pollan, however, his writing goes well beyond those two books or that subject; he can be a gifted writer on many matters of food and food science, and is not the scold that Omnivore’s Dilemma might lead you to believe that he is. Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation is a history of food and food science, and an explanation of how we used fire and heat to change the way we ate, in turn changing the trajectory of our species. His most recent book, a collection of two previously published essays plus a third, is called This is Your Mind on Plants, and covers three psychoactive compounds or chemicals produced by the plant world: opium, caffeine, and mescaline.

By far, my favorite part of this book was the portion on caffeine, which was originally released as an Audible original and excerpted by The Guardian as part of its longread series a few months ago. Pollan was a caffeine addict, like the overwhelming majority of Americans, and as part of his research into the chemical’s effects on our brains and our lives, chose to give it up completely before gradually reintroducing it into his life. He spoke to Dr. Matthew Walker, author of How We Sleep, who is a scold, at least on this topic, and among other things claims that caffeine’s half-life is around 6 hours, so a quarter of the caffeine you consumed in a cup of joe at 9 am is still in your system at 9 pm. (Estimates of its actual half-life vary, but it may be closer to 5 hours, which would push up that latter time to 7 pm.) Caffeine in the afternoon, which we often consume to combat our bodies’ evolved tendency towards biphasic sleep, is especially harmful; the iced coffee you have at 2 pm would still leave more than a quarter of its caffeine in your system at 11 pm, a typical bedtime for adults who have kids or at least have to work in the morning.

Most people understand on some level that caffeine can harm your sleep quantity and quality, but Pollan also points out how much we depend on caffeine each day for simple alertness, to feel like we think clearly, to clear the fog of sleep – or, of course, the fog of caffeine withdrawal. There is even research showing that caffeine can help certain types of recall and improve our reaction times in certain physical tasks, although viewers of Good Eats know that caffeine may make you work faster, but it doesn’t make you work smarter. Pollan gives a breezy history of caffeine and its two major delivery systems (tea and coffee), including descriptions of their ties to colonialism, exploitation of native peoples, and slavery, before bringing us back to the narrative of his caffeine withdrawal and reintroduction.

The opium essay appeared in slightly redacted form in Harper’s in the late 1990s, and is less about what the drugs derived from opium do than Pollan’s own misadventures in growing poppies in his own garden, only to discover that he may be violating federal law by doing so. Opium is a latex taken from the seed capsules of the Papaver somniferum plant, although Pollan claims that there are other poppies that can produce some of the same compounds, just in smaller quantities. The drugs we associate with poppies are opiates, alkaloids found within the latex, including morphine and codeine; or derivative products, such as heroin (made through acetylation of morphine) or oxycodone (synthesized from thebaine in the latex). You can consume the raw latex, which is supposed to be unspeakably bitter, and will cause nervous system depression. Pollan didn’t end up doing that, although he certainly thought about it, and wrote about thinking about it, and expunged a few pages until releasing the full article here. He describes the conversations from the time around what it was safe to write, while his editor at the time, John R. MacArthur, has disputed Pollan’s version of events. Anyway, Pollan drank some opium tea, and said it tasted awful but felt nice.

Then there’s mescaline, which, of these three drugs, has the unusual characteristic of offering very little downside to the user. Its use is highly restricted, because Drugs Are Bad! even though there’s a small body of evidence that mescaline, derived from a cactus that grows in the American southwest, and psilocybin, produced by several hundred species of fungi mostly in the Psilocybe genus, may help people with severe depression or anxiety. The majority of Pollan’s essay here revolves around mescaline’s somewhat recent history of use in religious ceremonies among certain indigenous American tribes, the ridiculous laws around its use, and environmental and cultural concerns around it. He eventually tries some as well, and has what sounds like a very pleasant experience of heightened awareness with mild hallucinations, not something that might fit the stereotype of a trip. I have never tried either of these psychotropics, and Pollan’s narrative made me slightly more curious about them.

Pollan the anti-scold is an insightful, conversational writer who is unafraid to educate his readers but never loses sight of the need to entertain at the same time. There might be a bit too much of him in the opium section – the idea of DEA agents bashing down his door because he had two poppies in his garden might come across as paranoid – but despite his first-person writing in the remaining two sections, he takes care not to let his persona take over. His thoughtfulness in describing the mescaline ceremony he witnesses, for example, does him credit; he’s just trying to get high, so to speak, not to appropriate anyone’s culture. It’s a short book, compiling some pieces you may have read before, but an enjoyable diversion, and one more tiny brick in the wall for drug decriminalization.

Next up: Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai, because Mike Schur told me to read it.

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