→ 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
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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
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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
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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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→ July 30, 2018
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The Emperor of All Maladies.

Siddhartha Mukherjee, an Indian-born American oncologist who trained at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, won the Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction for his 2010 tome The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, his first book and an enormous undertaking – an exhaustive attempt to chronicle the history of the disease itself and the ongoing scientific fight to cure it. Interspersed with anecdotes from his own oncology work, including several patients he treated – some who survived the disease, and many who did not – Emperor covers a truly incredible amount of ground, often with more detail than I needed to understand the story, and presents a sobering picture of how endless the efforts to treat and cure cancer will be, given the disease’s nature and ability to defeat our best weapons against it.

Mukherjee goes back to ancient Egypt and Greece to give us the earliest known examples of the disease’s appearance and explain how it got its name – it’s from the Latin word meaning ‘crab,’ and the word carcinoma comes from the Greek word for the same – but the bulk of the history in this book starts in the mid-19th century with the first real identification of a specific cancer, leukemia. The story wends its way through the late part of that century with the advent of radical mastectomies to remove breast cancer, disfiguring surgeries that would remove many muscles beyond the breasts and that were the brainchild of the coke-addicted surgeon William Halsted, who also conceived the modern residency program for new doctors that forces them to operate without sleep. We get the discovery that radiation causes cancer, and the related discovery that it might treat cancer as well, as would certain drugs that we now put under the umbrella of chemotherapy. Mukherjee takes the science thread all the way through what were, at the time, the latest developments in oncology treatment and research, including the ongoing identification of oncogenes (genes that, when switched ‘on,’ can produce cancer), proto-oncogenes (genes that become oncogenes with mutations), and anti-oncogenes (tumor-suppressing genes); and therapies that target specific cancer subtypes based on their genotypes – such as Herceptin, which has proven exceptionally effective against breast and other cancers cancer with the HER2 oncogene.

The science bits – my favorite, of course – are interspersed with much of the story of the American public policy fight over cancer, which led to a so-called “War on Cancer,” the passage of the 1971 National Cancer Act to boost the National Cancer Institute, and many breathless pronouncements that we were mere years away from finding a cure. The narrative lags at several points here – the origin story of the Jimmy Fund’s “Jimmy,” real name Einar Gustafson, is the big exception – although it serves as a reminder of how credulous the world was, including early researchers into oncology, about our ability to ‘beat’ or cure cancer. Cancer is not just one disease; it is many, probably hundreds, of diseases that all share the common characteristic of abnormal cell growth, but that can differ substantially by their origin in the body, and even for a specific source or organ can come in vastly diverse forms that require different, targeted treatments. The above-mentioned Herceptin works on HER2+ cancers, mostly breast cancer but sometimes appearing in gastric or ovarian cancers; it will be ineffective against HER2-negative cancers. Someone with ‘breast cancer’ can have any of several forms of the disease – each of which will respond in totally different ways to treatments. This is good news and bad news; the more we know about specific forms of cancer, the better that scientists can come up with targeted treatments to attack them, but there are also far more forms of cancer than we’d ever realized in the history of our fight against the disease. The single ‘cure for cancer’ is probably a chimera, because cancer is not just one thing, but a common attribute of many diseases, and stopping that attribute – rampant cell division – would kill regular cells too.

The Emperor of All Maladies is kind of a depressing read, between the awful outcomes for some of the patients described, but also because the outlook for the future of the disease is not that great. Yes, the medical world continues to search for and find treatments for specific cancers, some of which are the most effective drugs in the history of oncology, but it’s also clear that if your specific cancer isn’t one of those, the medical response is the same drug cocktail approach that has been the norm for decades – better than it was, and with the benefit of drugs to help combat nausea, but still an ordeal for the patient with modest success rates. And finding Herceptin-like advances for all cancers will take many years and billions of dollars that may not be available without a massive public investment. Dr. Mukerjee has put together a remarkable work of research and insight, written with great feeling for the individual patients fighting their cancers, but I left this book feeling worse about the war on cancer than I ever had before.

Next up: Dan Simmons’ The Fall of Hyperion.

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→ May 30, 2018
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The Tyranny of Metrics.

A scout I’ve seen a few times already this spring on the amateur trail recommended Jerry Muller’s brief polemic The Tyranny of Metrics, a quick and enlightening read on how the business world’s obsession with measuring everything creates misaligned incentives in arenas as disparate as health care, education, foreign aid, and the military, and can lead to undesirable or even counterproductive outcomes. With the recent MLB study headed by physicist Prof. Alan Nathan that found, among other things, that players trying to optimize their launch angles hasn’t contributed to rising home run rates, the book is even somewhat applicable to baseball – although I think professional sports, especially our favorite pastime, do offer a good contrast to fields where the focus on metrics leads people to measure and reward the wrong things.

The encroachment of metrics on education is probably the best known of the examples that Muller provides in the book, which is strident in tone but measured (pun intended) in the way he supports his arguments. Any reader who has children in grade school now is familiar with the heavy use of standardized testing to measure student progress, which is then in turn used to grade teacher performance and track outcomes by schools as well, which can alter funding decisions or even lead to school takeovers and closings. Of course, I think it’s common knowledge at this point that grading teachers on the test performance of their students leads teachers to “teach to the test,” eschewing regular material, which may be important but more abstract, in favor of the specific material and question types to be found on these tests. My daughter is in a charter school in Delaware, and loses more than a week of schooldays each year to these statewide tests, which, as far as I can tell, are the primary way the state tracks charter school performance – even though charters nationwide are rife with fraud and probably require more direct observation and evaluation. That would be expensive and subjective, however, so the tests become a weak proxy for the ostensible goal in measurement, allowing the state to point and say that these charters are doing their jobs because the student test scores are above the given threshold.

The medical world isn’t immune to this encroachment, and Muller details more pernicious outcomes that result from grading physicians on seemingly sensible statistics like success or mortality rates from surgeries. If a surgeon at a busy hospital knows that any death on the operating table during a surgery s/he performs will count, so to speak, against his/her permanent record, the surgeon may choose to avoid the most difficult surgeries, whether due to the complexity of the operations or risk factors in the patients themselves, to avoid taking the hit to his/her surgical batting average. Imagine if you’re an everyday player in the majors, entering arbitration or even free agency, and get to pick the fifteen games you’re going to skip to rest over the course of the season. If your sole goal is maximizing your own statistics to thus increase your compensation, are you skipping Clayton Kershaw and Max Scherzer, or skipping Homer Bailey and some non-prospect spot starter?

Muller mentions sports in passing in The Tyranny of Metrics but focuses on other, more important industries to society and the economy as a whole; that’s probably a wise choice, as the increased use of metrics in sports is less apt than the other examples he chooses in his book. However, there are some areas where his premise holds true, with launch angle a good one to choose because it’s been in the news lately. Hitters at all levels are now working with coaches, both with teams and private coaches, to optimize their swings to maximize their power output. For a select few hitters, it has helped, unlocking latent power they couldn’t get to because their swings were too flat; for others, it may help reduce flyouts and popups and get some of those balls the hitter already puts in the air to fall in for hits or go over the fence. But for many hitters, this emphasis on launch angle hasn’t produced results, and there are even players in this year’s draft class who’ve hurt themselves by focusing on launch angle – knowing that teams measure it and grade players in the draft class on it – to the exclusion of other areas of their game, like just plain hitting. Mike Siani of William Penn Charter has cost himself a little money this spring for this exact reason; working with a coach this offseason to improve his launch angle, he’s performed worse for scouts this spring, becoming more pull-conscious and trying to hit for power he doesn’t naturally possess. He’s a plus runner who can field, but more of an all-fields hitter who would benefit from just putting the ball in play and letting his speed boost him on the bases. Because many teams now weigh such Trackman data as launch angle, spin rate, and extension heavily in their draft process, either boosting players who score well in those areas or excluding those who don’t, we now see coaches trying to ‘teach to the test,’ and that approach will help only a portion of the draft class while actively harming the prospects of many others.

At barely 220 pages, The Tyranny of Metrics feels like a pamphlet version of what could easily be a heavy 500-page academic tome, recounting all of the ways in which the obsession with metrics produces less than ideal results while also explaining the behavioral economics principles that underlie such behavior. If you have some of that background, or just don’t want it (understandable), then Muller’s book is perfect – a concise argument that should lead policymakers and business leaders to at least reconsider their reliance on the specific metrics they’ve chosen to measure employee performance. Using metrics may be the right strategy, but be sure they measure what you want to measure, and that they’re not skewing behavior as a result.

Next up: I’m currently reading Ray Bradbury’s short story collection I Sing the Body Electric!.

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→ May 25, 2018
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Whistling Vivaldi.

In this era of increased awareness of cognitive biases and how they affect human behavior, stereotype threat seems to be lagging behind similar phenomena in its prevalence in policy discussions. Stereotype threat refers to how common stereotypes about demographic groups can then affect how members of those groups perform in tasks that are covered by the stereotypes. For example, women fare worse on math tests than men because there’s a pervasive stereotype about women being inferior at math. African-American students perform worse on tests that purport to measure ‘intelligence’ for a similar reason. The effect is real, with about two decades of research testifying to its existence, although there’s still disagreement over how strong the effect is in the real world (versus structured experiments).

Stanford psychology professor Claude Steele, a former provost at Columbia University and himself African-American, wrote a highly personal account of what we know about stereotype threat and its presence in and effects on higher education in the United States in Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do. Steele blends personal anecdotes – his own and those of others – with the research, mostly in lab settings, that we have to date on stereotype threat, which, again, has largely focused on demonstrating its existence and the pernicious ways in which it can affect not just performance on tests but decisions by students on what to study or even where to do so. The resulting book, which runs a scant 200 pages, is less academic in nature than Thinking Fast and Slow and its ilk, and thus a little less intellectually satisfying, but it’s also an easier read and I think the sort of book anyone can read regardless of their backgrounds in psychology or even in reading other books on human behavior.

The best-known proofs of stereotype threat, which Steele recounts throughout the first two thirds of the book, come from experiments where two groups are asked to take a specific test that encompasses a stereotype of one of the groups – for example, men and women are given a math test, especially one where they are told the test itself measures their math skills. In one iteration, the test-takers are told beforehand that women tend to fare worse than men on tests of mathematical abilities; in another iteration, they’re told no such thing, or something irrelevant. Whether it’s women and math, blacks and intelligence, or another stereotype, the results are consistently – the ‘threatened’ group performs worse than expected (based on predetermined criteria like grades in math classes or scores on standardized math tests) when they’re reminded of the stereotype before the test. Steele recounts several such experiments, even someone that don’t involve academic goals (e.g., whites underperforming in tests of athleticism),and shows that not only do the threatened groups perform worse, they often perform less – answering fewer questions or avoiding certain tasks.

Worse for our academic world is that stereotype threat appears to lead to increased segregation in the classroom and deters threatened groups from pursuing classes or majors that fall into the stereotyped category. If stereotype threat is directly* or indirectly convincing women not to choose STEM majors, or steering African-American students away from more academically rigorous majors or schools, then we need policy changes to try to address the threat and either throttle it before it starts or counteract it once it has begun. And Steele argues, with evidence, that stereotype threat begins much earlier than most people aware of the phenomenon would guess. Stereotype threat can be found, again through experiment, in kids as young as six years old. Marge and Homer may not have taken Lisa’s concerns about Malibu Stacy seriously, but she was more right than even the Simpsons writers of the time (who were probably almost all white men) realized.

* For example, do guidance counselors or academic advisors tell female students not to major in math or engineering? Do they discourage black students from applying to the best possible colleges to which they might gain admission?

To keep Whistling Vivaldi readable, Steele intersperses his recounting of academic studies with personal anecdotes of his own or of students and professors he’s met throughout his academic career. The anecdote of the title is almost painful to read – it’s from a young black man who noticed how differently white pedestrians would treat him on the street, avoiding eye contact or even crossing to the other side, so he adopted certain behaviors, not entirely consciously, to make himself seem less threatening. One of them was whistling classical music, like that of Vivaldi. Other stories demonstrate subtle changes in behavior in class that also result from stereotype threat, and show how students in threatened groups perform better in environments where the threat is diminished by policies, positive environments, or sheer numbers.

Stereotype threat is a major and almost entirely unaddressed policy issue for teachers, principals, and local politicians, at the very least. Avoiding our own use, even in jest, of such stereotypes can help start the process of ending how they affect the next generation of students, but the findings Steele recounts in Whistling Vivaldi call for much broader action. It’s essential reading for anyone who works in or wishes to work in education at any level.

Next up: Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient.

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