Category: Books

“The Sense of Freedom That Flight Creates”

(p. B12) Frank Frederick Borman was born on March 14, 1928, in Gary, Ind.  . . .  When he was 5, Frank visited Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio, and a lifelong passion for aviation was kindled.

“Dad took me for a five-dollar ride with a barnstorming pilot in an old biplane,” he recalled in “Countdown” (1988), a memoir written with Robert J. Serling. “I sat next to Dad in the front seat, with the pilot in the cockpit behind us, and I was captivated by the feel of the wind and the sense of freedom that flight creates so magically.”

. . .

What awed him most, he said, was his view of Earth from Apollo 8. As he put it, “The contrast between our memories of the Earth and the color on the Earth and the totally bleak and dead moon was striking.”

It was an image, he said, that he would “recall till the day I die.”

For the full obituary, see:

Richard Goldstein. “Frank Borman, 95, Astronaut Who Led First Orbit of the Moon, Dies.” The New York Times (Saturday, November 11, 2023): B12.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date Nov. 9, 2023, and has the title “Frank Borman, Astronaut Who Led First Orbit of the Moon, Dies at 95.”)

The memoir Borman co-authored that is mentioned above is:

Borman, Frank, and Robert J. Serling. Countdown: An Autobiography. New York: Silver Arrow Books, 1988.

“You Will Do Your Best Creative Work by Yourself”

(p. A12) The value of gathering to swap loosely formed thoughts is highly suspect, despite being a major reason many companies want workers back in offices.

“You do not get your best ideas out of these freewheeling brainstorming sessions,” says Sheena Iyengar, a professor at Columbia Business School. “You will do your best creative work by yourself.”

Iyengar has compiled academic research on idea generation, including a decade of her own interviews with more than a thousand people, into a book called “Think Bigger.” It concludes that group brainstorming is usually a waste of time.

Pitfalls include blabbermouths with mediocre suggestions and introverts with brilliant ones that they keep to themselves.

. . .

Plenty of people have always bemoaned brainstorming. Longtime Wall Street Journal readers may recall a 2006 “Cubicle Culture” column that skewered the popular practice, and Harvard Business Review published a research-based case against the usefulness of brainstorming in 2015.

. . .

Sometimes leaders bring employees together to create the illusion of wide-open input, says Erika Hall, co-founder of Mule Design Studio, a management consulting firm in San Francisco. In-person brainstorming is part of the back-to-office rationale for many of her clients, and she generally advises the ones that truly want to improve collaboration to first carve out some alone time for their workers.

When Hall needs inspiration, she goes for a run.

“It’s freaky,” she says. “I will go run on a problem, and things will happen in my head that do not happen under any other circumstance.”

Others might find “Aha!” moments in the shower or while listening to music. Leaving breakthroughs to private serendipity can feel, to bosses, like losing control, she acknowledges, but it might be more effective than trying to schedule magic in a conference room.

For the full commentary, see:

Callum Borchers. “ON THE CLOCK; Switch Off Brainstorming If You Want Brighter Ideas.” The Wall Street Journal (Thursday, May 18, 2023): A12.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary was updated May 18, 2023, and has the title “ON THE CLOCK; Office Brainstorms Are a Waste of Time.”)

The book by Iyengar mentioned above is:

Iyengar, Sheena. Think Bigger: How to Innovate. New York: Columbia Business School Publishing, 2023.

Milton Friedman Made the Case for Freedom to 15 Million Viewers

New York Times reviewer Szalai says that watching Milton Friedman’s “Free to Choose” documentary today is a surreal experience. To the contrary, I say that watching Milton Friedman’s documentary today is an exhilarating experience and watching the the evening news today is a surreal experience. (As a graduate student at the University of Chicago, I was in the audience for a couple of the episodes of Milton Friedman’s “Free to Choose” documentary.)

(p. C1) The documentary series “Free to Choose,” which aired on public television in 1980 and was hosted by the libertarian economist Milton Friedman, makes for surreal watching nowadays. Even if Ronald Reagan would go on to win the presidential election later that year, it was still a time when capitalism’s most enthusiastic supporters evidently felt the need to win the public over to a vision of free markets and minimal government.  . . .

They had an enormous audience: The 15 million viewers who watched the first episode saw an avuncular Friedman (diminutive and smiling), leaning casually against a chair in a Chinatown sweatshop (noisy and crowded), surrounded by women pushing fabric through clattering sewing machines. “They are like my mother,” Friedman said, gesturing at the Asian women in the room. She had worked in a factory too, after immigrating as a 14-year-old from Austria-Hungary in the late 19th century. Friedman explained that these low-wage garment workers weren’t being exploited; they were gaining a foothold in the American land of plenty. The camera then cut to a tray of juicy steaks.

For the full review, see:

Jennifer Szalai. “Sounding an Alarm Over America’s Values.” The New York Times (Saturday, February 18, 2023): C1 & C4.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the review was updated Feb. 17, 2023, and has the title “Is the Marriage Between Democracy and Capitalism on the Rocks?”)

The book based on Milton Friedman’s documentary is:

Friedman, Milton, and Rose D. Friedman. Free to Choose: A Personal Statement. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1980.

Lister Used Data, Results, and Amiability to Convince Physicians to Sterilize Hands, Scalpels, and Wounds

(p. C6) What was the most dangerous place in the vast territories of the British Empire in the 19th century? Was it the savage savannas of Zululand? Perhaps the frozen wastes of the Northwest Passage, or the treacherous high passes of the Hindu Kush?

To judge from “The Butchering Art,” a fine and long overdue biography of the great physician Joseph Lister by Lindsey Fitzharris, the answer might be a much more domestic corner of empire: the Victorian teaching hospital.

. . .

Infection rates plummeted when Lister used carbolic acid to wash hands and scalpels, to dress wounds, and to sterilize sutures. He even sprayed it into the air of the operating room. But other physicians were skeptical and bitterly resisted the notion that their sloppy and unhygienic practices were the cause of so many deaths.

. . .

Lister won over his opponents, not with bile and rhetoric but with a relentless focus on data and results, coupled with his innate amiability. He paid particular attention to audiences of medical students, perhaps anticipating Max Planck’s observation that bitter disciples of old dogmas are never won over by new theories, they simply die off and are replaced by a new generation.

The modesty and compassion of Lister would have been remarkable in any man, let alone a surgeon. His patients and students adored him. Lister taught his residents that “every patient, even the most degraded, should be treated with the same care and regard as though he were the Prince of Wales himself.” After he drained a young girl’s knee abscess, the girl showed him her doll, which was missing a leg. As Ms. Fitzharris writes, “The girl fumbled around under her pillow and—much to Lister’s amusement—produced the severed limb.” Lister called for needle and thread and “stitched the limb back onto the doll and with quiet delight handed it back to the little girl.”

For the full review, see:

John J. Ross. “BOOKSHELF; The Butchering Art.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Oct. 14, 2017): C6.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date Oct. 13, 2017, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; Review: ‘The Butchering Art’ Resurrects Joseph Lister.”)

The book under review is:

Fitzharris, Lindsey. The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017.

The reviewer repeats the plausible but debunked view of Planck that old scientists do not change their views. The debunking occurs in:

Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. “Age and the Acceptance of Cliometrics.” Journal of Economic History 40, no. 4 (Dec. 1980): 838-41.

Hull, David L. , Peter D. Tessner, and Arthur M. Diamond, Jr. “Planck’s Principle: Do Younger Scientists Accept New Scientific Ideas with Greater Alacrity Than Older Scientists?” Science 202 (Nov. 17, 1978): 717-23.

Exponential Growth Is Not Inevitable and Has Seldom Occurred Outside of Computer Chips

(p. C5) Nothing has affected, and warped, modern thinking about the pace of technological invention more than the rapid exponential advances of solid-state electronics. The conviction that we have left the age of gradual growth behind began with our ability to crowd ever more components onto a silicon wafer, a process captured by Gordon Moore’s now-famous law that initially ordained a doubling every 18 months, later adjusted to about two years.

. . .

Bestselling tech prophets like Ray Kurzweil and Yuval Noah Harari argue that exponential growth will allow us to disrupt our way into a future devoid of disease and misery and abounding in material riches.

. . .

The problem is that the post-1970 ascent of electronic architecture and performance has no counterpart in other aspects of our lives. Exponential growth has not taken place in the fundamental economic activities on which modern civilization depends for its survival—agriculture, energy production, transportation and large engineering projects. Nor do we see rapid improvements in areas that directly affect health and quality of life, such as new drug discoveries and gains in longevity.

. . .

The conclusion that progress is not accelerating in the most fundamental human activities is supported by a paper published in 2020 by the National Bureau of Economic Research. The authors, four American economists led by Bryan Kelly of the Yale School of Management, studied innovation across American industries from 1840 to 2010, using textual analysis of patent documents to construct indexes of long-term change. They found that the wave of breakthrough patents in furniture, textiles, apparel, transportation, metal, wood, paper, printing and construction all peaked before 1900. Mining, coal, petroleum, electrical equipment, rubber and plastics had their innovative peaks before 1950. The only industrial sectors with post-1970 peaks have been agriculture (dominated by genetically modified organisms), medical equipment and, of course, computers and electronics.

For the full essay, see:

Vaclav Smil. “Tech Progress Is Slowing Down.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Feb. 18, 2023): C5.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the essay has the date February 16, 2023, and has the same title as the print version.)

The essay quoted above is adapted from Smil’s book:

Smil, Vaclav. Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2023.

Some High Performers Find Ways to Avoid Accumulating Microstresses

(p. C5) Have you had days that exhaust you extraordinarily without any particular reason why?

. . .

There’s a common but little-understood reason for that exhaustion. We call it “microstress”—brief, frequent moments of everyday tension that accumulate and impede us even though we don’t register them.

. . .

One study published in the journal Biological Psychology in 2015 found that exposure to social stress within two hours of a meal leads your body to metabolize the food in a way that adds 104 calories on average. “If this happens daily, that’s 11 pounds gained per year,” noted Lisa Feldman Barrett, a psychology professor at Northeastern University and author of “Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain.”

. . .

In our research, we observed that some of the high performers—a small subset that we came to call the “Ten Percenters”—were much better at coping with microstress than the rest of those we studied, and perhaps than the rest of us, too. What do they do differently?

. . .

. . ., they’re better at removing themselves from interactions that generate microstress in their lives, whether or not they realize the dynamic. Ten Percenters are more likely to shape these interactions by dealing with simmering disagreements head-on or by limiting such contacts.

. . .

Our Ten Percenters were also thoughtful about not creating the kinds of conditions that cause microstress for others. Think about what happens—to both of you—when you push your child too hard on their grades and it comes back in the form of a rebellious attitude. Or the stress you may create as a manager by unnecessarily shifting expectations. Stopping this cycle helps to prevent microstress from boomeranging back on us.

For the full essay, see:

Rob Cross and Karen Dillon. “Combating the ‘Microstress’ That Causes Burnout.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, April 22, 2023): C5.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the essay has the date April 21, 2023, and has the same title as the print version.)

The essay quoted above is adapted from Cross and Dillon’s book:

Cross, Rob, and Karen Dillon. The Microstress Effect: How Little Things Pile Up and Create Big Problems—and What to Do About It. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 2023.

Public Sector Unions Make Government Unaccountable to the Will of the People

(p. A17) In 2008, six years after securing control over New York City’s public schools, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and schools chancellor Joel Klein put forward a program to tie teacher tenure to student performance. The goal was to reward the best-performing teachers with job security, encourage better student outcomes, and hold teachers accountable for demonstrated results. To most New York residents, it surely sounded like a good idea.

To New York’s teachers’ unions, however, the program was utterly unacceptable. Union leaders lobbied Albany, threatened state lawmakers (who could pass legislation binding the mayor) with the loss of political support, and walked away with a two-year statewide prohibition on the use of student test performance in tenure evaluations. In short, the union thwarted the mayor’s authority over the city’s schools and commandeered the state’s legislative power.

In this case and many others, a public-sector union served its own interests at the expense of the public’s. In “Not Accountable,” Philip Howard shows in vivid detail how such practices have made government at all levels unmanageable, inefficient and opposed to the common good. He argues that, in fact, public unions—that is, unions whose members work for the government—are forbidden by the Constitution. The argument, he notes, would have been familiar to President Franklin Roosevelt and George Meany, the longtime president of the AFL-CIO, both of whom championed private-sector labor but believed that public workers—teachers, fire fighters, policemen, civil-service employees—had no right to bargain collectively with the government.

. . .

Mr. Howard makes a persuasive case, but the chances of seeing it affect American political life are, at the moment, remote.

. . .

Still, the goal is admirable and worth pursuing. In place of public-sector collective bargaining, Mr. Howard calls for a merit-based system for hiring and evaluating government employees. Instead of stultifying work rules that thwart creativity, he envisions a public-sector structure in which employees can use their talents and judgment to improve the functioning of government. Fundamentally, Mr. Howard views the Constitution, and the law generally, as a mechanism for both action and accountability, one that entrusts powers to inevitably fallible human beings while subjecting them to the checks of others in authority and, ultimately, to the will of the people.

For the full review, see:

John Ketcham. “BOOKSHELF; Unelected Legislators.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, March 14, 2023): A17.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review was updated March 13, 2023, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; ‘Not Accountable’ Review: Unelected Legislators.”)

The book under review is:

Howard, Philip K. Not Accountable: Rethinking the Constitutionality of Public Employee Unions. Garden City, NY: Rodin Books, 2023.

In His Bathysphere Beebe “Maintained a Sense of Childlike Optimism”

(p. 28) Beautifully written and beautifully made, “The Bathysphere Book” is a piece of poetic nonfiction that strives to conjure up the crushing blackness of the midnight zone. Full color, overflowing with stunning illustrations of the uncanny creatures that live beyond the sun, it raises questions of exploration and wonder, of nature and humanity, and lets readers find answers on their own.

. . .

As he slipped deeper and deeper beneath the waves, Beebe bore witness to “a black so black it called his very existence into question,” and saw creatures that could be recorded only by describing them to Else Bostelmann, a painter who worked like a police sketch artist to render animals she would never see in colors like “bittersweet orange, metallic opaline green, orange rufous and orange chrome.”

. . .

. . . he maintained a sense of childlike optimism that pervades the book, cutting through the limitless cold of the sea: “Having traveled the world from the depths of the sea to the highest mountains, tramped through jungles and flown across continents, Beebe was more and more adamant that wonder was not produced by swashbuckling adventures — it was a way of seeing, an attitude toward experience that was always available. At every turn, the world’s marvels were right before our eyes.”

For the full review, see:

W. M. Akers. “Under the Sea.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, June 4, 2023): 28-29.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review was updated May 31, 2023, and has the title “Deep-Sea Creatures of Bittersweet Orange and Metallic Opaline Green.”)

The book under review is:

Fox, Brad. The Bathysphere Book: Effects of the Luminous Ocean Depths. New York: Astra Publishing House, 2023.

Organisms Differ Based on How DNA’s Fluid Instructions Are Implemented by Different Cells

(p. 13) Martinez Arias, a developmental biologist, has lived and breathed the cell’s struggle to be heard over a career spanning 40-odd years. His story is one of DNA elites against hardworking, blue-collar cells. Cells, not DNA, Martinez Arias points out, determine the ripples of our fingerprints and the texture of our irises.

Martinez Arias builds his argument against the supremacy of DNA around Frankenstein-like experiments that involve borrowing a gene from one organism and dropping it into another. Take, for instance, the fruit fly PAX6 gene. When this gene is mutated, flies develop without eyes. Yet when a human version of PAX6 is swapped in for the fly gene, it makes a fly with fly eyes, not a fly with human eyes.

This is because fly cells are doing the work. Living things are much more fluid, Martinez Arias argues, than the concept of a DNA instruction manual would have us believe. An organism is less like a car, built according to a precise blueprint, he suggests, than a hobbyist’s renovation project, where the cells who live there build a deck or replace a light fixture based on the tools that happen to be lying around in the garage and whatever lumber is on sale at the store. Many of the differences between you and me are the result of accidents in time, enacted by our cells.

For the full review, see:

Alex Johnson. “Going Viral.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, September 17, 2023): 13.

(Note: the online version of the review has the date Aug. 15, 2023, and has the title “A Reason to Cheer for Cells and the Viruses That Feed on Them.”)

The book under review is:

Arias, Alfonso Martinez. The Master Builder: How the New Science of the Cell Is Rewriting the Story of Life. New York: Basic Books, 2023.

Medical Research Focuses More on Antibiotics Than on Phages Partly Because Antibiotics Are Easier to Patent

(p. 13) While recent events have provided a painful reminder of the very bad viruses that prey on us, Tom Ireland’s “The Good Virus” is a colorful redemption story for the oft-neglected yet incredibly abundant phage, and its potential for quelling the existential threat of antibiotic resistance, which scientists estimate might cause up to 10 million deaths per year by 2050. Ireland, an award-winning science journalist, approaches the subject of his first book with curiosity and passion, delivering a deft narrative that is rich and approachable.

In the hands of d’Herelle and others, the phage became a potent tool in the fight against cholera. But, in the 1940s, when the discovery of the methods to produce penicillin at an industrial scale led to the “antibiotic era,” phage therapy came to be seen as quackery in Europe and America, in part, Ireland suggests, because antibiotics, unlike phages, fit the mold of capitalist society.

Capitalists love patents. A funny quirk of the patent system is that you cannot patent entire natural things, but you can sometimes patent the way you extract their byproducts. The first antibiotics, being the secretions of fungi, were easier to patent in the United States than phages, which were whole viruses.

For the full review, see:

Alex Johnson. “Going Viral.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, September 17, 2023): 13.

(Note: the online version of the review has the date Aug. 15, 2023, and has the title “A Reason to Cheer for Cells and the Viruses That Feed on Them.”)

The book under review is:

Ireland, Tom. The Good Virus: The Amazing Story and Forgotten Promise of the Phage. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2023.

The “Woke-Mind” Is “Anti-Science, Anti-Merit and Anti-Human”

(p. 9) At various moments in “Elon Musk,” Walter Isaacson’s new biography of the world’s richest person, the author tries to make sense of the billionaire entrepreneur he has shadowed for two years — sitting in on meetings, getting a peek at emails and texts, engaging in “scores of interviews and late-night conversations.” Musk is a mercurial “man-child,” Isaacson writes, who was bullied relentlessly as a kid in South Africa until he grew big enough to beat up his bullies. Musk talks about having Asperger’s, which makes him “bad at picking up social cues.”

. . .

At one point, Isaacson asks why Musk is so offended by anything he deems politically correct, and Musk, as usual, has to dial it up to 11. “Unless the woke-mind virus, which is fundamentally anti-science, anti-merit and anti-human in general, is stopped,” he declares, “civilization will never become multiplanetary.”

. . .

The musician Grimes, the mother of three of Musk’s children (. . .), calls his roiling anger “demon mode” — a mind-set that “causes a lot of chaos.” She also insists that it allows him to get stuff done.

. . .

He is mostly preoccupied with his businesses, where he expects his staff to abide by “the algorithm,” his workplace creed, which commands them to “question every requirement” from a department, including “the legal department” and “the safety department”; and to “delete any part or process” they can. “Comradery is dangerous,” is one of the corollaries. So is this: “The only rules are the ones dictated by the laws of physics. Everything else is a recommendation.”

Still, Musk has accrued enough power to dictate his own rules. In one of the book’s biggest scoops, Isaacson describes Musk secretly instructing his engineers to “turn off” Starlink satellite internet coverage to prevent Ukraine from launching a surprise drone attack on Russian forces in Crimea. (Isaacson has since posted on X that contrary to what he writes in the book, Musk didn’t shut down coverage but denied a request to extend the network’s range.)

. . .

Isaacson believes that Musk wanted to buy Twitter because he had been so bullied as a kid and “now he could own the playground.”  . . .  Owning a playground won’t stop you from getting bullied.

For the full review, see:

Jennifer Szalai. “Self-Driving Czar.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, September 24, 2023): 9.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review was updated Sept. 11, 2023, and has the title “Elon Musk Wants to Save Humanity. The Only Problem: People.”)

The book under review is:

Isaacson, Walter. Elon Musk. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2023.