Category: Books

Kid Paid $100,000 to Skip College and Mine Asteroids

(p. 18) As I sat down for lunch at a restaurant in Los Angeles, I placed a copy of “Valley of the Gods,” by Alexandra Wolfe, on the table, and a waitress walking by stopped to peer at the cover. . . .
“It’s about Silicon Valley,” I began. “It follows this young kid, John Burnham, who gets paid $100,000 by this weird billionaire guy, Peter Thiel, whom you’ve probably heard of; he’s a big Trump supporter and spoke at the Republican National Convention?” — a blank stare from the waitress. “Anyway, Thiel pays him (and a bunch of other kids) to forgo college so Burnham can mine asteroids, but he doesn’t actually end up mining the asteroids and. . . .”
. . .
The book begins with the protagonist, Burnham (or antagonist, depending whose side you’re on), who isn’t old enough to drink yet but is debating dropping out of college to follow the Pied Piper of libertarian and contrarian thinking, Peter Thiel, to Silicon Valley. As Wolfe chronicles, Thiel, who has a degree from Stanford University and largely credits where he is today (a billionaire) to his time at that school, started the Thiel Fellowship, in 2011, which awards $100,000 to 20 people under 20 years old to say no to M.I.T., Stanford or, in Burnham’s case, the University of Massachusetts, to pursue an Ayn Randian dream of disrupting archetypal norms.
It won’t be giving away the ending by pointing out that it doesn’t end well for Burnham.

For the full review, see:
NICK BILTON. “Denting the Universe.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, FEB. 19, 2017): 18.
(Note: ellipsis at end of second paragraph, in original; other two, added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date FEB. 14, 2017, and has the title “Pet Projects of the New Billionaires.”)

The book under review, is:
Wolfe, Alexandria. Valley of the Gods: A Silicon Valley Story. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017.

Enforcing New Blood Pressure Guidelines May Lead to Serious Falls

(p. A23) “Under New Guidelines, Millions More Americans Will Need to Lower Blood Pressure.” This is the type of headline that raises my blood pressure to dangerously high levels.
. . .
The new recommendation is principally in response to the results of a large, federally funded study called Sprint that was published in 2015 in The New England Journal of Medicine.
. . .
A blood pressure of 130 in the Sprint study may be equivalent to a blood pressure of 140, even 150, in a busy clinic. A national goal of 130 as measured in actual practice may lead many to be overmedicated — making their blood pressures too low.
. . .
Serious falls are common among older adults. In the real world, will a nationwide target of 130, and the side effects of medication lowering blood pressure, lead to more hip fractures? Ask your doctors. See what they think.
. . .
I suspect many primary-care practitioners will want to ignore this new target. They understand the downsides of the relentless expansion of medical care into the lives of more people. At the same time, I fear many will be coerced into compliance as the health care industry’s middle management translates the 130 target into a measure of physician performance. That will push doctors to meet the target using whatever means necessary — and that usually means more medications.
So focusing on the number 130 not only will involve millions of people but also will involve millions of new prescriptions and millions of dollars. And it will further distract doctors and their patients from activities that aren’t easily measured by numbers, yet are more important to health — real food, regular movement and finding meaning in life. These matter whatever your blood pressure is.

For the full commentary, see:
H. GILBERT WELCH. “Rethinking Blood Pressure Advice.” The New York Times (Thurs., NOV. 16, 2017): A23.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date NOV. 15, 2017, and has the title “Don’t Let New Blood Pressure Guidelines Raise Yours.”)

Welch has a book that makes a similar point, though more broadly, to that made in the passages quoted above:
Welch, H. Gilbert. Less Medicine, More Health: 7 Assumptions That Drive Too Much Medical Care. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2015.

For Jane Jacobs, “Self-Certainty” Was Better than a Doctorate

(p. 17) Like the critic Pauline Kael and the conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly, Jane Jacobs arrived to churn the fertile soil of American cultural ideology in the 1960s, brandishing a disciplined populist intellect and a comfort with courting enmity. All three were middle-aged mothers by the time they would shake things up. That Jacobs, nee Butzner in 1916, would force a reconsideration of the nature and purpose of cities was an outcome her young adulthood would have hardly suggested. An unexceptional student at Central High in Scranton, Pa., she later studied at Columbia before failing to gain formal admission to Barnard and abandoning the pursuit of a degree entirely. These experiences, Robert Kanigel maintains in his biography “Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs,” left her with a distaste for the academy that she carried throughout her career.
Where others had doctorates, Jacobs had a self-certainty that was manifest early on. In a chronicling of her childhood so thorough it includes the number of times she was late for homeroom during her first semester of high school (seven), Kanigel recounts an incident in which Jane was expelled from third grade for urging her classmates to dismiss the entreaties of a hygiene instructor, who asked them to pledge to brush their teeth twice a day for the rest of their lives. In Jane’s view, the promise would be impossible to keep, making the request absurd.

For the full review, see:
GINIA BELLAFANTE. “Fighting the Power Broker.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, OCT. 9, 2016): 17.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date OCT. 7, 2016, and has the title “Two New Books About Jane Jacobs, Urban Visionary.”)

The book under review, is:
Kanigel, Robert. Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016.

Sapolsky Wrong to Dismiss Hunter-Gatherer Violence

(p. 15) Sapolsky proposes 10 strategies for reducing violence, all reasonable but none that justify the notion that science is the basis for societal advances toward less violence and higher morality.
. . .
In this section Sapolsky becomes a partisan critic, including presenting a skeptical view about the supposed long-term decline of human violence claimed by Steven Pinker in “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.” Sapolsky asserts that Pinker’s calculations include elementary errors, and that low rates of violence among contemporary hunter-gatherers mean that warfare did not predate agriculture. His arguments here are unbalanced. He fails to note that data on hunter-gatherer violence is relevant only where they are neighbored by other hunter-gatherers, rather than by militarily superior farmers.

For the full review, see:
RICHARD WRANGHAM. “Brain Teasers.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, JULY 9, 2017): 15.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date JULY 5, 2017, and has the title “Insights Into the Brain, in a Book You’ll Wish You Had in College.”)

The book under review, is:
Sapolsky, Robert M. Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst. New York: Penguin Press 2017.

The System Is “Rigged” by the “Unelected Permanent Governing Class”

(p. 10) With its broad historical scope, Eisinger’s book lacks the juicy, infuriating details of “Chain of Title,” David Dayen’s chronicle of foreclosure fraud — another instance of white-collar crime that went largely unpunished. With its emphasis on institutions and incentives, it doesn’t serve up the red meat of Matt Taibbi’s “The Divide,” a stinging indictment of the justice system’s unequal treatment of corporate executives and street-level drug offenders. But for someone familiar with the political landscape of the contemporary United States, Eisinger’s account has the ring of truth.
After decades in which Wall Street masters of the universe were lionized in the media and popular culture, star investment bankers — rich, usually white men in nice suits — just don’t match the popular image of criminals. Democrats as well as Republicans cozied up to big business, outsourcing the Treasury Department to Wall Street and the Justice Department to corporate law firms. Even after the financial system collapsed, the Obama administration’s priority was to bail out the megabanks — to “foam the runway,” in Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s words. The Justice Department became increasingly staffed by intelligent, status-seeking, conformist graduates of the nation’s top law schools — all of whom had friends on Wall Street and in the defense bar. In that environment, the easy choice was to play along, strike a deal with an impressive-sounding fine (to be absorbed by shareholders) that held no one responsible, and avoid risking an acquittal or a hung jury. (The book’s title comes from then-U.S. Attorney James Comey’s name for prosecutors who had never lost a trial.) Corruption can take many forms — not just bags of cash under the table, but a creeping rot that saps our collective motivation to pursue the cause of justice. As Upton Sinclair might have written were he alive today: It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his résumé depends upon his not understanding it.
There’s just one problem. While the “unelected permanent governing class” may have been willing to look the other way when highly paid bankers wrecked the economy, many of the workers who lost their jobs and families who lost their homes were not. Outside the Beltway, the fact that the Wall Street titans who blew up the financial system suffered little more than slight reductions in their bonuses only reinforced the perception that the “system” is “rigged” — with the consequences we know only too well. Many people simply want to live in a world that is fair. As Eisinger shows, this one isn’t.

For the full review, see:
JAMES KWAK. “Getting Away With It.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, JULY 9, 2017): 10.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date JULY 5, 2017, and has the title “America’s Top Prosecutors Used to Go After Top Executives. What Changed?”)

The book under review, is:
Eisinger, Jesse. The Chickenshit Club: Why the Justice Department Fails to Prosecute Executives. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017.

For an Autistic Boy, Siri’s Patience Is “the Gift of Common Courtesy”

(p. C6) Late in the book, as a girl in Gus’s school takes him under her affectionate wing, the reader watches it all through Newman’s trepidation, followed by the dawning recognition that her son is someone “who may never be able to be responsible for another life, but who is nevertheless capable of deep affection, caring and considering. Sure, those emotions started with machinery and electronics — trains, buses, iPods, computers — and, particularly with Siri, a loving friend who never would hurt him.”
Hence, the title – drawn directly from a New York Times article Newman wrote in 2014, about Gus’s bond with Siri, Apple’s “intelligent personal assistant,” who could endlessly answer his questions, keep her son company and express — in that flat, sweet Siri voice — the gift of common courtesy. It went viral and led to this book. Why? Because the autistic boy displayed the dream/nightmare of this era: humans bonding with machines to get what they’re not getting from flesh-and-blood interactions. In this chapter, late in the book, Newman gallops through all the continuing experiments that use technology to lift and unleash the autistic (including my own effort to build augmentative technologies).
This is fertile terrain, born of the gradual recognition that technology’s great promise may in fact be to summon, capture and display our most human qualities, both the darkness and the light, to pave avenues of deepened connection with others. Here’s where the autistic, with their search for alternatives to traditional human connection, are actually innovators.
Does it dehumanize us if tenderness is tried out first with a machine? While his hyper-aware twin is showing standard bright-future achievements, Gus tentatively feels his way through life. But make no mistake. Gus’s deft fingers — rendered with unsentimental affection by his mom — are feeling things others will miss.
At one point, Gus says, “Good night, Siri, will you sleep well tonight?” Siri replies: “I don’t need much sleep, but it’s nice of you to ask.”
Newman’s response could speak for the entire book: “Very nice.”

For the full review, see:
RON SUSKIND. “A Character Among Characters.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, Aug. 20, 2017): 13.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Aug. 16, 2017, and has the title “A Family Memoir Makes the Case That Autism Is Different, Not Less.”)

The book under review, is:
Newman, Judith. To Siri with Love: A Mother, Her Autistic Son, and the Kindness of Machines. New York: HarperCollins, 2017.

Record High Temperatures in London

(p. C6) During London’s long summer of 1858, the sweltering temperatures spawned squalor. With a population of more than 2 million, London had outgrown its medieval waste-removal systems, turning Spenser’s “sweet Thames” into an open sewer. Epidemics such as cholera and diphtheria ravaged the poor and rich alike. The stench, as we now know, was a symptom of a bacterial problem. But at the time it was believed to be, in itself, the cause of disease. The dominant medical notion of miasmas held that “noxious and morbific” contagion was carried through the air.
The heat of 1858 made the problem of London’s effluvia unignorable. At the end of May, Rosemary Ashton notes in “One Hot Summer,” the temperature was 84 degrees in the shade; there followed three months of hot days, with record highs in the 90s for the shade and well over 110 degrees in the sun.
. . .
The Great Stink, as the noisome ordeal came to be called, is a terrific subject for Ms. Ashton, the noted scholar of George Eliot, George Henry Lewes and literary London. She excels at unearthing and explaining the daily distractions of the nose-holding populace over the course of the summer: horse races, art shows, murder and divorce trials, even the breezes that, as Darwin noted, wafted thistle seeds across the English Channel from France. Ms. Ashton also convincingly uses the Great Stink as a backdrop to crisis points in the lives of three great figures of the day whose biographies rarely overlap: Darwin, Disraeli and Charles Dickens.

For the full review, see:

Alexandra Mullen. “The Stink That Sank London; As highs climbed toward 100 degrees, raw sewage roasting on the Thames created the ‘Great Stink’.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Aug. 20, 2017): C6.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Aug. 11, 2017.)

The book under review, is:
Ashton, Rosemary. One Hot Summer: Dickens, Darwin, Disraeli, and the Great Stink of 1858. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017.

Socialized Medicine “Mummifies Its Doctors in Spools of Red Tape”

(p. A17) One of the reasons patients find condescension from doctors especially loathsome is that it diminishes them — if you’re gravely ill, the last thing you need is further diminishment. But the desires of patients, Marsh notes, are often paradoxical. They also pine for supreme confidence in their physicians, surgeons especially, because they’ve left their futures — the very possibility of one at all, in some cases — in their doctors’ custody. “So we quickly learn to deceive,” Marsh writes, “to pretend to a greater level of competence and knowledge than we know to be the case, and try to shield our patients a little from the frightening reality they often face.”
Over time, Marsh writes, many doctors start to internalize the stories they tell themselves about their superior judgment and skill. But the best, he adds, unlearn their self-deceptions, and come to accept their fallibility and learn from their mistakes. “We always learn more from failure than from success,” he writes. “Success teaches us nothing.”
This was a prominent theme in Marsh’s last book, and readers may have a sense of déjà vu while reading this one. Like “Do No Harm,” “Admissions” is wandering and ruminative, an overland trek through the doctor’s anxieties and private shames. Once again, he recounts his miscalculations and surgical catastrophes, citing the French doctor René Leriche’s observation that all surgeons carry cemeteries within themselves of the patients whose lives they’ve lost. Once again, he rails against the constraints of an increasingly depersonalized British health care system, which mummifies its doctors in spools of red tape. Once again, he describes his operating theater in all of its Grand Guignol splendor, with brains swelling beyond their skulls and suction devices “slurping obscenely” as tumors evade his reach.

For the full review, see:
JENNIFER SENIOR. “Books of The Times; Surgical Catastrophes, Private Shames.” The New York Times (Sat., Oct. 7, 2017): A17.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Oct. 5, 2017, and has the title “Books of The Times; A Surgeon Not Afraid to Face His Mistakes, In and Out of the Operating Room.)

The book under review, is:
Marsh, Henry. Admissions: Life as a Brain Surgeon. New York: Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, 2017.

Reinvesting Profits Enables the Scaling Up of Success

(p. A17) Muhammad Yunus has big goals: zero world poverty, zero unemployment and zero net carbon emissions.
. . .
Mr. Yunus has long been a hero of mine for his innovative faith in the resourcefulness of low-income people.
. . .
If you want to motivate support for social enterprise, a utopian promise of “A World of Three Zeros” makes for a better book title than “Helping 60 Albanian Farmers Grow Herbs.” And Mr. Yunus’s paean to entrepreneurship does indeed deliver inspiration about the power of human creativity. But problematic arguments remain, especially his imprecise criticisms of the current economic system and the implausibility of replacing the whole system with social entrepreneurship.
A major problem is one of scale. Mr. Yunus’s many social-enterprise examples are all on the same micro level as the 60 Albanian herb farmers. And while there’s nothing wrong with making a large number of small-scale efforts to help a great many people, it doesn’t qualify as a whole new system for the $76 trillion global economy. Mr. Yunus doesn’t confront the scaling problem. He could have noted, for instance, that successful social entrepreneurs, unlike successful private entrepreneurs, by definition don’t get the high profits to reinvest in scaling up successes.

For the full review, see:
William Easterly. “BOOKSHELF; How to Solve Global Poverty.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., Oct. 3, 2017): A17.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Oct. 2, 2017.)

The book under review, is:
Yunus, Muhammad. A World of Three Zeros: The New Economics of Zero Poverty, Zero Unemployment, and Zero Net Carbon Emissions. New York: PublicAffairs, 2017.

FCC Spectrum Regulations Drive Innovators to Bankruptcy

(p. A17) In 2004 the FCC moved to relax L-Band rules, permitting deployment of a terrestrial mobile network. Satellite calls would continue, but few were being made, and sharing frequencies with cellular devices made eminent sense. By 2010, L-Band licensee LightSquared was ready to build a state-of-the-art 4G network, and the FCC announced that the 40 MHz bandwidth would become available. LightSquared quickly spent about $4 billion of its planned $14 billion infrastructure rollout. Americans would soon enjoy a fifth nationwide wireless choice.
But in 2012 the FCC yanked LightSquared’s licenses. Various interests, from commercial airlines to the Pentagon, complained that freeing up the L Band could cause interference with Global Positioning System devices, since they are tuned to adjacent frequencies. Yet cheap remedies–such as a gradual roll-out of new services while existing networks improved reception with better radio chips–were available. In reality, the costliest spectrum conflicts emanate from overprotecting old services at the expense of the new. With its licenses snatched away, LightSquared instantly plunged into bankruptcy.
. . .
. . . regulatory impediments continue to block progress. Years after the L-Band spectrum was slated for productive use in 4G, it lies fallow–now delaying upgrades to 5G.

For the full commentary, see:
Thomas W. Hazlett. “How Politics Stalls Wireless Innovation; The FCC unveiled its National Broadband Plan in 2010–but couldn’t stick to it.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., Oct. 2, 2017): A17.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Oct. 1, 2017.)

The commentary, quoted above, is related to the author’s book:
Hazlett, Thomas W. The Political Spectrum: The Tumultuous Liberation of Wireless Technology, from Herbert Hoover to the Smartphone. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017.

“The Tabula Rasa of the American Dream”

(p. 22) The four Keats siblings, John and George, sister Fanny, and a third brother, “star crossed” Tom, dead of tuberculosis at 19, were all well schooled in the World of Pains. The orphaned children of a shiftless stable hand, they survived on the miserly dole of a tea merchant appointed their guardian. “The lives of these orphans,” Gigante remarks, “do have the makings of fairy tale.” John trained in medicine before taking up the far riskier profession of poetry; reviews of his ambitious long poem “Endymion” were so harsh that Byron cruelly joked he was “snuffed out by an article.” George limped along as a clerk in various mercantile firms, dreaming of something more ­adventurous.
Gigante has had the clever idea of telling the stories of John and George as parallel lives, a dual biography of brothers.
. . .
In her view, George’s departure to America with his young wife, Georgiana, was “an imaginative leap across 4,000 miles onto the tabula rasa of the American dream.” And yet, nothing — nothing, that is, beyond his famous brother — distinguishes George from thousands of other immigrants who joined in the Western migration during the tough years following the French Revolution, when it became painfully clear that possibilities for advancement in class-stratified Great Britain were severely curtailed.
. . .
The land of opportunity was also the land of crushing disappointment. On his second trip to America, after blowing his inheritance on a dubious investment with his elegant friend and neighbor Audubon, and retreating from the bleak prairies to more civilized Louisville, George finally completed his sawmill. (He would have been wiser to invest in Audubon’s pictures of otters and buzzards than a crackpot steamboat scheme.) After a few years of profit, when he built a columned mansion equipped with slaves near the center of town, George lost it all again in the Panic of 1837.

For the full review, see:
CHRISTOPHER BENFEY. “Ode to Siblings.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, October 16, 2011): 22.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date OCT. 14, 2011, and has the title “A Keats Brother on the American Frontier.”)

The book under review, is:
Gigante, Denise. The Keats Brothers: The Life of John and George. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011.