→ 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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→ 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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→ May 3, 2019
→ By

Bad Blood.

Theranos was one of the hottest tech startups of the last fifteen years, at least in terms of the breathless coverage afforded to the company’s putative blood-testing technology and young founder and CEO, Elizabeth Holmes. As you know by now, the entire thing was a giant fraud: the technology never worked, the company ducked or lied to regulators, and Holmes in particular lied to the press and investors who plowed a few hundred million dollars into the company before it collapsed. That implosion came about thanks to a few whistleblowers from inside the firm and the diligent reporting of Wall Street Journal journalist John Carreyrou, who tells the entire history of the scam in his book Bad Blood. The book is thorough, gripping, and infuriating: how did one inexperienced college dropout manage to con so many ostensibly intelligent people into believing her bullshit?

Theranos’s claim was that they could run over a hundred tests on just a single drop of blood drawn by a fingerstick by using a relatively minuscule device, first one called the Edison and later one called the miniLab, that could live in a doctor’s office, a pharmacy clinic, or even a patient’s home. This included routine tests like those for blood cholesterol levels as well as more complex tests that would ordinarily require a lot more blood, which would have to be drawn from a vein. None of this ever worked, and Theranos hid the fraud by taking blood samples back to its headquarters and running the samples on larger machines made by Siemens, all the while making increasingly grandiose claims about its technology, forging nine-figure partnerships with Walgreens and Safeway, and continuing to solicit investments at valuations that eventually crossed $5 billion, making Holmes a paper billionaire.

The media coverage of Theranos in general and Holmes in particular was willfully credulous, none more so than the Fortune cover story “This CEO’s Out for Blood,” a fawning profile that bought all of Holmes’ lies wholesale with what appears to be no attempt to independently validate any of her claims. (The writer, Roger Parloff, eventually admitted he’d been duped.) Holmes appears to have had a strategy for executing this con by co-opting the reputations of powerful, older men: she managed to pack her board with major political figures, including George Schultz and Gen. James Mattis, who all tended to be old white men with zero scientific or technical background, but whose presence carried a lot of weight with the media. She also hired attorney David Boies, eventually giving him shares in the company and a board seat, to stage scorched-earth attacks on anyone who dared criticize the company, which included intimidating former employees who might reveal that Theranos’ technology didn’t work. She even landed a spot as an Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship for the Obama Administration, only stepping down months after the fraud was revealed.

Carreyrou didn’t buy it, and he didn’t back down, all of which shows in his WSJ articles that dismantled the company’s house of lies and again shows in Bad Blood, which is meticulous in reconstructing the genesis and perpetuation of the fraud, with information gleaned from over 150 interviews with employees and others close to Theranos. He particularly benefited from information from Tyler Schultz, George Schultz’s grandson and a Theranos employee for about a year, who realized that Theranos’ technology didn’t work and that they weren’t properly verifying their results (but were still making the same claims of accuracy to the public), and who reported the company to regulators despite intense pressure and outright threats from Theranos, its lawyers, and his own family. (Schultz, who will turn 99 later this year, was a true believer in Theranos and in Holmes until well after the fraud was made public.) Bad Blood is full of details of internal interactions from Theranos that depict Holmes and COO Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani as vindictive, paranoid bullies who didn’t care that the technology didn’t work, or simply refused to accept that it didn’t, and thought they could steamroll anyone who tried to get in their way – and for about a decade, it worked.

The overwhelming sense Bad Blood gave me is that so very many of the people involved in the scam belong in jail. Holmes and Balwani, who was also her boyfriend when she hired him, come across as sociopaths who relentlessly bullied employees and the media; both are still facing criminal charges, while Holmes settled SEC fraud charges while Balwani is fighting them. They had many allies in their scheme, from Boies (whose behavior seems unethical, at least) to the various marketing and PR flacks inside and outside Theranos who helped perpetuate the con. Does Chiat Day, the major advertising agency Theranos hired to build its image, bear any responsibility for helping disseminate untruths about the company? What about Theranos’ marketing employees or in-house attorneys, the former repeating the lies Holmes and Balwani told them, the latter using dubious tactics to intimidate former employees into signing agreements against their own interests? If Holmes and Balwani actually serve jail time – I’m skeptical, but there’s still a nonzero chance of that – it may deter some future mountebanks, but the biggest lesson of Bad Blood seems to be how many people happily went along with the scheme because they thought Theranos was going to make them rich, and because there was little direct cost to them. Patients could have died from errant medical directions that came from Theranos’ inaccurate test results, yet just about every person involved in promulgating the swindle walked away with nothing worse than a bad name on their resumes.

Carreyrou raises the most salient point that investors and reporters missed during Theranos’ days as a high-flying simurgh: the venture capital firms backing Theranos focused on high tech, but not on biotech or medical devices. The VCs with expertise in medical investments were absent. Carreyrou argues that that should have set off alarm bells for other investors or for reporters racing to laud the company or its female founder/CEO, who benefited from the media’s desire to find a rare woman among Silicon Valley leaders, from her photogenic looks, and from her overt attempts to channel Steve Jobs (which come off as delusionally creepy in the book). Con artists will never lack for marks, but when the people who would ordinarily be most interested in backing a venture head in the other direction, it should serve as at least a prompt to ask more probing questions before putting the CEO on your magazine’s cover.

Next up: I’m preparing for the upcoming amazon series by reading Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman’s novel Good Omens.

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→ April 4, 2019
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Between You and Me.

Mary Norris has been a copy editor at the New Yorker for several decades, and, based on her book Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen, is what I had always imagined copy editors to be before I became a professional writer. If you’ve seen the last season of The Wire, you know the archetype I’m describing: The human dictionary, someone not just familiar with the finer points of grammar and syntax but who revels in those distinctions, and thus becomes both indispensable to harried writers who might not find the right word or who err in their usage as well as the sworn enemy of the same writers who, like me, would prefer to believe that their copy was perfect when it was filed.

Norris does a lot of that, it seems, and some of those language quirks serve as the starting points here for individual chapters that meander through questions of usage or linguistic evolution but also through fun or interesting stories from her forty years at one of the most revered English-language publications. The New Yorker has published works, fiction and non-fiction, from some of this country’s most esteemed writers, and Norris was able to edit and work with many of them, with her working relationship with Philip Roth earning significant mention in the book (a weird coincidence, since I just read a fictionalized version of a romantic relationship with him in Asymmetry). The publication is also well-known for maintaining standards on language, grammar, and orthography that, depending on your perspective, are either a noble attempt to fight the erosion of linguistic excellence or pretentious prescriptivism that leads people to say grammar is just something white people like. (I admit to sympathizing with the former sentiment more than the latter, but even the New Yorker loses me by putting a diaeresis in coöperation.) George Saunders has praised her editing, as has longtime editor in chief David Remnick.

The best parts of Confessions of a Comma Queen, for me at least, are the anecdotes about battles, internal and internecine, over editing decisions. I often answer people on social media or in chats by saying that “words have meanings,” a bromide that I think gets at a deeper truth: any modern language has a panoply of ways to describe just about anything, and in most cases these different words or phrases will differ slightly in denotation or connotation, so that in most cases there will be one or two optimal choices. Yet the subjectivity of language and its limitations in expressing the variety of human thought also mean that rational, intelligent people may even disagree over which words are the right ones. Norris details some of those battles and even more trivial ones, devoting much of one chapter to the hyphen, another to the semicolon (perhaps my favorite punctuation mark, but one she derides), and of course quite a bit to the comma, although I think she ultimately comes down on the wrong side of the debate over the serial, Oxford, or Harvard comma.

There’s a wonderful chapter on profanity that is appropriately filled with f-bombs, as well as a strangely fascinating chapter that is mostly dedicated to Norris’ quest for more #1 pencils, which I only knew existed by imputation, since I was always required to use #2 pencils for standardized tests and had seen #3 pencils (useless) but to this day have never laid eyes on a #1 pencil. The story of the pencils has no inherent drama but Norris manages to turn it into a comic escapade, complete with a delightful back-and-forth with the CEO of the pencil company whose pencils she ultimately obtains. There’s a discussion of the singular they, and other (failed) gender-neutral pronouns, that has become even more salient today than it was when Norris wrote about it, and of course the title’s phrase looms large in another discussion of how people misuse pronouns by saying things like “between you and I” or “me and Joey Bagodonuts both went 0-for today.”

I only had one real quibble with Between You and Me and it might not matter if you read the printed version. I listened to the audiobook, and Norris’ attempts to read Noah Webster’s writings, which used ?, a character known as the medial s that looks like an f but actually isn’t one, comes off like she’s mocking someone with a speech impediment; treating that character as an f is funny once, as a joke, but Norris carries it too far while ignoring the fact that it’s not an f at all. That gag slightly sours another wonderful chapter that explains how much of even contemporary English usage derives from decisions Webster made unilaterally on what was “proper” English, as well as other changes he advocated that never caught on. It’s a great read for the stickler in your life, or any writer/editor who might enjoy reading about the editing life and culture of one of America’s great and most distinctive magazines.

Next up: John Banville’s Booker Prize-winning novel The Sea.

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→ March 8, 2019
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T. rex and the Crater of Doom.

I read and greatly enjoyed Steve Brusatte’s The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs back in the fall, and made a note to pick up a book to which he referred many times, Walter Alvarez’s delightfully titled T. rex and the Crater of Dooooooooom (I may have added a few o’s there). Alvarez, an earth sciences professor at Cal Berkeley, developed the hypothesis that a massive impact of a non-terrestrial object wiped out the dinosaurs and ended the Cretaceous period in what is now known as the K-Pg or K-T extinction event. Along with his father, Luis, and numerous other scientists from multiple disciplines, Alvarez worked on the hypothesis and led the search for evidence, eventually finding enough evidence that the hypothesis is considered the correct explanation for the mass extinction. In this quick 150-page book, Alvarez retells the story of the development of the hypothesis and the global hunt for proof as well as the scientific fights over this specific hypothesis and the challenge it posed to the previous orthodoxy of uniformitarianism – the idea that changes to the earth were gradual and not caused by catastrophes like an asteroid or comet impact.

The scientific consensus on the K-T extinction event is well-established now, and Alvarez begins the book with a description of what likely happened the day that a giant rock, around 10 km in diameter, slammed into the northwest portion of what is now the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico, creating the Chicxulub crater on land and beneath the Gulf of Mexico. The impact took place 66 million years ago, so in the interim it had been largely covered by additional layers of sediment and rock on land, and thus its discovery was delayed until someone was actually looking for it in the first place. The Chicxulub impact was catastrophic on a scale unimaginable to us today; a rock that was wider than the height of Mount Everest slammed into the earth, releasing a billion times more energy than that created by the atomic bombs the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This impact was so powerful it vaporized gypsum in the earth, created tektite glass nodules, led to seismic waves in the rock itself, and would have killed anything living within several hundred miles of the impact site through heat or fire. The impact also kicked up enough dust, including the iridium that would settle in a consistent layer around the planet, to lead to a year or more of a de facto winter where sunlight was blocked enough to halt photosynthesis and devastate the global biosphere.

The hypothesis itself was controversial because of that previous orthodoxy that all changes to the earth occurred gradually, which dated back to Charles Lyell in the early 1800s and influenced the work of Charles Darwin. Alvarez’s heresy, that a single, massive, external catastrophe permanently altered the shape of the earth’s surface and the course of life on the planet – wiping out the dinosaurs and creating a massive ecological void that would be filled by large mammals, including us – encountered immediate pushback, some of which persists today even though the evidence in favor of the impact hypothesis is substantial. Alvarez walks through the history of the development of his hypothesis, including why it was never taken seriously before, and the scientific battle that followed it up through the 1990 discoveries that led to the conclusion that the impact that caused the Chicxulub crater was the same one that killed the dinosaurs.

Alvarez’s writing is on the dryer side, unsurprising given his background as scientist, but the story itself carries the book through – this was an earth-shattering (pun very intended) discovery, and it shook the foundations of an entire field of science. It’s a worthy read on its own but also a great reminder of the power of entrenched thinking, and how many earth scientists and geologists continue even to this day to fight against the preponderance of evidence that Alvarez’s hypothesis is correct. (We know the crater exists, so we know something very large hit the earth there, but there are arguments that, for example, the impact didn’t cause the global iridium layer, even though nearly all iridium in the earth’s crust came from extra-terrestrial sources.) He also makes sure to credit many, many other scientists who helped along the way, emphasizing that the search for evidence to support or contradict the hypothesis was a multi-disciplinary effort that spanned the globe and took over a decade, which is a kind gesture but did tend to slow the story down for me. It’s a short enough book that this was never really a problem, although I think Brusatte does a better job of explaining the Alvarez hypothesis for the lay audience than Alvarez himself does here in more academic fashion.

Next up: Still reading Iraj Pezeshkzad’s very funny novel My Uncle Napoleon.

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→ February 22, 2019
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Innovation and Its Enemies.

The late Calestous Juma died shortly after the publication of his last book, Innovation and Its Enemies: Why People Resist New Technologies, which may be why the book is still so little-known despite its obvious relevance to our fast-changing, tech-driven economy. Juma was a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School with a longtime focus on international development, especially the application of new technology to developing countries and to boosting sustainable development. While the prose is a bit on the academic side, Juma uses very well-known technologies and even other inventions that you might not think of as ‘technologies’ but that still drove massive cultural and economic changes that led to substantial societal, religious, or political opposition.

Juma’s main thesis is that there will always be forces that oppose any new technology or invention that offers the potential for change, and he tries to categorize the reasons for and the types of opposition that any innovation might face. Some of the case studies he covers are ones you’d expect, like the printing press, refrigeration, and genetically modified crops, but he also covers less-expected ones like margarine and coffee. Margarine was invented in the mid-1800s and faced a torrent of opposition from dairy farmers, leading to the development of dairy associations that lobbied Congress and state legislatures for absurd laws that restrained or prohibited trade in butter alternatives, from requiring labeling designed to scare consumers to requiring the stuff to be dyed pink to make it less appetizing. To this day there are still regulations that overtly favor dairy butter that date from decades ago, although the discovery that the trans fats in traditional margarine are deleterious to heart health has made such laws anachronisms.

Coffee might be the most fascinating story in the book because it appeared and spread like a new technology, even though we don’t think of it as one. Coffee originated in east Africa, notably Ethiopia, and spread across the Red Sea to Yemen, from which it began to permeate Arab societies and faced its first wave of opposition from Muslim authorities who feared its stimulant effects (with some imams ruling it haram) and from secular authorities who feared the culture of coffeehouse would give rise to organized political groups. The same two forces applied when the drink spread to Europe, where it also faced a new group campaigning against its spread: producers of beer and wine, who feared the drink would replace theirs – in part because all three were safer than drinking well water at the time – and employed every trick they could find, including getting “doctors” (such as there were in the pre-science era) to claim that coffee was harmful to one’s health. While there are still some religious proscriptions on coffee, the drink’s spread was eventually helped by its own popularity and by the split among many authorities on its beneficence and value, with monarchs and even the Pope coming out in favor of the drink.

The two chapters that look at the ongoing controversy, most or all of it fabricated, over transgenic crops is probably the most directly relevant to our current political discourse, as genetically modified organisms are probably required if we’re going to feed the planet. Juma shows how GMOs suffered because regulatory authorities were consistently behind the technology and had to react to changes after they happened, and then often did so without sufficient guidance from technology experts. No example is more appalling than that of a genetically modified salmon called the AquAdvantage salmon that grows to maturity in about half the time required for wild salmon, and that thus has the potential to reduce overfishing while providing a reliable protein source that also has less impact on the environment than protein from mammals or poultry. The U.S. government was totally unprepared for the arrival of a genetically modified animal designed for human consumption, which also gave opponents, from Alaskan legislators (including Don Young, who openly promised to kill the company behind AquAdvantage) to fearmongering anti-GM advocates (look at the “Concerns” section on the Wikipedia entry for the fish), time to maneuver around it, blocking it through legislation and excessive regulatory obstacles.

Where Innovation and Its Enemies could have used more help was in how Juma organizes his conclusions. There are common themes across all of his examples, from the natural human fear (especially those of adults over age 30) of change to concerns over job loss to questions about environmental impact, but the choice to organize the book’s narrative around specific case studies means that the conclusions are dispersed throughout the book, and he doesn’t write enough to bring them together. A book like this one could be extremely valuable for policymakers looking to create an environment that encourages innovation and facilitates adoption of new technologies while providing sufficient regulatory structure to protect the public interest and foster trust. It has all of the information such a reader would need, but it’s scattered enough that a stronger concluding chapter would have gone a long way.

Next up: Mikael Niemi’s Popular Music from Vittula.

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