→ March 26, 2018
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The Beak of the Finch.

Winner of the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction, Jonathan Weiner’s The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time should have ended most of the inane arguments still coming from creationists and other science deniers about the accuracy of the theory of evolution. Weiner tells the story of the Grants, a married couple of biologists who spent 20 years studying Galapagos finches – the same species that Darwin spotted on his voyage with the Beagle and that helped him develop his first theory of adaptation via natural selection – and observed natural selection and evolution in action. This remarkable study, which also showed how species evolve in response to changes in their environment and to other species in their ecosystems, was a landmark effort to both verify Darwin’s original claims and strengthen them in a way that, again, should have put an end to this utter stupidity that still infects so much of our society, even creeping into public science education in the south and Midwest.

The finches are actually a set of species across the different islands of the Galapagos, with the Grants studying those on Daphne Major, an uninhabited island in the archipelago that has multiple species of finch existing alongside each other because they occupy different ecological niches. Over the two decades they studied these species, massive changes in weather patterns (in part caused by El Niño and La Niña) led to years of total drought and years of historically high rainfall, with various species on the island responding to these fluctuations in the environment in ways that affected both population growth and characteristics. The beaks of the book’s title refer to the Grants’ focus on beak dimensions, which showed that the finches’ beaks would change in response to those environmental changes. In times of drought, for example, the supply of certain seeds that specific finch species relied on for their sustenance might become more scarce, and there would be a response within a few generations (or even one) favoring birds with longer or stronger beaks that gave them access to new supplies of food. Many Galapagos finches crack open seed cases to get to the edible portions within, so if those seeds are rarer in a given year, the birds with stronger beaks can crack open more cases and get to more food, given them a tangible advantage in the rather ruthless world of natural selection.

Weiner focuses on the Grants’ project and discoveries throughout the book, but intersperses it with other anecdotes and with notes from Darwin’s travels and his two major works on the subject, On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man. He incorporates the discovery of DNA and how that has accelerated our ability to study and understand evolutionary changes. He goes into the famous example of the white English moth that found itself at a severe disadvantage in the polluted world of the early Industrial Revolution, and how a single gene that determined wing color led to a shift in the moth’s population from mostly white to mostly black (to match the soot covering trees near Manchester and London) – and back again after England finally took steps to clean up its air. This one example is especially instructive in our ongoing experience of climate change, which Weiner refers to throughout as global warming (the preferred term at the time), and opens up a discussion about “artificial selection,” from how we’re screwing up the global ecosystem to antibiotic resistance to the futility of pesticide-driven agriculture (with the targeted pests evolving resistance very rapidly to each new chemical we dump on our crops).

Although Weiner doesn’t stake out a clear position on theism, the tone of the book, especially the final third, goes beyond mere anti-creationism into an outright rejection of any supernatural role in the processes of natural selection and evolution. While that may be appropriate for most of the book, as such processes as the development of the human eye (the argument about the hypothetical watchmaker) can be explained through Darwinian evolution, Weiner does overstep when he discusses the rise of human consciousness, handwaving it away as perhaps just a simple change in neurons or a single genetic mutation that led to the very thing that makes us us. (Which isn’t to say we’re that different from chimpanzees, with whom we still share 99% of our genes. Perhaps David Brin was on to something with his “neo-chimps” in the Uplift series after all.)

The most common rejoinder I encounter online when I mention that evolution is real is that we can’t actually see evolution and therefore it’s “only a theory.” The latter misunderstands the scientific definition of theory, but the former is just not true: We do see evolution, we have seen it, and we’ve seen dramatic shifts in species’ characteristics in ordinary time. Some speciation may occur in geological time, but the evolution of new species of monocellular organisms can happen in days (again, if you don’t believe in evolution, keep taking penicillin for that staph infection), and natural selection in vertebrates can take place rapidly enough for us to see it happen. If The Beak of the Finch were required reading in every high school biology class, perhaps we’d have fewer people – the book cites a survey from the 1990s that claims half of Americans don’t accept evolution – still denying science here in 2018.

Next up: David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, among the favorites to win the Pulitzer for Non-Fiction this year.

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→ March 20, 2018
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Nudge.

Richard Thaler won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Economics – or whatever the longer title is, it’s the one Nobel Prize people don’t seem to take all that seriously – for his work in the burgeoning field of behavioral economics, especially on what is now called “choice architecture.” Thaler’s work focuses on how the way we make decisions is affected by the way in which we are presented with choices. I mentioned one of Thaler’s findings in my most recent stick to baseball roundup – the candidate listed first on a ballot receives an average boost of 3.5% in the voting, with the benefit higher in races where all candidates are equally unknown (e.g., there’s no incumbent). You would probably like to think that voters are more rational than that, or at least just not really that irrational, but the data are clear that the order in which names are listed on ballots affects the outcomes. (It came up in that post because Iowa Republicans are trying to rig election outcomes in that state, with one possible move to list Republican candidates first on nearly every ballot in the state.)

Thaler’s first big book, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, co-authored with Harvard Law School professor Cass Sunstein came out in 2008, and explains the effects of choice architecture while offering numerous policy prescriptions for various real-world problems where giving consumers or voters different choices, or giving them choices in a different order, or even just flipping the wording of certain questions could dramatically alter outcomes. Thaler describes this approach as “libertarian paternalism,” saying that the goal here is not to mandate or restrict choices, but to use subtle ‘nudges’ to push consumers toward decisions that are better for them and for society as a whole. The audiobook is just $4.49 as I write this.

This approach probably mirrors my own beliefs on how governments should craft economic policies, although it doesn’t appear to be in favor with either major party right now. For example, trans fats are pretty clearly bad for your health, and if Americans consume too many trans fats, national expenditures on health care will likely rise as more Americans succumb to heart disease and possibly cancer as well. However, banning trans fats, as New York City has done, is paternalism without liberty – these jurisdictions have decided for consumers that they can’t be trusted to consume only small, safer amounts of trans fats. You can certainly have tiny amounts of trans fats without significantly altering your risk of heart disease, and you may decide for yourself that the small increase in health risk is justified by the improved flavor or texture of products containing trans fats. (For example, pie crusts made with traditional shortening have a better texture than those made with new, trans fat-free shortening. And don’t get me started on Oreos.) That’s your choice to make, even if it potentially harms your health in the long run.

Choice architecture theory says that you can deter people from consuming trans fats or reduce such consumption by how you present information to consumers at the point of purchase. Merely putting trans fat content on nutrition labels is one step – if consumers see that broken out as a separate line item, they may be less likely to purchase the product. Warning labels that trans fats are bad for your heart might also help. Some consumers will consume trans fats anyway, but that is their choice as free citizens. The policy goal is to reduce the public expenditure on health care expenses related to such consumption without infringing on individual choice. There are many such debates in the food policy world, especially when it comes to importing food products from outside the U.S. – the USDA has been trying for years to ban or curtail imports of certain cheeses made from raw milk, because of the low risk that they’ll carry dangerous pathogens, even though the fermentation process discourages the growth of such bugs. (I’m not talking about raw milk itself, which has a different risk profile, and has made a lot of people sick as it’s come back into vogue.) I’ve also run into trouble trying to get products imported from Italy like bottarga and neonata, which are completely safe, but for whatever reason run afoul of U.S. laws on bringing animal products into the country.

Thaler and Sunstein fry bigger fish than neonata in Nudge, examining how choice architecture might improve employee participation in and choices within their retirement accounts, increase participation in organ donation programs, or increase energy conservation. (The last one is almost funny: If you tell people their neighbors are better at conserving energy, then it makes those people reduce their own energy use. South Africa has been using this and similar techniques to try to reduce water consumption in drought-stricken Cape Town. Unfortunately, publicizing “Day Zero” has also hurt the city’s tourism industry.) Thaler distinguishes between Econs, the theoretical, entirely rational actors of traditional economic theory; and Humans, the very real, often irrational people who live in this universe and make inefficient or even dumb choices all the time.

Nudge is enlightening, but unlike most books in this niche, like Thinking, Fast and Slow or The Invisible Gorilla, it probably won’t help you make better choices in your own life. You can become more aware of choice architecture, and maybe you’ll overrule your status quo bias, or will look at the top or bottom shelves in the supermarket instead of what’s at eye level (hint: the retailer charges producers more to place their products at eye level), but the people Nudge is most likely to help seem like the ones least likely to read it: Elected and appointed officials. I’ve mentioned many times how disgusted I was with Arizona’s lack of any kind of energy or water conservation policies. They have more sun than almost any place in the country, but have done little to nothing to encourage solar uptake, although the state’s utility commission may have finally forced some change on the renewable energy front this week. Las Vegas actually pays residents to remove grass lawns and replace them with low-water landscaping; Arizona does nothing of the sort, and charges far too little for water given its scarcity and dwindling supply. Improving choice architecture in that state could improve its environmental policies quickly without infringing on Arizonans’ rights to leave the lights on all night.

Speaking of Thinking, Fast and Slow, its author, Daniel Kahneman, was a guest last week on NPR’s Hidden Brain podcast, and it was both entertaining and illuminating.

Next up: Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. No reason.

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→ February 7, 2018
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The Hidden Brain.

I’ve become a huge fan of the NPR prodcast The Hidden Brain, hosted by Shankar Vedantam, a journalist whose 2010 book The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and Save Our Lives spawned the podcast and a regular radio program on NPR. Covering how our subconscious mind influences our decisions in ways that traditional economists would call ‘irrational’ but modern behavioral economists recognize as typical human behavior, Vedantam’s book is a great introduction to this increasingly important way of understanding how people act and think.

Vedantam walks the reader through these theories via concrete examples, much as he now does in the podcast – this week’s episode, “Why Now?” about the #MeToo movement and our society’s sudden decision to pay attention to these women, is among its best. Some of the stories in the book are shocking and/or hard to believe, but they’re true and serve to emphasize these seemingly counterintuitive concepts. He discusses a rape victim who had focused on remembering details about her attacker, and was 100% sure she’d correctly identified the man who raped her – but thirteen years after the man she identified was convicted of the crime, a DNA test showed she was wrong, and she then discovered a specific detail she’d overlooked at the time of the investigation because no one asked her the ‘right’ question. This is a conscientious, intelligent woman who was certain of her memories, and she still made a mistake.

Another example that particularly stuck with me was how people react in the face of imminent danger or catastrophe. Just before the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the sea receded from coastal areas, a typical feature before a tidal wave hits. Vedantam cites reports from multiple areas where people living in those regions “gathered to discuss the phenomenon” and “asked one another what was happening,” instead of running like hell for high ground. Similar reports came from the World Trade Center after 9/11. People in those instances didn’t rely on their instincts to flee, but sought confirmation from others nearby – if you don’t run, maybe I don’t need to run either. In this case, he points to the evolutionary history of man, where staying with the group was typically the safe move in the face of danger; if running were the dominant, successful strategy for survival, that would still be our instinct today. It even explains why multiple bystanders did not help Deletha Word, a woman who was nearly beaten to death in a road-rage incident on the packed Belle Isle bridge in Detroit in 1996 – if no one else helped her, why should I?

Vedantam’s writing and speaking style offers a perfect blend of colloquial storytelling and evidence-based arguments. He interviews transgender people who describe the changes attitudes they encounter between before and after their outward appearances changed. (One transgender man says, “I can even complete a whole sentence [post-transition] without being interrupted by a man.) And he looks at data on racial disparities in sentencing convicted criminals to death – including data that show darker-skinned blacks are more likely to receive a death sentence than lighter-skinned blacks.

The last chapter of The Hidden Brain came up last week on Twitter, where I retweeted a link to a story in the New York Times from the wife of a former NFL player, describing her husband’s apparent symptoms of serious brain trauma. One slightly bizarre response I received was that this was an “appeal to emotion” argument – I wasn’t arguing anything, just sharing a story I thought was well-written and worth reading – because it was a single datum rather than an extensive study. Vedantam points out, with examples and some research, that the human brain does much better at understanding the suffering of one than at understanding the suffering of many. He tells how the story of a dog named Hokget, lost in the Pacific on an abandoned ship, spurred people to donate thousands of dollars, with money coming from 39 states and four countries. ( An excerpt from this chapter is still online on The Week‘s site.) So why were people so quick to send money to save one dog when they’re so much less likely to send money when they hear of mass suffering, like genocide or disaster victims in Asia or Africa? Because, Vedantam argues, we process the suffering of an individual in a more “visceral” sense than we do the more abstract suffering of many – and he cites experimental data from psychologist Paul Slovic to back it up.

The Hidden Brain could have been twice as long and I would still have devoured it; Vedantam’s writing is much like his podcast narration, breezy yet never dumbed down, thoroughly explanatory without becoming dense or patronizing. If you enjoy books in the Thinking Fast and Slow or Everybody Lies vein, you’ll enjoy both this title and the podcast, which has become one of my go-to listens to power me through mindless chores around the house.

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→ January 4, 2018
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On Immunity.

Eula Biss’ brief 2014 book On Immunity: An Inoculation takes a novel angle on the subject of childhood vaccinations by weaving the science around the subject into her personal experiences as a first-time mother hearing all of the nonsense anti-vaccine arguments out there and finding herself bombarded with information. Biss makes it clear that she is pro-vaccine and pro-science, and that she did get her son vaccinated, but her essay-like style puts the reader on the ground with her as she’s navigating the uncertainties and fears that come with parenthood, which may also give some readers a new window on how new parents get bamboozled by the many charlatans and frauds out there telling them not to vaccinate.

When my daughter was born, vaccinating was never a question for us … but we were shocked to learn that they vaccinate newborns for hepatitis B, a viral infection that is probably best known as a sexually transmitted disease but that can also be transmitted through many other bodily fluids, including blood, so it’s possible for a child to get an infection through exposure from another kid in school or day care. We made the mistake of looking online for information on the hep B vaccine, and found the website for the so-called “National Vaccine Information Center,” a dangerous anti-science group that spreads misinformation about vaccines and, of course, presented horror stories from parents who claimed the hep B vaccine harmed or even killed their babies. (We vaccinated anyway.)

Biss’ recounting of her own meanderings through the world of vaccine information and bullshit felt very familiar to me, as she obviously understands science – her father is a doctor, and she refers to him frequently in the text – but also gives real credence to the fears of the new parent, and how overwhelming all of the information coming at new parents can feel. Biss hits all of the notable cranks, from the NVIC to Andrew Wakefield to Bob Sears (who has been accused of selling medical exemptions for California kids) to well-meaning but clueless parents who talk about “toxins” or “natural” or “organic” as if those terms really mean anything when it comes to health. She walks back through the history of vaccinations, to Edward Jenner’s experiments with cowpox and previous awareness in non-European societies of inoculation techniques, and the associated history of anti-vaxers, a group that once at least had a legitimate complaint because vaccines weren’t regulated for safety or efficacy; in 1901, two separate batches of vaccines caused deadly tetanus outbreaks in St. Louis and Camden, New Jersey. Now, such groups just capitalize on the public’s science ignorance – and fear – to make a few bucks from selling books or “alternative” therapies. (Note: There is no such thing as “alternative medicine.” If it works, it’s medicine.)

Fear is just as much a theme of On Immunity as science, and Biss, unlike many writers (myself included), has quite a bit of empathy for parents who hear (bogus) horror stories of vaccine “injuries” or who see that vaccines contain aluminum (in adjuvants, which make the vaccines more effective) and waver on vaccinating their kids. Failing to vaccinate puts your kids at risk, but also the community as a whole; Biss discusses herd immunity, which was first identified nearly a century ago, and the societal cost of failing to vaccinate, as well as the risk posed to vulnerable populations who can’t be vaccinated, such as newborns, the elderly, or the immune compromised. This understanding tone makes it a better read, I think, for folks who are on the fence about vaccinations; she was essentially preaching to the converted with me, while hardcore denialists won’t bother with the litany of facts she includes or the blithe knockdowns of anti-vax tropes.

Biss is a “professor of instruction” in Northwestern’s English Department and has garnered praise both for On Immunity and her 2009 essay collection Notes from No Man’s Land; she writes here like an essayist, with a strong first-person perspective that allows her to bring the reader inside her head, so to speak, as she became a mother and experienced all of the typical anxieties and moments of panic that come along with new parenthood. It makes the brief book both readable and engrossing, almost as if Biss wanted to slip in a little education – a dash of history, a pinch of immunology – along the way. And the resulting work may do as much or more to address new parents’ fears of vaccines, fears that are unfounded, irrational, but still quite common, as direct attacks on anti-vaxer falsehoods.

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→ December 31, 2017
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Hi, Anxiety.

Kat Kinsman is a food writer who used to run CNN’s Eatocracy site and now is the senior food and drinks editor at Extra Crispy, a site (also owned by Time, Inc.) dedicated solely to breakfast. She’s also lived with anxiety, panic, and depression for just about her entire life, and since 2014 has been very public about these conditions and the steps she has to take to manage them. Her first book, Hi, Anxiety: Life with a Bad Case of Nerves, is a memoir of a disordered life that is, by turns, funny, sad, aggravating, and most of all, hopeful, as Kinsman has had to overcome mental health challenges beyond what I would call the ‘average’ sufferer has to face – and has done so enough to write this very witty, big-hearted book about it all.

Kinsman’s book is not a how-to, or a self-help book, but is more of a confessional, as she details events or periods of her life, often exposing herself in ways that I imagine were painful for someone with an anxious mind, that were ultimately dictated by her mental health issues. Her mother also had serious depression and anxiety, as well as mini-strokes that appear to have presaged dementia and Parkinson’s, and living with her mom taught Kinsman how to be anxious – how to worry about everything, to blame herself for things beyond her control, and to expect the worst even in harmless situations. Because anxiety tends to feed itself, growing up anxious put Kinsman into more situations that exacerbated the problem, and the medications pushed on her while she was young did not particularly help her and often made things worse.

I’ve written a few times about my own anxiety, including growing up anxious, so the emotional ground Kinsman covers in Hi, Anxiety is familiar to me … but her case is or was certainly more severe than mine. I’ve had lifelong stomach issues, largely related to anxiety, but Kinsman has had to put up with stronger physical manifestations of her anxiety and panic than I ever have, and she’s also had to work harder to maintain control of her environment than I have. She expands on these points in amusing interludes delineating her “irrational fears,” like driving, being driven, or getting her hair cut (in which she also discusses the anxiety around tipping, which I fully appreciate), mundane events that, to most people, pose no problem at all. If you’re anxious, even the simplest tasks become fraught with peril – getting the mail or answering the phone, because you’re afraid it will bring some terrible news or a huge bill; driving to the store, because you might hit someone, or get hit, or just do the wrong thing and make all the other drivers laugh at or scorn your incompetence.

That’s where Hi, Anxiety succeeds most – Kinsman humanizes an anxious life by giving so much detail on episodes from childhood through her marriage where anxiety (and/or depression) prevented her from doing ordinary things, or altered outcomes when she did do something. Many of these events weren’t Kinsman’s fault – she had a few bad boyfriends, one of whom really did a number on her in a way that I won’t spoil because it’s such a “holy shit” moment in the book – but when you’re anxious, you kind of believe the universe is operating against you, or at least that your account with the universe is permanently in arrears, so of course it was your fault, or you had it coming, and why didn’t you prepare better for it?

Kinsman also gets into the techniques that have helped her live with her condition – and those that haven’t, like medications – but is careful not to prescribe for the reader, making it clear in the concluding essay that she doesn’t have the answer and that every anxious person will have to find his/her own solution. For her, it’s talk therapy, some supplements, occasional hypnosis, and avoiding certain known triggers. For me, with a milder case, it’s medication, occasional therapy, some mindfulness techniques, and exercise. Each person’s case is different; there is no single etiology of anxiety or panic disorder and thus no single trick to help you. Hi, Anxiety is the book to help someone understand more about what it’s like to live with a serious mental illness, whether the reader is suffering from it or knows someone who is, and perhaps the spur to go seek treatment. It’s such a quick, compulsive read – I crushed it inside of 24 hours – that you could really recommend it to anyone, even someone with no concept of mental illness, to help them understand something of what it’s like to live with a brain that spends much of its time working against you.

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→ December 15, 2017
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The Body Keeps the Score.

I’ve been open about my own mental health issues, such as this piece I wrote on being anxious throughout my childhood, but am fortunate in one respect in that my childhood was also relatively free of trauma. I grew up in a loving family, didn’t lose any close family members until I was a teenager – both of my grandmothers lived to their 100th birthdays – and never had to deal with the effects of divorce or abuse, to pick just two possible traumas that affect kids. Events I might recall as “traumatic” pale in comparison to what others grew up with.

I’ve only come to learn about trauma and PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) in the last handful of years, due to several close friends who suffer from it and how its effects can often include problems I’ve dealt with, including anxiety, panic, depression. Somewhere along the way I heard about Dr. Bessel van der Kolk’s seminal 2015 book The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, which I have since learned is an incredibly influential and important book in the world of mental health professionals. Dr. van der Kolk has spent decades working with trauma victims and was one of the leading proponents of the hypothesis, later supported by fMRI and similar evidence, that trauma actually alters the brain in a physical sense rather than just a mental one, and that even minor events can still have traumatic effects on our brains, especially when they happen while we’re young.

Dr. van der Kolk spends the first part of The Body Keeps the Score discussing his own history in working with trauma victims and the difficulty he and other colleagues had in even gaining acceptance for the idea of the aftermath of trauma as a distinct medical disorder. PTSD was only recognized by the American Psychiatric Association as a formal diagnosis in 1980, when it was included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders‘s third edition (DSM-III), thanks to a surge in sufferers among soldiers who returned from fighting in Vietnam. Awareness of the condition dates back to ancient Greece, and is well-documented in medical and popular literature from the 1800s forward under terms like “shell shock” (whence our word “shell-shocked” derives), but people with PTSD prior to 1980 were treated as if they had a panoply of other, seemingly unrelated mental health disorders, which led to problems like overmedication and a lack of any progress back towards a normal life.

From there, the author discusses new evidence from the world of neuroscience to support his and others’ hypotheses that the brain of a trauma victim works differently than the brain of someone without PTSD. Different parts of the brain are activated in similar situations, although among trauma victims there can be varying responses, from panic to dissociation to shutdown. He also discusses the various ways we develop PTSD, often in excruciating details of childhood abuse or wartime atrocities, tying these underlying conditions to changes in methylation of genes that can even be passed on to offspring, a process known as “epigenetics,” that also explains how the brains of trauma victims end up operating on a different BIOS than those of others.

The prose here can feel a bit academic, perhaps the result of van der Kolk’s background but also that he’s a native Dutch speaker and writing in his second language. In part five, which constitutes nearly half of the book, the writing livens up as he delves into various methods of attacking trauma and retraining the brain not to panic, dissociate, or just peace out when the person is presented with a trigger. Some suggestions are obvious or well-known, like using yoga or EMDR therapy (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, which sounds like it shouldn’t work, but does help trauma victims), while others are novel and surprising, including participation in theater or similar role-playing activities, or using a computer program to try to ‘reprogram’ the brain not just in its fear response but all of the time. He includes EEG graphs that show patterns of attention in the brains of study participants where the trauma victims’ brain waves are less tightly connected and even diverge in the milliseconds after the subject was presented with information for the brain to process. Neurofeedback, which allows the user to regulate his/her own brain function with the help of software that displays EEG results, has shown promise for trauma victims and people with other mental health disorders to reestablish control over their brains’ betrayals. Dr. van der Kolk also goes into heart-rate variability training, self-leadership of the different parts of our personality (not quite dissociative identity disorder, but leaning that way), and the pros and cons of cognitive behavioral therapy or medication for PTSD sufferers.

If you or someone close to you is a trauma victim of any sort, even if it seems like a ‘minor’ trauma, The Body Keeps a Score will be an illuminating read that could help alter the course of your/your intimate’s treatment. Even just the final section, where he points out why things like CBT aren’t effective (discussing the trauma over and over doesn’t actually change the way the brain responds to it or other triggers) and gives numerous suggestions for other remedies, would be useful. If you can get through some of the more technical language earlier in the book, though, the entire read is worthwhile, especially as van der Kolk explains his own journey of understanding through decades of working with veterans, children, and other trauma victims to get to this comprehensive theory of how best to treat these people – often people who were considered untreatable by previous generations of psychiatrists.

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→ October 27, 2017
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Everybody Lies.

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz made his name by using the enormous trove of data from Google search inquiries – that is, what users all over the world type in the search box – to measure things that researchers would typically measure solely by voluntary responses to surveys. And, as Stephens-Davidowitz says in the title of his first book, Everybody Lies, those surveys are not that reliable. It turns out, to pick one of the most notable results of his work (described in this book), that only 2-3% of men self-report as gay when asked in surveys, but the actual rate is probably twice that, based on the data he mined from online searches.

Stephens-Davidowitz ended up working for a year-plus at Google as a data scientist before leaving to become an editorial writer at the New York Times and author, so the book is bit more than just a collection of anecdotes like later entries in the Freakonomics series. Here, the author is more focused on the potential uses and risks of this enormous new quantity of data that, of course, is being collected on us every time we search on Google, click on Facebook, or look for something on a pornography site. (Yep, he got search data from Pornhub too.)

The core idea here is twofold: there are new data, and these new data allow us to ask questions we couldn’t answer before, or simply couldn’t answer well. People won’t discuss certain topics with researchers, or even answer surveys truthfully, but they will spill everything to Google. Witness the derisive term “Dr. Google” for people who search for their symptoms online, where they may end up with information from fraudsters or junk science sites like Natural News or Mercola, rather than seeing a doctor. What if, however, you looked at people who reveal through their searches that they have something like pancreatic cancer, and then looked at the symptoms those same people were Googling several weeks or months before their diagnosis? Such an approach could allow researchers to identify symptoms that positively correlate with hard-to-detect diseases, and to know the chances of false positives, or even find intermediate variables that alter the probability the patient has the disease. You could even build expert systems that really would work like Dr. Google – if I have these five symptoms, but not these three, should I see a real doctor?

Sex, like medical topics, is another subject people don’t like to discuss with strangers, and it happens to sell books too, so Stephens-Davidowitz spent quite a bit of time looking into what people search for when they’re searching about sex, whether it’s pornography, dating sites, or questions about sex and sexuality. The Pornhub data trove reveals quite a bit about sexual orientations, along with some searches I personally found a bit disturbing. Even more disturbing, however, is just how many Americans secretly harbor racist views, which Stephens-Davidowitz deduces from internet searches for certain racial slurs, and even shows how polls underestimated Donald Trump’s appeal to the racist white masses by demonstrating from search data how many of these people are out there. Few racists reveal themselves as such to surveys or researchers, and such people may even lie about their voting preferences or plans – saying they were undecided when they planned to vote for Trump, for instance. If Democrats had bothered to get and analyze this data, which is freely available, would they have changed their strategies in swing states?

Some of Stephens-Davidowitz’s queries here are less earth-shattering and seem more like ways to demonstrate the power of the tool. He looks at whether violent movies actually correlate to an increase in violent crime (spoiler: not really), and what first-date words or phrases might indicate a strong chance for a second date. But he also uses some of these queries to talk about new or revived study techniques, like A/B testing, or to show how such huge quantities of data can lead to spurious correlations, a problem known as “the curse of dimensionality,” such as in studies that claim a specific gene causes a specific disease or physical condition that then aren’t replicated by other researchers.

Stephens-Davidowitz closes with some consideration of the inherent risks of having this much information about us available both to corporations like Google, Facebook, and … um … Pornhub, as well as the risks of having it in the hands of the government, especially with the convenient excuse of “homeland security” always available to the government to explain any sort of overreach. Take the example in the news this week that a neighbor of Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook mass murderer, warned police that he was threatening to do just such a thing, only to be told that the police couldn’t do anything because his mother owned the guns legally. What if he’d searched for this online? For ways to kill a lot of people in a short period of time, or to build a bomb, or to invade a building? Should the FBI be knocking on the doors of anyone who searches for such things? Some people would say yes, if it might prevent Sandy Hook or Las Vegas or San Bernardino or the Pulse Orlando or Columbine or Virginia Tech or Luby’s or Binghamton or the Navy Yard. Some people will consider this an unreasonable abridgement of our civil liberties. Big Data forces the conversation to move to new places because authorities can learn more about us than ever before – and we’re the ones giving them the information.

Next up: J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians.

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→ September 8, 2017
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Half-Earth.

Biologist E.O. Wilson has won two Pulitzer Prizes for Non-Fiction, including one for, of all things, a textbook on ants, along with numerous other awards for his lengthy bibliography of popular and scholarly works on evolution, sociobiology, ecology, and conservationism. His 2016 book Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life falls into the last category while drawing on multiple fields of expertise to make his case that we should preserve half of the area of the planet for conservation to maintain biodiversity and fight climate change, but for a work by a great scholar and professor, Half-Earth feels half-hearted, as if Wilson knows what he wants to argue but couldn’t be bothered to support his side sufficiently to sway the unconvinced.

The idea of preserving half of the planet, land and sea, for conservation isn’t new nor is it Wilson’s; he credits Tony Hiss with coining the term “half-earth” to describe the concept in a Smithsonian magazine article in 2014. And there’s little doubt that man’s impact on the planet – its environment and the millions of other species on it – has been a net negative for everyone but man, with the pace of change only accelerating as we continue to alter the compositions of the planet’s atmosphere, soil, and water supply. Wilson does well when describing what we might lose or have already lost as a result of our mere presence or our industrial activities, talking about habitats we’ve razed or species we’ve driven to extinction deliberately, through the introductions of invasive species, or through other changes to the environment. But he assumes that the reader will see these losses as significant, or even see them as losses, without sufficiently detailing why it matters that, say, we’re wiping out the world’s rhinoceros population, or various island birds and rodents have been exterminated by the introduction of non-native snakes.

What’s missing even more from the work, however, is a consideration of the costs of an endeavor like the one Wilson is proposing. Man is fairly well distributed across the planet, and setting aside 50% of its land mass for conservation would require resettling hundreds of thousands of people, possibly millions, many of them members of indigenous populations who live in the least-altered environments on the planet. Crowding the planet’s seven billion people (and rising) into less of the space will trade some environmental problems for others, as various forms pollution rise with population density, and many large urban areas already struggle under the weight of their people, with third-world megacities paralyzed by traffic and its attendant problems. Relocating people is expensive, difficult, and traumatic. There’s also the very real question of feeding those seven billion people and supplying them with fresh water, which we’re already struggling to do; if you reserve half of the world’s land and half of its oceans for conservation, those tasks become more difficult and likely more expensive – a cost few people will be willing to bear directly. It might be necessary, but Wilson glosses over the practical problems his solution would create.

There is, however, one good reason to read Half-Earth right now, at least in the United States, where the current federal administration is rolling back environmental protections left and right, including cutting funds for wildlife area acquisition and management. But I thought Elizabeth Kolbert’s Pulitzer-winning book The Sixth Extinction made the same general case more powerfully and thoroughly, describing the current, anthropogenic mass extinction that could rival the K-Pg event for sheer number of species exterminated if we don’t do anything about it. Kolbert goes into greater depth with more concrete examples of how man’s activity has altered the planet and moved species around to extinguish some species and threaten others, including a lengthy discussion of chytrid fungus, a thus-far incurable ailment that is killing off tropical frog species with alarming speed.

I think Wilson also fell into the trap that William Easterley (among others) has identified in charitable and other “good intentions” efforts – aiming impossibly high, so that you can never meet your stated goal. You want to end world hunger? That sounds great, but it’ll never happen, and the only outcome will be the creation of a giant organization that absorbs donations without ever accomplishing much of anything. Micro-efforts yield more tangible results, and increase accountability for workers and donors alike. So while saying “let’s reserve half the planet to save it” is an admirable goal, and may even be the right strategy for the long term, it ain’t happening, and talking about it doesn’t get us any closer to solutions. If you want to help save the planet, work towards small, achievable goals. And right now, that probably means working for change in Washington.

Next up: Nina George’s 2013 novel The Little Paris Bookshop.

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→ September 1, 2017
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Evicted.

I have two new Insider posts on the Verlander trade and the Justin Upton trade.

Princeton sociology professor and ethnographer Matthew Desmond won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction for his book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, a stunning work of first-person research that examines a major socioeconomic problem from the ground level, rather than the top-down, data-driven approach I expected from a book in his genre. Desmond spent several months living among the inner-city underclass in several neighborhoods in Milwaukee in 2008 and 2009, shadowing tenants and landlords, witnessing evictions and forced moves, accompanying residents to rehab, AA meetings, even to court, recording what amounted to over 5000 pages of transcribed notes and conversations, to produce this devastating and utterly human portrait of people who simply do not exist to the house-secure classes.

Desmond’s aim here is clear: eviction is more than just a temporary loss of shelter, but a massive disruption to the economic and psychological well-being of entire families, a process that can lead to job loss, substance abuse, and crime, and a scarlet letter on a person’s record that can make it harder to obtain future housing and employment. The vulnerable class of the working or semi-working poor are victimized repeatedly by a system that takes the majority of their income, often over 75% of it, to cover rent for substandard housing, then punishes them if they fall behind and are evicted in a process that overwhelmingly favors the landlords. Tenants are often afraid to assert their rights, if they have any, or to report building code or maintenance violations for fear of retaliation. Once evicted, families may end up having to pay exorbitant fees to place their limited possessions in storage, with no access to their things, until the almost inevitable time when they can’t afford the monthly cost and lose what little they had.

Desmond accompanies several single residents and entire families on their journey through multiple evictions and the Lodge, a homeless shelter readers will know all too well before the book is complete. The access these people gave him is remarkable, as he captures their words at some of their most vulnerable and depressed moments, often witnessing their stuff being carted out to the curb in trash bags by Eagle Movers, who apparently maintain a truck (or two?) just for the purpose of serving landlords who are evicting residents. He also relates a firsthand account of housing discrimination – and explains in an afterword how the Fair Housing Authority did nothing with his formal complaint. (And that was under a Democratic administration; I doubt it’s any better today.) He also spends significant time with two slumlords – although he refuses to refer to either as such – to give their perspective, usually in their own words, even explaining how one, Sherrena, was “proud” of her landlord status and her collection of properties, even though Desmond makes it very clear that she is a nightmare landlord whose failure to maintain safe conditions in her buildings should probably have landed her in court.

By spending so much time with poor residents, Desmond also makes it clear what critical needs are not addressed when most of someone’s income – often income from disability payments – goes to cover the rent. Going without food, or without enough food, is an obvious outcome. But such tenants often have no heat or hot water, or sometimes can’t cover the gas or electric bills. Medical care is often entirely out of the question. Buying a new pair of shoes for a child, a mundane event for even middle-class families, is an enormous achievement. One of the few success stories in the book, Scott, a former nurse who lost everything when he became addicted to painkillers, has to borrow from his parents to cover the cost to get into a rehab program and begin taking methadone. Many other people Desmond follows don’t have even that bare safety net of a parent or relative to help cover a payment – or, in the case of one single mother, her safety net repeatedly refuses to help.

Desmond saves his prescriptions and recommendations for the epilogue, choosing instead to let the individual narratives tell the reader the overarching story of a system that traps these American untouchables in a cycle of poverty from which it is very difficult to escape. It’s easy to say, as so many politicians like to do, that the solution to poverty is to make poor adults go to work. That facile, elitist answer ignores the realities of work for the underclass: Available jobs barely pay enough to cover the rent, evictions and other related actions (police are often involved, with Milwaukee employing sheriffs specifically for this purpose) can count against someone on a job application, and missing time to try to find new living space can cost such a person his/her job. Affordable – or “affordable” – housing is often located far from work, with poor public transit options in many or most cities. We get repeated examples of people evicted because of the actions of someone else. One woman is evicted because the police were called to her apartment by a neighbor because her partner was beating her. Another loses what sounds like a perfect apartment because her young son got in a fight and her babysitter asked neighbors if they had any weed. And landlords get away with this because tenants don’t fight back, enforcement of what few rights they have is scarce, and there’s a line of people waiting to get into every apartment the evicted vacate.

In that epilogue, Desmond offers ideas and potential solutions, including universal housing vouchers that can be used anywhere, without discrimination, the way that recipients use food stamps. He speaks of reasonable housing as a fundamental human right, which is how western European governments and societies view it, arguing that “the pursuit of happiness” is impossible without adequate shelter. Desmond also pushes solutions that are, at best, antithetical to the capitalist underpinnings of our society, including broader rent control, without sufficient consideration of the economic consequences of such policies (rent control programs can stifle construction and push landlords to convert rental properties to non-rental ones). He seems to advocate for more public housing, but doesn’t discuss how we can expand the housing stock without repeating the problems of previous housing projects, many of which became unsafe and were razed within 20 years of their construction. His proposed solutions should spark discussion of how to solve the American housing crisis – or, at least, a discussion that there is a housing crisis at all – but seem like they will trade current problems for new ones rather than creating comprehensive solutions that at least consider how the market will react to major policy shifts. That’s a minor issue in a remarkable work that is dedicated more to exposing these problems to the wider audience, to bringing people in distress out of the shadows and into the public consciousness, because without that there won’t even be a conversation about how best to help them in an economy that still places a high value on the rights of private property owners.

I listened to the audio version of Evicted, which is narrated by actor Dion Graham, whose voice will be familiar to fans of The Wire. Graham does a masterful job of bringing the various characters to life with just subtle changes in tone – and treats these people, who are largely less educated and less articulate than, say, Graham himself is, with respect. It would be easy to caricature these underprivileged tenants, but Graham’s renditions infuse them with the quiet dignity they deserve, so that the listener may feel sorrow or pity for them, but not scorn.

Next up: Thomas Stribling’s Pulitzer-winning novel The Store. I’m about 60 pages in, and while the story is moving along, the casual racism in the writing – Stribling was from Alabama, set the novel in Florence, and has it taking place shortly after the Civil War – is appalling.

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→ August 16, 2017
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Not a Scientist.

Dave Levitan’s 2017 book Not a Scientist: How Politicians Mistake, Misrepresent, and Utterly Mangle Science couldn’t have come at a better time … or a worse one, I guess, if you’re at all rational-minded and believe that science is real and should inform policy decisions on science. Levitan’s book looks at the various ways our elected officials – really, our elected Republican officials in nearly every example in this book – either ignore science to suit their goals or twist it to justify bad decisions. He wrote the book last year, but it was published this spring, so while our Dear Leader doesn’t figure much directly in the meat of the book, Levitan has added an introduction to at least address the topic of anti-science, which is only growing in importance as the United States continues to cede any leadership role on global issues like climate change and ocean acidification.

This quick read will be pleasant enough for right-minded people who accept facts as they are, but it won’t tell you much you don’t already know. Levitan identifies about a dozen different tricks pols use to ignore scientific realities that interfere with their plans, and you won’t be surprised at the names that appear or the topics under discussion. Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe – I’d identify these guys as Republicans, but you know they all are – makes various appearances for his climate denial, since he’s in the pocket of the oil and gas industries and gladly ignores the evidence that man-made activities are warming the planet or that fracking is harmful. Trump and Michelle Bachman both appear for their vaccine denialism. Marco Rubio and Mike Huckabee also appear on climate denial. Ted Cruz and Mitch McConnell both pushed the “global cooling” hoax – which was never a scientific consensus or proven hypothesis of any sort – as part of their denialism. Mo Brooks (Alabama) pushed some anti-science nonsense about immigrants spreading deadly diseases to justify his xenophobia. Rick Santorum appears for his bogus arguments against an EPA standard aimed at reducing mercury pollution in the water and air. George W. Bush gets quite a bit of ink here for the reasons he used for cutting funding for basic research. There are, to be fair, a couple of Democrats in here, including former DEA head Chuck Rosenberg, who threw out some serious bullshit on the topic of marijuana to try to rationalize the government’s treatment of it as a drug as dangerous as cocaine or meth. Even Barack Obama gets a little smackdown, although in his case, his error was overstating the benefits of a scientific endeavor, the Human Genome Project.

The readers who would really benefit from Not a Scientist are the folks least likely to read it: The politicians I just mentioned and all of the people who vote for them. Science is not subject to your personal approval. Vaccines work, life evolved from a single common ancestor, the climate is warming and it’s our fault, GMOs are safe, chemtrails are fake. You don’t get a vote on any of this – but you do get to vote every November, and many people (probably not many of you specifically) vote for candidates who publicly disavow or attempt to discredit settled science, all in the name of pursuing other policy goals. Their words and actions put everyone at risk – literally everyone, when it comes to climate change, and more than just humans, but coral reefs, tropical frogs, even many microorganisms whose roles in the global ecosystem we don’t even yet understand. This stuff matters, much more than whether two men living 2500 miles away from you get a piece of paper that says they’re married, but the Republican Party of 2017 has got everyone convinced that gays and ISIS are the real threats and climate change is some sort of progressive hoax. People who don’t get this, who vote for Inhofe and McConnell and Brooks and Rubio and of course the guy in the White House, need to read Not a Scientist. But they won’t, and their celebrations last November and this past January were just another nail in our collective coffins.

If this stuff bothers you as much as it does me, check out 314 Action, a new nonpartisan science-advocacy group that encourages more STEM professionals to run for political office so that we get voices in Washington DC and every state capital who speak out in favor of science and fact.

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