American mythology on the self-made man is more harmful than helpful.
So argues Alissa Quart in her new book Bootstrapped, which published back in March. I appreciate any thoughtful criticism of American capitalism, a system I’ve spent my career reporting on. This book seemed reflexively partisan to me at times — Republicans bad, Democrats good — which weakened the punch. But there’s lots to like in here. I recommend it
What can a campaign book say that a candidate can’t on a campaign trail?
I read them when I want to hear from a serious candidate with whom I am not especially aligned. Daily campaign reporting follows minor crisis. I like to understand how these candidates want to be packaged.
That’s why I read Florida governor Ron Desantis’s new book Courage to be Free. It isn’t especially well-written (no ghost writer?), and there’s plenty of trite talking points (lots of Fauci bashing). But there are a few worthwhile criticisms.
Below I share my notes for future reference (and plenty of questions he leaves unaswered).
You don’t actually know where you’re going, so how could you ever feel behind? One approach: learn widely, and you may be surprised.
That’s a takeaway from sports journalist David Epstein’s 2019 book “Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World.”
No surprise the book was comforting to many, gathering research into a pop science argument that we ought not specialize too early. It’s a nice gathering of academic work, though many of the examples looked more like a collection of remarkable people (of course Nobel laureates are also often artists). Still, I appreciated the take.
For parents: Let kids struggle in their learning (stop the hints). True and lasting learning looks like struggle. How to learn? Spacing out the learning, taking practice tests and using “making connections” questions — they all helped longterm but impaired short term.
We should enjoy math like we do music: as patterns and poetry with logic to understand our world and ourselves.
“Mathematics is a way to coerce the chaos into sense.” So writes mathematician Sarah Hart in her 2023 book Once Upon a Prime: The Wondrous Connections Between Mathematics and Literature.
Her book is a charming collection of how mathematics is used and appears in great writing — and bad writing too. The book has three sections: numbers as structure; numbers as metaphor and phrases and numbers as character. I enjoyed it, and recommend it for writers, readers and those interested in how the world works.
The fall of Neanderthal and the rise of homo sapiens; the fall of Rome, the rise of Christianity; the fall of Ghenghis Khan and the rise of Ming dynasty; the Age of Exploration and the splinter of the Catholic Church, the rise of capitalism, the fate of the American Revolution and where slavery took root and did not.
We only see history as a story about people, but tiny microbes are far more important. That’s the take by academic Jonathan Kennedy‘s 2023 book Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues. (After On Savage Shores, this is the second book in a row I’ve read by authors from southwest England).
For most of human history we didn’t know the microscopic level so we didn’t understand the role it played. Fewer than 1,300 of our ancestors may have lived at one time a million years ago, in part because of climate and disease, according to research released this summer. The effects of the microscopic world are bigger than we’ve yet realized.
This book picks up from an influential 1976 book called Plagues and People. It’s insightful and challenging and presents a new way to see the world. I recommend it. Below I share my notes from the book for future research.
Already hundreds of indigenous Americans lived in France before Cortes landed in Mexico in 1519.
Their stories are more complex, rich and nuanced than we typically understand. Too rarely have we followed their journey across the Atlantic to Europe, which they considered “savage,” especially because of the stark inequality they found.
That’s the focus of history professor Caroline Dodds Pennock’s 2023 book “On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe,” which she calls “a project of discovery.” Like the 2006 book 1491, this is part of an effort to add complexity to the post-contact era.
I shared notes from my reading below for future research.
If we have grown so rich so fast, why do so few of us think we’re living in utopia?
Something started during The Enlightenment, but everything really changed between 1870-2010, what has been called “the long twentieth century.” The world got richer and more technologically advanced at a rate many times faster than in any period of human history.
That’s the focus from economics historic Bradford deLong’s 2022 book “Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century.” This extends Robert Gordon’s effective 2016 book The Rise and Fall of American Growth.
What happened in 1870? Well, deLong argues that we “invented invention,” with the help of the research lab and the corporation. Globalization happened too because, by 1870, “ it became more expensive to conquer than to trade.”
The book is well regarded in economics and history communities that I follow, so I eagerly read and enjoyed it. I recommend it for anyone as nerdily interested as I am. Below I share my notes for future reference.
Corporations were invented in Roman times to extend the effectiveness of the government. Cicero called them “sinews of the state”
Over the next two thousand years, their form was refined but always followed the logic that they were meant to extend the common good of the nation. Queen Elizabeth didn’t charter the East India Company to make London merchants rich but to organize capital to help extend English rule; Abraham Lincoln chartered the Union Pacific railroad not for Boston capitalists but to bring a unified infrastructure. Profit wasn’t the state’s main interest but a deal was struck to allow for profit if value was created.
The Cold War turned corporations from tools to heroes, “a defining feature of western life,” to contrast with the Soviet Bloc — and that’s when we lost control of them. That’s a major theme from academic William Magnuson’s 2022 book For Profit: History of Corporations.
It’s dense but effective for anyone like myself with an interest in the foundation he provides on business, capitalism and economics. Below I’ve compiled my notes from the book for future research.
The United States remains the central leader in one of the most economically dynamic periods the world has ever known. We lack an organizing principle and shared vision.
That’s the overall argument from Scott Galloway, the business-school professor and pundit, in Adrift, his 2022 book centered around 100 charts on economics, culture and life. It’s a thoughtful, fun and breezy read for heavy material. It reads a bit like a textbook for the digital age.
A small segment of men out earn everyone else, but that’s not the dominant story of the American economy of the last 50 years: Men are falling out of the economy.
Overall: Higher rates of education, a sprawling prison population and antisocial-like behavior (despair) seem to account for at least five million missing prime-age men from the workforce.
The unemployment rate as an indicator entirely misses the crisis of labor-force participation among prime age men — because waves of men aren’t even trying to get formal work anymore. It’s ignored for many reasons, one of which may be that it doesn’t fit a progressive priorities, so it’s largely been voiced by conservatives — with a few exceptions. This is not happening in any other rich country save for Italy; This needs to be an issue of national and bipartisan interest.
That’s the main theme of Men Without Work: America’s Invisible Crisis, a book by demographer Nicholas Eberstadt. The book was first published in 2016, though I read an updated pandemic version published in 2022 amid dramatic economic shifts.
I’ve backed into this sort of trend-reporting when I covered how tenure rates have changed over time, and I’ve come across Eberstadt’s work elsewhere. I took his new pandemic release asa reason to read his full work. It’s urgent and nuanced and interesting and important.
