The Gulf War was a seemingly decisive military action led by the United States against Iraq in 1991.
Over a series of essays, French philosopher Jean Baudrillard argued the war was an expression of his concept of “hyperreality,” in which emerging visual media could be used to create something false that appears even realer than reality itself.
By 1995, he assembled these essays into a final, short book called The Gulf War Did Not Take Place.
Continue reading The Gulf War Did Not Take PlaceWhat Americans call a “housing affordability crisis” is really a mobility crisis — economic, geographic and social. Housing is where that immobility becomes most visible, and so expensive housing is more a symptom than the disease.
That’s from a new book by historian and Atlantic journalist Yoni Appelbaum called “Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity.“
In healthy economies, including for much of the American golden age, people move to better jobs, cheaper places, growing regions. In the US today, people are increasingly trapped in place. When people can’t move, demand piles up in a small number of “winning” metros. Prices explode there, while other places stagnate or hollow out. I’ve written on the topic this year myself here and here.
Appelbaum’s book recounts the long trends that are piling up today. He recounts how American zoning regulations were introduced for race and class control, not for genuine health or safety concern. Early 20th century leaders, including eventual-US President Herbert Hoover, misunderstood crowded tenements and single-family homes as the obstacle and the accelerant, rather than what they really were: the launching pad and the eventual destination for those who made it out.
That history has persisted to today, where regulation and competing priorities strangle what might naturally occur. As famed mid-century urbanist Jane Jacobs said, over-planning a community is “attempting to substitute art for life”
Below I have notes for my future reference from Greenbaum’s detailed book. It’s wonky, and less colorful than I expected, but for anyone invested in the topic, it’s worth it.
Continue reading The “housing affordability crisis” is really a mobility crisisA very small number of men dominate the most powerful and wealthiest positions, and are among the most aggressive humans alive.
But though this tiny number accounts for many disparities, and men have not taken enough domestic imbalances, their trend lines are worrying. Boys and men are going the wrong direction fast.
That’s from the 2024 book by Richard V. Reeves: “Of Boys and Men Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It.” It’s one of a growing collection of research and literature.
As Reeves writes: “We have an education system favoring girls and a labor market favoring men. Two wrongs don’t make a right.”
Below I share my notes for future reference.
Continue reading Of Boys and MenThe singular use of “they” is entirely consistent with other linguistic shifts, and even familiar to older periods of English. The term’s partisanship may come more from how quickly and forcefully the change, rather than the change itself.
That’s from linguist John McWhorter’s new book Pronoun Trouble: The Story of Us in Seven Little Words.
I’m a fan, and have read most of his other books. This one is consistent with his growing style: Using credible linguistics research to guide us through today’s language changes. It’s a quick and approachable read, I recommend it.
Below I share my notes for future reference.
Continue reading Pronoun Trouble by John McWhorterIn the 1980s, the American government spent billions of dollars on paramilitary campaigns to advance Cold War objectives. They also spent something like $20 million on a series of information campaigns.
Effective as it was, few are interested in celebrating the effectiveness of what more often got laughed about in military circles, including funding secret newspapers and distributing banned literature within the Soviet system, Poland in particular.
This is documented in The CIA Book Club: The Secret Mission to Win the Cold War with Forbidden Literature, a book published this summer and written by Charlie English.
The book is not really about the CIA, that’s just a particularly compelling subplot. Rather the bulk of the book is a thorough rehashing the Polish underground resistance and how that intersects and was often funded in part by the CIA. The subterfuge is inspiring in a sense, the power of free information. I enjoyed the book and recommend it to other history fans.
Below find my notes for future reference.
Continue reading The CIA Book Club“Market fundamentalists aren’t wrong about everything.”
Sometimes the right solution is to do nothing until there’s more information. Some markets do resolve themselves. Prohibition was a worse cure than the very real disease of alcohol abuse.
“But competition doesn’t mean we don’t have rules.”
That’s from The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market, a 2023 book from Erik M. Conway and Naomi Oreskes. They’re the journalist-researchers behind the influential 2010 book Merchants of Doubt, which identified the strategy of disinformation used to defend cigarettes and then climate denial.
When they wrote their 2010 book, they assumed those blocking interventions into tobacco addiction and then climate change were motivated by greed. Later, they realized it was because of a true and ideological market fundamentalism. This new book is answering how that pathological fundamentalism came to be.
A binary choice between the market and the state, between unconstrained capitalism and Soviet central planning is a myth, they argue. The “free market” category, and spirit, was a manufactured marketing and propaganda campaign. Instead, a sensible approach balances market and government interventions.
It’s not the problem that corporations don’t do more for society, they write, it’s that they stop governments from doing so. “If efficiency were our only goal, then market fundamentalism might make sense. But efficiency is a tool not an end.”
Below notes for my future reference.
Continue reading The Big Myth of the “free market”The 20th century “hardened an artificial distinction between professional journalists and everyone else.” The 21st century has crashed that down.
That’s from “We’re all journalists now,” a book written almost 20 years ago in 2007 by lawyer and constitutional law scholar Scott Gantt. As he wrote: “In a sense, we are returning to where we started.”
Gantt’s thin volume is a valuable representation of what was changing then. Below I share notes for future reference.
Continue reading We’re all journalists now: Scott Gantt wrote in 2007Mark Zuckerberg could reign “like the Queen,” writes Sarah Wynn Williams.
She’s the former Facebook exec turned whistleblower who’s new book Careless People details her time working closely with Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg and other international staff.
“I’m struck by the impermanence of importance,” she writes. “And yet, Mark could conceivably continue to hold his place cheering world leaders for another 50 years. He’ll see these leaders off in the generations of leaders that follow them.”
Other former staff at Facebook, later renamed Meta, were critical of Wynn Williams’s portrayal. But the book is detailed and riveting. It portrays not evil-doers, but, like the characters in the Fitzgerald novel that originates the book’s title, self-interested and vain people who have more power than they’ve earned.
“A different path was possible,” she writes. “We all would be better off.”
Below I have notes for my future reference.
Continue reading Careless People: a Facebook whistleblower’s accountFree will, as we commonly understand it, is an illusion.
Chemical reactions and and a complex interplay of far-flung factors shape what options come before us, argued neuroscientist-philosopher Sam Harris in his slim, sharp 2012 book Free Will.
“You can do what you decide to do,” he writes. “But you cannot decide what you will decide to do.”
The practical implications inform how to treat criminality, with a sense of sympathy for the unlucky bastards whose lives lead them to bad deeds. Strategic punishment is still possible, though, he argues: If we could incarcerate hurricanes we would, and we give justice to wild animals without calling it free will.
Below are notes for my future reference.
Continue reading Free will is an illusion: Sam HarrisDemocrats should be able to campaign by saying ‘vote for us, we’ll govern like California.’ Instead Republicans campaign by saying ‘vote for us, or they’ll govern like California.”
The American left lacks a central organizing principle, other than slowing progress with an ever growing checklist of rules: they need an alternative. So argues Abundance, a book by prominent, center-left national journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. As a perfect representation of the divided era, the book’s commercial success and the author’s rising popularity has created a backlash from many progressives. Classic liberal Klein in particular just seems to irk a whole class of leftists.
As the authors write in the book: “One way of understanding the era we are in is as the messy interregnum between political orders.”
Their “abundance agenda” is polarizing in part because their interest is in operating the current system, and many of their would-be-allies turned critics are not. The identifiers of “liberal,” “progressive,” “leftist” and “socialist” are discussed tirelessly among smart people with graduate degrees and little serious focus on governing. Many of them contribute to the dismaying see-sawing of elected Democrats, that have for generation focused on appeasing a diverse coalition.
The left, the authors write, “seeks legitimacy through rule following rather than through the enactment of the public’s will.“ The United States is a big distributed republic, with thousands of layers of government, at town, county and state levels, to experiment and demonstrate an ability to solve problems. Instead, as the authors argue, rather than solving homelessness in some Democratic city, leaders oversee a multi-year research phase to hire a BIPOC-led consulting firm that confers with a full list of constituent groups from identities, environmental and social causes to gather community feedback.
Nothing is solved, everyone complains. Most vote elsewhere next go-round. This has gotten Klein and Thompson lots of glowing praise from centrists, and ferocious pillorying from progressives. One small contribution I kept thinking about while reading the book: Lots of their perspective would play nicely in local political contexts, rather than vicious national conversations.
Meanwhile, public trust continues to decline, and green infrastructure is slowed. Setting aside the Biden administration’s ambitious IRA green energy bill and the Chips and Science Act focused on industrial policy, Democrats long ago gave up “supply side” policies. Their book argues that should change.
Politics today is a fight over what we have, or had — not what we can create.
Below I share my notes for future reference.
Continue reading Abundance
