→ 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
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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
→ 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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→ August 30, 2019
→ By

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
→ By

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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→ July 22, 2019
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Billion Dollar Whale.

When I reviewed Bad Blood a few months ago, one of you recommended Tom Wright and Bradley Hope’s book Billion Dollar Whale, since it’s in a similar vein – another story about a con artist who took very wealthy people for a substantial ride. While Elizabeth Holmes got caught, and may even stand trial next year (although I hold out little hope of serious punishment), Jho Low, the “whale” at the heart of this book, remains a fugitive from justice, and still has a lot of the proceeds of his massive scam – maybe the biggest in world history.

Low was a Malaysian nobody with a little bit of family money who somehow talked his way into the good graces of Malaysian President Najib Razak and some of his myrmidons, and thus ended up in control of a new sovereign wealth fund in Malaysia called 1MDB. Low, with the help of other officials in Malaysia and co-conspirators in the United Arab Emirates, managed to loot the fund of several billion dollars, using the proceeds to party his way around the world, but also to invest in or start legitimate businesses. He invested in EMI Music, bought real estate in the United States and the United Kingdom, and even funded a Hollywood production company called Red Granite Pictures, co-founded by the stepson of President Razak, which produced the Oscar-nominated film The Wolf of Wall Street as well as Daddy’s Home and Dumb and Dumber To. Meanwhile, Low kept his position of power by providing Razak’s wife with millions of dollars in gifts and jewelry, while using state funds to drum up support to keep Razak in office. He did all of this with the help of major western investment banks, notably Goldman Sachs, which profited handsomely from Low’s looting of the Malaysian government’s supposed investment fund, as well as a Swiss bank called BSI.

Wright and Hope spin an unbelievable yarn here, going from Low’s childhood to his years at Wharton, where he already showed the sort of pretension and penchant for not paying his debts, through his rise and partial fall as the de facto leader of 1MDB. Low befriended Leonardo DiCaprio, giving him millions of dollars of art as gifts, and dated supermodel Miranda Kerr, giving her $8 million in jewelry. (DiCaprio and Kerr forfeited all of those gifts, voluntarily, once the FBI began its investigation into 1MDB.) He also hung out with Jamie Foxx and producer Swizz Beatz, the husband of singer & musician Alicia Keys; Swizz Beatz in particular continued to support Low even when it was clear that the latter had come by all his money via fraud.

Low’s con was really simple as cons go – he covered up his pilfering of the till with a series of paper transactions, doing so with the cooperation of other con men in Malaysia’s government and with the sovereign funds of Arab nations, all of whom took payouts to participate in the scam. What is hard to fathom, and what Wright and Hope spell out so well, is how thoroughly Low et al bamboozled western banks and accounting firms – or how little they cared about the provenance of the funds as long as they were getting paid. Billion Dollar Whale could be a textbook in a class on “Know Your Customer” rules, and what happens when banks fail to follow those procedures. Low skated repeatedly at points when someone should have told him no, simply because he could get someone else to forge a letter to support him.

Wright and Hope try to explain some of Low’s personality and choice to go into a life of fraud, but largely end up stymied by how bland he was – socially awkward and introverted, granted access to famous people and women by his money but still every bit as inscrutable. He also studiously avoided attention throughout his tenure with 1MDB, so there was minimal press coverage of him, and he didn’t start to appear in the media coverage of the scandal until after several stories had already appeared. So it’s not a biography of Low in any sense, but a story of a con – a completely fascinating one because of how many people either went along with it (to get rich) or failed in their fiduciary or legal duties to stop it.

A huge part of Low’s ability to get away with this scam for years was the tie to Razak, who was finally ousted from office in an election in 2018, after which he and his wife were arrested for corruption. Just this week, prosecutors in his trial showed that his wife spent over $800,000 in one day on jewelry, spending that went through the 1MDB fund; I assume this is the same story Wright and Hope tell of Low taking Razak’s wife to a famous jeweler. Low, however, fled to China and appears to still be running around the country with access to at least some of his ill-gotten gains, which means the Chinese government is, for some reason, okay with him doing so in spite of an Interpol warrant out for his arrest.

Next up: Laura Cumming’s The Vanishing Velázquez: A 19th-Century Bookseller’s Obsession with a Lost Masterpiece.

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→ July 15, 2019
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Furious Hours.

Casey Cep’s Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee is more like three non-fiction novellas in one package, tied together by overlaps in the stories but not by any significant theme, so the inclusion of all three in a single tome feels a bit forced. Each of them is interesting and tightly told, none more so than the first of the three, as Cep has done substantial research, although ultimately she can’t create a conclusion where none exists.

Harper Lee did not write another book after the runaway success of the novel she would refer to as “the Bird” for the rest of her life, and barely wrote any words at all for publication, leading to a popular myth around her that she had said all she wanted to say – a myth into which her famously reclusive nature also played. Lee did try to write another book, however, about the story Cep unfurls in Furious Hours, that of the Reverend William Maxwell, a black preacher and timber worker in Alabama in the 1960s and early 1970s who took out numerous life insurance policies on family members, including two wives, and then killed at least five of them to collect the payouts. He was arrested and charged with one murder but acquitted mostly due to the lack of direct evidence, and the killings only stopped when the uncle of his last victim executed him point-blank at the funeral service. Lee heard about this story and spent years researching the Maxwell case, interviewing the man’s killer and Maxwell’s longtime attorney, Tom Radney, among others, but for reasons Cep tries to address in the final third of the novel, she was never able to finish it – or even submit part of a manuscript.

Maxwell’s story is a crackerjack, right up to his dramatic death. He wasn’t just a cold-blooded, calculating murderer, but a traveling, revivalist preacher, a longtime con man, and a hard worker on timber sites, respected if a bit feared by the men with whom he worked. His decision to kill off his first wife, and then continue to kill off several other family members, for no other apparent purpose than to collect insurance money, came fairly late in his life: he was around 44 when his first wife was found dead in her car – this was a common method for Maxwell, with four of the five corpses for which he is assumed to bear responsibility discovered in or under cars – and he was killed at age 52, right after delivering the eulogy for his last victim. Cep details the murders and how Maxwell managed to get away with so many, even as a black criminal in 1970s Alabama – although the fact that all of his victims were also black may also have helped him.

Maxwell spent a lot of time over those eight years in court, sometimes defending himself against murder charges but more often fighting insurance companies that tried not to pay him for deaths they thought he’d caused. His lawyer through all of those cases was a white man, Tom Radney, formerly an idealistic state legislator who came home to open up a private practice and made good money off Maxwell, since he was so frequently at war with the law. Radney’s story makes up the middle third of the book and it’s the weakest by far; he’s not as fascinating a character as Maxwell or Lee, nor is any part of his life as interesting as what they both did, but there’s also a reliability problem with Radney’s story that isn’t present in the other two – he helped Lee in her research, which then became part of Cep’s. History is told by the survivors, and Radney outlived Maxwell by over 30 years, while Lee was alive but chose silence.

The third section tells Lee’s story, not just the story of her work on the never-submitted book she titled “The Reverend,” but her whole biography – no small task given the author’s disdain for media attention and her nearly half-century of self-enforced silence. Cep does her best work here, because there is so much in the Lee section that I never knew about her – details from her childhood and adolescence, the extent to which she worked with Truman Capote on In Cold Blood (and perhaps wrote, or rewrote, parts of it), her reactions to the book’s enormous and almost immediate success, and some of the real explanations for the writer’s block that kept the world from ever seeing “The Reverend,” or anything else, in print. (The book that was released a year before her death, Go Set a Watchman, was her first manuscript, which multiple publishers rejected before J.B. Lippincott responded favorably but asked for major revisions; the revised book is the one we know.) Perhaps there isn’t enough material for a full-length biography of Lee, who wrote numerous letters but was obviously very protective of her privacy, but this is a very good use of the limited material that is available.

So Furious Hours is a good read – three good reads, really, or at least two, and the middle one is fine – but a disjointed one. The first section is a true crime story with lots of drama and salacious details; the last one is a thorough if short biography of a pivotal figure in American literature who, herself, was a flawed, regular human whose success contributed to her undoing. The through line of Furious Hours is a tenuous one: it’s the Maxwell case, but without Maxwell there, the connection feels forced. If you approach this book as three distinct reads that share a particular connection, it’s probably going to be far more satisfying than the series of loose ends left by trying to into the three a single narrative that isn’t quite there.

Next up: Sadegh Hedayat’s novella The Blind Owl, in its first translation.

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→ July 7, 2019
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On Spice.

I’m a longtime customer of Penzeys Spices, a massive mail-order operation that consistently delivers some of the highest-quality spices and dried herbs I’ve found anywhere. They offer some hard-to-find options, and sell just about everything in whole or ground form; I prefer to grind my own, so I buy many things (nutmeg, cloves, allspice, black pepper) whole from them, getting enough to last years. They also sell my favorite Dutch-processed cocoa, and the cost per ounce is more than competitive. It doesn’t hurt that the company is unabashedly progressive; their email newsletters have taken on a strident anti-Trump tone, especially when the issue at hand is human rights.

Caitlin PenzeyMoog is part of the family behind the company, and would help bottle or bag spices when she was a kid, although she’s since moved on to a career in writing – she’s an editor for the AV Club. Her first book, however, brings her back to her roots (and rhizomes): On Spice, a breezy, highly informative, yet still entertaining compendium of the best-known spices in your kitchen, as well as some lesser-known ones, and herbs, and alliums, and capsicums, and even salt.

On Spice is loosely organized by the flavoring agent she’s discussing, with each chapter or sub chapter telling you where the spice/herb/whatever comes from, and how it’s used, and perhaps notes on varieties or suggestions on storage or how to buy it. Her approach is evidence-based, even though so much of what she describes appears to come from her personal experience – and that is what makes the book so enjoyable to read. She has stories from three generations of Penzeys; her grandparents, who owned a store called The Spice House that inspired her parents to start the mail-order Penzeys business, appear frequently as side characters.

There’s also some actual, functional kitchen wisdom in the book, including a few things I didn’t know or simply never considered. The book itself came out of a piece PenzeyMoog wrote in April 2017 for The Takeout called “Salt Grinders are Bullshit,” which gets expanded within On Spice‘s chapter on salt. (The short version: We grind many spices to crack open a protective exterior shell and expose volatile, essential oils in the interior that provide flavor and aroma. Salt is a rock. If you grind it, it’s just smaller rocks.) I’ve been putting used vanilla beans in my giant sugar container for probably 15 years now, and I know it’s made all of my baked goods better; she explains the how and why – and also goes into why vanilla is so expensive. Why do we put bay leaves in stocks and soups, and why do we have to take them out before serving? How do you know if the saffron you’re buying is the real thing? You’ve probably never had true cinnamon; the spice we call cinnamon in the United States is nearly always cassia, a more strongly-flavored, and less expensive spice derived from the bark of a related tree. Real Ceylon cinnamon may actually not taste enough like cinnamon for you if you’re used to cassia.

There’s a ton of useful information in here if you’re cowed by the variety of spices available to you, whether it’s the spice aisle at your local supermarket (some of which may be quite stale), the bulk aisle at Whole Foods (better for buying small amounts of spices), or mail-order companies. PenzeyMoog explains the meaning of terms for spice blends, including za’atar, ras-el-hanout, harissa, garam masala, and curry. There are even some unrelated tangents in sidebars and footnotes, my favorite of which informed me that Angostura bitters (a nonpotable bitters that is an essential ingredient in an old fashioned) is named for the village where it was invented, but doesn’t contain any of the bark of the angostura tree.

PenzeyMoog’s writing style is fun and accessible, even when she veers off into slightly nerdier territory, explaining some of the science behind spices/herbs, or going into how to get the scent of garlic off your hands after you’ve handled it. (Those stainless steel things people keep by their sinks? Useless.) The stories from her grandparents’ shop keep the book light and easy to read, and she has the right balance of detail and brevity. I’ve been cooking and buying spices from Penzey’s for a long time, and I still learned quite a bit from it. On Spice even concludes with recipes for spice blends, dishes, and beverages if you’re looking for inspiration, although I got more than enough value from the text proper.

Next up: John Berger’s Booker Prize-winning novel G..

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