→ 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
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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
→ By

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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→ February 3, 2019
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Cork Dork.

Bianca Bosker’s Cork Dork: A Wine-Fueled Adventure Among the Obsessive Sommeliers, Big Bottle Hunters, and Rogue Scientists Who Taught Me to Live for Taste is experiential non-fiction that manages to maintain its balance even when the author might have had trouble maintaining hers. She took a year to try to prepare for and pass a sommelier exam, something that would normally take three years, and along the way learned about the science of taste and smell, experienced the strange subcultures of sommeliers and wine snobs, and drank a tremendous amount of wine. A good friend of mine who worked in one of the restaurants mentioned in the book recommended it to me a year or so ago, and it’s both entertaining and, since I knew and still know very little about wine, informative.

Bosker went from writing about technology to complete immersion in the wine world to prepare for that exam and write this book, which meant learning a lot of about wine – its history, its manufacture, its varieties – and the restaurant culture around wine as well. Sommeliers are expected to be experts in wine, people who know everything on the wine list and can recommend bottles to customers based on their tastes and on what food the customers wish to order, but who are also there to sell wine; alcohol is often, perhaps nearly always, the biggest profit center for any restaurant that sells it. The sommelier exam involves not only identifying wines during a blind tasting, but a test of service, with a judge pretending to be a difficult customer and judging the candidate on physical service and how well the candidate answers questions.

To speed up the process, Bosker throws herself into the work of learning how to identify wines, including visits to researchers in olfactory science – by far the book’s most interesting section, as she explains how olfaction (smell) was long denigrated as the least important sense and one unworthy of serious scientific study. You may already know that most of what we classify as “taste,” whether for food or for libations, is actually smell, and that the traditional “taste map” of the tongue is so much hot garbage, a relic from pre-scientific ideas of anatomy. How wine is served – in what vessels, at what temperature – affects what chemicals escape from the wine and make it into our noses for our brains to identify, and thus how we perceive the wine’s flavors. To learn these scents, she bought a kit to better train her nose, which is a thing I did not realize you could do – in fact, people with olfactory deficiencies can improve their senses of smell by, of all things, practice. (I passed this along to Will Leitch, who lost his sense of smell to a childhood illness, and he expressed the understandable concern of regaining something he has no real memory of having.)

Bosker does gloss over one significant question that still dogs the world of wine, from sommeliers to independent wine criticism, although she mentions it in passing numerous times. There are many experts, including a handful of economists like Princeton’s Orley Ashenfelter, who developed a formula based on weather data that predicted Robert Parker’s famous wine scores, who say wine reviews and evaluations are largely bullshit. Wines are among the most chemically complex things we consume, with hundreds of chemicals responsible for the array of aromas that produce the ‘notes’ experts profess to find in wine – although Bosker concedes that some of these notes are pretentious folderol made up to impress consumers. The debate is whether anyone can train their noses and palates to detect so many different notes in a few sips and sniffs of any bottle. You could ascertain this via mass spectrometry, and the knowledge of the aromas produced by specific chemicals in wine as led to an entire industry of factory-produced wines that are assembled additive by additive. Can experts actually discern these? I’m doubtful; Bosker doesn’t delve into this deeply enough.

That skepticism colored my reading of anything in Cork Dork pertaining to the exams, whether the basic sommelier’s exam she takes or the master sommelier exam that made the news last year when one of the judges leaked answers to the tasting portion. Are we testing something real? How much of these results represent actual skill in wine detection, and how much is just good guessing? And how much do we need to know or understand to just enjoy wine? The same characteristics that distinguish wines grown in different terroirs in different seasons can also appear in coffee and chocolate, two products I particularly enjoy, but identifying the different notes in a single-origin coffee doesn’t make me appreciate the cup any more. Perhaps I’m just an oeno-philistine, but as much as I liked Cork Dork, I also found myself shaking my head at the hoops through which Bosker and other wine geeks had to leap to get that sommelier certification – and still don’t know to what extent that test actually measures something real.

Next up: I just started Tommy Orange’s novel There There, which I’ve seen mentioned as a potential Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winner this year and is indeed named after the Radiohead song.

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→ November 14, 2018
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An Economist Gets Lunch.

EDIT: As of March 2020, when Cowen argued that elite universities shouldn’t worry about paying their service workers, I can no longer recommend Cowen’s book for any reason whatsoever.

One of you was kind enough to give me a copy of Tyler Cowen’s book An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies earlier this year, buying a copy for me at Politics & Prose for me to pick up when I spoke there at a book signing in June. The book was very much up my alley, combining my passion food with my newfound interest in behavioral economics, as Cowen offers a breezy look at why we eat the way we do, and how someone who wants better food can use a little rational thinking to try to identify new places to eat. It’s a quick read, and maybe a little too nonchalant in spots when Cowen talks about foreign food cultures, with more than enough information on our modern food culture and economy to satisfy me (especially since I didn’t pay for it – thanks again, Haris!).

Cowen is a professor of economics at George Mason University who tends to favor a more libertarian, free-market approach to domestic policy, and that philosophy is very apparent throughout this book, as the focus is very much on taste rather than other modern foodie concerns like sourcing, environmental impact, or fair labor practices. Cowen’s survey of the modern food scene explains why, for example, chain restaurants will nearly always provide inferior food (they have to aim for the largest possible market, which means standardizing flavors and avoiding anything near or at the extremes that might alienate a large share of customers), or why so many highly-rated restaurants lose their edge within the first year after opening. I’d say I probably already knew much of this, just because of my years of exploring the food scenes in American cities and my conversations with so many people working in the industry, but would also guess that most American diners haven’t thought about these questions to the same extent because they don’t eat out as often as I might (due to travel) or Cowen does (because I think he just loves to eat out).

The early parts of the book cover things like the above-mentioned “how American food got bad” or how the typical supermarket has helped ruin our diets. Cowen mentions visiting Asian supermarkets around him that offer better and less typical produce at lower costs – but, more importantly, are organized entirely differently than the U.S. groceries are, with more square footage devoted to produce, meat, or fish, and less on packaged goods … and, I suppose not shockingly, to cheese, since lactose intolerance is higher in Asian populations. To some extent, his suggestions of visiting multiple stores to prepare meals is a manifestation of privilege – I work at home, so it’s nothing for me to split my weekly food shopping between Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, and a local farm stand, but I also recognize I have the flexibility in my schedule to do so where many other people don’t.

One particularly interesting if specific chapter delves into American barbecue, explaining why regional variations in the cuisine arose and how developments like mechanical pits have changed barbecue (I’d argue for the worse). The chapter opens up some gaps in Cowen’s knowledge of culinary history, however, as he gives short shrift to the cooking method’s roots in Africa, something that comes up a few times as the book progresses – his lens on cuisines is very much that of an American, and the concluding chapters on what foods to hunt when traveling in various foreign cities read like the words of a tourist, not a native or an expat who’s lived in those places.

Cowen doesn’t ignore other topics than the search for better food at a cheaper price – there’s a chapter that touches on environmental concerns, called “Eating Your Way to a Greener Planet,” although the complexity of ethical eating is enough to fill a book or two – but that’s very much his core philosophy. It’ll work for a lot of readers: Often that is just what we’re trying to do – cook better food for less. I’ve at least changed my own eating patterns, in part because I have the time and means to do so, to try to make better choices for the planet and the people involved in growing, preparing, and selling me the food I eat. That made Cowen’s book an interesting read for me, but perhaps more of a novelty than a work that changed my outlook on food.

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→ November 9, 2018
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The World As It Is.

The World As It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House ended up a very different read than what the subtitle led me to believe it would be. Ben Rhodes, who was a senior adviser to Obama for all eight years of the latter’s tenure, mostly as Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications and Speechwriting, does give numerous first-person anecdotes from his time in the White House. The point of this book, however, seems to be much more about the toxic political and media environment that started just before Obama’s election with the “birther” hoax movement, escalated during Obama’s first term thanks to the likes of Sen. Mitch McConnell and Fox News, and eventually triumphed with the election of Donald Trump in 2016. No one book could really answer the “how” of Trump’s election(although racism was certainly a big factor), but Rhodes attempts to show historical trends that led to this point, including the no-win situations they faced with tough foreign policy decisions in Libya, Syria, and Iran, as well as the rise of online disinformation efforts spearheaded by the Russian government.

The foreign-policy decisions drive much of the book, as that was Rhodes’ focus anyway and several of those choices ended up becoming massive political issues and headaches for the Administration. Rhodes details why we didn’t intercede in Syria earlier, and why we still did very little even when we chose to get involved after evidence that the Syrians had used chemical weapons on their own people. One such reason was the opposition from Republicans who, at the same time, were decrying the rise of ISIS (Daesh) in the region – a group that emerged in the vacuum created by our failure to establish a successor government after we invaded Iraq and ousted Saddam Hussein. The buildup to the coalition that conducted airstrikes on Libyan forces – including us, but with European allies agreeing to take the lead – also gets a detailed treatment.

The Iran deal, on which President Trump recently reneged (which calls our reliability in international negotiations into question), gives Rhodes a chance to show how much back-channel work had to be done to convince enough Senators to agree to the deal despite well-funded opposition, much of it from donors and PACs sympathetic to Israel, and the vocal disapproval of Israel’s long-serving Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. (As I write this, Netanyahu is embroiled in a corruption scandal that is threatening his position and his legacy.)

There’s a baseball connection in all of this as well, as Rhodes was one of the leaders of the covert effort to normalize relations between the United States and the communist regime in Cuba, which had broken off a half-century earlier. It’s the best part of the book as well, since Rhodes was in the room for so many discussions and can give snippets of dialogue between representatives of both sides, and even describe phone calls from Cuban authorities – including Raúl Castro – haranguing the President about the history of U.S. offenses against the Cuban government. The lengthy process resulted in the freedom of many political prisoners in Cuba, as well as the release of American Alan Gross, held there on (likely bogus) charges of espionage, although the regime’s grip on power remains too strong. And, of course, it all wrapped up in a state visit by Obama to Havana, where he took in a baseball game and appeared on ESPN.

Rhodes shows he has little respect remaining for the opposition after the obstructionist tactics they used to fight the Iran deal, to stymie the nomination of Merrick Garland, and to help defeat Hillary Clinton in 2016. He also details the rise of the disinformation industry during Russia’s invasion and annexation of Crimea and attempts to further infringe on Ukraine’s territorial sovereignty, as well as the downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 by Russian insurgents there, for which Russia managed to evade any responsibility or blame. There’s some self-reproach in here – should anyone in the Obama Administration have seen Russia’s use of troll farms to sway world opinion as a threat to our own democracy? – although it’s more based in opinion than hard research or evidence.

Rhodes also describes some of the public attacks made against him, his presumed faith, his degree in creative writing (as in, he would be good at spinning fiction in speeches he wrote), and more, an environment that only has deteriorated further in the last two years. When I posted a picture of a quote in the book to my Instagram, someone responded that he was “pretty sure Ben Rhodes is also the most incompetent senior level administration official in the last 100 years.” I really can’t speak to Rhodes’ competence – although, really, with Ringling Bros. staffing the current administration, I’m not sure how this could be true – but I think it speaks more to the incomplete and likely inaccurate public depiction of a man whose actual function and performance were mostly hidden from view. Rhodes’ version of events is his perspective, of course, and perhaps the truth is that he did some parts of his job well and others not so well. That message and the toxic political culture into which this book was published overshadow any memoir-ish aspects of Rhodes’ book.

Next up: Connie Willis’ Terra Incognita, a collection of three of her novellas, including the Hugo-nominated Remake.

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