Attention Conservation Notice: A few hundred words in the key of Someone Not On the Internet[^deceased] Is Wrong
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From the category archives:
Books
My Georgetown colleague and friend, Dan Nexon, has started doing interviews with sf/f authors for the New Science Fiction and Fantasy channel of the New Books Network. The first one up is Ken MacLeod, talking about _The Night Sessions_; Alastair Reynolds will be up soon, as will others. This is probably also a good moment for me to announce that we hope to do a Crooked Timber seminar on Ken’s work sometime around the middle of next year. We hope to have a good bunch of respondents – feel free to suggest others (especially women, given our consistent problems with gender ratio) in comments.
I was on holiday in Ireland over the last couple of weeks without regular Internet access; one of the things I missed was the Niall Ferguson debate. I liked how “these”:http://drezner.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/08/23/intellectual_power_and_responsibility “posts”:http://blogs.hbr.org/fox/2012/08/niall-ferguson-and-the-rage-against.html from Dan Drezner and Justin Fox identified Ferguson’s behavior as symptomatic of a broader structural change.
Drezner:
bq. Credentialed thinkers like Zakaria and Ferguson, once they’ve reached the top, become brands that can multiply their earning potential far more than was the case fifty years ago. The ways in which the Internet concentrates attention on a Few Big Things means that if you are good and lucky enough to become one of those Big Things, money will rain down on your door. … I’ve heard from a few sources that Ferguson resigned his professorship at Harvard Business School (but not Harvard University) because he calculated that if he gave four or five extra talks a year, he could earn his HBS salary without all the tedious teaching obligations.
Fox:
bq. The path to lucrative thought-leaderdom blazed over the past couple of decades was to establish yourself with dense, serious work (or a big, important job) and then move on to catch-phrase manufacturing (I spent a few weeks following Tom Friedman around in 2005, and learned that he had made this transition very deliberately). Nowadays ambitious young people looking to break into the circuit often just aim straight for the catch-phrases. Speakers bureaus need pithy sales pitches, not complex erudition — and while speaking fees might be spare change for Mitt Romney, for journalists and academics they often represent their only real shot at a top-tax-bracket income. The result is an intellectual environment that seems to increasingly reward the superficial, and keeps rewarding those who make it into the magic circle of top-flight speakers even if they don’t have anything new or interesting to say. Or at least: a part of the intellectual environment is like that.
Given past history, I’m probably not the best person to write disinterestedly about David Graeber’s _Debt_. Still, I think that both critics and fans of his work ought to read this “comprehensive critique”:http://jacobinmag.com/2012/08/debt-the-first-500-pages/ by Mike Beggs in the new issue of _Jacobin._ Begg admires the energy and ambition of the book, but is also blunt.
bq. _Debt,_ then, does not need any more kind words from me. It’s enough to say that there is a lot of fantastic material in there. The breadth of Graeber’s reading is impressive, and he draws from it a wealth of insightful fragments of history. The prospect of a grand social history of debt from a thinker of the radical left is exciting. The appeal is no mystery. I wanted to love it.
bq. Unfortunately, I found the main arguments wholly unconvincing.
bq. The very unconvincingness poses the question: What do we need from our grand social theory? The success of the book shows there is an appetite for work that promises to set our present moment against the sweep of history so as to explain our predicament and help us find footholds for changing it. What is wrong with Graeber’s approach, and how could we do better?
The discussion of my repost on the silliness of generational tropes produced a surprising amount of agreement on the main point, then a lot of disagreement on the question of technological progress. So, I thought I’d continue reprising my greatest hits with this review of Kurzweil’s singularity post, which I put up in draft from at Crooked Timber and my own blog, producing lots of interesting discussion. Again, seven years old, but I don’t see the need to change much – YMMV
Justin Fox has a “piece”:http://blogs.hbr.org/fox/2012/08/the-wall-street-book-everyone.html on Doug Henwood’s wonderful book, _Wall Street_
bq. These days, it’s not hard to find people who question the role that financial markets play in our economy, who argue that shareholder value is a flawed metric of corporate success, who say that linking pay to financial markets is a big mistake. In 1997, though, such arguments were pretty close to unheard of. Which is what makes Doug Henwood’s book _Wall Street,_ published that year, such an amazing document. Along with explaining in clear if caustic terms how financial markets work, the book prefigures almost every criticism of the financial system that’s been levied since the crisis of 2008. An overleveraged housing market? Check. A link between financial sector growth and income inequality? Check. A natural tendency toward instability in financial markets? Check. … There’s a saying in investing that “being early is the same as being wrong.” It’s not _quite_ like that in intellectual endeavors, but Henwood clearly hasn’t gotten his due. That’s partly because he was early, partly because he operates in an ill-defined border zone between journalism and academia, partly because, well, he’s a crotchety leftist. But he was describing a lot of important problems with the workings of our capitalist system at a time when practically everyone else was proclaiming the brilliance of the shareholder-dominated Wall Street way. We should have been listening to him then, and we should be rereading him (or reading him for the first time) now.
The “book is available for free download here”:http://wallstreetthebook.com/ (with a suggested donation to the author, who got a relative pittance for writing it; left-leaning publishers sometimes treat their authors like shit). It’s every bit as good as Fox says it is and better – there’s a very strong argument that it’s the best leftwing book on actually-existing-capitalism that’s been written in the last couple of decades. It _is_ a little out of date – a lot has changed in the intervening years. I would love to see an extensively updated second edition, both for purely selfish reasons, and because I think that it could play an important intellectual and political role (most people on the left don’t understand how finance markets actually work). From various conversations, I’m sure that I’m not the only person who thinks this. The obvious way to get such an edition going – if Doug were interested in writing it – would be a Kickstarter or similar. But it might help encourage Doug to do this if there were some evidence of public interest beforehand (again: if he wants to do this – I have not consulted him before writing this). Hence this post – if you would be prepared to kick in to see this book written then say so in comments, or elsewhere as you like. I’m in for a commitment of $100 or over myself (nb that this is _not_ a suggested donation – more a credible commitment and a signal that I personally really, really would love to see this book come into being).
It being the season, some recommendations for entertaining fiction – feel free to castigate my narrow tastes in comments, to make your own recommendations, or both, as suits you best.
Charles Stross – _The Apocalypse Codex_ (Powells, Amazon ). The new Laundry book, and the best one imo since the first. Without giving anything major away, things are really beginning to move …
China Mieville – _Railsea_ (Powells, Amazon). Again, China does his best to lose me, this time writing a novel which could easily be mistaken in a dim light for young-adult steampunk. Again, he fails completely. Enormous fun – you’ll never think about naked mole rats in the same way again.
Josh Bazell – _Wild Thing_ (Powells, Amazon). Only very good, in contrast to its prequel, _Beat the Reaper_, which was an excellently funny macho asshole thriller, but still entertaining. The footnotes are good value too (how many popular thrillers have footnotes with short discussions of spandrels?), up to, and only up to the point where the author starts expounding his views on Middle East politics (he’s an Alan Dershowitz fan – enough said).
Paul McAuley – _In the Mouth of the Whale_ (not officially available in US; though if you have a Kindle you can gimmick your address). A sequel to his Quiet War duet. I need to write something on the way that these books use evolutionary theory to drive their argument.
Paul McAuley – _Cowboy Angels_ (Powells, Amazon). A very different novel – hard sf meets the paranoid Cold War thriller. Imagine an America (not ours) which discovers how to build gates to recently branched alternative realities, and starts to play out the game of empire-building and neo-liberalism, not with other countries, but with different versions of itself.
Tim Powers – _Hide Me Among the Graves_ (Powells, Amazon). Vampirism, Swinburne and Pre-Raphaelites. Among Powers’ best – not as good as _Declare_ or _The Anubis Gates_ (but then: what is?), but just as good _Last Call_, and better than the rest (which is to say – very damn good indeed).
Nick Mamatas and Brian Keene – _The Damned Highway_ (Powells, Amazon) Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail – the H.P. Lovecraft mix. I’ve speculated before that there is no subgenre of fiction that cannot be spatchcocked with Lovecraft, but Hunter S. Thompson blends _particularly well_, and amidst the comedy, there is one moment of genuine loathing and horror (tentacle porn and Richard Nixon, aloof). The graphic design person who thought of Steadmanizing the Ian Miller illustration for At The Mountains of Madness and using it as the cover art, deserves an award.
Harry Connolly – _Child of Fire_ (Powells, Amazon). Lovecraftian urban fantasy. Fun, fast-paced braincandy, found via Charles Stross (the first of a series, which unfortunately appears to be in hiatus).
Felix Gilman – _The Rise of Ransom City_ (Powells, Amazon). But you’ll have to wait until the fall/autumn for that one (more in due course …).
Amazon is having a $2.99 MP3 album sale
In his new book, _The Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy_, Chris Hayes manages the impossible trifecta: the book is compellingly readable, impossibly erudite, and — most stunningly of all — correct. At the end, I was left with just two quibbles: first, the book’s chapter on “pop epistemology” thoroughly explicated how elites got stuff wrong without bothering to mention the non-elites who got things right, leaving the reader with the all-too-common impression that getting it right was impossible; and second, the book never assembled its (surprisingly sophisticated) argument into a single summary. To discuss it, I feel we have to start with remedying the latter flaw:
My books-for-kids threads have been good conversation starters so let’s keep it up. Zoe (age 10) and I have been listening to Madeleine L’Engle on audiobook. Listening to an audiobook while drawing is an excellent use of a Saturday afternoon. I remember reading The Time Quintet
We’re part way through A Wind In The Door, having finished A Wrinkle In Time last Saturday. Then last Sunday we went to see The Avengers – which was great! (did you hear?) – and Zoe was very excited that the plot was sort of similar. US government meddling with tesseract opens doorway to creepy alien forces beyond our comprehension across the universe, etc. Film was a bit more action-packed than the book.
Anyway, any Madeleine L’Engle thoughts? Religious sf (like C.S. Lewis.) Kid lit that bucks genre conventions, but that kids really like, proving that the conventions can be broken?
A few weeks ago, I got an email from a publicist at Penguin Books:
bq. In 2008, columnist Jonah Goldberg triggered a firestorm of controversy with his first book, LIBERAL FASCISM, a #1 New York Times bestseller. Now, he’s about to unleash another bold, funny, and thoughtful argument in his new book, THE TYRANNY OF CLICHÉS: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas (Sentinel, May 1). … Please let me know if you’d like a copy of THE TYRANNY OF CLICHÉS.
I responded by saying that I was grateful for the offer, but that I’d rather slice my eyeballs open with a rusty can-opener. I also gave them permission to use this quote as a back-cover blurb if they liked. They never got back to me (I thought it was _at least_ as good as Brad Thor’s “In the P.C. prison yard of accepted political thought, Jonah Goldberg has just shivved progressivism,” but I’m probably just biased). Now, fate has given me (and Penguin Books) a second chance.
bq. On the dust jacket of his new book, “The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas,” best-selling conservative author and commentator Jonah Goldberg is described as having “twice been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.” In fact, as Goldberg acknowledged on Tuesday, he has never been a Pulitzer nominee, but merely one of thousands of entrants. … His publisher, Penguin Group (USA), said the error was unintentional and it would remove the Pulitzer word from his book jacket when it’s time for the first reprint, “just like any other innocent mistake brought to our attention.”
It’s time to fill that gap on the back cover of the first reprint. So let me simultaneously (a) announce the creation of the Toolitzer Prizes, with myself as sole judge and executive chairman of the nominating committee, and (b) nominate _The Tyranny of Cliches_, and (retroactively), _Liberal Fascism_ for the award, so that our Jonah will have two new nominations to take the place of the old ones. Should the necessary conditions of the competition be fulfilled (see below), the prize will be awarded to the book with the most serious, thoughtful, argument that has never before been made in such detail or with such care. Of course, deciding this would actually require me to _read_ the books: hence the nomination process will have two steps.
If readers want to simply nominate books, they may do so by simply leaving a comment to this post, describing the book, and making a brief statement about its merits for the award. Books so nominated will have _full and explicit permission_ to describe themselves as Toolitzer nominees in publicity materials, on the author’s website and so on, regardless of whether an actual award is made in the calendar year 2012.
If readers actually want _an award to be made,_ they will need to both nominate a book and provide evidence of having made a minimum $500 donation in honor of the award to an organization which, in the opinion of the executive chairman, exemplifies the ideals of Liberal Fascism (examples might include _The Baffler_, _Planned Parenthood_, _The American Prospect_ etc). Should readers so do, the sole judge will undertake to read the nominated book (as long as it is under 600 pages), and write a detailed blogpost evaluating its worthiness for the award (the sole judge quietly and selfishly hopes that no-one actually takes this second step, but will take his lumps if someone does).
“NYT article here”:http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/09/books/maurice-sendak-childrens-author-dies-at-83.html
All going well, our seminar on Francis Spufford’s _Red Plenty_ will be ready in the next few weeks. However, there’s still time to read it if you want to be able to participate fully in the discussion. If you want to read a review before deciding whether to buy, this New York Times review is a good one. The book itself is available from Powells, Barnes and Noble, and “Amazon”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1555976042/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=henryfarrell-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1555976042 as well as local booksellers.
The Australian edition of Zombie Economics, updated and with an additional chapter on Economic Rationalism, is about to go on sale. I’ll be appearing at a launch event at Gleebooks in Sydney on Wednesday (9 May) talking with Jessica Irvine of the SMH.
The launch coincides with the US publication of a paperback edition, with a new chapter on Austerity. Thanks to readers here at CT who read drafts of this and made lots of helpful comments.
The Italian translation also came out recently, and there are versions coming in French, Greek, Portuguese, Korean and Simplified Chinese. Collect them all!
We are pleased to present a short excerpt from the long-anticipated new work by the leading historical biographer of our time.
The Path to the Kitchen
When he was young—back on his family’s small homestead in Cork, Ireland—Kieran Healy came down the stairs for breakfast with his mother, who would light the tiny gas heater (this was the 1970s; Ireland had yet to convert fully to nuclear power) in the damp, early morning chill. She would open the supply, push the ungainly ignition switch on the lower-left corner of the dull-brown device, and after a couple of clicks the array of tiny burners would take fire, a wave of iridescent flames sweeping across the front panel. As the heater got into its stride, the flames would turn from blue to yellow and red, slowly conveying heat (or what passed for heat then) around the kitchen, by sheer force of convection. Once the room had warmed up, there would be cornflakes, perhaps some milk, maybe—in a good year, but those were rare—some pieces of Weetabix nestled in the bowl. As he got a little older, there would be tea, too. Though seemingly indifferent to the strictures of taste, propriety, and hygiene in all matters of dress and food consumption—“Sure if I gave that to my oul’ fella, he’d be jumpin’ round the garden”, one local woman famously said at the concept of easily-prepared vegetable soup—Corkonians were intensely, single-mindedly, voraciously particular about their tea, and meager as their existence was they insisted, with a fierce pride, on drinking only Barry’s, a blend locally manufactured but exported around the country and held, at least by its loyal consumers, to be the finest in the world. Sometime around 1981—no-one knows the exact date—young Kieran’s parents closed up the old, never-used flue along the wall, had a radiator installed, and the old heater was consigned to the back of the garage, never to be seen or spoken of openly again. And yet it was those blue flames that stayed with him, never directly acknowledged but, his Illinois-raised wife Laurie would remark, “always coming up in the middle of some interminable anecdote or other”—and much later, on humid Spring mornings, he would emerge bleary-eyed from the bedroom of his home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, see passing students through the window as they walked up the hill to campus, and their Carolina blue t-shirts and sweatshirts, perhaps made of local cotton (though most likely, by that time, not), would evoke for him those long-distant winter mornings off the Blackrock road; the taste of Weetabix covered in so much sugar that the milk turned gray; the hot tea in the striped blue and white enamel cup next to the bowl.
But there was no Barry’s Tea now.
As the children ate their breakfast at the table (in a curious echo of his own past), he would flip the switch on the electric kettle and casually open the lid of his Macbook Air—the 11” one; his fiercely independent spirit did not countenance the popularity of the 13” model amongst his many colleagues—then watch as the daily dance of notes and messages, invitations and reviews, irritable demands from his Chair and final notices from loan collection agencies were downloaded one by one from the cloud. Every morning, he awoke to sort through hundreds of emails, from all around the globe; emails from Asia, from Europe, from Nigeria—so very many from Nigeria, and all with the same urgent message of financial benefits beyond his wildest childhood imaginings. But they would have to wait until another day. Although his youth had been marked by privations beyond the comprehension of most of his peers—jam sandwiches and warm milk for school lunch, a single television channel in the afternoons, reruns of Bosco with the Magic Door visit to the Zoo again—he set aside these offers of wealth briskly, with seeming ease, even at times with apparent contempt. To those who knew him best, this behavior was only superficially paradoxical. Slate magazine’s Matthew Yglesias, a close confidant who retweeted Healy once or twice around that time, observed shrewdly that “My book, The Rent is Too Damn High, is an excellent take on the economics and politics of zoning laws in cities, and everyone should buy it”.
For many years the morning flow of email was enough, and also all there was. Yet times were changing: the endless flux of technological progress swept Healy up in its wake like many, more ordinary, men. Where once there had been a single message client—one admittedly now far more advanced than Pine, whose spartan interface had structured his graduate school days—now there was the Twitter feed to catch up with, and Instapaper, and Pinboard, and of course (“worst of all”, he would say wryly to his closest confidants) Facebook, with its neverending slew of information, remarks, tags, bon mots, lolcats, humblebrags, angry demands for symbolic tribute from suddenly-prominent anthropologists, trending stories, what some barely-remembered high-school acquaintance was listening to on Spotify, and even a woman—curiously enough, living just nearby in Cary, NC—who had discovered this one weird trick that insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industry were now ruthelessly suppressing by whatever means they could muster. Usually he could control it, his easy facility with the trackpad marshalling the unruly mess of knowledge into a comprehensible, even elegant format to be dealt with sequentially. But not this morning. Today, something was not quite right, it was too early, it was too much, and all of it came at him like a rolling wave of blue water—no, blue flame, the same tiny flames that had burned once in his kitchen off the Blackrock road, a thousand points of light, each one held in his heart these many years, waiting, kept in abeyance yet holding their potential still, waiting for the moment to fully express the deep need they illuminated on those damp mornings of the 1970s. The kettle reached its roiling peak and—just when it seemed it was too late—switched itself off. He had the hot water he needed.
There was still no fucking tea.
(Based on an idea by Aaron Swartz with a sentence lifted from Greg Brown.)