Category: Books

“Troublemaker” Finally Convinced Peers That Hub Trees Distribute Resources to Kin

(p. C7) Over the years, Ms. Simard encountered no shortage of pushback. Government bureaucrats were reluctant to spend money on her recommendations. Her managers resisted changing their forestry models and perhaps “couldn’t listen to women,” labeling her a “troublemaker.” Fellow scientists challenged her research methods. This last may have originated in envy, but ultimately is an important part of the scientific process—after all, without stringent vetting, we might still believe that Vulcan is, indeed, a planet. Today Ms. Simard’s research is widely accepted. We now know that through fungal networks trees share resources, that mature trees (what she calls “hub trees” in her research, and “mother trees” when speaking to popular audiences) support seedlings, favor their kin and distribute resources, even in death. It’s a radical new understanding of plants.

For the full review, see:

Eugenia Bone. “Seeing the Forest.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, May 8, 2021 [sic]): C7.

(Note: the online version of the review has the date May 7, 2021 [sic], and has the title “‘Finding the Mother Tree’ Review: Seeing the Forest.”)

The book under review is:

Simard, Suzanne. Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest. New York: Knopf, 2021.

Non-Drug Treatments Are Under-Studied Because They Are Hard to Patent, and Hard to Test in Randomized Clinical Trials

(p. C3) In particular, decades of research show that mental, physical and social stimulation is one of the potential ways to ward off Alzheimer’s disease.

. . .

All of these findings come from observational studies that look at people’s existing lifestyle and cognitive health, as opposed to providing them with a “lifestyle treatment” and then assessing cognitive outcomes. The gold standard in modern medicine is randomized, blind, placebo-controlled trials, which are more quantifiable and objective, and there have been few such trials of lifestyle treatments for dementia and Alzheimer’s.

Those that exist have shown disparate results. For example, a study published in the journal Applied Neuropsychology in 2003 found that while mental drills could train people to do better on specific tasks like recalling words from a list, the effect didn’t translate into overall cognitive improvement. Clinical trials on social engagement are currently lacking.

One reason why the cognitive benefits of lifestyle enrichment haven’t been sufficiently studied is that nonpharmacological treatments such as physical exercise can’t be easily patented, so pharmaceutical companies aren’t interested in investing. It’s also difficult to use placebos. In drug trials, a look-alike sugar pill and a test drug are randomly assigned to participants, but there’s no equivalent of a sugar pill for enrichment activities. Instead, the control group either receives no intervention, a fact that can’t be easily hidden to avoid bias, or they receive some other interventions that may have effects of their own and muddle trial results.

For the full essay, see:

Han Yu. “An Active Lifestyle Can Help To Ward Off Alzheimer’s.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Feb. 27, 2021 [sic]): C3.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the essay has the date February 25, 2021 [sic], and has the title “Can an Active Lifestyle Help Ward Off Alzheimer’s?”)

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

Yu, Han. Mind Thief: The Story of Alzheimer’s. New York: Columbia University Press, 2021.

Chernow Channels McCloskey’s Index Card Advice

In her wonderful paper on how to research well and write clearly, Deirdre McCloskey suggests that we always carry with us a pack of 4 by 6 cards, so that we have them handy when we are hit by an epiphany or hear a relevant quote. (The suggestion probably also appears in the later book versions of her wonderful paper, but I do not have a copy handy to check.)

(p. C11) Mr. Chernow usually spends about twice as much time researching a book as writing it. He types up his research on a computer, so that he has it backed up, and then prints out the individual entries on paper with perforated edges that he can tear into 4-by-6-inch cards. (He was inspired to use index cards by Vladimir Nabokov, who wrote his novels on them.) He then files the cards chronologically and indexes them. His research on Grant fills some 25,000 cards packed into 22 boxes, all stacked up in the office of his Brooklyn brownstone under a big abstract painting.

For the full interview, see:

Alexandra Wolfe. “WEEKEND CONFIDENTIAL; Ron Chernow.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Sept. 16, 2017 [sic]): C11.

(Note: the online version of the interview has the date Sept. 15, 2017 [sic], and has the title “WEEKEND CONFIDENTIAL; Ron Chernow’s New Chapter: Ulysses S. Grant.”)

The main Chernow book discussed in the interview is:

Chernow, Ron. Grant. New York: The Penguin Press, 2017.

McCloskey’s wonderful paper, mentioned above, is:

McCloskey, Deirdre. “Economical Writing.” Economic Inquiry 23, no. 2 (April 1985): 187-222.

Private-Sector Experimentation Versus Washington Inertia in the Fight for Longer Life

(p. A15) Amid today’s technological wizardry, it’s easy to forget that several decades have passed since a single innovation has dramatically raised the quality of life for millions of people. Summoning a car with one’s phone is nifty, but it pales in comparison with discovering penicillin or electrifying cities. Artificial intelligence is being heralded as the next big thing, but a cluster of scientists, technologists and investors are aiming higher. In the vernacular of Silicon Valley, where many of them are based, their goal is nothing less than disrupting death, and their story is at the center of “Immortality, Inc.” by science journalist Chip Walter.

. . .

That is the backdrop to Mr. Walter’s absorbing story, which he begins with a visit to Alcor, the Arizona-based organization that says it preserves corpses at minus 124 degrees Celsius “in an attempt to maintain brain viability after the heart stops.” (Current “patients” include baseball legend Ted Williams.) While this life-extending strategy, known as “cryonics,” is often ridiculed, the individuals profiled in “Immortality, Inc.” are high-status, highly regarded figures whose initiatives can’t be easily dismissed. What links them, writes Mr. Walter, is that “they are all troublemakers at heart.” They believe that the “conventional approaches” of most medical researchers and practitioners are, “at the very least, misguided.”

. . .

While “Immortality, Inc.” is focused on aging and the efforts to defy it, the book is also a gripping chronicle of private-sector experimentation and ingenuity in the face of inertia in Washington. “As recently as five years ago,” Mr. Walter writes, “the great pashas at [the National Institutes of Health] . . . looked upon aging research as largely crackpot.” He faults the Food and Drug Administration for refusing to classify aging as a disease. As a result, clinical trials—the foundation of medical research—can’t be conducted.

For the full review, see:

Matthew Rees. “BOOKSHELF; Birthdays Without End.” The Wall Street Journal (Monday, Jan. 27, 2020 [sic]): A15.

(Note: ellipses between paragraphs, added; ellipsis within paragraph, in original.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date Jan. 26, 2020 [sic], and has the title “BOOKSHELF; ‘Immortality, Inc.’ Review: Birthdays Without End.”)

The book under review is:

Walter, Chip. Immortality, Inc.: Renegade Science, Silicon Valley Billions, and the Quest to Live Forever. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic, 2020.

Physicians Are Neither Trained Nor Paid to Express the “Medical Heresy” that Good Health Depends on Good Nutrition

(p. A17) Amazingly, medical schools in the United States focus very little on nutrition. The topic, according to one study, gets less than 1% of the classroom time that aspiring physicians are required to sit through over four years—even though the foods and beverages people ingest are far and away, in America, the biggest drivers of disease.

Because of the knowledge gap, doctors routinely miss opportunities to counsel their patients on the connection between nutrition and health—thus allowing bad eating habits to keep doing major damage. This failure is one of many indictments that Robert Lustig, a physician, brings against America’s medical-nutritional establishment in “Metabolical,” a wide-ranging polemic that covers the misdeeds of food and beverage companies and the misinformation that, in his view, contributes to the undermining of health.

. . .

Dr. Lustig’s real complaint is with “ultra-processed” products, which account for 58% of Americans’ calorie intake. Such products—candy, crackers, deli meat, frozen pizzas, fruit juices—are increasingly found not just in supermarkets and restaurants but virtually everywhere: movie theaters, hardware stores, gas stations, even health clubs. They’re typically mass produced, have a long shelf life and offer low nutritional quality.

How low? Dr. Lustig characterizes these products as “poison” more than two dozen times. To validate the claim, he describes in detail how the dominant features of such foods—high in sugar but also teeming with nitrates and refined carbohydrates—lead to cancer and other chronic diseases like diabetes and heart disease. Roughly 60% of Americans are afflicted with such diseases today (up from 30% in 1980). Relatedly, unhealthy eating has contributed to the decline in U.S. life expectancy in recent years.

That doctors don’t do more to steer their patients away from such hazards is only part of Dr. Lustig’s attack on the medical profession. He believes that, on the whole, doctors are “parochial,” taking their cues mostly from other doctors and thus succumbing to herd thinking. He worries that too many elements in their professional world—research, clinical meetings, webinars—are underwritten by Big Pharma and that the little nutrition science they know is compromised by studies that are sponsored by food companies. He says that doctors “don’t listen” to their patients and prefer to reach for the “quickest and easiest form of treatment,” whether it works or not, in part because insurance companies have limited the length of patient visits. “Talking about lifestyle changes takes time that we don’t have—because that’s how we’ve been trained and how we get paid.”

. . .

Dr. Lustig says that his book is “both my act of contrition to you, the public, and my act of medical disobedience to the medical establishment.” He hints that he could write such a book only after retiring from clinical practice—at the University of California, San Francisco (where he is an emeritus professor)—because “no ivory tower academic bastion would want to take credit for the ‘medical heresy’ that you’ll find sandwiched within these pages.”

For the full review, see:

Matthew Rees. “BOOKSHELF; Is It Something I Ate?” The Wall Street Journal (Monday, May 10, 2021 [sic]): A17.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date May 9, 2021 [sic], and has the title “BOOKSHELF; ‘Metabolical’ Review: Is It Something I Ate?”)

The book under review is:

Lustig, Robert H. Metabolical: The Lure and the Lies of Processed Food, Nutrition, and Modern Medicine. New York: Harper, 2021.

The Cholera and Bubonic Plague Vaccination Campaigns of Waldemar Haffkine Count as Evidence of “the Benevolence of British Medical Imperialism”

(p. C7) “In the end, all history is natural history,” writes Simon Schama in “Foreign Bodies: Pandemics, Vaccines and the Health of Nations.” The author, a wide-ranging historian and an engaging television host, reconciles the weight of medical detail with the light-footed pleasures of narrative discovery. His book profiles some of the unsung miracle workers of modern vaccination, and offers a subtle rumination on borders political and biological.

. . .

Inoculation, Mr. Schama writes, became a “serious big business” in commercial England, despite the inoculators’ inability to understand how (p. C8) it worked, and despite Tory suspicions that the procedure meant “new-fangled,” possibly Jewish, interference in the divine plan. In 1764, the Italian medical professor Angelo Gatti published an impassioned defense of inoculation that demolished humoral theory. Mr. Schama calls Gatti an “unsung visionary of the Enlightenment.” His work was a boon to public health, though his findings met resistance in France, where the prerevolutionary medical establishment was more concerned with protecting its authority.

. . .

(p. C8) Mr. Schama alights on the story of Waldemar Haffkine, the Odessa-born Jew who created vaccines against cholera and bubonic plague. In 1892, Haffkine inoculated himself against cholera with the vaccine he had developed at the Institut Pasteur in Paris. He went on to inoculate thousands of Indians, and so effectively that his campaigns served as, in Mr. Schama’s words, “an advertisement for the benevolence of British medical imperialism.”

. . .

The author notes the contrast between the facts of Haffkine’s achievements and the response of the British establishment, with its modern echoes of the medieval fantasy that Jews were “demonic instigators of mass death.” Yet Mr. Schama’s skepticism of authority only extends so far. It would have been instructive to learn why, when Covid-19 appeared, the WHO concurred with Voltaire that the Chinese were “the wisest and best governed people in the world” and advised liberal democracies to emulate China’s lockdowns.

Haffkine’s colleague Ernest Hanbury Hankin once wrote an essay called “The Mental Limitations of the Expert.” Mr. Schama’s conclusion shows the limitations of our expert class, which appears not to understand the breach of public trust caused by the politicization of Covid policy and the suppression of public debate. You do not have to be “far right” to distrust mandatory mRNA vaccination. As Mr. Schama shows, the health of the body politic depends on scientific inquiry.

For the full review, see:

Dominic Green. “Protecting the Body Politic.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Sept. 23, 2023): C7-C8.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date September 22, 2023, and has the title “‘Foreign Bodies’ Review: Migrant Microbes, Human Borders.”)

The book under review is:

Schama, Simon. Foreign Bodies: Pandemics, Vaccines, and the Health of Nations. New York: Ecco Press, 2023.

Burning One’s Own Book Is Protected by the Right of Free Expression

(p. C6) There are few sights as alarming as a book set alight. Igniting the printed word in order to destroy the ideas contained therein runs counter to our notions of enlightenment, deliberation and reason. It can also carry a message of contempt for those who consider the burned book sacred. But while there’s no need to condone book burning and plenty of reasons to condemn it, it shouldn’t be punished by law.

That principle is now in jeopardy in Denmark, which has witnessed more than 170 anti-Muslim demonstrations in recent years, including a number of public Quran burnings. In response, lawmakers have introduced a bill to criminalize “improper treatment of objects of significant religious importance.” Offenders would face up to two years in prison. In announcing the proposed law, the Danish government cited the problem of being “seen in large parts of the world as a country that facilitates insulting and denigrating actions against other countries and religions.”

The move marks a reversal from the Danes’ approach in 2005, when the publication of cartoons depicting the Muslim Prophet Muhammad in a Danish newspaper sparked worldwide violence. Then the Danish government stood firm in its defense of free expression, rejecting calls to censor—or even censure—the paper.

. . .

The Danish government insists that its proposal is merely a “targeted intervention,” claiming it will “not change the fact that we must maintain very broad freedom of expression in Denmark.”

. . .

Yet by treating religious sensitivities as inviolate, the measure risks legitimizing the notion that vengeance may be warranted against those perceived to have denigrated the sacred.

. . .

The impulse to outlaw expression that creates unease, offense and uproar is not unique to Denmark. Censors around the world designate speech as dangerous and subversive in order to silence it. Denmark needs to reassure Muslims that it is committed to keeping them safe, protected and respected. It should do that by upholding rather than betraying the country’s core commitment to free expression and human rights.

For the full commentary, see:

Suzanne Nossel. “Book-Burning Bans Are the Wrong Way to Fight Religious Hatred.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Sept. 23, 2023): C6.

(Note: ellipses added.)

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

Nossel’s essay, quoted above, is related to her book:

Nossel, Suzanne. Dare to Speak: Defending Free Speech for All. New York: Dey Street Books, 2020.

Mao’s Red Guard “Just Wanted to Beat Us to Death”

(p. C7) The Cultural Revolution is the monster that lurks behind the Communist Party’s claims of harmonious, orderly leadership in China. Under Mao’s direction, fanatical youth turned on their teachers, their parents, all figures of authority. This was an era of torture and violence, committed in many cases by mere children. Nobody was safe—perpetrators became victims, and victims took revenge. As many as two million died, and tens of millions had their lives destroyed.

. . .

In “Red Memory” the author explores how people in 21st-century China continue to process a collective trauma that the government would prefer to erase, even as the Party itself cannot put Mao behind it. The book unfolds as a series of portraits of people and settings tied to the events from half a century ago.

. . .

A music composer who was savagely tortured tells Ms. Branigan that he used to think there was some catharsis at work behind the violence, a correction of some kind to help bind people together. But there was not. “I wasn’t helping them at all,” he said of his tormentors. “They just wanted to beat us to death.”

. . .

The reporting in this book was gathered between 2008 and 2015, when Ms. Branigan was a Guardian correspondent in China. Poignantly, she observes that she could not have conducted such interviews today. In the past several years, even greater pressure has come down on those who wish to remember a past the Party wants to forget. People who spoke freely with her 10 years ago might not risk doing so today. The internet sites of commemoration have been shut down.

For the full review, see:

Stephen R. Platt. “The Chairman’s Children.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, May 13, 2023): C7.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date May 12, 2023, and has the title “‘Red Memory’ Review: China’s Cultural Revolution Still Echoes.”)

The book under review is:

Branigan, Tania. Red Memory: The Afterlives of China’s Cultural Revolution. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2023.

Nobelist Phelps Opposes a Universal Basic Income, Since Recipients Might Miss the Fulfilment That Comes from Meaningful Work

UBI below stands for Universal Basic Income.

(p. C9) And yet Mr. Phelps, the winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize in economics and emeritus professor of political economy at Columbia University, is among the most lucid, passionate and original defenders of capitalism. (He is also the founding director of Columbia’s Center on Capitalism and Society.) He disparages European-style corporatist economies as being unsuited to dynamism or innovation. Progressives who’d claim him as their own would do well to remember that he takes a hostile view of the idea of a universal basic income.

In “My Journeys in Economic Theory,” Mr. Phelps declares that it is “disappointing that UBI”—embraced by such modish politicians as Andrew Yang and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—“has not received widespread opposition.” The idea, if implemented, “would entice people and their children away from meaningful work and thus from a sense of involvement in the economy—society’s central project.”

It is this last, humane observation that distinguishes Mr. Phelps from the economists’ tribe, reflecting his belief that the nobility of capitalism lies in the chance it offers for prosperity and self-discovery on a national scale. He calls this phenomenon “mass flourishing,” words that make up the title of his late-in-life magnum opus, published in 2013 when he was 80.

. . .

It is apparent in his memoirs that Mr. Phelps wishes to be remembered most for his theories of the past two decades, which focus on the workplace and creativity. He believes that economists are mistaken in their supposition that the reward for work is pay alone. As he writes in “Dynamism” (2020), in America “it is very clear that work is central to a meaningful life.” People at all rungs of the economy “possess imagination and creativity,” and the modern economy is “a vast imaginarium” in which growth comes from “creativity within the workforce.”

Mr. Phelps underscores a connection between economic growth and job satisfaction. He urges economists “not to stop at the standard theory” but to explore an “uncharted realm” of human desires and fulfillments. There’s more to life than capital, mere employment and national income. And certainly more to economics.

For the full review, see:

Tunku Varadarajan. “On the Way to the Nobel, and After.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, May 13, 2023): C9.

(Note: the online version of the review has the date May 12, 2023, and has the title “‘My Journeys in Economic Theory’ Review: A Creative Nobelist.”)

The book under review is:

Phelps, Edmund S. My Journeys in Economic Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 2023.

Phelps’s magnum opus, mentioned above, is:

Phelps, Edmund S. Mass Flourishing: How Grassroots Innovation Created Jobs, Challenge, and Change. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2013.

University of Chicago Press Undermines Its Own New Edition of Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom

(p. C9) I had never read “Capitalism and Freedom” and was renewed in my admiration for midcentury American reading audiences. The book, full of tightly reasoned arguments about the principles of economic freedom in various spheres of life, sold 400,000 copies in its first 18 years. The University of Chicago Press, which first published the book six decades ago, evidently would rather it stop selling. The new edition’s foreword is written by Binyamin Appelbaum, a member of the New York Times editorial board, who treats Friedman’s classic text as mildly interesting artifact. “Friedman’s claim that ‘widespread use of the market reduces the strain on the social fabric,’ ” Mr. Appelbaum assures us, “misapprehended the nature of society, which is more like a muscle than a fabric.” I await Chicago’s edition of J.K. Galbraith’s “The Affluent Society,” with a foreword by Larry Kudlow.

For the full review, see:

Barton Swaim. “Of Markets and Morals.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Jan. 30, 2021 [sic]): C9.

(Note: the online version of the review has the date January 29, 2021 [sic], and has the title “Politics: Of Markets and Morals.”)

The book under review is:

Friedman, Milton. Capitalism and Freedom. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2020 [1st ed. 1962].

Humans’ Adaptive, Flexible Intelligence Evolved Where Climate “Change Was Dramatic, Frequent, Unpredictable and Stressful”

(p. C9) In “Origins: How Earth’s History Shaped Human History,” astrobiologist and professor of science communication Lewis Dartnell argues that “there is a clear causal chain taking us from the politics and socio-economic conditions of today, to their roots in historical agricultural systems, and then further back to the geological tapestry of the ground beneath our feet.”

. . .

The final sentence he offers as summation—“The Earth made us”—can be read two ways, capturing the parallel themes of “Origins.”

With emphasis on “us,” it refers to the origin of the genus Homo, a clade of naked apes giving rise to our species, H. sapiens, the greatest biological superpower of all time, one so potent that all others in our genus are extinct. Why did this emergence take place in the cradle of the East African Rift and nowhere else? And why did the arrival of our genus broadly coincide with the onset of high-frequency climatic swings about two million years ago? Mr. Dartnell concludes that this recently uplifted and intricately rifted landscape created a mosaic of habitats dominated by lakes that further amplified the climatic oscillations between dry-wet and hot-cool conditions. Change was dramatic, frequent, unpredictable and stressful. Thus “intelligence” became “the evolutionary solution to the problem of an environment that shifts faster than natural selection can adapt the body . . . driving . . . ever more flexible and intelligent behavior.”

For the full review, see:

Robert M. Thorson. “The Earth and Us.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, April 23, 2022 [sic]): C9.

(Note: ellipsis between paragraph, added; ellipses within paragraph, in original.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date May 9, 2019 [sic], and has the title “‘Origins’ Review: The Earth and Us.”)

The book under review is:

Dartnell, Lewis. Origins: How Earth’s History Shaped Human History. New York: Basic Books, 2019.