→ October 20, 2020
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Biased.

Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt is a social psychologist and professor at Stanford University who received a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Grant in 2014 for her work on implicit bias and how stereotypic associations on race have substantial consequences when they intersect with crime. Her first book, Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do, came out in 2019 and explains much of her work on the topic with concrete and often very moving examples of such bias occurring in the real world – often in Eberhardt’s own life – when Black Americans encounter the police.

The heart of Biased comes from Eberhardt’s work on racial bias and crime, and many of the stories that she uses to illustrate conclusions from broader research efforts involve the murders of unarmed Black men by police. One chapter starts with the shooting of Terence Crutcher, who was shot and killed by a panicked white police officer, Betty Shelby, who was, of course, acquitted of all charges in connection with her actions. (She later said that she was “sorry he lost his life,” as if she wasn’t involved in that somewhow.) Crutcher’s twin sister, Tiffany, has become a prominent activist focusing on criminal justice reform and raising awareness of the role white supremacy plays in endangering Black lives.

Eberhardt uses Crutcher’s story and her words to frame discussions of how implicit bias – the kind of bias that happens beneath our conscious thought process – leads to outcomes like Shelby killing Terence Crutcher. We can all recognize the kind of bias that uses racial slurs, or explicitly excludes some group, or traffics in open stereotypes, but implicit bias can have consequences every bit as significant, and is more insidious because even well-intentioned people can fall prey to it. Multiple studies have found, for example, that white subjects have subconscious associations between Black people and various negative character traits – and some Black subjects did as well, which indicates that these are societal messages that everyone receives, through the news, entertainment, even at school. When police officers have those implicit biases, they might be more likely to assume that a Black man holding a cell phone is actually holding a gun when they wouldn’t make the same assumption with a white man. This becomes a failure of officer training, not a matter of all cops who shoot Black men being overtly racist, while also drawing another line between those who say Black Lives Matter and those who counter that All or Blue or Fuchsia Lives Matter instead.

No other arena has the same stakes as policing and officer-involved shootings, but implicit bias also has enormous consequences in areas like education, hiring, and the housing market. Eberhardt runs through numerous studies showing implicit but unmistakable bias in the employment sphere, such as when test candidates with identical resumes but different names, one of whom bears a name that might imply the candidate is Black, receive calls back at vastly different rates. Implicit bias can explain why we still see evidence of redlining even when the explicit practice – denying the applications of nonwhite renters, or the offers of nonwhite home buyers, to keep white neighborhoods white – has been outlawed since the Fair Housing Act was passed in 1968.

Eberhardt also speaks to Bernice Donald, a Black woman who is now a federal judge but who experienced discrimination in education firsthand as one of the first Black students in DeSoto County, Mississippi, to attend her local whites-only high school, where she was ignored by some white teachers, singled out by faculty and students alike, and denied opportunities for advancement, including college scholarships she had earned through her academic performance. The implicit biases we see today affect not just students’ grades, but how students of different races are disciplined, and how severe such discipline is. Eberhardt doesn’t mention the school-to-prison pipeline, but the research she cites here shows how that pipeline can exist and the role that implicit bias plays in filling it with Black students.

Some of the studies Eberhardt describes in Biased will be familiar if you’ve read any similar books, such as Claude Steele’s Whistling Vivaldi or Banaji & Greenwald’s Blindspot, that cover this ground, but Eberhardt’s look is newer, more comprehensive, and punctuated by deeply personal anecdotes, including a few of her own. While she was a graduate student at Harvard, on the eve of commencement, she and her roommate were pulled over by a Boston police officer for a minor equipment violation, harassed, injured, and brought to the station, where a Dean from their department had to come vouch for their release. She eventually had to go to court, where she was acquitted of all charges – which included a claim that she had injured the officer, a claim the judge ridiculed, according to Eberhardt. Would that have happened if she were white? Would it surprise you to hear that the cop who hassled her and her friend was Black? And what, ultimately, does this, and research showing that Black motorists are far more likely to be stopped for the most trivial of causes and more likely to end up dead when stopped by police, tell us about solutions to the problem of implicit bias in policing? The answers are not easy, because implicit bias is so hard to root out and often isn’t evident until we have enough data to show it’s affecting outcomes. We won’t get to that point if we can’t agree that the problem exists in the first place.

Next up: I just finished Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo last night and am reading Graham Swift’s new novel Here We Are.

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→ August 1, 2020
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Educated.

In her memoir Educated, Dr. Tara Westover describes her upbringing off the grid by survivalist Mormon parents, including a father who she describes as suffering from undiagnosed bipolar disorder and a physically abusive older brother, and the price she paid for leaving that world by going to university and beyond. It’s a maddening read, and often grueling given the family’s refusal to seek medical treatment even when family members suffer gruesome accidents, but the ultimate message is that Westover did get out and establish herself as an independent adult in a way her parents would never have allowed had she stayed.

Westover’s father is indeed a Mormon, but is more completely described as an extremist, with a violent, anti-government, apocalyptic worldview that has far more in common with hardline Islamists than with mainstream LDS adherents. He refuses to send his children to school and doesn’t even get the younger ones proper birth certificates or social security numbers. He makes money running cash businesses like scrap collection and some construction work, risking grievous injury to his children, more than enough that a state authority should have stepped in at some point and removed the kids for their own protection. The state of Idaho appears to take no interest in the Westovers, however, even when he removes his older children, who did briefly attend public school, and doesn’t bother to home-school them. Meanwhile, as Tara gets older and especially when a local boy takes an interest in her, she finds herself increasingly targeted by Shawn, her violent, controlling older brother, whose behavior becomes even more erratic after multiple head injuries.

So much in this book is appalling, not the least of which is the willful ignorance of just about every adult who comes into contact with Tara and her siblings – and that includes her subservient mother, who does nothing to stop Shawn’s abuse, and who later becomes a successful charlatan purveying essential oils (and, from what I can see online, making all kinds of fraudulent medical claims about their powers) and “balancing” chakras. There are other adults in the town near where the Westovers live who have some idea of what’s amiss with the family, such as the total lack of home-schooling or the child labor occurring at their homestead, but appear to do nothing. Tara’s attempts to stand up for herself are nearly always undermined by the lack of support from anyone except, occasionally, one of her older siblings, although even her older sister Audrey – an earlier target of Shawn’s abuse – lets her down in this regard, leaving Tara no choice but to sever relations with her parents and most of her siblings if she wants to lead an independent life.

Westover takes pains in a one-paragraph introduction to say that she rejects any interpretation of her book as an indictment of Mormonism or organized religion, and there’s some merit to her implicit argument here that the real villain in the story is her father’s untreated mental illness. It is hard to read Educated, however, without seeing their church as complicit in the cycle of abuse and subjugation in the Westover family: Girls are raised to be wives and mothers, not to be educated, and certainly not to be independent in thought or deed of their husbands. There’s more than just familial pressure on Tara to stay in Idaho rather than pursue a formal education for the first time, starting at Cambridge and later continuing at Harvard – where her parents visit her to make one apparently last effort to bring her back into the fold from Satan’s clutches.

Her decision to pursue that education, after much soul-searching and a battle within herself to make a decision in her own best interests for what might have been the first time, results in some seriocomic moments that had to be excruciating for Tara to experience in the moment. She went to college having never heard of the Holocaust, with little to no sense of the existence of the civil rights movement, and ignorant of most aspects of modern Western culture. It’s a testament to her own natural intelligence that she was able to score highly enough on the ACTs to get into college at all, and that she was able to catch up on the equivalent of several years of material to be able to take age-appropriate classes once at Cambridge. It’s also incredibly aggravating to read this and think of all the Tara Westovers likely living out in the hinterlands who never get the opportunity to pursue their educations, or never even learn of the world beyond the borders of their homesteads or towns. She’s the lucky one, who got out, and realized that so much of what her parents and her church had taught her was false. She’s also probably the tip of a much larger iceberg of girls and women whose potential and agency are wasted by ignorance and superstition.

Tara is now Dr. Westover, and her story is still going, so Educated doesn’t conclude the tangible parts of the narrative; this is a memoir of personal growth, and of what Dr. Westover endured and ultimately sacrificed to become an independent woman who has rejected the core tenets that most of her immediate family hold. She seems torn in the last few chapters of the book between her choices and what she left behind, to the point that she seemed to be apologizing on behalf of the many family members, most importantly her parents, who will never apologize, and who seem to think she’s the one in the wrong. The catharsis here is not ours to demand, but I wanted one, a final break, an acknowledgement that her parents, with the help of their church, did her numerous wrongs, and with her brother have dealt her damage from which she will probably spend the rest of her life recovering.

Next up: I’m halfway through David Mitchell’s new novel Utopia Avenue.

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→ July 15, 2020
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Say Nothing.

Patrick Radden Keefe won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Non-Fiction this spring for his book Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, a well-deserved honor for what is easily one of the best narrative non-fiction books I’ve ever read. The future of the NBCC is in doubt after mass resignations over the behavior of board member Carlin Romano in the wake of the board’s attempt to draft a strong statement on structural racism in the publishing world, but with this, Everything Inside (Fiction) and The Queen (Biography), they picked three tremendous books for their three big awards in this cycle.

Say Nothing is the story of the disappearance of Jean McConville, a widowed Protestant mother of eight, in Belfast in 1972, who was “disappeared” and whose body wasn’t even found for forty years. Keefe uses that as a framing device to provide an incredibly detailed, unsparing history of the Troubles, taking advantage of the trove of new information that has become available in the last decade on the conflict, including copious interviews with people actually involved in the violence who spoke to historians working at Boston College.

McConville was one of sixteen people who were considered Disappeared from the Troubles, and her case, and its ultimate resolution, work extremely well as a point of entry to discuss the conflict as a whole – particularly because some of the people involved in or with knowledge of her abduction were major figures in the Troubles. Keefe walks back to the origins of the strife between Catholics and Protestants in the six counties of Northern Ireland, focusing on the rise of the Irish Republican Army and its various splits (into the Official IRA and the Provisional IRA), and on the violent repression by the British authorities that created a war zone in Belfast for decades.

Keefe shifts the focus in the second chapter, after depicting McConville’s abduction, to Dolous and Marian Price, Catholic sisters who joined the Provisional IRA, the terrorist wing of the group that sought the unification of all of Ireland and expulsion of the British from Ulster at any cost. These two fanatical women were involved in numerous critical events of the Troubles, including the car bombing of the Old Bailey and other London sites in 1973, for which she went to prison; the first series of IRA hunger strikes in the 1970s; and several of the abductions of the Disappeared. Dolours eventually gave up her role in the violent struggle but remained politically active, opposing the Good Friday Agreement and eventually revealing that Gerry Adams was far more involved in IRA violence than he admitted, while Marian continued to engage in terrorist activity well into her 50s. The two make fascinating characters to study while conveniently bringing the narrative to several events critical in any retelling of the Troubles.

The Belfast Project provided Keefe with a wealth of material to fill in much of the historical record on the McConville case and many other Provisional IRA operations from the late 1960s until the Good Friday Agreement was signed in 1998, thanks to hours of in-person interviews the two historians behind the project conducted with former and even still current IRA members. The original intent was for the content of those interviews to remain confidential until after each subject’s death, and after the first few passed away, including Brendan Hughes, who ran multiple terror attacks for the IRA against British soldiers and also led the 1978 “dirty protest” and the 1980 Hunger Strike while in the prison known as Long Kesh, and who opposed the peace accord as too favorable to the United Kingdom. Hughes named many names, including the person he said ordered the abduction and murder of McConville, and these revelations – coming after Hughes’ death – led to prosecutions and an international court proceeding that eventually forced Boston College and the Project to turn over all of their interviews relating to specific crimes, even those that involved confessions by still-living persons. Without those materials, Keefe wouldn’t have much to add to the history of the Troubles beyond what had already been written by 2010, but the interviews with Hughes and Dolours Price both shed substantial light on multiple attacks and murders, also allowing Keefe to provide a conclusion to the Jean McConville story (albeit one that never led to a conviction). There’s also a tangent here about the nature of oral histories and whether the Belfast Project might have deserved some legal protection, although the school declined to fight the subpoena and subsequent efforts to invoke journalists’ privilege failed.

The detail is what carries the day here for Say Nothing; even if you’ve read about the Troubles before, as I had for a project while in college, you probably haven’t read anything this specific and well-structured. Keefe weaves multiple narratives together, giving nuance to so many of the people involved, even those who participated in multiple murders and carried out vicious campaigns of terror against their own neighbors and fellow citizens. You won’t leave with sympathy for Hughes or the Price sisters, but you will still get to see them as three-dimensional actors, and their revelations help give more texture to the portrayals of other major IRA figures all the way up to Gerry Adams, who had a whole second act as a politician and supporter of peace while denying that he was ever involved in the IRA – a lie that he was able to perpetuate for more than two decades because of the very code of silence that kept Jean McConville’s killers from ever facing justice.

Next up: Tony Collins’ The Oval World: A Global History of Rugby.

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→ July 6, 2020
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Mindware.

I appeared on the Inquiring Minds podcast this spring to promote my book The Inside Game, and co-host Adam Bristol recommended a book to me after the show, Dr. Richard Nisbett’s Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking. Dr. Nisbett is a professor of social psychology at the University of Michigan and co-directs the school’s Culture and Cognition program, and a good portion of Mindware focuses on how our environment affects our cognitive processes, especially the unconscious mind, as he gives advice on how to improve our decision-making processes and better understand the various ways our minds work.

Nisbett starts out the book with an obvious but perhaps barely understood point: Our understanding of the world around us is a matter of construal, a combination of inferences and interpretations, because of the sheer volume of information and stimuli coming into our brains at all times, and how much of what we see or hear is indirect. (If you want to get particularly technical, even what we see directly is still a matter of interpretation; even something as seemingly concrete as color is actually a sensation created in the brain, an interpolation of different wavelengths of light that also renders colors more stable in our minds than they would be if we were just relying on levels of illumination.) So when we run into biases or illusions that affect our inferences and interpretations, we will proceed on the basis of unreliable information.

He then breaks down three major ways in which we can understand how our minds process all of these stimuli. One is that our environments affect how we think and how we behave far more than we realize they do. Another is that our unconscious minds do far more work than we acknowledge, including processing environmental inputs that we may not actively register. And the third is that we see and interpret the world through schemas, frameworks or sets of heuristics that we use to make sense of the world and simplify the torrent of information coming at us.

From that outline, Nisbett marches through a series of cognitive biases and errors, many of which overlap with those I covered in The Inside Game, but explains more of how cognition is affected by external stimuli, including geography (the subject of one of his previous books), culture, and “preperception” – how the subconscious mind gets you started before you actively begin to perceive things. This last point is one of the book’s most powerful observations: We don’t know why we know what we know, and we can’t always account for our motives and reasons, even if we’re asked to explain them directly. Subjects of experiments will deny that their choices or responses were influenced by stimuli that seem dead-obvious to outside observers. They can be biased by anchors that have nothing to do with the topic of the questions, and even show effects after the ostensible study itself – for example, that subjects exposed to more words related to aging will walk more slowly down the hall out of the study room than those exposed to words relate to youth or vitality. It seems absurd, but multiple studies have shown effects like these, as with the study I mentioned in my book about students’ guesses on quantities being biased by the mere act of writing down the last two digits of their social security numbers. We would like to think that our brains don’t work that way, but they do.

Nisbett is a psychologist but crosses comfortably into economics territory, including arguments in favor of using cost/benefit analyses any time a decision has significant costs and the process allows you the time to perform such an analysis. He even gets into the thorny question of how much a life is worth, which most people do not want to consider but which policymakers have to consider when making major decisions on, say, how much and for how long to shut down the economy in the face of a global pandemic. There is some death rate from COVID-19 that we would – and should – accept, and to figure that out, we have to consider what values to put on the lives that might be lost at each level of response, and then compare that to economic benefits of remaining open or additional costs of overloaded hospitals. “Zero deaths” is the compassionate answer, but it isn’t the rational one; if zero deaths in a pandemic were even possible, it would be prohibitively expensive in time and money, so much so that it would cause suffering (and possibly deaths) from other causes.

In the conclusion to Mindware, Dr. Nisbett says that humans are “profligate causal theorists,” and while that may not quite roll off the tongue, it’s a pithy summary of how our minds work. We are free and easy when it comes to finding patterns and ascribing causes to outcomes, but far less thorough when it comes to testing these hypotheses, or even trying to make these hypotheses verifiable or falsifiable. It’s the difference between science and pseudoscience, and between a good decision-making process and a dubious one. (You can still make a good decision with a bad process!) This really is a great book if you like the kind of books that led me to write The Inside Game, or just want to learn more about how your brain deals with the huge volume of information it gets each day so that you can make better decisions in your everyday life.

Next up: I just finished Ann Patchett’s The Dutch House this weekend and am about halfway through Patrick Keefe’s Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland.

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→ June 22, 2020
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Being Wrong.

Kathryn Schulz won a Pulitzer Prize in 2015 for her New Yorker story “The Really Big One,” about the earthquake that is likely to devastate the Pacific Northwest in the next half-century. It is one of the greatest longreads I’ve ever read, and one of the major reasons I’ve expanded my Saturday link roundups from what used to be a few links on most weekends to a dozen or more stories headlined by the best longreads of each week. It’s also why I wouldn’t move out to Seattle or Portland despite all of the benefits of living in that part of the country.

Her first book was 2010’s Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error, a meditation on and paean to the power of making mistakes, and an explanation of how our brains respond to the feeling of being wrong and how we use it, sometimes without realizing it, to learn and make better decisions in the future. It’s a book I wish I’d read a decade ago, and certainly before I wrote The Inside Game, but also helped affirm my longstanding commitment to owning my mistakes at work by detailing when and why my evaluations of certain players were wrong.

Schulz writes with a clarity and joy in the subject that is evident from the first lines. She asks “Why is it so fun to be right? As pleasures go, it is a second-order one at best,” and immediately has your attention: It is fun to be right, but why? And why does it feel so bad to be wrong, even if what you’re wrong about is ultimately something trivial?

Being Wrong breaks down the experience into three parts – where errors come from, what it’s like to be wrong, and what we can gain from being wrong and learning to embrace it. Part one dovetails well with other books I’ve read about the ways we think, but gets even further down into our mental processes than the sort of cognitive biases and errors I discussed in The Inside Game, such as describing how inaccurate our own memories can be (and why eyewitness testimony isn’t the unassailable truth our judicial system has long assumed it to be), how prior beliefs affect memory and observation (leading to cognitive dissonance), and how our thinking evolves as we mature and yet is still vulnerable to confirmation bias or forming conclusions based on insufficient evidence.

Part two goes into how we experience wrongness, while also continuing to explore the ways in which we are or become wrong. We can disbelieve things we know or strongly believe to be true simply because of the influence of others, which applies to spheres as different as religion or science. Schulz looks at some of the history of doomsday prophets who claimed that the Second Coming or a similarly cataclysmic event would occur on a certain date; when it didn’t happen, many of these prophets’ adherents didn’t give up on their faith in their soothsayers, but cooked up post hoc rationalizations why the prophets weren’t actually all that wrong in the first place. One such event, in 1844, spawned the Seventh Day Adventists, a sect that claims over 25 million followers even though it was founded by three followers of a prophet whose prophecy failed, leading them to concoct an explanation – utterly unverifiable, of course – that has hoodwinked people for over 150 years.

Schulz also delves into the persistence of memory – and how easily it can lead us astray, giving the story of Penny Beernsten, whose identification of the man who attacked and sexually assaulted her was overturned by DNA evidence that identified her actual attacker 18 years later. Beernsten has been extremely open about her experiences, including describing how she tried to remember details of her attacker’s face during the attack and how certain she was about her identification after the fact, as well as what happened to her when she learned that she was wrong and had sent the wrong man to prison for nearly two decades. This leads into a discussion of flawed prosecutions, where police officers and/or government attorneys will often cling to prior beliefs even when tangible evidence disproves them.

The third section, Embracing Error, looks at people and institutions that have made the active choice to accept errors as a part of life and build processes to trap them, minimizing their short-term impact and long-term frequency. This covers medical errors, which ended up the entire impetus for Atul Gawande’s excellent book The Checklist Manifesto, and how simple solutions like pre-operation (or pre-flight, or pre-anything) checklists can lead to significant reductions in errors, saving lives, injuries, or just cash. Schulz also explains how the awareness that we might be wrong makes us more apt to listen to the feedback or contrary opinions of others, avoiding the ‘yes men’ mentality of many leaders in government and industry. She wraps up the book with a detour into humor, asking why it’s so funny to us when other people are wrong (there’s quite a bit of research on this, which surprised me) but less so when the mistakes are ours, and uses that to launch into a philosophical discussion of fact versus art, certainty versus uncertainty, and how being wrong is essential to our survival and progress as a species. That assumes, of course, that we can admit we’re wrong, and then do something about it, which is certainly not the case in the United States today, where falsehoods are merely “alternative facts” and an entire party preaches science denial from wearing masks to stop a pandemic to denying evolution and climate change in its platform. Maybe they should read Being Wrong, but I have a feeling it wouldn’t get through.

Next up: About 2/3 of the way through Richard Nisbett’s Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking.

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→ December 31, 2019
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Dark Money (book).

Jane Mayer’s Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right is the most horrifying book I read all year – but it’s not a horror novel, just a work of well-investigated, well-argued non-fiction that details how archconservative billionaires, usually mad over having to pay taxes, have spent hundreds of millions or more of their own money to buy control of our government. Their efforts helped catapult the retrograde right-wing of the Republican Party from the fringes to the party’s new core, gave them control of the legislative and executive branches, and have, for the last two years, allowed them to pack the federal judiciary with judges who agree with their reactionary views on taxation, environmental regulations, and women’s rights. If this book doesn’t horrify you, you must be one of them.

The main target of Dark Money is the Koch brothers, David (who just died this August) and Charles, who run the second-largest closely held company in the United States. Before David’s death, each was worth around $50 billion, each had longstanding individual efforts to avoid paying taxes, and their company had decades of violations of environmental regulations, including dumping benzene, a known human carcinogen that we absorb by breathing its vapors, into the air near their oil refinery in Corpus Christi. The Kochs’ response to these various federal actions against them has been to pump hundreds of millions of dollars into various front groups that donate to legislative and gubernatorial candidates who promise, in turn, to roll back environmental protections or to push tax cuts for the highest brackets; and to fund professorships at various universities where the positions will go to so-called “free-market advocates” and where the Koch brothers may have had say in hiring. Along with other anti-tax, anti-regulation billionaires, including the DeVos family, Wilbur Ross, John Olin, Art Pope, and more, the Kochs helped found the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation; spent hundreds of millions fighting climate reform; and helped fund massive gerrymanders in states from Ohio and Pennsylvania to North Carolina. They’ve packaged most of these policies, which help them directly or indirectly by helping the businesses they own, as issues of “freedom,” while tying some of them to issues that matter to social conservatives, so that they might convince enough voters to swing their way even when those policies (such as eliminating laws or regulations that fight pollution) would hurt those voters themselves.

Even if you agree with some of the positions that these billionaires are pushing, Mayer’s main thesis here is that our democracy has been bought by a tiny number of people, so that fewer than 20 of these billionaires are setting wide swaths of federal and state policies for a country of 300 million. It is improbable that this extreme minority, all of whom are white and quite old, nearly all of whom are male, and all of whom are in the top 1% of the top 1% of the top 1% of Americans by wealth, would all agree among themselves on policies that are also beneficial to the country as a whole … but even if, improbably, they did so, that’s not how our system of government is supposed to work, and not how most Americans think it works. But, as Mayer describes through her history of the Kochs and of the way money has metastasized throughout our political system, since Citizens United – a Supreme Court ruling that resulted from funding by the Koch brothers and their allies – this is exactly how our government works. Billionaires buying the policies they want is a feature, not a bug.

Mayer also goes into the Nazi roots of the Kochs’ fortune; it is unlikely that the brothers would have become this wealthy had their father not helped Adolf Hitler build a major oil refinery in Hamburg that let the Nazis refine high-octane fuel for their warplanes. Fred Koch, Charles’ and David’s father, also helped Joseph Stalin develop the Soviets’ then-moribund oil industry, helping ensure the dictator’s grip on power and setting the stage for the Cold War after the second World War. It’s estimated they spent nearly $900 million in the 2016 election to try to elect their favored, hard-right Republicans to state legislatures across the country and ensure control of both houses of Congress. Is that possible if Fred Koch doesn’t take Hitler’s money?

There isn’t a simple solution to the problems Mayer details in Dark Money, and she doesn’t pretend there are, instead pointing out every policy change and judicial decision that created this particular monster. Lax IRS regulations have allowed billionaires to funnel money into “non-profits” that don’t have to disclose their donors but manage to skirt rules against such groups funding candidates. Citizens United gave corporations the free speech rights previously reserved for individuals. A lack of federal rules on soft money, donated to groups (like Super PACs) but not directly to candidates, has further enabled the wholesale purchasing of legislators; corporations can’t contribute directly to candidates, but they can fund Super PACs, which can then campaign for or against candidates as long as they aren’t coordinating with the candidates they support. None of this will change soon; it certainly won’t change as long as this version of the Koch-funded Republican Party retains control of the Senate, the White House, and much of the federal judiciary. A huge part of the power of Dark Money is that Mayer channels her obvious indignation into providing more details on the shady (yet legal!) behavior of these billionaires, rather than just delivering a screed on the subject, even though the desire to deliver a screed would be easy to understand.

I don’t think boycotts accomplish a whole lot – they require such enormous coordination, and the presence of viable alternatives – but I am at least trying to avoid spending my money with companies owned by these reactionary billionaires and other companies that support their efforts (such as by funding the American Legislative Exchange Council, the conservative lobbying group that goes so far as to write bills for their member legislators to submit). I wouldn’t shop at Menard’s if I lived in the Midwest, not with its owner helping fund fights against unions and saying he “doesn’t believe in environmental regulations.” I won’t buy paper goods from Georgia Pacific, although I’m realistic – if I buy a new house, or do some renovations, I probably have no say over where any plywood or OSB comes from. And I don’t think I’m going to move the needle with any of these companies; I would just rather know my money isn’t going directly to help the subjugation of our democracy.

Next up: I’m reading a pair of Evelyn Waugh novels – first The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, and then Black Mischief.

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→ November 6, 2019
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Standard Deviations.

While working on my own forthcoming book The Inside Game (due out April 21st from HarperCollins; pre-order now!), I stumbled across a chapter from Prof. Gary Smith’s book Standard Deviations: Flawed Assumptions, Tortured Data, and Other Ways to Lie with Statistics, a really wonderful book on how people, well-meaning or malicious, use and misuse stats to make their arguments. It’s a very clear and straightforward book that assumes no prior statistical background on the part of the reader, and keeps things moving with entertaining examples and good summaries of Smith’s points on the many ways you can twist numbers to say what you want them to say.

Much of Smith’s ire within the book is aimed at outright charlatans of all stripes who know full well that they’re misleading people. The very first example in Standard Deviations describes the media frenzy over Paul the Octopus, a mollusk that supposedly kept picking the winners of World Cup games in 2010. It was, to use the technical term for it, the dumbest fucking thing imaginable. Of course this eight-legged cephalopod wasn’t actually predicting anything; octopi are great escape artists, but Paul was just picking symbols he recognized, and the media who covered those ‘predictions’ were more worthy of the “fake news” tag now applied to any media the President doesn’t like. Smith uses Paul to make larger points about selection bias and survivorship bias, about how some stories become news and some don’t, how the publish-or-perish mentality at American universities virtually guarantees that some junk studies (found via p-hacking or other dubious methods) will slip through the research cracks, and so on. This is more than just an academic problem, however: One bad study that can’t survive other researchers’ attempts to replicate the results can still lead to significant media attention and even steer changes in policy.

Smith gives copious examples of this sequence of events – bad or corrupt study that leads to breathless news coverage and real-life consequences. He cites Andrew Wakefield, the disgraced former doctor whose single fraudulent paper claimed to find a link between the MMR vaccine and autism; the media ran with it, many parents declined to give their kids the MMR vaccine, and even now, twenty years and numerous debunking studies later, we have measles outbreaks and a reversal of the eradication the hemisphere had achieved in 2000. Smith chalks some of this up to the publish-or-perish mentality of American universities, also mentioning Diederik Stapel, a Dutch ex-professor who has now had 58 papers retracted due to his own scientific misconduct. But these egregious examples are just the tip of a bigger iceberg of statistical malfeasance that’s less nefarious but just as harmful: finding meaning in statistical significance, journals’ preferences for publishing affirmative studies over negative ones (the file drawer problem), “using data to discover a theory” rather than beginning with a theory and using data to test it, discarding outliers (or, worse, non-outliers), and more.

Standard Deviations bounces around a lot of areas of statistical shenanigans, covering some familiar ground (the Monty Hall problem and the Boy or Girl problem*) and less familiar as well. He goes after the misuse of graphs in popular publications, particularly the issue of Y-axis manipulation (where the Y axis starts well above 0, making small changes across the X-axis look larger), and the “Texas sharpshooter” problem where people see patterns in random clusters and argue backwards into meaning. He goes after the hot hand fallacy, which I touched on in Smart Baseball and will discuss again from a different angle in The Inside Game. He explains why the claims that people nearing death will themselves to live through birthdays or holidays don’t hold up under scrutiny. (One of my favorite anecdotes is the study of deaths before/after Passover that identified subjects because their names sounded “probably Jewish.”) Smith’s reach extends beyond academia; one chapter looks at how Long-Term Capital Management failed, including how the people leading the firm deluded themselves into thinking they had figured out a way to beat the market, and then conned supposedly smart investors into playing along.

* Smith also explains why Leonard Mlodinow’s explanation in Drunkard’s Walk, which I read right after this book, of a related question where you know one Girl’s name is Florida is incorrect, and thank goodness because for the life of me I couldn’t believe what Mlodinow wrote.

I exchanged emails with Smith in September to ask about the hot hand fallacy and a claim in 2018 by two mathematicians that they’d debunked the original Amos Tversky paper from 1986; he answered with more detail that I ended up using in a sidebar in The Inside Game. That did not directly color my writeup of Standard Deviationshere, but my decision to reach out to him in the first place stems from my regard for Smith’s book. It’s on my list now of books I recommend to folks who want to read more about innumeracy and statistical abuse, in the same vein as Dave Levitan’s Not a Scientist.

Next up: About halfway through Mary Robinette Kowal’s The Calculating Stars.

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→ November 4, 2019
→ By

Riding the Rails with Paul Theroux.

Paul Theroux first came to my attention a few years ago when I picked up one of his later travelogues, Last Train to Zona Verde, which chronicled his trip (mostly) by train from Cape Town up the western coast of southern Africa through Namibia, detouring into Botswana, and eventually into Angola. It was weirdly fascinating, no less so that this older white American would enter territory where he would stand out in the worst ways, potentially attracting unfavorable attention, and that he had to abandon his original plan of traveling all the way up the coast and inland into Mali once he reached the Angola-DRC border. It’s a grim trip, where the curmudgeonly Theroux documents the bleak poverty he encounters at each stop, noting environmental degradation and tourism aimed at westerners who have too money and think that poor is cool, while, in my view, missing what his own privilege and perspective bring to his observations.

Several readers suggested I go back and read Theroux’s better-known, earlier travelogues, especially The Great Railway Bazaar and The Old Patagonian Express, both of which appear in an e-book trilogy called Riding the Rails With Paul Theroux, which I got on sale for the Kindle for $4 and which includes the later book Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, where he recreates the trip of the first book thirty years later. They are long, meandering, fascinating, and unstinting; they don’t cast Theroux in a particularly good light; yet they also open a window on places the vast majority of us will never see, from Tashkent to Baku to Santa Ana to the Khyber Pass, exposing cultures, foods, and traditions that remain ‘foreign’ to the west even in this era of globalization.

The Great Railway Bazaar made Theroux’s name as an author, especially of this very specific style of book: a non-fiction narrative work that follows the author on a trip where he documents the mundane, not merely the extraordinary. Much of the content of all three books revolves around the modest inconveniences and occasional joys of traveling in proximity to other people, including the varying customs of folks traveling by train in different countries and the ways in which train travel becomes a signal of economic status in those cultures. This first book chronicle’s Theroux’s trip by train from Paris through Istanbul, Teheran, India, Burma, and Thailand, eventually putting him in South Vietnam (after the U.S. withdrawal, before the fall of Saigon), after which he flies to Japan and returns home via the Trans-Siberian Railway. The journey, we later learn in the third volume, cost him his marriage – he returned home to find his wife, who opposed the trip, has taken up with another man – but made him a literary star.

The second book follows Theroux from Chicago through Texas, Mexico, most of Central America – twice he has to take to the skies, skipping Nicaragua as too dangerous and jumping past gaps in the rail lines – into South America, eventually ending up in Esquel, a small inland city in Patagonia, on the Argentine side of the Andean border with Chile. The third book sees him revisit the first trip 33 years later, but due to massive political changes, he heads north to avoid Iran and Afghanistan, passing through the Caucasus, Turkmenistan (shortly before the death of its deranged dictator Saparmurat Niyazov), and Uzbekistan. He remarks at length on the changes he’s seen in India’s big cities, while places like Sri Lanka and especially Burma (now Myanmar) have barely changed, before visiting Cambodia for the first time since the Khmer Rouge fell and Singapore for the first time since his novel Saint Jack was banned there, finishing his trip again via Japan, Vladivostok, and Moscow. (He flew from Tashkent to Amritsar, lacking a ground route through Tajikistan.) His description of these changes blends the factual and his own disdain for pretty much all of it: he denigrates Indian megacities for their unfettered growth and evidence income inequality, then derides the next two countries he visits for their failures to thrive.

By far, the most entertaining parts of Theroux’s books are his encounters with countries furthest from my own experiences as a traveler; I have been to over 20 countries, but only one is outside of North America or Europe (Taiwan), and all of my visits to developing countries except one were for tourism. I’m probably never going to Azerbaijan or Turkmenistan, and the odds of me visiting El Salvador or Honduras are extremely low given their current levels of political turmoil and violence. He comments on how “Considering their history – not only the riots, civil wars, and revolutions, but also the uproarious earthquakes and incessant vulcanism – it is a wonder that (Central American countries) exist at all and have not furiously vanished beneath the sea,” an amusing sentiment made more so by the flips in fate in the intervening four decades. Nicaragua was too dangerous to visit, so he went to El Salvador. Colombia and Costa Rica have developed into fairly well-off economics, at least by the standards of their neighbors. Turkey raced forward between his two visits, only to regress rapidly since Ghost Train was published. He visited South Vietnam a year before the north invaded and unified the country; now he compares his visits to Saigon and Hue, while visiting Hanoi for the first time. He visits the famous temples at Angkor Wat for the first time since the Khmer Rouge came and went; and the secret red light district of Singapore for the first time since its autocratic government banned his novel Saint Jack. He passes through the Jewish Autonomous Oblast, which has almost no Jews living in it, of Russia, a place I didn’t even know existed before reading this book. So much of the pleasure of these books is Theroux visiting places I’ll never go, sometimes making me envious, other times letting me know I don’t need to feel that bad about missing them.

Theroux’s status as an author stood him in good stead even on his first trips, as the last two books include encounters with some very famous authors he meets on his sojourns. He spends days with Jorge Luis Borges in Buenos Aires, meets up with Orhan Pamuk – about to win the Nobel Prize for Literature – in Istanbul, goes to the home of Arthur C. Clarke – who’d be dead within two years – in Sri Lanka, and travels a bit with Haruki Murakami in Japan. Each of these conversations feels like one of those essays I’d find in the New Yorker and would share with you all in a Saturday post; Borges and Clarke really come to life on these pages, while Murakami comes off as reticent and pensive, although I suppose that’s unsurprising.

Theroux, though, doesn’t come off very well in his books. He doesn’t seem to like other people very much, especially not people working jobs he views as menial. He might be a little bit racist. The first two books in particular stand out for Theroux’s stereotyping of various peoples and overemphasis on physical characteristics, including skin color, while the third is more muted but still has his voice and, with it, his obvious tendency to create a clear distinction between himself and anyone he deems as ‘other.’ He’s also more than a little bit sexist, and some of his commentary on sex and the skin trade comes off as creepy even before you consider that he made the trip in the third book when he was about 65 years old. Some of the commentary in the first two books may have been acceptable in its time; much of this material in the third book was already cringeworthy in 2008, when it was published, and it’s all worse now.

There’s also something quaint about these books in the era of cheap air travel and, outside of Europe, very limited and/or expensive rail options. I could forgive Theroux’s act a bit, given the window on the world he opened and the existence of at least some self-deprecation. He’s also acutely aware of the poverty he sees, and understands his economic privilege even while othering so many of the people he encounters on the trains. There’s something quite admirable in his willingness to leap into these journeys, to travel to places most of us wouldn’t dare visit on our own for fear of disease or violence or simply the unknown. Even where the text hasn’t aged well, the voyages themselves justified the time.

Next up: Mary Robinette Kowal’s The Calculating Stars, winner of this year’s Hugo Award for Best Novel.

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→ October 23, 2019
→ By

The Queen.

If you’d like to win a free, signed copy of this book, sign up for my free email newsletter by this Friday, October 25, at 12 pm ET. I’ll choose one subscriber at random to win the prize, graciously donated by Josh and Little, Brown & Co.

Josh Levin has been writing for Slate since 2003 and has co-hosted their podcast Hang Up and Listen for a decade now. (I appeared on the show way back in 2013.) His first book, The Queen, has nothing whatsoever to do with sports, however; it is an engrossing profile and history of Linda Taylor, the woman tabbed by Chicago newspapers and made infamous by Ronald Reagan as a “welfare queen,” whose fraudulent activities were widely embellished by the media and conservative politicians … and who also probably committed other, far worse crimes during her long life of malfeasance.

Linda Taylor was a welfare cheat, and got caught multiple times doing so, although attempts to prosecute her weren’t always successful, and authorities didn’t always follow through even when she was caught because the laws didn’t adequately address this type of public assistance fraud. She used different identities to apply more than once for aid, and used the names of children who weren’t hers, or didn’t exist at all, to ask for more. It’s possible that she was among the most financially successful people exploiting the public aid system in the 1970s, and that that alone would have been enough to make her story newsworthy.

Levin does way more than tell the story of Taylor’s misdeeds around welfare, however. For one thing, he gives readers a detailed biography of Taylor, from birth to death, giving much-needed balance to her story. He explains the roles that uncertain parentage and mixed-race status in a time when that could leave someone ostracized from white and black circles had in shaping her life, while also using interviews and public records to show that Taylor was more than just a con artist, with credible accusations of kidnapping and even murder following in her wake. One of the more interesting threads in Taylor’s biography is her false claim that she was the daughter of a man in Chicago who died and left behind a maybe-illegal fortune, leading to a trial that hinged as much on her own history of lying as anything else.

That alone would make for a pretty good, if short, book, but Levin adds a second and more substantial layer to Taylor’s story by explaining how she became the front-page welfare queen whose thimblerigging became fodder for politicians and activist journalists in Illinois and, eventually, across the country. Levin details much of the life of George Bliss, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for the Chicago Tribune, whom Levin credits with putting Taylor in the spotlight and helping create the image of her as both an extensive welfare cheat and a symbol of wrongdoing around the public aid system, both by recipients and by people working within the government. That was then picked up by members of the Illinois state legislature, who at one point managed to create their own extrajudicial investigative team to go after welfare frauds, and subsequently by Ronald Reagan in his 1976 presidential campaign.

Reagan, who had left office as California’s governor after two terms in 1974, was a primary challenger to Gerald Ford, who of course was the first unelected official to ascend to the Presidency and was seen as vulnerable for that reason and his tie to the disgraced President Nixon. Reagan began using the story of the “Chicago woman” who used dozens of aliases and the names of hundreds of children to collect hundreds of thousands of dollars in undeserved welfare checks. He was referring to Taylor, but overstated the extent of her crimes and her takings, and continued to embellish the story as the campaign continued – even over objections of some of his own campaign staffers. Levin spins this into a larger point about Reagan’s penchant for dissembling, misrepresenting, or outright lying – and the lack of accountability even from the media covering his campaign at the time – and while Levin never draws the direct parallel to our current President or the contemporary environment of “alternative facts,” I found it impossible to read The Queen without thinking that even Trump’s original campaign was a direct descendant of Reagan’s. Trump is just more blatant about his lies, and perhaps more unrepentant about it, but he was hardly the first – especially when it comes to demonizing people of color.

And that’s the other significant theme of Levin’s book: This is very much a story about race. Taylor’s precise ethnicity is unclear, and she passed for white, black, Latina, and Filipina at different points in her life, but at a time when the “one-drop rule” still existed through the American south, she was generally seen as black. That made her the ideal target for politicians courting white voters angry over the stagnant American economy of the post-oil crisis 1970s and the societal changes that resulted from the civil rights movement. Race-baiting is hardly new in American politics, but Taylor’s race and the breadth of her actual or presumed crimes made her the perfect talking point for candidates looking to appeal to the “economically anxious” non-Latinx white voters who, in 1976, constituted 89% of the U.S. electorate. As I write this, we’re dealing with the current President accusing Democrats pursuing an impeachment inquiry of a “lynching,” invoking a term used almost exclusively to refer to the murders of black men across the American south between the civil war and 1981, when Michael Donald was lynched in Alabama by multiple members of the Ku Klux Klan. Levin makes the case that this sort of coded language is hardly new, and was widely used by a candidate who would go on to serve two terms as President, winning re-election by a historic landslide in 1984.

There’s quite a bit more detail in The Queen, including side threads on the officers who first brought Taylor to some measure of justice (and led to her infamy), Taylor’s daughter and her role in some of the ongoing scams, and comments from people whose lives were affected, almost all adversely, by Taylor’s involvement. The possible murder committed by Taylor for a modest financial gain is an appalling enough story, although Levin can only go so far with that subplot because Taylor was never even arrested for that crime, and the same goes for the accusations that she kidnapped children and either sold them or used their identities to gain more public aid while neglecting the kids. There’s a lot of misery in The Queen, some of it belonging to Taylor herself, but it’s also very much a story of the modern United States – of race and class divides, of lying and self-serving politicians, and of a media culture that still is learning the importance of holding people accountable for their words.

Next up: Just about done with the second book in Paul Theroux’s Riding the Rails trilogy.

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→ October 9, 2019
→ By

The Mushroom Hunters.

I love mushrooms – the edible kind, that is. (Never tried the other kind, sorry.) I’m not sure when I first realized they’re among my favorite foods; I do remember seeing the Good Eats episode “The Fungal Gourmet” and deciding to try the various recipes Alton Brown gave on that show, and discovering I liked them all. It was probably the first time I’d cooked mushrooms, and it inspired me to try a recipe in The Joy of Cooking for a white mushroom pizza with goat cheese, a pizza I still make often and have refined over the last 20 years. That may have been the starting point, but it just scratched the surface of what the kingdom of edible fungi has to offer.

A friend of mine from middle school asked me last month on Facebook if I’d read Langdon Cook’s The Mushroom Hunters: On the Trail of an Underground America, a non-fiction narrative work about several people who forage for the wild mushrooms that end up on restaurant plates and occasionally in markets across the country. Not only is the book an extraordinarily interesting study of a gray market industry and two of the eccentrics who live within, but Cook imparts a lot of useful information on various mushroom species – including a few fungi we call mushrooms but that belong to a different phylum, Ascomycota, than true mushrooms – that I’d eaten but never cooked, or seen but never eaten, or just flat-out had never encountered before.

Mushrooms are different from other foods that are foraged in the wild in that their removal does not diminish future supply, and when done responsibly the foraging doesn’t damage the environment. (If the foragers leave trash or are careless with surrounding plants, of course, that’s another story.) Wild mushrooms have extensive root structures below the ground, and humans typically harvest the edible shoots that appear above the surface and allow the mushroom to spread spores. Removing those tips doesn’t kill the mushroom itself, which continues to live in the ground, usually feeding off rotting wood, and will produce new shoots the following year. Different mushrooms live in different climates, with different food sources – sometimes favoring specific species of trees with which they’ve co-evolved over long periods of time – and varying ‘crops’ from year to year. Morels, among the most valuable culinary mushrooms, tend to pop up in abundance after forest fires, although they, like the famous truffles of western Europe and now the Pacific Northwest, are not technically mushrooms but are sac fungi classified in Ascomycota. (They’re also the subject of a great two-player game.)

Cook runs through the main mushrooms you’ll find in restaurants, only skipping the derided and flavorless white button mushrooms, dedicating long chapters to those morels, the meaty porcini (also called king boletes), the prized matsutakes, and the autumnal chanterelles, while giving shorter but still useful descriptions to species as diverse as candy caps, black trumpets, lobsters, yellowfoots, and more. He describes many mushrooms that chefs prize but that aren’t cultivated and would only appear if you went to the right restaurant or perhaps farmers’ market, and with just about every mushroom he describes, he gives a handful of ways he likes to prepare or consume them, or just straight-out tips on what you should or shouldn’t do. For example, just about every mushroom pairs well with cream, butter, and other dairy products, but matsutakes areone exception and are best served without those staples of French and Italian cuisines.

Cook himself is a character in the book, but the two stars are Doug, an iconoclastic forager with some interesting if not entirely consistent life philosophies; and Jeremy Faber, a mushroom buyer who runs a wholesale service to chefs on the west coast and in New York, and who also forages himself and takes Cook on several of his trips, including the morel hunt in the Yukon that fills the last long chapter in the book. Faber has extensive relationships with chefs in Seattle, including James Beard winner Matt Dillon and Faber’s former business partner Christina Choi, who was a rising star in the Seattle scene before dying far too young during surgery to address a brain aneurysm. Cook follows the mushroom supply chain to the tables of restaurants like those, and to special events like a multi-course dinner at the Oregon Truffle Festival, describing dish after dish with mushrooms used in typical and atypical fashions. If this book doesn’t make you want to cook with mushrooms, you probably just don’t like the things in the first place.

Doug is the perfect eccentric for a book like The Mushroom Hunters, with his mix of humanist views and self-serving wisdom, as well as a rather healthy disregard for property rights and the boundaries of national parks. He and Faber rail against federal and state government regulations that treat mushrooms as finite resources and restrict or simply ban foragers from gathering them, even though such activities might be good for the forest and, if done right, do no harm. Their self-interest is obvious here, and Cook acknowledges that not every forager is as responsible about cleaning up their own mess or respecting the other flora and fauna that grow in these environments. It’s also hard to feel much sympathy for Doug when he describes foraging on privately owned land without permission and finds himself threatened or unable to escape with his haul.

The Mushroom Hunters would be a great read if it offered nothing more than its education on mushrooms themselves – how they grow, where they thrive, how they’re gathered, and how to prepare and cook them – within some broader story, but Cook also wraps up the story of each species in some larger trip or escapade starring one of the two men at the heart of the book. It is a book about the foodstuffs themselves, with appearances from a handful of other wild plants the foragers often target, while also giving a window on to this shadow economy that also includes numerous immigrants from Mexico and southeast Asia, and thus serves as a bit of a microcosm of our society as a whole, with stories of racism, economic inequality, and labor exploitation sprinkled throughout the book. If you enjoy the fungus and want to know your chanterelles from your shiitakes, it’s a wonderful, educational read.

Next up: My friend Joe Posnanski’s upcoming book The Life and Afterlife of Harry Houdini.

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