Book Recommendations

• Matt Bai reminds us of Richard Ben Cramer's What It Takes, the greatest campaign narrative ever published. I agree. What It Takes is actually the book that launched my political path. The portrayal of Gary Hart impressed me, so I grew interested in the man, searched him at the right time to hear about his abortive 2004 campaign, and volunteered for it. That effort fell apart rather quickly, but it's why Joe Trippi brought me to the Dean campaign, which is where I really got into blogging, and on and on. In conclusion, I owe everything to Cramer.

ª The second best best campaign book, or so I'd argue, is Trail Fever by Michael Lewis.

• Over at The Monkey Cage, Lee Sigelman recommends a core reading list for understanding the media's influence on American politics. I've only read The Atlantic article it's based off of, but I'd add James Fallows' Breaking the News: How the Media Undermines Democracy.

Posted Without Comment

From Brookings comes a new, must-read book:

Opportunity 08: Independent Ideas for America’s Next President

New Brookings Book Focuses on Critical Issues Facing the Nation

Opportunity 08: Independent Ideas for America’s Next President offers innovative solutions to the issues facing the 2008 Presidential candidates, presented in 5,000 word essays that provide a concise, yet thoughtful, overview of how to tackle pressing policy challenges. Part One of the book focuses on “Our World” and its topics include the challenge of dealing with Iran, the rise of China, climate change, oil dependence, Middle East peace and the future of Iraq. Part Two, “Our Society,” takes a look at key domestic issues such as housing policy, poverty, inequality, upward economic mobility and voting reform. Part Three, “Our Prosperity,” tackles vexing problems such as the budget deficit, health care access and quality, retirement security, and the challenge of strengthening information technology in the United States.

The editor of Opportunity 08: Independent Ideas for America’s Next President, Michael E. O’Hanlon, is a senior fellow in Foreign Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution. He is a frequent media commentator on national security and is the author or coauthor of numerous books, including Defense Strategy for the Post-Saddam Era; Hard Power: The New Politics of National Security; and A War Like No Other: The Truth about China’s Challenge to America.

More Kindle Commentary

• So my early enthusiasm is waning. The IP protections seem like a dealbreaker. I can't read pdfs? I have to pay to aggregate blogs? Amazon is fairly clearly trying to follow the iPod model, where your technology gives you such an early lead, that you can lock up all your content and nobody's the wiser. But even the iPod only locks up iTunes content -- it doesn't try to keep me from playing music I already have, or that a friend gave me, or that I downloaded off the net. Kindle does.

• That said, if Amazon really has figured out the technology, someone else will match the product without the locks. Or Amazon will decide to open the Kindle in order to better corner the market. If e-book readers really are the future, just as iPods were, the important thing is that someone kicks off our brave new world. The Kindle may do that, even as its many locks and constraints open the market for a successor.

• If the Kindle does work, it will make much more of a difference for non-fiction readers than fiction lovers. I don't think the advantage is in size -- a book really isn't that big. It's in information delivery. I really want some technology that allows me to clip parts of books, make annotations I can e-ail to myself, and better organize the information I glean from reading. Simply looking over words is a tremendously inefficient way to absorb knowledge, and it's long past time someone came up with a product that helps correct for my brain's sieve-like nature and general failings.

• Isaac Butler makes a fair point here, offering the Hayekian case for print:

Why will it be unsatisfying? Because it's not a book. I don't mean to be conservative here, but the simple fact of the matter is that there's something about books that just works. It's not that explainable, so it's hard to try to phrase it as a counterargument, but here goes...the book is one of humankind's perfect inventions... like bread, or the wheel (or, I'd argue, cheese). You might be able to improve on its design but you can't fundamentally change the thing. It's perfect as is. It's survived as a human invention for a truly shocking amount of time. As sentimental as this sounds, I just don't think that many people really want to cuddle up with their electronic reader and delve into the latest from Henning Mankell.

The Best Paragraph I've Read Today

From Chris Hayes' review of Stud Terkel's new memoirs:

You just can't beat people: as a description of Terkel's guiding ethos, you just can't beat that. Through more than a dozen books of oral history on topics ranging from working life to war, race, and the great hereafter, Terkel has demonstrated an unshakeable faith in humanity in all its flaws and triumphs. It's this fascination with the human condition which gives his books their verve and pathos. With a sharp eye and a sympathetic (if no longer particularly sensitive) ear, Terkel has coaxed wisdom and insight from janitor and senator alike. And in an age of reality television, on which ordinary people are given a shred of celebrity for the price of their dignity, Terkel has always offered the opposite, a steadfast insistence on presenting his subjects with dignity, grace, and empathy. You come away from Terkel's books with more faith in humanity than you had before.

Chris isn't quite so positive on the memoir, but everyone in the country should own a copy of Terkel's masterpiece, Working.

Terror Dreams

I've been leafing through Susan Faludi's new book on the country's post-9/11 turn to a protective masculinity fantasy, but haven't gotten quite far enough to offer any systematic thoughts. There's a chapter on the presidential candidates and guns which is interesting, but makes too much out of what was really a very small part of the campaign. The chapter on the myths surrounding Jessica Lynch's "rescue," however, is great, if only because it reminds us what a cynical heap of lies we were fed. Faludi recounts the bizarre spectacle of the soldiers storming the hospital where Lynch was being treated, kicking in doors that the staff had given them keys too, ripping open Lynch's sand-filled, anti-bedsore mattress to take sand samples, and triumphantly carrying away the "rescued" Lynch, who was wearing a dress one of the Iraqi nurse's brought from home. All this two days after the hospital's employees had tried to bring Lynch to an American base, but had their ambulance shot at for the trouble.

Here, by the way, is Rebecca Traister's review of Faludi's book.

Lords of the Land

I attended a briefing this morning with Akiva Eldar, political columnist for Ha'aretz and coauthor of Lords of the Land, one of the first comprehensive histories of the Israeli settlers movement published in either Hebrew or English. I haven't read the book yet, but it certainly sounds interesting, and the topic is crucially important. I've long been confused, given the settlement's moral indefensibility and their obvious spoiler effect on peace deals, why the government allows for their construction. According to this review of the book, it may not be that simple:

Consider, for example, one incident at the movement's beginning, told in detail in the first section of the book: In the spring of 1968, less than a year after Israel acquired new territories in the lightning victory of the Six-Day War, a group of young men, led by Rabbi Moshe Levinger, approached the military administration of the occupied territory with a modest request. They asked to celebrate the Passover Seder in Hebron, the newly occupied city of our biblical forefathers and foremothers.

Armed with a military permit signed by commander of the Eastern front General Uzi Narkis, they arrived in the ancient town on the night of April 12, and rented rooms in the Park Hotel. It later turned out that they neglected to keep their promise to leave the city when the holiday was over. The government had already rejected plans, submitted by Minister Igal Alon, hero of the War of Independence, to create a Jewish neighborhood in Hebron. Prime Minister Levi Eshkol was not happy with the whole Seder affair, but he failed to grasp the full meaning of this little bridgehead, and he did not put his foot down...His minister of defense, Moshe Dayan, another war hero, came up with a compromise: to move the group temporarily to the military administration's building, until a permanent solution could be found. The settlers took this to be a kind of official recognition. They were already busy creating an improvised school for their children (inside the Park Hotel), followed by a yeshiva.

When the issue was brought up in Cabinet again, rather than deciding on creating a Jewish settlement, the government first decided not to evacuate those already there. By and by, a settlement sprang up. A fact on the ground. The army mobilized to protect it. And since it was there already, by September of the same year, a government that never intended to settle any of the territories approved construction of a Jewish neighborhood in the city. This would become a pattern: Facts on the ground are created, army and bureaucracy follow, and finally the government grants retroactive approval.

Of course, even rogue elements require some sort of government support, less future settlements be left in the cold. And on this, it seems that there were always powerful enough groups within the Israeli government willing to exert pressure on behalf of the settler's. The book explains "how land grabs were disguised as military zone restrictions; how new settlements were disguised at first as "neighborhoods" of existing ones; how legal terms were twisted and devoid of meaning, creating double standards and lax enforcement; how government funds were diverted in clandestine, roundabout ways; how bureaucratic hierarchies grew strange humps to bypass regular procedures, and so forth." And once the settlement was constructed, the government couldn't, politically, leave it undefended. So at the end of the day, "a small group of zealots, a mere 2% of Israel's population, managed to exploit the nation's inability to decide the fate of the territories to an extraordinary extent. With various degrees of sympathy and antipathy from different governments, they were able to drag a whole country into a state it never really debated, let alone decided on." It's like the worst Mircotrend ever.

More on The Trap

Read Kevin on Daniel Brook's The Trap. Kevin points out another thing that bugged me abut the book, namely, Brook's apparent belief that anyone in the corporate world trudged there, death march style, after being priced out of working for a rewarding non-profit.

I know lots of people in the for-profit world. They like their jobs pretty well -- just as well as Hill staffers and non-profiteers. And a lot of them like having money! Brook paints for-profit work as a loathed fallback to every young person's natural ambition to work for Amnesty International, but not only does that fail to track with my experience, it's sort of insulting to folks who have chosen a different career path than I have, and thus probably not the way to build political support for a program that will reduce their salaries.

The Big Con

I tend to find it very hard to finish books.  So rather than me using a bunch of nice adjectives for it, let me just say that I finished Jon Chait's book, The Big Con, on the rise of crackpot, rightwing, economics in two days.  On the beach.  It's a very, very good piece of work, and contains the clearest, most sustained demolition of supply-siderism I've encountered.  It's also got a lot of very clear, quick writing on economics in general, including this quote-worthy bit on taxes:

You can look at the federal tax code as a kind of layer cake.  At the bottom is the federal payroll tax, used to finance Social Security and Medicare.  This tax is a flat rate and covers wage income only to around $100,000 a year, with all income above that level exempt.  This is the most regressive tax imposed by Washington.  Above the payroll tax sits the income tax.  The income tax is more progressive, exempting low wage workers and making high earners pay a higher rate.  On top of that are taxes on capital gains and dividends.  These taxes are even more concentrated at the top, since they affect only those who receive lots of income from accumulated wealth.  The most progressive tax of all is the estate tax, which is paid by a tiny handful of fabulously wealthy heirs.

Compare that layer cake to President Bush's policies.  The tax at the bottom, the payroll tax, he has not touched at all.  The tax just above that, the income tax, he sliced by about a tenth.  The taxes just above that, the capital gains and dividends, he cut in half.  And the tax at the very top, the estate tax, he abolished altogether (though he has not mustered enough votes to abolish it permanently).  Bush's opposition to any given tax is exactly proportional to the degree that it affects the rich.

The book also has the world's most perfect description of Grover Norquist, about whom it says:

Norquist, like a Bond villain, has an irresistible penchant for spelling out his master plans in their full, nefarious detail.

It's almost impossible to accurately convey how true that is.

The Argument

I haven't read Matt Bai's The Argument, though it seems, from the reviews, that the book's flaw was being conceived in 2004, reported in 2005, obviated in 2006, and released in 2007.  That's not really Bai's fault.  Lakoff really did seem like a big deal, and if you immersed yourself in the Democratic Party's search for messaging gurus, it's understandable that you'd ache for a bit of substance.

But that immersion is the key.  The Democratic Party's reworking of its message was a prime Bai story over the last few years.  His critique of it, by contrast, has been that Democrats need ideas, not gurus.  Notably, that they need a social policy capable of withstanding the 21st century, the "information age," or whatever synonym we're using for The Now (zoom!) that week.  But whatever the worth of the gurus, Bai's critique is myopic -- it's a function of what he's reporting on, rather than what's going on in the Party.

As a reporter, I focus on policy ideas.  And damn it, I'm drowning.  Bai seems to think Democrats need a health care plan, but I could show him no fewer than 20 fully-realized plans and outline the basic areas of consensus -- and they're broad -- that outline the Party's essential orientation on the issue.  Same goes for pension planning, trade adjustment plans, or any and every other element of social policy you can think of.

These plans have a common thread -- a social policy for the 21st century, if you will: Globalization and its attendant economic forces have destabilized the working class and the corporate welfare state they relied on, so the government should step into the breach and guarantee what employers no longer can.  And though Bai may not have been paying attention, Democrats have even settled on certain policy gurus -- notably Jacob Hacker, Joseph Stiglitz, and Elizabeth Warren -- who're uniting previously opposed wings of the party, as in Hacker's involvement with both the traditionally left wing EPI and they're bete noire, Robert Rubin's centrist Hamilton Project.  Bai's book may be a good read, but if you only profile politicians and messaging types, you should have some self-awareness that you're unlikely to trip over much new policy thinking along the way, and an affirmative effort to search some out is required before you critique its absence.

ETA and the Roots of Terrorism

By Randy Paul of Beautiful Horizons

There is no country in Europe that interests me more than Spain. There is no ongoing issue in Spain that frustrates me more than ETA, one hopes the last homegrown terrorist organization in Western Europe.

I've been reading Giles Tremlett's excellent book, Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through Spain and Its Secret Past and recommend it heartily, especially if you have an interest in Spain. His chapter on ETA is especially compelling.

Why does ETA want independence, especially for what appears to be only the Spanish portion of the historic region? Granted, there is no question that much of the region suffered greatly  under the dictatorship of Franco, who referred to the region as the "rebellious provinces" and who banned the language from being spoken, while rewarding the communities of Alava and Navarre for supporting his uprising. Times have certainly changed, however:

• Basque is acknowledged as an official language in Spain, despite the fact that it is not spoken by a majority of the population within the Basque country and barely has one million speakers and even fewer who speak it as a first language. . Here is the website for the Basque language verson of  Spain's national rail system called RENFE. It's also available in Gallego and Catalan in addition to Castellano.
• The Basque Region has at least as much autonomy as any other region in Spain, if not more.
• The Basque Region has far and away the best economy in Spain, including the most disposable income in the country.

Granted that the government of  former Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez committed acts that probably spurred younger people into supporting ETA, but that was years ago. So, why the desire for independence that leads to such horrid violence? Why the obsession among some with the fact that the Basque population has a higher percentage of RH- in its population or the claims that the Basques have unusual crania? Why the insistence that a referendum be held for independence when recent polls show only 38% of the population would vote for independence?

I wish I knew.

A Righteous Smackdown

By Randy Paul of Beautiful Horizons

Revenge is a dish best served cold or at least sarcastically as Richard Kluger hands the execrable Richard Brookhiser his head here. My favorite part? This:

It was an honor to be so subtly awakened from my self-deception by Mr. Brookhiser, who has honed his own skills by laboring for 30 years on the staff of National Review, a beacon of insightful commentary as well as fair and balanced judgment. Thanks, too, to your staff for selecting him. As we say out here in Berkeley, that iniquitous den of bluest liberalism, have a nice day.

Ouch!

Grace Paley, R.I.P.

By Kathy G.

Via James Wolcott comes the sad news that Grace Paley has passed away.

Paley, who was 84, was a great stalwart of the antiwar and women's movements, a New Yorker through and through, and a prodigiously gifted writer. If you've never read her, do yourself a favor and pick up her Collected Stories. You'll be dazzled by her warmth, wit, passion, empathy, and colloquial eloquence.

I heart Terry Castle

By Kathy G.

I agree with James Wolcott -- Terry Castle is a wonderful writer. She's a Stanford literature prof who wrote a brilliant book about one of my all-time favorite novels (it's got to be in my top five favorite novels, at least), as well as a fascinating study analyzing cultural representations of lesbians.

For a number of years now, she's been contributing the occasional article to the London Review of Books, and every one of them I've read, the literary reviews as well as the autobiographical essays, has been a gem. The latest one is a memorable piece about a trip to New Mexico with her elderly mom. But I think her all-time classic has got to be her gimlet-eyed and hilarious essay about her frenemy Susan Sontag.

I agree with Wolcott that her personal essays should be collected together and published as a memoir in book form. They're way too good to be consigned to the ephemeral format of a journal article.

Robert Frank Reviewed

Cornell economist Robert Frank's short and brilliant Falling Behind is the most illuminating and important book I've yet read on inequality. It's altered how I view the economy in almost all particulars, and I highly, highly recommend that you all pick it up. Over in The New York Times, Daniel Gross has a very clear and concise explanation of its arguments and implications. Well worth a read.

Gross also evaluates Frank's The Economic Naturalist, which compiles homework assignments from his students examining everyday occurrences through an economic lens. That was a somewhat less useful book, and seemed more an example of cute-o-nomics paired with a really smart business plan (his students, after all, wrote most of it). But since you all know how I love examples of collective action problems, here are two from that book:

“If women could decide collectively what kind of shoes to wear, all might agree to forgo high heels,” he writes. “But because any individual can gain advantage by wearing them, such an agreement might be hard to maintain.” And why do Frank’s humanities colleagues across Cornell’s idyllic quad, who are supposed to be good at writing, use so much jargon? It’s an arms race of erudition.

David Ignatius Likes to Read

And is surprisingly good at articulating why. Most columns by Serious People trying to prove that they know how to have fun fall flat, but Ignatius' exploration of his own affection for hefty English novels is actually a great read. He also hits on one of my real weaknesses as a traveler -- my tendency to use vacation as a time to start a good book, and then pass the time in the book rather than the place. When I was 8 or 9, I went with my brother to Israel while I was in a fantasy phase. He likes to say that, in fact, he went to Israel. I went to Pern.

But so long as we're on literature, Ignatius gives the general encomium to fiction's virtues. He writes that, "a wise person (my mother, actually) once observed that it was essential to read novels, because otherwise people would not know how to behave. They would encounter problems of the heart that would be insoluble, save for the education they had received in watching the great characters of fiction struggle to make moral choices."

Is this true for any of you out in Blogland? Because I've had to make many a tough decision and just about never found my literary memories capable of offering much guidance. This, in fact, always seemed like a dodge to me, an attempt to argue for the usefulness of reading fiction, lest it be considered a mere trivial diversion. I found some validation for certain decisions I'd made in various Nick Hornby novels, I don't think that's what Ignatius is referring to here. But maybe other people really do call up The Power and the Glory when they're confused....

The Trap!

Lots of people are telling me that I need to read Daniel Brook's book The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America, and I probably do. But if Adam Doster's review is correct, it's main point seems a bit banal. So far as I can tell, Brooks argues that conservative economic policies have shredded the safety net, forcing more and more talented graduates to enter law school (or investment banking, or whatever) rather than follow their bliss by working for low pay at virtuous non-profits.

Well, yeah. Working for low pay at a job that confers lots of Good Person points has always been something of a luxury for the young, well-off, and independent. And you don't go into law or hedge fund management because you're seeking subsistence: You do it because you're seeking riches, and status. I am, to be sure, a big believer in the economic autonomy offered by such programs as universal health care. But I don't think the end result will be a vast reordering of the occupational landscape. It will just be more people with health care, and a bit less job lock. And creating economic security for the young and upwardly mobile (i.e, by creating free college) will cost other people more money -- money that I'm not sure should be spent subsidizing the educations of the upper middle class.

All that said, I haven't read the book, and should. It's fully possible Brooks deals with exactly these objections.

By-The-Numbers Book Reviews

The Unbearable Lightness of Being is something like 65% of the greatest book ever written and 35% of something you wrote for a freshman philosophy class and are now embarrassed of.

American Furies

I haven't read Sasha Abramsky's American Furies: Crime, Punishment, and Vengeance in the Age of Mass Imprisonment, but it's next on my list. This country's culture of imprisonment is a critical, and usually under-noticed, contributor to crime, inequality, poverty, the breakdown of the nuclear family in urban areas, depressed earnings among black men, intergenerational transmission of economic status, etc, etc, etc. It's hard to find good reporting and analysis on these issues, as the imprisoned are, by definition, out of sight, and deeply unsympathetic, so their lives and outcomes take on less urgency. But Silja Talvi's review suggests Abramsky's book is more than up the challenge.

Good as Abramsky's book may be on the informational issues, the "what can be done" part of this is tough, as rehabilitative, humane prison reforms are considered politically suicidal. But though I agree with that conventional wisdom, Rhode Island has restored the vote to felons, and in a more amazing shift, Florida's Republican governor did the same thing, so maybe the politics of the issue are changing.

In Search of Worse Books

Special Topics in Calamity Physics. Now that's a well-done book. Sure the characters are disruptively unbelievable and the plot doesn't really start until page 300 and the ending makes no sense at all, but those are virtues; they help the book hit my sweet spot: Entertaining, but not grabbing.

I hate being grabbed by a book. It's troublesome. You lose sleep, sneak looks during the workday, don't want to get off the bus, and generally act out all the downsides of infatuation. Jonathan Rosen's Joy Comes in the Morning, for instance, is currently making a run at ruining my life. Wonderful book, to be sure, but a pain in the ass for that very reason. It's keeping me up at night, and, come the day, beckoning from my bag when I actually need to be writing.

With Special Topics in Calamity Physics, I could merrily read for 20 minutes before going to bed without any particular interest in knowing what happened next. It was The Entourage of books: Great dialogue, charming moments, fun characters, but no nettlesome investment in the characters or interest in the plot to muck up the experience. I need more like it.

The Road To Serfdom: Now With 100% More Cartoons

Via Greg Mankiw, here's the illustrated, Road to Serfdom graphic novel. I must say, I sometimes forget how wacky the implications, and particularly the orthodox interpretations, of these canonical conservative documents can be. Make sure to read past page 10, when things really go off the rails. And to page 16, when we find that Tom Friedman really is omnipresent.

Book Club Suggestions

Okay, it turns out you folks like my crackpot book club idea. So we're going to do it. First step, of course, is to pick the book. So I'm going to offer two suggestions of my own, and you can either back me up in comments, or propose other candidates. After I see what you folks are into, I'll winnow the list down and we'll have some sort of vote.

The Populist Persuasion by Michael Kazin. A history of populism, in all its American forms, focusing on its rhetoric, communication, and aims. Goes all the way from the agrarians to Perot. Kazin's a great writer and a smart thinker. In the 15 pages I read before an article deadline interrupted me, there was much underlining.

John Kenneth Galbraith by Richard Parker. Readers know the importance I place on Galbraith in the canon of liberal thought. This is a remarkable book, and I'd welcome the chance to read it again, and with more thought. The problem is, it's long. And while well-written, the ideas are complex and it can move somewhat slowly. I'm worried folks will drop out. Also, biographies tend to have periods which are simply expository -- what can we really say about his youth on a farm?

The UAW and the Heyday of American Liberalism by Kevin Boyle: Combines a few of my obsessions in fairly obvious ways. Plus: You hear so much about the unreasonable demands of GM's workers and the crazy benefit packages they negotiated. I'm rather interested in getting into the context of all that.

Okay, those are mine. Now you go.

Scarcity Economics

Arnold Kling writes:

some of the most interesting economic observations concern relative abundance. Look at our standard of living compared to 100 years ago. Look at South Korea compared with North Korea. Robert Lucas famously said that "The consequences for human welfare involved in questions like these are simply staggering: Once one starts to think about them it is hard to think of anything else."

The standard economics textbook does not treat the issues of "relative abundance" very well. I think that there is a market opportunity for a book that can fix that.

I'm pretty sure such a book was written; it even sold a few million copies. Indeed, I've long thought Arnold Kling would benefit from reading it...

Book Club

A friend and I were lamenting our inability to actually finish nonfiction books, and musing about starting a book club to help provide some discipline. I, however, am unimpressed with my ability to regularly attend events outside my living room, and downright pessimistic about my aptitude for cleaning up after events that occur in my living room. Yet my blog remains clean and regularly updated. And so an idea struck!

So here's the question, internet people: How do you feel about a book club? I'd start an extension on this blog (ezraklein.typepad.com/bookclub, or something), folks who want to join would sign up, and we'd go from there. I'd give a couple people keys to the Caddy, so they could post up impressions, and we'd have awesome discussions full of penetrating insights, illuminating ruminations, and consciousness expanding drug trips. Plus, we'd actually finish a book. But no use going through all that if you're not interested. So: Interested? Tell me in comments. And since this probably depends at least in part on the book we'd read, let's use Michael Kazin's The Populist Persuasion as a likely candidate for the first read.

Libraries vs. Amazon

This is weird:

Checking Out [John J. Miller]
Are public libraries supposed to repositories of the best that has been thought and said, or are they supposed to compete with bookstores for customers? In Fairfax County, Va., librarians are removing classics that haven't been checked out recently so they can make more room for bestsellers and titles that Oprah likes. I've got some pretty strong libertarian tendencies, but I've always had a soft spot for public libraries. If they merely become government-run versions of what the private sector delivers so efficiently nowadays—the ability to purchase just about any book ever printed, and often at a very good price if you're willing to buy from a secondhand seller—then maybe we don't really need them anymore.

Since when do bookstores allow you to check out books for no fee, finish them, and bring them back? That's the primary difference between libraries and bookstores -- they make reading cheap, if not free. As it happens, John and I work at magazines. Books magically flow into our offices, and those that don't can be freely ordered from the kind elves staffing publisher publicity departments. But for those whose employment (or lack thereof) eschews such perks, $25.95 (or a bit over $20 on Amazon, once shipping is included) for Special Topics in Calamity Physics is steep. Libraries make it less so. That's their function: Not to serve as a dusty repository of the classics, but to economically democratize the world of letters.

So far as the Fairfax branches go, I'm all for keeping the hits of yesteryear available, but they are, I''ll remind John, delivered fairly efficiently by the private sector, and for dirt-cheap if you're willing to go secondhand. The Education of Henry Adams, one of the removed classics, is available for $1.44 on Amazon -- $13.05 cheaper than the cheapest copy of Special Topics. So it would seem the libraries could do more good by making the pricier, contemporary novels widely available, rather than duplicating the inexpensive back catalogues of the private sector. Indeed, it seems oddly un-libertarian to demand that libraries paternalistically ignore market pressures and consumer preferences in order to stock the titles that educated elites have deemed "classics." Nothing against the classics, of course, but it would certainly seem that in the age of Amazon and online used retailers, libraries should ensure their stock hews as close to the preferences of their users as possible.

Middle Ground

I'm all for more pamphlet publishing. There's a peculiar lack of middle ground in journalism, where you can either write a 4-5,000 word article on a subject or a 70,000-100,000 word book. Surely some topics would be best served by a word count between 5,001 and 69,999. To some degree, this is driven by the fact that books are artifacts, often written by authors to stand as testament to their brilliance and bought by readers to serve as evidence of their erudition. The book is not written to maximize readability, and the buyer often does not read it. So yeah, pamphlets. I'm also happy to see a middle ground emerging in trade publishing, where certain books are starting in paperback form with a lower word count and price point. There's really no reason authors should have to choose between magazine length and magisterial when deciding how best to address a topic.

Update: The first link, by the way, goes to an interview with Adam Bellow, Saul Bellow's son and a conservative editor and publisher. It's interesting stuff. His analogy for the rise of online political content seems fairly spot-on:

I think it can best be described cosmologically. First there is a big bang. Thousands and thousands of individual blogs are spewed out. Nobody reads them in particular. They are all just little points sort of flickering in the cosmic gloom. But over time, because the Internet is a kind of pure intellectual democracy, little aggregations form. People are drawn to one another by common interests. And at the same time, certain individuals emerge as large planetary bodies, very often surrounded by circles of other people who share their interests.

I don't know if the net's a "pure intellectual democracy," but the general point seems sound. In any case, it's a good interview, well worth a read.

Best Books Of 2006, and 1987, and 1965, and...

There's little I love more than a few good book recommendations. But I'm always saddened to see the year-end lists constrained to books of that year, a needless limit when I'm much more interested in books the author discovered that year and found dazzling. Happily, John Judis's heap o' recommendations over at TNR merrily eschews such narrowness to range widely over the past four decades of American letters. Like my editor Harold Meyerson, Judis is a graduate of the post-War left (if I don't misremember, he was also a Michael Harrington disciple) and encyclopedic on all things related to American politics.

Meanwhile, I remain vaguely aghast that no bright publisher has offered a book composed merely of notable intellectuals and individuals recommending the titles they believe everyone should read. Or, given the limits of print, Amazon or some other smart web retailer should create, pursue, and publicize just such a series, hyperlinking all the recommendations to the order pages.

Faster Than The Speed Of Light

Kevin Drum wonders if rumors really do travel faster than light, and implores folks to link here to help find out. Reminds me of one of my favorites parts from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

The history of the Galaxy has got a little muddled, for a number of reasons: partly because those who are trying to keep track of it have got a little muddled, but also because some very muddling things have been happening anyway. One of the problems has to do with the speed of light and the difficulties involved in trying to exceed it. You can't. Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws. The Hingefreel people of Arkintoofle Minor did try to build spaceships that were powered by bad news but they didn't work particularly well and were so extremely unwelcome whenever they arrived anywhere that there wasn't really any point in being there.

Update: Or, from comments, comes this passage from Mort (by Terry Pratchett):

The only things known to go faster than ordinary light is monarchy,
according to the philosopher Ly Tin Weedle. He reasoned like this: you
can't have more than one king, and tradition demands that there is no gap
between kings, so when a king dies the succession must therefore pass to
the heir *instantaneously*. Presumably, he said, there must be some
elementary particles -- kingons, or possibly queons -- that do this job,
but of course succession sometimes fails if, in mid-flight, they strike an
anti-particle, or republicon. His ambitious plans to use his discovery to
send messages, involving the careful torturing of a small king in order to
modulate the signal, were never fully expanded because, at that point, the
bar closed.

Klostermania

As part of my sorta-off-from-work-though-not-really-because-I-have-an-article-due vacation (all those hyphens are going to really fuck up that line break), I just finished a rare non-political read in Chuck Klosterman's Killing Yourself to Live. I'll vaguely disagree with Julian and say the book, which abandons its ostensible topic of Rock-and-Roll deaths in favor of hundreds of pages of quirky romantic ruminations, is really much better for the topic change. Indeed, until Julian's review made me aware this wasn't just some maudlin road trip, I was going to skip it. Glad I didn't: the journey actually proves itself quite fun (and occasionally trenchant), though if you'd asked me during the first hundred-or-so pages, I would have been considerably more enthusiastic (though not for any reason I can quite put my finger on).

The virtue of focusing on memories that are relatively mundane rather than rock trivia that's relatively specific is pretty well explained in Klosterman's brilliant essay on Saved By The Bell from Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs. Comparing the comforting predictability of Saved By The Bell with MASH's intellectual contrarianism, he argues in the former's favor because "important things are inevitably cliche," and that's no reason to dismiss them. That strikes me as a correct observation, though one that's disincentivized at multiple junctures in the creative process.

The first, obviously, is the reviewers, who've little time for staid topics. But critics aren't the only ones with a fetish for the fresh. Editors have an instinctual aversion to the cliche, and love nothing more than to ask how your concept is different than the similar concepts preceding it, so you tend to get a lot of writers with books on fairly specific and rare experiences** interspersed with a few that've managed to dress up the ordinary in a costume the publishing house doesn't recognize. Which is how you get Chuck Klosterman pitching a book about dead rock stars and writing a book about his obsessive attempts to understand his four major relationships. A road trip to the death sites of rock stars strike publishing houses as original. "Girls I've Loved" doesn't. But it happens to make a much better book.

But Klosterman's great virtue is in being, not really some other dude, but you, albeit with a few modifications. If their really is a cult of Chuck, it's eerily reminiscent of how he describes the Cult of Zeppelin:

Led Zeppelin sounds like the way a cool guy acts. Or -- more specifically -- Led Zeppelin sounds like a certain kind of cool guy; they sound like the kind of cool guy every man vaguely has the potential to be, if just a few things about his world were somehow different.

And Klosterman writes like a cool drinking buddy sounds. He's a sort of oddball raconteur who's simultaneously nerdy enough to appear reachable while interesting enough to be desirable. His appeal isn't in good looks, or book smarts, or an obvious charisma. It's in marshaling a certain shared cultural and personal experience (Saved By The Bell, relationships) and remembering them a bit more vividly, and thinking about them a bit harder, than most of us do. But not much more vividly, or thoughtfully, than we imagine ourselves capable of.

That's partially because Klosterman happens to dominate a particularly accessible subculture: Pop culture. I've always been thankful my expertise is in politics rather than, say, chemistry. The latter, while undeniably more useful to humanity, doesn't often come up at dinner parties. But if politics is conversationally accessible territory, rock music, basic cable, and basketball are all the more so. And his savant-like facility with its songs, shows, and trivia offers the added oomph needed for publishers to trust in the appeal of his essays.***

This memorized mastery over a sort of shared cultural heritage allows him to take already accessible experiences and make them ADA compliant. Same deal with Hornby. Not only are they writing about the common and the contemporary, but they're grounding it in the most universal vernacular around. Which is a neat trick. The rock references pretend to elevate musing over the mundane into some more esoteric realm, but they actually do quite the opposite: They make sure even those bereft of similar experiences can infer the proper meanings thanks to the pop-cultural touchstones.

So anyway: Yeah, good book.

** There really are an astonishing number of books chronicling what it's like to grow up as an Indian in the UK. And most of them are actually pretty good.
*** It's probably not coincidental that the two writers most associated with Gen Y ennui -- Hornby and Klosterman -- both use the obsessive recitation of rock trivia as their hook.

The Best-Reviewed Book of All

Eric Alterman notes that Peter Beinart's book is racking up some great reviews. Not necessarily great in that they really like Beinart's effort, but great in that they're fascinating, well-crafted, deeply provocative pieces of writing. He links to three in particular -- Kevin Mattson in the Boston Review, Frank Rich in The New York Review of Books, and Kevin Baker in Harper's -- but that's scarcely the tip of the ice berg. Just from memory, Michael Lind took the book on in Democracy, Andrew Bacevich hated on it in The Nation, Michael Tomasky throttled it in The American Prospect, George Packer explored it in The New Yorker, Fred Kaplan engaged it in The Washington Monthly, James Lindsay praised it in The Washington Post, Richard Samuelson went at it in The Claremont Review, etc. Yet, weirdly, few of the reviews were overwhelmingly positive: The book hasn't been so ubiquitous because folks just love it. Nor has it sold remarkably well. So what's with the affection of review pages?

This is partly a quirk of journalism: Very few outlets will simply allow a writer -- even a renowned one -- to publish an essay on a large subject of their choice. Magazine articles require ledes, color, and interviews, while op-eds constrain you to three paragraphs and a bio line. But that doesn't mean writers don't have long, non-reported ideas on big subjects that they'd prefer not to turn into books. So political publishing has come up with a sneaky compromise: Publications will let you spend pages and pages ostensibly reviewing a book, when what you're really doing is crafting an essay on the book's subject. That way, the piece ostensibly "reports" on an event -- the release of a new book. And since many writers want to expound on foreign policy and the left, Beinart's book, which addressed that precise topic, has proved perfect cover.

But do these essays help the books they ostensibly promote? I'm skeptical. In the book-writing business, there are three interested players: The writer, the agent, and the publisher. All three are worried about sales, but rather often, the writer will have a day job that actually pays the bills, and the purpose of the book will largely be prestige and attention. In that case, an unending series of reviews by Important People in Serious Magazines will do the trick. Though many of Beinart's reviews were relatively critical, the fact that so many minds were grappling with his book undoubtedly burnished his reputation. They were certainly good for Peter Beinart

For the publisher and the agent, however, I'd guess it's a different story. They want sales. And my hunch is that long-form book reviews actually depress sales. The essays on Beinart's book, for instance, were long pieces targeted at the precise audience that would potentially purchase The Good Fight. But these long pieces both offered a deep summary of Beinart's book and an opinion the reader could have on Beinart's book. Since few folks require much more than a basic understanding of a popular book's argument and the ability to fake an intelligent opinion on it at parties, these long reviews offered the basic benefits of having read the book without the investments of time or money required to buy or finish it. Indeed, I've always wondered if the tagline of The New York Review of Books shouldn't be: We Read Books So You Don't Have To. I wonder if there's any data on this out there.

If you're interested, my thoughts on the book, which I did read, are here.

Books

David Brooks argues that one indicator that conservatism is running out of steam is a distinct paucity of "big, impactful books" on the right. He reminisces about the good ol' days, the 80's and 90's, when George Gilder, Alan Bloom, Charles Murray, and others were writing books that fundamentally shifted how conservatives viewed the world. Such books aren't being released lately, he laments.

Well, truth be told, my knowledge of conservative publishing is rather sparse, so I've little more than a suspicion that he's right. But is the left any different? Over the past ten years, and certainly over the past five, it would be simple to point out titles that changed how the left views politics. Books like What's The Matter With Kansas, Don't Think of an Elephant, and even Crashing the Gate offered fairly fundamental insights into the depressing electoral realities facing Democrats. But eliminating the strategic, have there been any really important books for how the left views the world or its problems? If a young liberal came to you and asked for the few titles that would truly change her intellectual outlook, what would you recommend?

Woodward 2.0

Bob Woodward's new book paints the president as a resolute leader so in awe of his own conviction and resolution that he can't adapt to new realities, and thus has been unable to learn from the mistakes in Iraq. That's in stark contrast to Bob Woodward's last book, which painted Bush as a resolute leader whose in awe of his own conviction and resolution was perfectly suited to the new, post-9/11 reality. Matt asks:

Why were the earlier books so different? Did he somehow not notice this stuff before? It's a serious problem for the most prominent people in the journalism world to be merely lagging indicators, praising leaders when they're popular and then pointing out that, in fact, they suck only after a whole series of disasters discredit them.

Nah, he noticed all this stuff before. And he mentioned it all. His last book was perfectly explanatory. It's merely that then, Bob Woodward thought pigheadedness was a virtue, now it's a vice. The problem is that Woodward is not what folks might call an analyst. Here's Nora Ephron, who was married to his partner Bernstein, explaining Woodward's technique:

Bob has always had trouble seeing the forest for the trees. That’s why people love to talk to him; he almost never puts the pieces together in a way that hurts his sources. And that’s also why he has so much access: his sources can count on him to convey their version of events. When Bob says that when he was first told about Valerie Plame, he [just] didn’t think it was important.

Woodward knows what's going on, but not what to think of it. He's a safe vessel for hall-of-power confessionals precisely because he doesn't put the pieces together in any sort of innovative and damning way. But without that analytical approach, Woodward simply colors his reporting with whatever crayons everyone else is using. If Bush is atop the world, Woodward's interviews show why. If he ain't, the very same interviews will shed light on that, too. What's impressive about the two Woodward books isn't how different they are, but how similar. The reporting hasn't much changed, it's the conventional wisdom that's shifted and, thus, Woodward's adjectives.

And, so far as political experts being nothing but lagging indicators, it's really much, much worse than that. Try incorrect indicators.

Book Meme

I have been caught, it appears, by the accursed book meme, courtesy of the accursed Julian Sanchez. Curses! Here we go:

1) One book that changed your life?

Yikes, no easy start, huh? It was probably, to be honest, Noam Chomsky's 9/11. That was the first political book I was ever given, and it came at a time -- just after the attacks -- when I was ready and willing to get politically activated. It made me a radical for awhile, to be sure, but in getting me involved, it set me on the path that has placed me here, writing this post.

2) One book that you have read more than once.

This one will end a bit embarrassingly, but I read Anne McCaffrey's The Dragonriders of Pern trilogy incessantly when I was young. I'd finish it, flip the back cover closed, and start right back on page one. I must have read that book thirty times.

3) One book that you would want on a desert island?

How to get off a desert island (but seriously folks, I'll be here all week!). I've actually always thought this question is poorly framed. Obviously, I would want a book that imparted some number of technical or agricultural skills. If we're going to eliminate that category, however, I'd probably want something dense enough that I could keep discovering new facets. And am I getting off the island at some point? If not, maybe I want some sort of spiritual book or meditation manual, the better to mentally adjust and adapt to my dire situation. Or possibly porn.

4) One book that made you cry.

Not sure any book ever has. On the other hand, an episode of Ultraman once broke me down.

5) One book that made you laugh.

I'll join with Julian in giving this one to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Come to think of it, that's another book I've read over and over and over again.

6) One book you wish had been written.

Well, I have one I'm going to write, but I'm excited about someday doing that, so I'm glad it remains in my head. As for other books, if there were more I wish had been written, I guess I'd write them. If I can be fanciful with the answer though, I'd go with What I Think About Things, In Simple, Declarative Sentences and Dark Ink by Jesus.

7) One book you wish had never been written.

The Da Vinci Code. Just because when I see it listed on folk's Facebook profiles as their favorite book, I instantly lose respect for them. Which I don't like doing.

8) One book you are reading currently?

The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan. It's an unbelievably fascinating look into our food chain and eating habits.

9) One book you've been meaning to read?

The Rise of American Democracy, by Sean Wilentz. I really don't know my American history that well, and Wilentz is such a talented writer. But it's so big and ambitious that I'm scared to crack it open. If we're talking fiction, just insert any piece of famous literature. Crime and Punishment, Lolita, The Sun Also Rises, The Naked Lunch, Herzog...Odds are, I haven't read it, and feel great terrible about the oversight.

I'm going to tag Kevin, Mark, and Amanda. And because I'm devilish, I'm going to add, but not answer, the following question:

10) What book do you routinely recommend but haven't actually read?

Bwahahahah.

The Trouble With The Trouble With Diversity

Speaking of the Walter Ben Michaels book, LB has posted up some extended thoughts on his central diversity vs. inequality arguments, and I agree with just about every word. So earlier, when I wrote that I "really haven't achieved sufficient clarity in my own thoughts" to address the book at length, I should've just written that "LB hasn't yet seen fit to actually write up the reactions I was hoping to one day process, and I will link as soon as she does."

How Evites Explain Dinesh D'Souza's New Book

In DC, I run with a community of writers, political thinkers, and sundry other intellectual types. The circle is large, sprawling, and relatively incestuous: We go to each other's parties, attend each other's events, go to each other's happy hours, etc and so on. What that means is that there are an awful lot of Evites floating around at any given time. This one to a barbecue, that one to a birthday, the third to a going away bash. And because a heavy portion of this crowd is comprised of professional prose stylists, there's ever-increasing pressure to make the invites funnier, the responses, wittier. It was rather fun at the beginning, but now the pressure is too intense, with each successive invitation demanding sharper wit and more innovative approaches. The meta comments ("Enthusiastic response!") have been tapped out, the dark humor analogies to foreign conflicts largely used up. I've taken to visiting wikipedia and pegging my invitations to some absurd anniversary or holiday falling on the date (my last party fell on international pi day -- 7/22). It's exhausting stuff.

I was reminded of the Evite arms race by the title of Dinesh D'Souza's latest, uh, "book": The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility For 9/11. I'm becoming convinced rightwing book is caught in a similar loop, only this time towards ever more insane and inflammatory titles. Dinesh, after all, had to top Ponnuru's The Party of Death and Coulter's Treason, and will soon be contending with Goldberg's Liberal Fascism: The Totalitarian Temptation from Mussolini to Hillary Clinton. I'm rather confident, particularly given Ponnuru's totally embarrassed reaction to his own book's title, that this is a purely mercenary decision on their part. Most of these folks fancy themselves serious thinkers but, in the end, publishing's a tough market, and a bloodthirsty title can stand between you and bargain rack oblivion.

But like with our Evite invitations, too much pressure for too long and all the good jokes, or slurs, get taken, and what's left sounds forced and self-parodic. To blame not merely the left, but the cultural left for 9/11? To wreck the word fascism by attaching it to "liberal"? It's a problem. Though one, if the Evite I just responded to is any indicator, that has no real solution.

What Got Pinter his Nobel Prize?

I can't say I've read much by Harold Pinter, but then I never claimed to be anything but the uncultured boor that I am. Nevertheless, this whole hubbub over whether his views or prose won him the Nobel strikes me as a bit silly. Starting from the obviously true observation that the majority of eminent writers skew left politically, the way to judge whether someone of Pinter's caliber got picked for his plays or his opinions is an easy thought experiment: if you were the Nobel committee and you were trying to pick a prose stylist whose ascension would be the clearest slap in Bush's face, would you pick Pinter?

Well, no.

Pinter may be a Bush critic, but he's not a particularly well-known one. You could've gotten a lot more mileage out of awarding Philip Roth his overdue award, particularly now that The Plot Against America has clarified his stance. Indeed, that would've have the added plus of motivating other writers who feel themselves overdue for a Nobel to write books implicitly comparing Bush to fascist anti-semites. Hell, you could even delve into the quasi-muck of popular fiction and go with John LeCarre, who did, after all, redefine spy novels, and whose Absolute Friends was a former intelligence officers denouncement of the Bush administration. But instead you'd go with Pinter? Sorry folks, but I think not.

Pinter might not like Bush, but he's neither particularly piercing nor unquestionably effective in his distaste. He's a leftie, sure, but only incidentally so, the movement will hum along just fine without him. So while you can certainly argue that his politics didn't hurt, it's a bit bizarre to hold that they, and not his plays or vision, were the driving reason behind his pick. It just doesn't make sense.

You Spin Me Right Round Baby Right Round

From Henry's review of Hacker and Pierson's new book Off Center:

So why hasn’t the Republican party been punished by voters for its radicalism? As I understand it, Hacker and Pierson’s explanation has three main components. First, information. Voters are often poorly informed about politics, and are vulnerable to “tailored disinformation,” which distorts public perceptions. Second, institutions. The Republican Party has been able to use its dominance of Senate, House and Presidency to set the agenda and to sideline opposition. Finally, networks. “New Power Brokers” like Tom DeLay have been able to assemble networks that bring together politicians, think-tankers, funders and lobbyists, creating a coherent agenda across separate institutions, rewarding and protecting loyalists while brutally punishing those who go off-message.

And as I understand it, the argument really begins and ends behind door number one. That the Republican Party has been able to leverage their institutional dominance to reshape the playing field and imprison Democrats in the dugout helps explain their effectiveness, sure, as does the DeLay-led synergy among moneymen, idea peddlers, and politicians, but the reason they can bring their ideological babies to term is the peculiar structure of the media and the openings it provides for disinformation. If voters don't know, they can't oppose. And the media's preference for screaming fests, their willingness to let distortions and half-truths fly unchallenged, their grateful acceptance of a cadre of professional flacks paid and trained to lie unpopular positions into broadly acceptable forms, and all the other quirks of the "objective" protocols have taught listeners to basically tune out the whole show, to watch it as a boxing match rather than an informational session. The results are unambiguous, this comes from a PIPA poll released shortly before the election:

Majorities of Bush supporters incorrectly assumed that Bush favors including labor and environmental standards in trade agreements (84%), and the US being part of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (69%), the International Criminal Court (66%), the treaty banning land mines (72%), and the Kyoto Treaty on global warming (51%). They were divided between those who knew that Bush favors building a new missile defense system now (44%) and those who incorrectly believe he wishes to do more research until its capabilities are proven (41%). However, majorities were correct that Bush favors increased defense spending (57%) and wants the US, not the UN, to take the stronger role in developing Iraq’s new government (70%).

Bush supporters also, themselves, favored some of the positions that they attributed to Bush. Majorities of Bush supporters favored including labor and environmental standards in trade agreements (93%), and the US being part of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (68%), the International Criminal Court (75%), the treaty banning land mines (66%), and the Kyoto treaty on climate change (54%). Only 33% of Bush supporters wanted to build a new missile defense system now, while more wanted to do more research until its capabilities are proven (56%).

Same thing happened during the Clinton health care initiative. Studies showed that, over the course of the controversy, voters actually got stupider, which is to say that the fairly clear understanding they had of the Clinton plan at the start actually degraded over a year of wall-to-wall coverage. The media, the commercials, the politicians -- all these ended up misinforming the populace on what was being debated. It should thus be no surprise that, after ClintonCare died, surveys found voters wanted a health care proposal that was -- you guessed it -- almost exactly like Clinton's.

For now, our politicians live on disinformation. The Energy Bill was an atrocity, the Medicare Bill a giveaway, the tax cuts targeted at those with no need, the Iraq War sold on the dangers of weapons that didn't exist. The only failure, Social Security privatization, flopped because Bush eventually admitted what it was -- not a solvency plan, but a restructuring of a beloved program. Betcha he won't make that nistake again.

All Hail Our New Robot Overlords

Lots of folks are talking about Ray Kurzweil's new book The Singularity is Near. His argument, basically, is that true artificial intelligence is a function of computing power, we currently haven't created it because we don't have the computer power, given current trends we will have it in about 20 years, then our artificially intelligent robots will begin working on speeding up the process ever-more, making human intelligence almost useless in a relatively short period of time. Kurzweil kindly goes in for the "this will help humans and make us all much happier" explanation rather than the "we're all gonna be robot-slaves" argument. To me, that one seems a coin toss. In any case, the singularity is when it happens, when our intelligence becomes increasingly non-biological and and the world becomes Totally Awesome.

Reactions vary. Kevin thinks he's right, but that he cheated on a graph. Matt thinks he's wrong, and points to our dashed hopes for nuclear power as proof. Tyler wonders why IE still crashes if we're so damn smart. And so on.

Count me critical. Inventions don't tend to follow the tracks we think they will. If they did, we'd have long ago had our flying cars, phaser guns, and teleportation devices. So the graph that Kevin references showing the increasing speed of technological innovation strikes me as a point against. We're getting better at making things, but we don't tend to improve them in the way futurists expect. Very rarely folks get a few things right and so the reputation of futurists everywhere is saved, but given what we've seen in the past, Kurzweil's analysis strikes me as too easy an extrapolation to accurately describe where we're going to end up. In my read, the one thing we aren't is linear.

On that note, what sort of intelligence is Kurzweil talking about? I assume he's after something quite similar to consciousness, which may prove a problem. Kevin may be right that the brain is but a biological machine, but it's a biological machine that doesn't quite follow itself. Many of its properties are emergent, and unless we're starting to see that correct programming and processor design are giving rise to characteristics much different than producers expected and more powerful than anything they imagined, AI is going to probably remain quite a ways back in consciousness, simply because we've little idea how to actually design anything actually resembling it.

Now, if Kurzweil is talking about glorified calculators, massively able machines that do a couple things a billion times better than humans and are considerably more flexible when working on a problem, that's likely possible, but nevertheless a whole different, and potentially less arresting, issue.

Lastly, and this is decidedly not what Kurzweil's talking about, we have a society raised on Aasimov and The Matrix -- the barriers to AI, in the long-run, are going to be less technological and more legal/societal. When truly smart machines do start to tumble off the production line, when they do begin to replace folks in service jobs and prove able to replace them in all jobs, you're likely to see a backlash of almost unimaginable proportions. Nativism will be supplanted by its far more desperate cousin, humanism, and I'd be fairly surprised if the government didn't enact controls making the prohibitions on cloning look laughable. Think the X-Men comics in more recent years. Humans don;t like to believe themselves obsolete, and my hunch is they'll be vicious and swift in stopping production on anything that threatens to make them so.

The Republican War on Science

Chris Mooney is everywhere. The Daily Show, Fresh Air, the papers, the internet...and everywhere he goes, his hosts say the same thing:

Buy his book.

And guess what I'm going to say?

Buy his book.

Bunches of other bloggers have reviewed it, so I'm not going to spend too much time recapping the basics, but in short, The Republican War on Science is about the right's multipronged effort to devalue, contradict, and drown out scientific evidence that discredits their agenda. And since their agenda has become wholly business-oriented and/or religiously motivated, Republicans have had too start waging war against empiricism a lot.

That bit about business is important because one neat coup the GOP has achieved is getting the Christian Right to yell so loud that the demands Business are often near-inaudible. Thus, we're focused on religious abuses and socially conservative policies when the really damaging stuff is being perpetrated by industry. A good example is the Supreme Court bait-and-switch, where we all sat anxiously awaiting a caveman like Luttig, only to get a smiling, genial, tool of corporations in Roberts. And its repeated across the board -- theocrats make the noise, plutocrats get the action. So while a thorough education based on Biblical principles should be fought tooth-and-nail, creationism's inclusion in certain classrooms is no more, and maybe quite a bit less, damaging than the toxins being belched into the air, the funds being poured into Star Wars and the global warming evidence being suppressed. What's worse, or at least more galling, is that so much of these abuses are in the name of "Sound Science", a term which, as Chris documents, was invented by Big Tobacco. Science, generally speaking, is sound, otherwise it isn't science.

But the overriding point that the book settles into is probably the most important. Republicans, on every front and at every opportunity, have worked to destroy the prestige of experts and assault the legitimacy of evidence. And no group can do that over a long period of time, on a multitude of issues, and remain personally unaffected. They can't fight experts in the electoral arena and then respect them when its time to govern. And they haven't.

One place it came out, I think, is Katrina. If your attitude is that expertise is secondary to politics, appointing a campaign crony to head FEMA is a perfectly reasonable expression of that worldview. And if you tend to ignore most career professionals, paying little attention to the Army Corps. of Engineers and the disaster-prediction specialists in the government is business-as-usual. So those hapless agencies saw their requests and warnings subordinated to the overall political goals of the Administration, and, now sitting low on the Administration's ideological agenda, their funding was cut and their urgency unheeded.

That's not to say many folks were catching fire over the prospect of a New Orleans hurricane. But some, both within FEMA and in the journalistic community (Chris Mooney included), were. And if the Bush administration had a real respect for expertise and a serious commitment to at least checking into the alarms set off by specialists, we could've been better prepared. But they don't and we weren't. And if we don't take Chris's book seriously, global warming, peak oil, pollution, and a host of others are going to punish us for the oversight.

Again.

Thanks!

Enormous thanks to the kind reader who snagged me The World's Banker from my Amazon Wish List. Not only will I be more informed on global trade, but I now know the feature works, too! And so do all of you! In any case, I really do appreciate it when folks take the time to buy me things. I try not to ask for donations on this site, largely because the world has far better causes for your money than random tips in my jar, and since I occasionally ask you to donate to those better ends, I don't feel I should be constantly playing Santa with the bell. But the Wish List is, to me, a bit different.

All the books in there will make this site better, either by leaving me educated on a subject was embarrassingly ignorant on or adding more context and information to something I already know a bit about (that's why, incidentally, I put so little fiction on the list). It also allows you to be targeted, so if you like my health care work, you could get me One Nation, Uninsured, and if you wanted me to write more about Labor, you could pick me up The UAW and the Heyday of American Liberalism, and if you wanted to steer me towards something else entirely, you could always e-mail me with a "suggestion" of a book I'd be smart to add on. I figure, then, that the whole thing is very logical. If you like what I say on certain topics (or think that you would), you can put up some cash to improve my commentary on those topics. Seems like a good way of doing things.

So, in conclusion, thanks to my secret santa, and buy me books because I've rationalized them differently than donations.

If I Could Be Like Bobby

Posted by Nick Beaudrot

To maintain the Law of Conservation of Blog Post Length, I'll answer Ezra's book query in short order.

I just picked up The Gospel According to RFK to feed my Bobby "first New Democrat" Kennedy hero-worship. It's a collection of speech excerpts from Kennedy's 1968 Presidential campaign -- all quality stuff, but with enough length to remind you that even RFK doesn't drip eloquence from every single sentence that comes out of his mouth. There are plenty of good speeches, on health care, poverty, civic responsibility, and foreign policy, and while one out of every three chapters will draw out enough empathy to have you on the verge of tears, the rest of the book is "just" a bucnh of good campaign speeches.

It'd be tough to revive Bobby's political coalition, and his policies are a bit obsolete now, but if more Democrats learned to talk like Bobby, they'd lose way fewer elections.

Saturday Books

I had finals this week, so there's not been much interesting prose on my nightstand. I read a bit of Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture and am finishing up Nixon vs. Kennedy. But it's been more of a periodicals week, and the New York Review of Books has been leading the charge there. What'choo got?

Saturday Books

David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise: As mentioned below, I'm really enjoying it.  Yes, I know his examples sometimes don't hold water and his sociological brush is broad enough to use Australia as canvas, but it's still fun, he still has fascinating thougts and ideas, and he still brings a better, more incisive eye towards a certain subset of people than most anyone else writing about them.  Other books of this sort suffer from an unrestrained contempt towards their subjects or a desire to lionize.  Brooks, I think, likes living this life, but is nevertheless a bit ashamed at its inconsistencies and oddities, and the tone that that his conflicted indulgence results in is delightful.  Since I'm a Bobo in good standing, I'm loving the book.

Chris Matthews Kennedy and Nixon:  Yeah, that Chris Matthews.  Before he ran an inconsistent television show, he apparently wrote books.  More surprising yet, they're pretty good.  This one focuses on the troubled relationship between the two presidents when they were rising political stars.  They had an affinity for each other because they were both, basically, bloodthirsty.  Kennedy won Congress using an array of dirty tricks and bribes that make DeLay look like a choirboy.  As for Nixon, his red-baiting was legendary and actually provided the template for McCarthy's later perfection of the form (the Wisconsin Senator actually cribbed whole speeches from Nixon).  He was a nasty, lying campaigner and an absolute workaholic.  The two of them, in the end, were the same sort of folks.  It's just that Kennedy's looks, charm and money allowed him to get away with his tactics, even be admired for them while Nixon went down in disgrace.  In some ways, that's a much more profound judgment on Americans and how we treat criminals from different classes than it is a verdict on either man.

Rodney Stark's The Rise of Christianity: A sociologist's study of what sort of conversion rate Christianity needed to explode as it did (the answer?  About 40%.) and what sort of conditions allowed it to maintain the growth.  I'm not too far into it, so that's all I know for now.

What's on your nightstand?

Saturday Book Club

Slight change to this.  Saturday I'm just going to do books, both fiction and non.  Sunday I'll do music.  Rules remain the same: I'll put down what I'm reading/listening to, comment on it, and you'll do the same.

Victor S. Navasky's A Matter of Opinion: Navasky, the longtime publisher of The Nation, has written his memoirs on the magazine industry.  I thought the book would be a bit broader than it is -- this is really about the nuts and bolts of running a journal of opinion -- but it's still an interesting read.  Navasky's engaging, his early run-ins with folks who later became great are entertaining, and for an aspiring magazine writer like myself, the technical stuff is fairly interesting.  But don't go here looking for a political memoir; it's not one.  It has reminded me to read Charlie Peters Tilting at Windmills, though.

Nick Hornby's A Long Way Down and The Polysyllabic Spree:  I think I've blown through the guy's whole ouvre in the last two weeks.  High Fidelity, About a Boy, and A Long Way Down all got swallowed up (I'd previously ready How to be Good).  A Long Way Down is fun stuff, certainly.  You don't spend three hours at Borders polishing off anything that's a pain-in-the-ass.  But About a Boy and High Fidelity had a feeling that they needed to be written, that Hornby had something he desperately needed to say about life.  Not so here.  This one looks more like he thought of a clever plot device (four strangers go to a popular suicide spot on New Year's Eve, awkwardly meet, and decide to come down and stay in touch) and wrote a book to spin it out.  Enjoyable stuff, certainly, but nothing profound, nothing raw, nothing that really touches on your own life or gives you insight into another's.

As for the Spree, it's a collection of Hornby's essays from The Believer, all of which focus on how successful he's been that month at getting through the books on his reading list.  The general answer?  Not very.  As I have more sympathy for that condition than just about any other I know of, it's a book well worth having.  Proceeds from it also go to benefit 826, McSweeney's multicity nonprofit that teaches reading, writing, and everything else to kids who need the help.  As 826LA put on a bang-up reading last night (featuring my friend Josh Bearman and his shockingly good piece on The Metaphysics of Pac-Man) that included two free glasses of sangria, I feel all the better about the purchase.

As you can see, it's not been the most productive week I've ever had.  Blame school and the Supreme Court.  On the bright side, I found a book I desperately do want to read.  So if anyone out there would like to pluck The UAW and the Heyday of American Liberalism out of my wish list, I'd be much obliged.

Your turn.

On Literary Fiction

Not to march in on Fortuna's territory or anything, but this bit from Nick Hornby's Polysyllabic Spree is too good not to excerpt. He's talking about Zoe Heller's Desperate Characters and, by extension, all "literary" fiction:

It's brilliantly written, I can see that much, and it made me think, too. But mostly I thought about why I don't know anyone like the people Fox writes about. Why are all my friends so dim and unreflective? Where did I go wrong?
Toward the end of the book, Otto and Sophie, the central couple, go to stay in their holiday home. Sophie opens the door to her house and is immediately reminded of a friend, an artist who used to visit them there; she thinks about him for a page or so. The reason she's thinking about him is that she's staring at something he loved, a vinegar bottle shaped like a bunch of grapes. The reason she's staring at the bottle is because it's in pieces. And the reason it's in pieces is because someone has broken in and trashed the place, a fact we only discover when Sophie has snapped out of her reverie. At this point I realized with some regret that not only could I never write a literary novel, but I couldn't even be a character in a literary nobel. I can only imagine myself, or any other character I created, saying, "Shit! Some bastard has trashed the house!" No rumination about artist friends -- just a lot of cursing and some empty threats of violence.

That's generally how I feel, he just said it a lot better. Maybe when I'm older I'll like Ian McEwan, but for now, 40 pages of Atonement was all I could take. Meanwhile, I've read about 600 pages of Hornby in the last five days. I feel like a guy who walked out of the opera to shotgun beer in front of football. And, since I'm usually an elitist political nerd, I like getting a chance to be that guy.

Sunday Nonfiction

I told you I was going to stick with this. Yesterday was fiction, today is fact, tomorrow is music. The rules are I put down what I'm reading with my comments and you put down what you're reading with your comments. Or, if you're illiterate, you can just talk about what other people are reading. Off we go:

Nick Hornby's The Polysyllabic Spree: Couldn't pass this one up. It's a collection of essays Hornby wrote for The Believer on "one man's struggle with the monthly tide of books he's bought and book he's been meaning to read." Welcome to my life.

Earl Malt's Rehnquist Justice: Collection of academic essays on the Rehnquist Court, one for each Justice. Trying to bone up on what each member means to the country's judicial direction, and thus what it means when one or another retires.

Tony Horwitz's Confederates in the Attic: A narrative book exploring Civil War culture. Hardcore reenactors, confederate flag crimes, the Daughters of the Confederacy, and so forth. I could never live in it, but it's worth trying to understand.

Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America: Term paper, so I had to choose from the poli-sci canon. Figured I should use de Tocqueville so I can ostentatiously inject it into articles later on, making folks think I'm erudite without actually reading through the classics.

Your turn.

Airplane Reading

Oren, despite hating the first half, loved the latter part of Nick Hornby's High Fidelity.  I haven't read it, but I did pick up Hornby's About a Boy for the plane ride yesterday and loved it.  When 300 pages fly by in about 2.5 hours, you know you've been grabbed.  I've long left easy fiction simply because the habit was too costly (Hornby cost me $5 per hour of enjoyment), but with Amazon used, that's no longer so much of a consideration.  And I do need to get out of this masochistic reading phase, where it either needs to be nonfiction or the sort of fiction that supposed to build character and open horizons.  Enjoyment...not...bad.

Speaking of serious fiction though, I'm just about through Michael Shaara's novel of Gettysburg, Killer Angels.  Reading it, you understand why the South is able venerate this war, why they worship those who fought it.  It was a bad cause, but it managed to attract some impressive men.  True, the North won, but they won ugly.  And while the South lost, they did it beautifully.  The North seems to have been a puddle of incompetence and idiocy, bureaucracy and bad decisions.  The South?  Larger than life men, separate from the Cause but duty-bound to battle it out.  Underdogs who fought till the last inning without proper equipment and only lost by a few runs.  Generals whose traits allow them to be venerated by non-racists because they, judged by the time, weren't very racist.  if the North had had Lee and the South Meade and Hooker, not only would the war have been over quicker, but there wouldn't be the sort of timeless martyrs and heroes able to make the Cause such a mainstream, attractive obsession centuries down after defeat.

The Survivor

CJR's got a good interview with John Harris, author of the Clinton assessment The Survivor. I'm on page 340 of the book and it's a fun read; not much new if you've studied the era before, but about as good an intr