→ July 6, 2020
→ By

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
→ By

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
→ By

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
→ By

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
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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
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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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→ August 30, 2019
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Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism.

Dr. Peter Hotez is a vaccinologist who works on developing vaccines for neglected tropical diseases (NTDs), most of which affect developing countries and thus get little or no attention from affluent nations like the United States – although climate change will start to push some of the disease vectors (like mosquitoes) across our borders in time. He’s become a pro-vaccine activist in recent years because of the rising volume and, unfortunately, power of the American and British anti-vaccine movements, which have both begun exporting their bullshit to other countries, risking large epidemics in densely populated, emerging nations like the BRICS or the major countries of southeast Asia.

Dr. Hotez is also a father, and one of his children, Rachel, is an adult with autism spectrum disorder. He combines those two facets of his life, personal and professional, in his new book Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism, in which he lays out the indisputable facts of vaccine safety. Weaving stories of Rachel’s life, from the first discovery that she had “pervasive developmental disorder, not otherwise specified,” a now deprecated diagnosis for autism spectrum disorder, through the challenges of her school years and the most recent attempts to find her a stable role in the work force, into stories from his own career, Hotez makes the impersonal personal, while also brooking no nonsense from those who would call him a “shill” or otherwise deny the truth that vaccines are safe and effective.

Hotez is now the chief of Baylor College of Medicine’s National School of Tropical Medicine, based in Houston, which itself ends up a big part of the family side of his story, portions of the book where he lays bare the incredible challenges of raising a child with autism spectrum disorder. Rachel’s case at least sounds like it is on the severe end of the spectrum, with learning disabilities, oppositional tendencies, and monotropist behaviors, although she’s not self-injurious and by the end of the book Hotez has at least some hope that she may have found a job opportunity through an individual coaching program provided via Goodwill. It’s often heartbreaking to read of the immense obstacles Hotez and his wife, Anne, whose voice is also in the book, have faced with Rachel in situations that parents of children without ASD take for granted or even experience as high points.

Of course, for me, the greater appeal of Hotez’s book going into it was his angry, evidence-based arguments against the denialist movement that has given us back the measles, a disease we’d eradicated in the United States twenty years ago, as well as surging cases of other dangerous, often fatal vaccine preventable diseases. Hotez just tweeted as I wrote this post to a Guardian article saying there have been 90,000 measles cases in Europe this year – a disease that is close to 100% prevented by vaccination. Hotez is quite patient in his explanations of how the anti-vaccine myths, notably the one that the MMR vaccine was associated with autism (it’s not, at all), first arose – in that case, because of a fraudulent study, since retracted, that cost the author his medical license – and why every such myth is wrong.

Vaccine denialists really don’t get anything right, and Hotez lays out the reasons in the specific case of the bogus claim that vaccines somehow lead to autism: It is a biological impossibility. Hotez’s book has the best lay explanation I’ve come across of the causes of autism, which, oh by the way, is already present before birth, and thus before an infant receives any vaccines. Autism is an expression of at least 65 already identified genes, as well as potentially hundreds of others, and the claim that a vaccine can cause autism is a sort of post hoc rationalization combined with complete science ignorance. That’s a large part of why these anti-vaccine claims keep changing – it’s the mercury, no it’s the alum, no it’s the number of vaccines administered at once, no it’s the formaldehyde. None of these factors causes autism, or any other disorder or condition. Vaccines can have mild side effects, including a fever and soreness at the injection site; in extremely rare cases, around one in a million, they can cause a serious reaction. Hotez points out that you are more likely to be struck by lightning than to be injured by a vaccine; meanwhile, ten people in the United States died of pertussis alone in 2018, four of them infants under the age of one, although the doubling of pertussis infection rates that occurred around 2012-14 has abated. He also has strong words for the anti-vaxxer lie that measles is a benign childhood infection, focusing in particular on SSPE, an invariably fatal aftereffect of a measles infection, hitting as many as 1 in every 600 people who survived a measles infection as an infant, that involves pervasive brain inflammation, loss of cognitive and motor functions, and death.

For his vaccine and general science advocacy, Hotez has been attacked online and off, with lunatics doxing him, calling his house and his work, and demonizing him on autism support websites (much as they’ve done with Paul Offit, co-inventor of the lifesaving rotavirus vaccine). It’s unsurprising from a movement that has no facts on its side, and that has recently begun targeting communities of color, including Somali immigrants in Minneapolis, with its anti-vaccine messaging, leading, of course, to a measles outbreak in that city (which could then be blamed on immigrants!). Hotez offers several potential policy proposals to combat the rising tide of anti-vaccine and general anti-science sentiment, including ending nonmedical exemptions to mandatory vaccination laws, encouraging scientists to engage in more public advocacy (even if it means they publish less), and increasing investment in disease prevention in developing countries. To his list, I would add improving basic science education in this country; we never learned about vaccines anywhere in my grade school experience, nor did anyone explain how the scientific process works, which would provide students with critical thinking skills that might help them reject the garbage science deniers peddle online. Hotez also has strong, necessary words for the media, who continue to discuss a vaccine-autism “controversy” where there is none, no more than there is controversy that the earth revolves around the sun, a view rather nicely summarized in this recent comic:

There’s a call to action for everyone in Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism, from asking your state representatives to end all nonmedical exemptions to voting for pro-science candidates to speaking out publicly, regardless of your role, about the safety and necessity of vaccines. Within this story, Hotez also gives us the deeply personal side of being the parent of a child and now adult with autism, a reminder that there are maybe 3 million Americans with autism spectrum disorder and insufficient resources to support them. We can do better on all fronts; Hotez’s book should motivate many people to do so.

Next up: I’m going to finish Wolf Hall in the next 48 hours if it kills me.

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→ August 2, 2019
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Amity and Prosperity.

If you’ve heard of fracking at all, it’s probably for bad reasons; the practice of fracturing rocks to free and capture natural gas has caused substantial environmental damage, from earthquakes to groundwater contamination to air pollution, across wide swaths of the Midwest, down through Oklahoma and Texas. The practice was once hailed as a way for the United States to achieve energy independence, or at least reduce our dependence on oil from the Middle East, and was even embraced by some Democrats, including Barack Obama, who would have said in the next breath that they favored policies to protect the environment.

Eliza Griswold’s Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America documents the horrendous effects of fracking on one town, Amity, in western Pennsylvania, where the drilling company Range Resources ran amok, ignoring environmental regulations or simply lobbying the state to alter them, sickening local residents – possibly to the point of causing cancer – and making multiple homes unlivable. She reported for eight years on this story, getting close to two mothers in the area in particular whose children and animals were sickened by groundwater and air pollution from Range’s fracking and mishandling of waste materials, and won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction for this book. No Range executives were fined or charged; the company was only modestly fined, despite violations of environmental regulations and false claims in its advertising; and the homeowners most adversely affected received a pittance after years of litigation against Range and Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection.

The story all takes place in the northern Appalachian region, atop the Marcellus Shale formation of sedimentary rock, which it turns out contains a large quantity of natural gas that must be retrieved via hydraulic fracturing, now called “fracking” for short. This involves the high-pressure injection of a slurry of water, sand or other proppants, and various additional chemicals to hold the fractures open, reduce friction, lubricate the drill bit, prevent scale deposit buildup, or serve other purposes. The result of the process, in addition to copious supplies of natural gas, is a lot of wastewater that can contain hydrogen sulfide, ethylene glycol, arsenic (released from the rock that has been fractured), and other chemicals or elements that are harmful to human health when ingested or inhaled. The national desire for cheap domestic energy sources, the (mistaken?) belief that natural gas could serve as a “transitional” fuel between coal/oil and renewable energy sources, and extensive lobbying by the oil and gas industry have led to a regulatory environment that is, to a large extent, dictated by the companies the agencies, including Pennsylvania’s toothless DEP, are supposed to be monitoring and sanctioning. The DEP, in this case, was defanged by Democratic governor Ed Rendell, then further hamstrung by Republican governor Tom Corbett and the GOP-controlled legislature, which passed a law that was likely written in large part by the oil and gas lobby; it should surprise no one that the DEP completely whiffed on the Range fracking endeavor in the Marcellus shale region, but it should surprise and enrage you to hear that lawyers for the company and the agency worked together in the lawsuits filed by the sickened homeowners.

Fracking continues largely unabated in states controlled by the Republican Party, which touts their job-creation potential (and that isn’t in dispute) and potential to provide cheap energy from within our borders, although many, many Democratic politicians have gone along with fracking for their own reasons. What is clear, however, is that the process requires substantial regulation if it could ever be made safe for citizens anywhere in the vicinity of the wells. Any drilling within a mile of community water sources puts the water at risk of contamination, and that’s even if the fracking company handles its waste water correctly. Range, according to Griswold, used open waste “ponds” to store its toxic sludge, didn’t line them properly, and then ignored evidence of leaking while fighting any effort to get them to take responsibility. (Several Range executives Griswold named not only escaped any accountability, but have since moved on to better jobs in the industry.) One of the two mothers Griswold profiles, Stacey, kept diligent notes on the appearance of foul odors in the air (hydrogen sulfide, like the smell of rotten eggs, which can indicate bacterial contamination as well) and the increasing illnesses of her kids, one of whom missed a year of school because of fracking pollution, and the deaths of many of her animals. Yet despite all of this evidence, the state of Pennsylvania tried to pass a law, some of which was struck down by the state Supreme Court (but not all!), that would have prevented local governments from banning or regulating fracking in their area; prevented doctors from discussing poisoning cases possibly caused by fracking with each other; and excluded private water wells from pollution/leakage notification requirements.

Griswold’s telling of this story is fundamentally humanist – she never, at any point, loses sight of the people suffering from Range’s actions, the people who reside at the heart of the book – but it is also very much a story of institutional failure. Pennsyvlania, which was gerrymandered into another dimension, let many of its citizens down in the most basic way. We take certain government protections for granted, yet here, the people who were supposed to be protecting the state’s water, air, and land resources – it’s one of only three states with an environmental rights amendment to its state constitution – did no such thing; at best, they looked the other way when Range wanted to drill and frack, and at worst, they aided and abetted the polluters, including helping them fight against the state’s own citizens when the latter tried to assert their rights under the amendment. It bears repeating: Pennsylvania didn’t just do nothing. They worked against their own citizens. If you live there, you should be angry. If you live anywhere in the United States, but especially somewhere where there’s fracking, you should be angry. Once this garbage is in the groundwater, entire towns will become unlivable, maybe for generations. If you’re cool with wide swaths of Oklahoma looking like the Love Canal, I guess that’s your choice, but I wasn’t okay with it before I read Amity and Prosperity and I sure as hell am not okay with it now.

Next up: Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation, the story of how he threw two consecutive no-hitters.

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→ July 29, 2019
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The Vanishing Velázquez.

I’m largely a philistine when it comes to art, and was completely in the dark when it came to Diego Velázquez, a Spanish painter from the 1600s whose work remained tremendously influential into the 20th century. He is known for his ability to create illusions in two dimensions, for his brushworks, and for the complexity of his portraits. His work influenced painters whose names or work you probably do know, including Picasso, Dali, and Manet.

Velázquez’s magnum opus, now hanging in the Prado in Madrid, is Las Meninas, a complex scene that includes the young Infanta Margarita Teresa, the daughter of the Spanish King Philip IV; and the painter himself, at a canvas, looking out at the viewer. It is a complex image of various people, at least most of them real, in various poses and at varying distances from the viewer, a cross-section of personages at the royal palace that plays with light and focus to give the illusion of depth.

In the 1840s, a Reading, England, bookseller named John Snare purchased what he believed to be a previously unknown portrait of Charles Stuart, painted by Velázquez, at the era’s equivalent of a yard sale, paying a few pounds for a painting that should have been worth a few thousand. His story is the backbone of Observer art critic Laura Cumming’s book The Vanishing Velázquez: A 19th Century Bookseller’s Obsession with a Lost Masterpiece, in which Cumming intertwines what she could piece together of Snare’s tragic life with a history of Velázquez in general and Las Meninas in particular. It’s an interesting, erudite book that I also found intermittently confusing, as Cumming is so invested in explaining to us the importance of this still (I think) somewhat obscure Spanish painter – certainly his name and work are less known than Van Gogh, Monet, Picasso, et alia – that she often loses track of Snare’s story. I was confused at several points about what paintings she was discussing, especially since, as was the custom of the time, Snare’s portrait of Charles Stuart was untitled.

Snare grabbed the painting at the country house auction, consulted a few experts, had the painting cleaned up, and concluded that he had a lost Velázquez. He exhibited the painting locally, taking a small fee for visitors to come see it, but kicked up two controversies that would eventually send him and the painting into exile. Two art critics decided, perhaps for the wrong reasons, that the painting wasn’t a Velázquez, but was by the Dutch painter Van Dyck or someone else less important in art history. The estate of the local earl, where the painting was presumed to have previously hung, decided to file a frivolous action against Snare, even seizing the painting briefly and forcing him to defend himself in court at great expense, a proceeding which Cumming can recount in some detail thanks to court records.

Snare eventually fled to the United States with the portrait, leaving his pregnant wife and three children behind, never to see them again. His exact reasons for doing so are unclear, and while he exhibited the painting in the United States, Cumming also can’t tell us what Snare did with the proceeds – he lived in impoverished circumstances in New York, so perhaps he sent the money back to England, but this is all speculation. He died around 1884 in New York, bequeathing the painting to his youngest son, Edward, who traveled to the United States to meet his father for the first time, but after the painting appeared at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1885, it vanished from sight and all records. It may still exist somewhere in a private collection, or even be stored somewhere, but its fate is unknown, and no images of the portrait survived either.

Cumming tells this story well enough given the paucity of source material, but she largely alternates chapters about Snare with those about Velázquez’s life, work, and masterpiece Las Meninas. The latter parts are informative, but I can’t say they’re interesting; even when she goes to great lengths to explain why the Spaniard’s work remains important and influential, without seeing the paintings – the book has fewer than a dozen images of his paintings, including Las Meninas and Juan de Pareja, a portrait of Velázquez’s slave who became his student and whom the painter granted his freedom – it’s hard to grasp Cumming’s finer points about brushstrokes or how the painter created the illusion of three dimensions on a canvas. Perhaps you need more of a foundation in art, or specifically in the type of baroque art in which Velázquez excelled, to fully appreciate this part of the story. I found myself a bit lost in these explanations, and for parts of the book was unsure which painting exactly Snare had found. I will say, at least, that Cumming made me want to see some of his work up close, and I’d especially love to see Las Meninas in person some day to appreciate a painting that Picasso tried to emulate in 58 separate sketches and that Manet called “perhaps the most astonishing piece of painting that has ever been made.”

Next up: Ira Levin’s A Kiss Before Dying.

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