→ 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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→ October 24, 2018
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The Cooking Gene.

Michael W. Twitty’s memoir The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South won the James Beard Foundation’s Book of the Year Award this spring, as well as a separate award for Writing. Combining Twitty’s own search for his genealogical and culinary roots with a long exploration of how the enslavement and forced migration of millions of Africans defined what we now think of as the cuisines of the United States, the Caribbean, and much of South America, The Cooking Gene wanders around the globe in prose and subject in a quest for meaning and identity through food.

Twitty is a fascinating character in his own book: born in Washington D.C. in 1977, Twitty is African-American, gay, and a convert to Judaism, and thanks to DNA testing and genealogical research, he can trace his ancestry back to white ancestors in the 1800s. He’s an advocate for black culinary history in this country, leading the “Southern Discomfort Tour” and giving a TED talk on the extent to which African foodways informed and defined American cooking, notably southern cuisine, but have been ignored or underrepresented in discussions of our culinary history. He has spoken, cooked, and served at plantations in the South that formerly housed slaves, and his knowledge of culinary history is largely the result of his own autodidactic nature. He began the project that eventually became The Cooking Gene in 2011, publishing the book in 2017 (via an imprint of HarperCollins, the same publishing house that produced Smart Baseball) to great acclaim.

The narrative in The Cooking Gene is nonlinear of necessity, something Twitty acknowledges in the closing section, which meant that for me it took a while to get wrapped up in any aspect of the story, but once he gets rolling on his own ancestry the book starts to resemble a more cohesive work – even though his heritage is anything but cohesive. Twitty traces his roots back to many places, including presumed white ancestor named Bellamy whose plantation he visits, to various tribes of west Africa including the Akan people of Ghana and Mende people of Sierra Leone, and to … Ireland, of all places, which apparently got him some amusing reactions when he visited and told locals why he was there.

Every trip branches out into multiple anecdotes, just as every new DNA test he takes – there’s one, AfricanAncestry.com, that provides more specific information on African DNA lineages – also leads to new digressions and stories. There’s a lot of slave history in The Cooking Gene, much of it physically brutal, but also much of it putting the lie to the myths of the benevolent slaveholders who sent their cooks to learn French cooking in Paris, but treated them just as badly when they returned, often using the education merely as a way to increase the resale value of their ‘property.’

The broader point of this book, however, is that all cuisines we think of as distinctly American or Caribbean derive heavily from west African cooking traditions, to the point where Twitty flatly accuses many white chefs, writers, and culinary historians of a form of appropriation. Even our words for many ingredients, like okra (from ??k??r??, an Igbo word, spoken in southeastern Nigeria), trace their etymologies back along the slave trade routes from the American South and Caribbean to western Africa, where such foods and the antecedents of dishes like gumbo go back for centuries. Beans and rice, whether the Creole red beans version or the Brazilian feijão or the hoppin’ john of the Carolinas, originate in west Africa. Fried chicken, considered a staple Southern food with Scottish origins, also has roots in west Africa, where the meat was heavily seasoned and fried in palm oil. Yams, peanuts (groundnuts), and watermelon all originated in different parts of Africa, and are also now considered part of the traditional cuisine of the American South. Twitty also offers the rare example of a culinary tradition traveling the other way, from the Americans to Africa, as nixtamalization, the process of treating corn (maize) with a strong alkaline solution to remove fungal toxins while increasing the nutritional value of the product.

Twitty connects his search for his genealogical roots with his exploration of his culinary roots by combining them into a single if meandering narrative around identity – that both types of roots were, in effect, stolen from black Americans when they were captured in Africa and brought against their will to the Americas. Thus, by reclaiming the culinary and gustatory heritage of black Americans, Twitty believes he and others can continue to rebuild their cultural and ethnic identities in a country that still attempts to marginalize and disenfranchise people of color.

I listened to the audiobook version of The Cooking Gene, read by Twitty himself, which was probably not the best decision. Twitty has an endearing, folksy delivery, but pauses constantly at strange points in sentences, even breaking up phrases where no breaks belong, which I found endlessly distracting. It’s not an occasional thing – he regularly does this, as if he’s turning to the next page – and I think I’d recommend the physical or ebook formats instead.

Next up: Ben Rhodes’ memoir of his years in the Obama White House, The World As It Is.

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→ October 5, 2018
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The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs.

If it seems like there’s a surfeit of information out there on dinosaurs for readers or viewers of all ages (“Dinosaur Traiiiiiiin…”), then you might share my surprise to see the publication this year of a new book, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World, that covers similar ground. Providing an overarching history of the reign of the members of the Dinosauria clade from their rise prior to the end-Triassic extinction event, through the Jurassic era, until the Chicxulub meteor caused the K-Pg extinction event and wiped out all non-avian dinosaurs from the planet around 66 million years ago, the book works down from a high-level overview and then dives to the surface to provide more specific example. Author and paleontologist Steve Brusatte, who appears on the BBC program Walking with Dinosaurs, has managed to create a book for the mass market that doesn’t skimp on the science or on the sort of specific details that give texture and relevance to the broader story, while also drawing very specific parallels between the two extinction events that bookend the dinosaurs’ reign and the mass extinction event going on right now due to the actions of mankind.

(Full disclosure: This book was published by the William Morrow imprint of HarperCollins, which also published my book, Smart Baseball, and I received a copy of the book through my relationship with them after Mr. Brusatte reached out to me via Twitter.)

Brusatte provides two main recurring features in the book while telling a fairly linear history of dinosaurs, including why they ended up the dominant species after the Triassic-Jurassic extinction event (one caused by runaway global warming that was exacerbated by the release of methane trapped in glaciers and polar ice caps, which is exactly what anthropogenic climate change is threatening to do right now) and how they died off in rather quick fashion. One is that he profiles several of the best-known dinosaur species or genii, including Tyrannosaurus rex and Triceratops, in disciplined, fact-based fashion to try to counteract many of the myths that have grown up around various sauropods through the magic of fiction. (The demon spawn of Michael Crichton come in for special criticism throughout the book.)

The other feature is a series of concrete examples from the field, as Brusatte goes to dig sites and/or talks to other paleontologists who have done so and gives detailed descriptions of how new species are found, identified, and categorized. China is the hottest spot for new dinosaur finds, and he explains why that is in geological terms, as well as why T. rex was only king of some parts of the world. Understanding what we know directly from Jurassic era fossils and what we can infer from those bones but also where and how they were found helps the reader follow the scientists’ path towards a more accurate taxonomy of sauropods and of their timeline on the planet.

Near the end of the book are two chapters that stood out as fascinating enough to live on their own as excerpts or as something a reader who might not have the interest or the reading level to get through an entire book would enjoy. One, “Dinosaurs Take Flight,” explains that birds are indeed the descendants of dinosaurs – actually, they are dinosaurs, in Brusatte’s telling – and explains how and why they evolved. The idea of something as complex as an avian wing or an eyeball emerging from the process of evolution is often a stumbling block for those who choose to deny the facts of the matter, but Brusatte lays out the story in plain language, with examples, without detracting from the sheer interest level of what he’s describing. The other is the final chapter, “Dinosaurs Die Out,” which has one of the best pop histories I’ve seen of the discovery of the Chicxulub meteor impact and the Alvarez hypothesis, by the father and son team of Luis and Walter Alvarez. The pair did a bit of forensic geology to discover that the iridium layer in the world’s crust at the K-Pg boundary was too dense and too uniform to have originated on the planet, and thus must have come from an external source. They looked for an impact site from a large meteor or comet and eventually found it in the Yucatán peninsula of Mexico, a buried crater now known as Chicxulub, a nearby town. Brusatte leads the chapter with a fictional but probable rendition of what the day of impact looked like; the meteor hit at around 67,000 miles per hour, hitting with the force of over 100 trillion tons of TNT, causing earthquakes near 10 on the Richter scale and winds over 600 mph, killing everything within about 600 miles of the blast site.

Brusatte in turn credits Walter Alvarez’s book T. rex and the Crater of Doom as a source, calling it “one of the best pop-science books on paleontology ever written,” high praise as I think Brusatte himself may have written one too. I knew fairly little about dinosaurs coming into the book, other than what I might have learned 35 years ago (probably inaccurate) or learned more recently sitting alongside my daughter, so this book was right in my wheelhouse – a pop-science book that never talks down to the reader but also remembers to provide some fundamental knowledge before deep dives into the specifics. It’s fun, it’s interesting, and Brusatte also manages to make many of the scientists in the book seem like stars (google Jingmai O’Connor, whom he calls the world’s preeminent authority on avian dinosaurs, to see what a cool scientist is like). I’m glad Steve contacted me as the book would likely have slipped right past my radar otherwise.

Next up: I read Nick Drnaso’s Booker Prize-longlisted graphic novel Sabrina today, and just started Patrick Modiano’s novella Missing Person.

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→ August 29, 2018
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Word by Word.

Until just last year, if you wanted to read a popular non-fiction book about dictionaries, there was really just one title – The Professor and the Madman, the runaway hit by Simon Winchester that tells the story of the strange relationship between James Murray, the primary editor of the first Oxford English Dictionary, and, Dr. W.C. Minor, an erudite murderer who contributed countless citations for words in the book while writing from the Broadmoor psychiatric hospital. The book was more about that partnership than the creation of the dictionary itself; Winchester followed it up with The Meaning of Everything to tell the rest of the story of the OED’s creation, but it lacked the verve of the first book.

Kory Stamper, a lexicographer who worked for Merriam-Webster for about two decades, has now contributed to this niche with a ribald and totally fascinating book about her experiences there and what really goes into the making of a modern dictionary in Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries, which turns what might appear to be a staid subject into almost a romp through the process of making and revising definitions. That process is changing rapidly in the digital age, and Stamper seems to have hit this topic at the perfect time, right up to a description of the staff cuts at M-W that happened just a few years ago (right before her departure, I think), and to a last chapter on the way lexicographers – people who write and edit dictionaries – now have a much different role, one that has them interacting with readers more than before and in more direct fashion. With Merriam-Webster also making aggressive moves on to social media – their Twitter account is a must follow, as their subtweet game is a grade 80 for me – and re-establishing itself as the preeminent brand in its space even as Google tries to obviate dictionaries completely by defining words on page one of search results, it’s an ideal time to examine and reconsider the importance of dictionaries in the lives of anyone who loves or lives by language.

Word by Word doesn’t have a straight narrative, but there are consistent themes running through the book that tie widely disparate chapters together, none more strongly than the innate love of words and language that connects lexicographers and folks, like me, who still find pleasure in getting lost in a dictionary. (I was one of those kids who, when bored, would pull the dictionary or a volume of our World Book encyclopedia off the shelf and read pages at random.) Stamper uses those ties to walk readers through and around the dictionary’s essential contents, such as the way definitions are written, the structure and purpose of etymologies, and how dictionaries handle thorny matters like how to handle offensive words or when to even identify words as such (in the chapter “Bitch”), how to ensure that definitions aren’t unintentionally biased (in the chapter “Nude” – think pantyhose), and how to handle words that some people don’t think are words (“irregardless” – not a proper word, but because it’s a word people use, it has to be in the dictionary). I’m sort of amazed at how much flak Stamper reports getting from readers who believe that the dictionary has the authority to control the language, like the Académie Française, or even to alter society. The chapter on the word “Marriage” revolves, of course, around Merriam-Webster’s internal debate over how to handle same-sex marriage – first acknowledging it in a second definition, and eventually simply defining it, as they do now, without regard to gender or identity: “the state of being united as spouses in a consensual and contractual relationship recognized by law.” There’s a usage note at that link, discussing the controversy and saying that “This is not an issue to be resolved by dictionaries,” although it’s clear that no one ever reads the intro or the usage notes.

Stamper has a prodigious vocabulary, which is hardly surprising, and writes with a mixture of the erudition and ease of a David Foster Wallace, mixing high and lowbrow humor with aplomb, and never dumbing down her prose or patronizing the readers. This is an unapologetically smart book for people who don’t blench at obscure words or mind a didactic or technical discussion of word origins or how best to phrase a definition. It’s also laugh-out-loud funny in many places, in part because Stamper can really craft a good story, and in part because some of what she describes – reader feedback, in-house arguments, even an escapade with the cleaning crew messing up her notes – is just so ridiculous. And throughout it all is a genuine love of words, one I truly share. I still write down new words I encounter in books – ouroboros is one I recently found – so I can look them up, and have a little notebook with those words and their definitions because maybe some day I’ll need one of them. Even if I don’t, I still have them and can appreciate them for their own sake. I think Ms. Stamper would approve.

Next up: Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles.

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→ August 22, 2018
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Rebel Talent.

I heard Harvard Business School Professor Francesca Gino on a recent episode of the Hidden Brain podcast, discussing her new book Rebel Talent: Why It Pays to Break the Rules at Work and in Life and her thesis that ‘rebels’ are more successful innovators in the workplace and that bending or breaking some societal mores can lead to greater happiness as well as productivity. That concept is certainly an appealing one – who doesn’t like the idea of pushing boundaries and then proving to the world that you were right to do so? – and in cases where Gino can back up her insights with data, rather than merely with anecdotes, it’s compelling. The book varies too much between those two poles, however, with so much of it supported by individual observations, that I wasn’t entirely convinced that her hypothesis was as generalizable as she wants it to be.

Much of Rebel Talent is built around Gino’s profile of and visits with Italian celebrity chef Massimo Bottura, whose restaurant, Osteria Francescana, has received three Michelin Stars and appears regularly on lists of the best restaurants in the world. (It also shows up in one episode of season two of Master of None.) Bottura is the exemplar of the rebel in Gino’s definition; working within the tradition-bound world of Italian cuisine, Bottura has introduced the sort of deconstructive, modern approach to cooking popularized by el bulli (where he worked for a summer) and Noma, turning classical Italian preparations inside out, often with a gently mocking tone to the new versions. Gino cooked in Bottura’s kitchen for a night and devotes a fair amount of time to describing a few dishes, such as one called “the crunchy part of the lasagna,” a specific dish that gives the diner the almost-burned, crispy edges that form around the top edges of that baked pasta dish, which many people (myself included) will tell you it’s the best part. As someone who’s generally interested in food and cooking, I enjoyed these passages on their own merits, although the narrative would drag when Gino would shift from talking about Bottura’s approaches to food to his approaches to managing his staff (still relevant to her premise, but come on, I’m here for the cooking ideas).

There are long parts of Rebel Talent where Gino deftly defends her arguments with a blend of such anecdotes and with real data. The chapter “Uncomfortable Truths” looks at the value of diversity in the workplace and in life, that there is hard evidence that diverse teams are more productive and more creative, while people are often happier living or working in diverse environments. (Diversity in these instances refers to demographic diversity, rather than diversity of educational or employment backgrounds.) A team of all white men will tend to be less productive or creative than a comparable team with even one person who is nonwhite or non-male. Such additions can also help to reduce discriminatory attitudes on the parts of the dominant subgroup in the environment. It’s the most compelling individual argument anywhere in the book – if you want teams that innovate, and even go beyond the norms of your workplace, then mix it up by hiring a diverse employee base and putting people together in heterogenous teams.

However, too much of the book leans very heavily on a handful of individual examples, and it was hard for me to accept the generalization of those specific cases to the workplace or society as a whole. Gino does a masterful job of retelling the heroic efforts of Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, who was the pilot of US Airways flight 1549 when birds disabled both of the plane’s engines, forcing an emergency landing that Sully decided in a matter of seconds he had to make on the Hudson River. Did he make this decision because he was, in Gino’s terms, a ‘rebel?’ I think it’s just as easy to argue that he made this decision based on years of experience, a calm demeanor in the face of unimaginable pressure, and the preparations afforded to him by his training and the in-flight checklist that, at least, he and his co-pilot could begin to use before time ran short and Captain Sullenberger had to made an immediate decision to land in the water rather than trying to get to a runway in New Jersey. There’s a similarly stirring anecdote Gino uses multiple times about then Portland Trailblazers coach Mo Cheeks coming to the aid of a young girl who panicked while singing the national anthem before a playoff game and forgot the words. Cheeks realized she was in trouble, walked over to her, said “it’s all right,” and started singing with her so she could pick back up where she’d trailed off, with the entire arena joining in. It’s a beautiful and emotional story, but was Cheeks a rebel, or just a dad and a good human being, helping a child who needed someone?

Rebel Talent is a bit of a swerve from the books in the business genre I usually read, which tend to be more data-driven and grounded in disciplines like cognitive psychology; it’s written for the mass audience, clearly, and thus lighter in prose and tone. It gave me plenty of food for thought, pun intended, and is an encouragement to be bolder and more innovative in any of my various endeavors. I’m just not sure Gino sufficiently supported her broader points, beyond these one-off individuals who rebelled and succeeded (where many others have likely failed) to justify her bigger claims about the value of rebels at work and in life.

Next up: Kory Stamper’s Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries.

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→ August 17, 2018
→ By

Deep Work.

I am very prone to distractions, especially when it comes to sitting down at the computer to get work done. The obvious one is social media – I need to be on Twitter and Facebook for work purposes, but I spend far more time on those sites, especially the former, than I could justify rationally – which soaks up far too much of both my time and attention each day. But there are far more distractions around me, even though I don’t work in an office. Email is a constant intrusion, coupled with the feeling that you have to respond to certain emails immediately. Texts are the same, with an even greater sense of urgency. But there are also more mundane aspects of quotidian life at home that interfere with my ability to work – seemingly innocuous things like stopping to make coffee or to grab the mail, or to do a little cleaning, or to go get the mail, or to start prepping dinner. I’m aware on some level that all of these things make me less productive than I could be, but it takes a conscious effort to surmount them.

Cal Newport has some advice for me and anyone else who suffers from the noises & distractions from anything good in his new book Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, a quick read that offers some hard advice that sounds easy to follow but in practice is hard to implement. He argues that deep work is an entirely different mode of thinking, the kind that we tend to disdain today because it doesn’t ‘look’ productive, but in fact is far more conducive to the kinds of productivity that matter: you’ll get more done, and what you do will be better. Newport even emphasizes that this is the kind of work that’s going to matter more in our modern, knowledge-driven economy, where merely being good at repetitive but shallow tasks isn’t enough to give you a sustainable career.

Deep Work has two sections, and you could easily just skip the first and read the second if you’re more focused on advice and a checklist for becoming a deep worker than in his arguments why deep work matters (although I’d still recommend reading the whole thing). That first part explains why you should realign your working habits around deep work: that it’s valuable in the marketplace, that few people can do it well, and that the cognitive processes around it produce work that is meaningful for the person doing it. Your brain functions differently in ‘deep work’ modes, and the more time you spend practicing it, the better you’ll get, producing more work and higher quality work as a result. He delves into the idea of ‘deliberate practice,’ popularized by Malcolm Gladwell and then roundly mocked by critics, going back to the professor, K. Anders Ericsson, who coined the phrase based on research into how we learn difficult material and what separates experts in certain fields from others working in those areas.

Newport also talks distractions, explaining why they’re a real problem in part one and recommending avoiding them in part two. Open offices come in for particular criticism, because they create more noises and more opportunities for co-workers to interrupt any attempts at deep work, all under the guise of creating “more opportunities for collaboration” (which, he later points out, may not even be accurate). The increased desire across industries to measure employee productivity – what Newport calls “the metric black hole” – also contributes to the fight against deep work, driving employees to do what will improve their metrics, not what will be more productive. And there are huge social obstacles to deep work, because most of us naturally want to be responsive, collegial, and, worst of all, available for colleagues when they appear to need our attention.

Part two of Deep Work is the checklist, four global rules, each with various corollaries, for becoming a deep worker: practice working deeply, embrace boredom, quit social media, and schedule your day to sequester and minimize shallow work. Newport is really prescribing an entirely new way to approach your job, one that will probably feel highly restrictive and type A to most people. But even in less than two weeks of dabbling in some of his recommendations, I can vouch for everything I’ve tried. There’s no question he’s right about social media; I used to keep Twitter and my public Facebook page open in browser tabs all day, so I could keep an eye on relevant news and respond to reader questions, but I’ve stopped doing that entirely. I’m writing this post with my browser closed entirely, and have reserved any questions or links I’ll need to finish this review until I’ve completed the body text and am almost ready to post it. I’ve started cordoning off email time, realizing that virtually nothing in my email related to work is actually urgent unless it’s an editor’s question about something I’ve filed – and by that point, my period of deep work has paused because I’ve finished a column or post and moved on to the next task. I’ve long encouraged readers to post baseball questions in my chats, where I can address the entire audience at once, rather than via private messages like email or Facebook, where my answer goes to just one person. (I also wouldn’t have time to answer all the baseball questions I get through email or other services, but if you message me with questions about mental health, I will answer.) Somehow I managed to write a book without very good work habits, judging by the standards Newport lays out in Deep Work, but if I do get the chance to write another one, I’ll feel much better armed to do it now that I’ve read his advice.

Next up: Min Jin Lee’s 2017 novel Pachinko.

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→ August 9, 2018
→ By

So You Want to Talk About Race.

When a TV channel decided to put together a panel on the Atlanta Braves’ 1990 teams on Hall of Fame weekend last month, they chose a set of criteria – members of the organization from that time period who were also inducted or selected for the Baseball Hall of Fame by the writers or one of the Hall’s committees – that produced a panel of six men, all of whom are white. The 1990s Braves were a typically diverse MLB team for the era; about 20-24% of their roster in any given year comprised players of color, some of whom were crucial to the team’s success. Fred McGriff’s arrival in a mid-1993 trade spurred one of the most furious second half runs we’ve ever seen, where Atlanta overtook San Francisco to win the division after falling nine games back in mid-July. David Justice’s home run accounted for the only run in Game 6 of the 1995 World Series, the only championship won by Atlanta in the 1990s. Andruw Jones became the youngest player ever to homer in a World Series game in 1996, then became the second player ever to homer in his first two World Series at bats, and his defense was a big part of Atlanta’s run of division titles for the rest of that decade. Given that those Atlanta teams depended on the contributions of players of color, and that diversity improves outcomes in education, workplace productivity, and decision-making, the choice of criteria that excluded all persons of color harmed the end product.

This panel took place right after I had finished listening to the audio version of Ijeoma Oluo’s book So You Want to Talk About Race, which is part polemic, part plea, and part guide for people of all political and philosophical beliefs who want to talk or even think about issues of race and diversity. She’s talking about racism, yes, but more broadly, she’s talking about race and how we can have better, more productive conversations about race, and racial bias, and similar types of bias like those around gender, place of origin, or sexual orientation. Ojuo is a queer black woman whose father is Nigerian, so she is able to fill the book with personal anecdotes, but she also draws substantially on others’ stories and on scholarship in the areas of racism and diversity.

The book’s chapters are provocative, by design, even though the subject matter within each often veers significantly from the initial questions. Chapters include “Why can’t I say the N-word?,” “Is police brutality really about race?,” and “Why can’t I touch your hair?,” all of which contain stories that range from appalling to horrifying, and grab the reader’s attention from the outset by the shocking nature of the titles. (The hair thing really flabbergasted me, but I asked two African-American women I know well enough to ask about the subject, and both said yes, they are frequently asked by strangers if someone can touch their hair – or have strangers touch their hair without asking.) I’m sure most people inclined to pick this book up would have the same reaction to such chapter titles as I did – because you’re not black, yes it is, and because it’s not your body – but Oluo uses those as departure points for broader questions of how society others people of color and ignores systemic or structural forces that continue to hold back nonwhite members of society on both social and economic fronts.

Other chapters get right to the meat of the subject, such as those on intersectionality and the school-to-prison pipeline, as well as the one titled “Why am I always being told to ‘check my privilege?'” Oluo is comfortable making the reader uncomfortable; she even acknowledges this by telling how often she’s been criticized for talking too much or too vocally about race and racial bias. Some people want to believe we live in a post-racial society or that we are raising our children to be “blind to color.” The systemic issues behind police brutality against citizens of color or the high discipline and incarceration rates of young black men are not gone, or going away any time soon, and Oluo explains just how pervasive they are (that black students are far more likely to be suspended than white students, three times as likely for boys and six times as likely for girls).

As for privilege, Oluo doesn’t hold back. You can see some of the same ideas that appear in her book in this long essay she wrote in March of 2017, in which she points out that people who ‘woke up’ to the existence of systemic and structural racism after the election of Donald Trump were, in fact, experiencing the result of privilege, because Americans of color deal with it and its residues every day. (Resumes with white-sounding names get more callbacks for interviews than those with nonwhite-sound names. Scare quotes may apply.) But Oluo’s message to white readers is clear: We are late, and we have contributed to the backsliding in the rights of minorities, but we can still help if we are willing to accept our own failings and those of society. She wrote in that essay to white readers, “you can help in ways that I cannot,” and the exhortation appears again and again in the book, with countless suggestions and calls to action, questions you can ask at work, at your children’s schools, of your elected representatives, in formal and informal social groups.

There is much work to be done, and it will require the cooperation and effort of populations who are not adversely affected by such biases, conscious or structural. If you have privilege and a platform, which I do, you can use it to speak out when you see active or passive bias – lack of representation, dog-whistling, micro-aggressions, stereotype threat. You can go to school board or PTA meetings and ask about the percentage of faculty members who are persons of color, or whether the curriculum accurately reflects nonwhite cultural experiences, or how students of color are disciplined – and whether that’s different from how white students are. You can push for laws that might reduce incidents of police violence against citizens of color, like requiring body cameras, or to change or repeal laws that do not mention race but have had a disparate impact on black communities, like fighting to decriminalize drug possession and to expunge records of those non-violent crimes. You can push for greater diversity at work, not for ‘tokenism,’ but because it will make you and your company more productive. Most of all, Oluo urges readers, you can’t just pretend this stuff isn’t real. It’s everywhere because it is writ into the fabric of our society, a society that is a mere six generations away from enslaving black people, two generations away from denying them basic civil rights, one generation away from open discrimination in the workplace, and still today in a world where Americans of color, especially those who are black, face insidious, subtle discrimination at the workplace, in church, on the streets, in schools, and anywhere else they might dare to be black.

So yes, I do want to talk about race. I want to try to do something to make the world better when it comes to race, bias, and diversity. I believe that world will make us all better off – we’ll be happier and more productive people. I also believe that I am privileged, and that I’ve benefited from the same kind of structures that Oluo points out have held back people of color, because most of these arenas are a zero-sum game – college admissions, employment, etc. If a black candidate is rejected for his/her race, or is seen as less qualified because s/he grew up in disadvantaged conditions and lacked access to better education or learning resources, the beneficiary will more than likely be a white person. Oluo’s book encouraged me to say something when I saw tweets about that panel – not that it was “racist” per se, but that it excluded persons of color, and thus was not representative – and to think more about how I can make some small difference when it comes to race and bias in my work and in my life.

One aside: There was one section of one chapter in So You Want to Talk About Race that rang false for me – the portion of the chapter on cultural appropriation (an uncomfortable read for me, as someone who consumes a lot of culture without thinking about this question) where Oluo discusses rap music. Rap originated as a black genre of music, just as jazz and the blues did, and was later co-opted by the musical mainstream, which has meant white artists also use the form, and white record executives and promoters and agents all profit from it. Whether a musical form, essentially rhythmic poetry, can truly be appropriated is a worthwhile question to debate; is it comparable to a structure like a fugue or an aria, a template to which the artist must then apply his or her own creative energies? Oluo lost me, however, with claims that this assimilation has led to white rappers finding easy success in the field despite showing less talent than black rappers who struggle to find an audience. The claim itself is entirely subjective; judging what rappers have more talent would probably bog down in an argument over what exactly defines talent in rap, whether it is technical skill or lyrical ingenuity or musical innovation or something else, but even more troubling to me is that the claim appears not to be true. A few white rappers have found enormous commercial and critical success. Eminem is the best example, but he was the protégé of Dr. Dre (who is African-American), and Dre produced Eminem’s biggest albums and released them through his Aftermath imprint. (For example, The Marshall Mathers LP was produced by Dre, The 45 King, Mel-Man, and the Bass Brothers; three of those five men are African-American.) You could count the number of white rappers to have significant commercial success on two hands – the Beastie Boys, Vanilla Ice, Macklemore – while African-American rappers, many of whom seem (to my subjective ears) to have had success because of who produced them rather than their own talents, continue to dominate the singles and album charts. I understand what Oluo was trying to say here, but I don’t think the reality of the marketplace bears out her specific criticisms.

Next up: Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport.

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→ July 31, 2018
→ By

Big Chicken.

Antibiotic resistance doesn’t get a ton of headlines, but it is one of the most critical threats to global health, enough so that the United Nations resolved to address the problem at a summit late in 2016. At the time, they estimated there would be 10 million deaths annually from resistant ‘superbugs’ by the year 2050, which doesn’t include people who would die indirectly from the scourge, such as people who can’t have surgery because the antibiotics that you receive before any operation are no longer effective. In a country where a third of the population rejects the truth of evolution, getting people to understand this issue – itself the product of evolutionary processes among bacteria – has been difficult, and never seems to rise very high on the priority lists for policymakers.

Maryn McKenna’s new book Big Chicken: The Incredible Story of How Antibiotics Created Modern Agriculture and Changed the Way the World Eats, the journalist and Schuster Institute fellow explains how we got here by way of the humble chicken, which took over our plates and menus thanks to the prodigious and reckless use of antibiotics, in turn leading to widespread antibiotic resistance in our food supply and outside of it as well. Chicken became an industrial product because someone realized that pumping birds full of antibiotics as part of their feed would make them grow faster, regardless of whether they had any need for these medications. While the chicken world consolidated and counted its profits, bacteria did what they do – evolved, through mutations and gene transfer, to become resist to one drug after another, spreading through and beyond our food supply, abetted by antibiotic residues that washed into the water supply from overuse.

McKenna builds the book around the narrative of one man who nearly died from salmonellosis, an infection caused by bacteria in the Salmonella genus (there are two species, and either can cause this illness), part of a widespread 2013 outbreak caused by unsanitary conditions at the Foster Farms chicken processing plant. The specific Salmonella strain in this outbreak, known as Heidelberg, was resistant to multiple antibiotics, sickened over 600 people, and resulted in at least 200 hospitalizations, although there were no reported deaths. Within the framework of this patient’s ordeal – he survived, but will have lifelong complications, which is common for people who develop these infections – McKenna walks through the history of the chicken as foodstuff, from its advent as an industrial product through changes to the bird to the very recent movement by major chicken producers and consumers to stop antibiotic use.

The very rise of this form of industrialized animal husbandry was an accident, which is one of the book’s most interesting sections (granted, I love history of science stories); there wasn’t any reason to think pumping healthy birds full of antibiotics would make them grow faster, but it did, to a shocking extent. What is infuriating, if not entirely surprising, is how government agencies responsible for ensuring public health rolled over and played dead for Big Chicken and the antibiotic manufacturers themselves even as scientists began to sound alarms about resistant bacteria in the 1950s. The manufacturers played the Big Tobacco game of demanding more proof, aided and abetted by Congressman Jamie Whitten, a Democrat from Mississippi, who abused his power to protect the two industries from proposed restrictions on antibiotic usage until his retirement in 1994. (Whitten wrote a pro-pesticide screed as a rejoinder to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, in case you were unclear on his stance on the matter.) Mckenna parallels this narrative with a walk through the tactics of the bacterial world to outflank our best drugs, most recently with the emergence of bacteria with the mcr-1 gene, conferring resistance to colistin, an antibiotic of ‘last resort’ that has been used for bacteria resistant to all other antibiotics.

Blaming the two industries of chicken and pharma, along with the complicity of useless government agencies (the FDA and the USDA), is easy, but the American consumer is also a major part of the problem here. We eat far more meat than we need to meet our dietary requirements, but we insist on meat being cheap, which encourages us to both eat and waste more of it. We’ve also decided we want lean meat, based on nutritional advice from the Useless Department of Agriculture that turned out to be mostly to entirely wrong, leading to greater demand for breast meat, and in turn for farmers to grow chickens with giant breasts and smaller legs, to the point that the broiler-fryer chickens you might get in an average grocery or warehouse store can’t walk or stand up normally. (I rarely see them in stores, but once did buy a pasture-raised whole chicken; it had less than half the breast meat of even a well-raised conventional bird.) McKenna goes into this in more detail – how the rise of ‘chicken fingers’ and the McNugget exacerbated this trend, how consumers prefer buying chicken parts rather than whole birds – while also pointing out how producers bred birds with these un-natural characteristics to suit the marketplace.

There is hope, at least in this book, on both the antibiotic resistance and the chicken-producing fronts. The UN has, at least, paid lip service to the cause of fighting antibiotic resistance. Several major chicken producers, led by Purdue, have stopped or pledged to stop using antibiotics in full, or to only use them to treat sick birds rather than as growth promoters or for prophylactic purposes. Many large chicken buyers, including Panera, Chipotle, and even McDonald’s, have also pledged to go antibiotic-free, or have done so already. Whole Foods has long been antibiotic-free as well. (One reason I buy organic milk and eggs, even though ‘organic’ itself isn’t that meaningful: It guarantees the cows/birds in question weren’t given antibiotics.) And slowing the use of antibiotics on animals should help in particular if and when researchers discover the next big class of antibiotic compounds. We may have gotten much farther with the drugs we had if we hadn’t given them in such huge quantities to the animals we raised and ate.

McKenna also visits chicken farmers who are operating outside of the main supply chain of industrial birds, raising heirloom varieties in the American heartland or raising certified Label Rouge birds in France, chickens that neither look nor taste like the bland if predictable American hybrids. Educating consumers with the disposable income to buy these birds is a challenge, but one that has plenty of precedent in the market for high-end foods. The bigger conundrum is how to provide enough meat, chicken or otherwise, to feed a world that increasingly demands it and doesn’t want to pay more for it, without the overuse of antibiotics that has led us to the edge of a bottomless pit of resistance.

Next up: Dan Simmons’ The Fall of Hyperion.

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