John
A book about what happens when a society recovering after a war and a pandemic is taken over by explicit and unashamed white supremacist thugs who worship a con man who thinks no rules apply to him and that he can do whatever he wants. This is a great book and I wish every American could read it and be warned … Egan knows how to write a page-turner.
Left you wanting a follow up book like “They Thought They Were Free” — an exploration of how the people of Indiana wrestled with having been part of a mass psychosis after the fever broke. We see now that, as Indiana was thought to be the Alabama of the North in the 1920s, it’s the Alabama of the north again today - deeply deeply in thrall to MAGA instead of its ancestor, the KKK.
A book about what happens when a society recovering after a war and a pandemic is taken over by explicit and unashamed white supremacist thugs who worship a con man who thinks no rules apply to him and that he can do whatever he wants. This is a great book and I wish every American could read it and be warned … Egan knows how to write a page-turner.
Left you wanting a follow up book like “They Thought They Were Free” — an exploration of how the people of Indiana wrestled with having been part of a mass psychosis after the fever broke. We see now that, as Indiana was thought to be the Alabama of the North in the 1920s, it’s the Alabama of the north again today - deeply deeply in thrall to MAGA instead of its ancestor, the KKK.
Disillusioned
This is such a worthy book on a crucial subject; painful in many places. The author's main background as an education reporter brought him into the story and, to his credit, he realized the larger forces at work and operating nationally as the elites keep fleeing "the last great thing" for the "next great thing" -- except that trying to do that now (now that the overall economy has stopped expansion in real wealth and overall wealth has become ever more grotesquely unequal) means that it's a game of exploding musical chairs, where they keep building a few nice recliner chairs with massage features every round, but most of the chairs have rotted so badly that when someone sits down they end up losing wealth instead of repeating the historic post-war run, where the racial spoils system meant that all the white GIs returning got to get into the Suburban Growth Ponzi Scheme on the ground floor, while people of color are like people who have to try to run to catch a bus that left the stop ...
He interviewed Chuck Marohn of Strong Towns while writing the book, and Chuck had him on the Strong Towns podcast in early 2024 -- it was a prickly interview because Chuck kept wanting to say "It's not about race, and the Growth Ponzi Scheme victimizes poor people on a race neutral basis" . . . which is only half-right -- because the way we segregated the suburbs through legal means (see "The Color of Law" if you are unfamiliar with the way the racial segregation was anything but happenstance) meant that family wealth has never happened for most families of color, and now that the music keeps stopping more and more as the economy increasingly becomes nothing but casino speculation, it's overwhelmingly the case that the most frequent victims of the exploding chairs in the musical chairs game are the people of color who, had they been allowed to build wealth on an equal basis with whites after WWII, would be vastly ahead of where they are now.
Except for things funded by gas taxes, we've stopped lavishing wealth on the suburbs -- just as the folks who benefited the most from that practice now flee for the exurbs and privatized schools and services.
This is such a worthy book on a crucial subject; painful in many places. The author's main background as an education reporter brought him into the story and, to his credit, he realized the larger forces at work and operating nationally as the elites keep fleeing "the last great thing" for the "next great thing" -- except that trying to do that now (now that the overall economy has stopped expansion in real wealth and overall wealth has become ever more grotesquely unequal) means that it's a game of exploding musical chairs, where they keep building a few nice recliner chairs with massage features every round, but most of the chairs have rotted so badly that when someone sits down they end up losing wealth instead of repeating the historic post-war run, where the racial spoils system meant that all the white GIs returning got to get into the Suburban Growth Ponzi Scheme on the ground floor, while people of color are like people who have to try to run to catch a bus that left the stop ...
He interviewed Chuck Marohn of Strong Towns while writing the book, and Chuck had him on the Strong Towns podcast in early 2024 -- it was a prickly interview because Chuck kept wanting to say "It's not about race, and the Growth Ponzi Scheme victimizes poor people on a race neutral basis" . . . which is only half-right -- because the way we segregated the suburbs through legal means (see "The Color of Law" if you are unfamiliar with the way the racial segregation was anything but happenstance) meant that family wealth has never happened for most families of color, and now that the music keeps stopping more and more as the economy increasingly becomes nothing but casino speculation, it's overwhelmingly the case that the most frequent victims of the exploding chairs in the musical chairs game are the people of color who, had they been allowed to build wealth on an equal basis with whites after WWII, would be vastly ahead of where they are now.
Except for things funded by gas taxes, we've stopped lavishing wealth on the suburbs -- just as the folks who benefited the most from that practice now flee for the exurbs and privatized schools and services.
This is actually a 4.5 star review with two 1-star deductions for howling errors that seem to stem mainly the author’s self-regard for his own mathematical savvy and the kind of “I’m clever in this area, so I must be clever in this area too” bias that trips up so many.
Overall, it’s a good update of the themes from some better but older books in the genre such as “Innumeracy” and “A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper” and Jordan Ellenberg’s “How Not to Be Wrong.” Chapter 7, “Alternate Realities” about the misuse of statistics in the criminal justice system is especially worthwhile and important, and the three short appendices explaining various examples of mathematical errors are quite good.
The deductions are for an early comment accusing Al Gore of cherry-picking data in his famous slide-deck presentations by showing what the Florida coastline would look like if the Greenland ice sheet melted, causing see levels to rise 20 feet. Seife notes that Gore is right to warn about sea level rise — but he wrote “It’s just that sea levels aren’t going to rise twenty feet anytime soon.” Here in 2024 — but also in 2010 — there was lots of evidence that our models of the effects of climate instability are persistently and systematically UNDERestimating both the pace and severity of changes. It reads as if Seife was dying to find an example of cherry picking that he could hang on a Democrat, so he simply asserted something that, alas, seems less certain every day, that we needn’t concern ourselves “anytime soon” with what a world without Greenland ice would look like.
The second star is deducted because Seife does only the most superficial gloss on the math of voting methods and ends up saying that it’s all just sport and that we like third party spoilers because it makes elections more interesting. Instead of noting that the entire gerrymandering problem he spends significant time covering is the result of the arcane single-member district system that is not constitutionally required, Seife simply asserts that we can simply use non-partisan redistricting commissions to abolish gerrymandering … which ignores the consequence of self-sorting, which is giving white rural voters a significant over representation in the US House to go with their significant overweight in power through the US Senate. Seife attacks ranked-choice voting and asserts — in direct contradiction to substantial evidence — that voter errors would “go through the roof” if ranked choice ballots are adopted.
ISBN 978-0-670-02216-8, 2010 Viking Press
This is actually a 4.5 star review with two 1-star deductions for howling errors that seem to stem mainly the author’s self-regard for his own mathematical savvy and the kind of “I’m clever in this area, so I must be clever in this area too” bias that trips up so many.
Overall, it’s a good update of the themes from some better but older books in the genre such as “Innumeracy” and “A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper” and Jordan Ellenberg’s “How Not to Be Wrong.” Chapter 7, “Alternate Realities” about the misuse of statistics in the criminal justice system is especially worthwhile and important, and the three short appendices explaining various examples of mathematical errors are quite good.
The deductions are for an early comment accusing Al Gore of cherry-picking data in his famous slide-deck presentations by showing what the Florida coastline would look like if the Greenland ice sheet melted, causing see levels to rise 20 feet. Seife notes that Gore is right to warn about sea level rise — but he wrote “It’s just that sea levels aren’t going to rise twenty feet anytime soon.” Here in 2024 — but also in 2010 — there was lots of evidence that our models of the effects of climate instability are persistently and systematically UNDERestimating both the pace and severity of changes. It reads as if Seife was dying to find an example of cherry picking that he could hang on a Democrat, so he simply asserted something that, alas, seems less certain every day, that we needn’t concern ourselves “anytime soon” with what a world without Greenland ice would look like.
The second star is deducted because Seife does only the most superficial gloss on the math of voting methods and ends up saying that it’s all just sport and that we like third party spoilers because it makes elections more interesting. Instead of noting that the entire gerrymandering problem he spends significant time covering is the result of the arcane single-member district system that is not constitutionally required, Seife simply asserts that we can simply use non-partisan redistricting commissions to abolish gerrymandering … which ignores the consequence of self-sorting, which is giving white rural voters a significant over representation in the US House to go with their significant overweight in power through the US Senate. Seife attacks ranked-choice voting and asserts — in direct contradiction to substantial evidence — that voter errors would “go through the roof” if ranked choice ballots are adopted.
ISBN 978-0-670-02216-8, 2010 Viking Press
This is the BEST book on education ever — I’ve read it a couple times now and it just makes me so sad that I didn’t have a teacher like Paul Lockhart, and it makes me crazy that despite his book, the US has doubled and tripled down on drone model “math education” that, as he says, is exquisitely well designed to crush any interest in or desire to engage with anything mathematical. If we in the USA taught reproduction as well as we teach math, we’d have a collapsing population that would make Japan’s birth dearth seem like a population explosion.
This is the BEST book on education ever — I’ve read it a couple times now and it just makes me so sad that I didn’t have a teacher like Paul Lockhart, and it makes me crazy that despite his book, the US has doubled and tripled down on drone model “math education” that, as he says, is exquisitely well designed to crush any interest in or desire to engage with anything mathematical. If we in the USA taught reproduction as well as we teach math, we’d have a collapsing population that would make Japan’s birth dearth seem like a population explosion.
Enjoyable natural history and philosophy a la Stephen Jay Gould. Very readable.
Enjoyable natural history and philosophy a la Stephen Jay Gould. Very readable.
Hooked on Chess
An amazing life story, and a real window into how life was much less brutal, at least for white men, in the post-war period before 1980. Instead of saddling the talented Mr. Hook with huge debts as we do with students today, the government paid (twice) to send him to art schools so that he could pursue his calling as an artist, and he ended up getting some significant grants for his artwork, which allowed him to pursue his triple avocations of chess, gambling and art. He built an amazing life that, if you proposed it for a script today, would be thrown out as completely implausible. He’s was not the greatest writer but he does convey a fantastic story and you end up greatly regretting not having been able to spend time with him and hear some of his stories.
An amazing life story, and a real window into how life was much less brutal, at least for white men, in the post-war period before 1980. Instead of saddling the talented Mr. Hook with huge debts as we do with students today, the government paid (twice) to send him to art schools so that he could pursue his calling as an artist, and he ended up getting some significant grants for his artwork, which allowed him to pursue his triple avocations of chess, gambling and art. He built an amazing life that, if you proposed it for a script today, would be thrown out as completely implausible. He’s was not the greatest writer but he does convey a fantastic story and you end up greatly regretting not having been able to spend time with him and hear some of his stories.
Very worthwhile — profiles people who have figured out that you don’t change minds by trying to force people to let go of their beliefs in favor of yours, but rather by using normal professional sales techniques (believe in what you’re selling, sell the benefits, don’t adopt your competitors’ frames, etc.) and listening to people to find out what THEIR concerns are, rather than just insisting that they should be concerned with what you are concerned with. Quite a hopeful book all in all. I was impressed, liked it much more than I thought I would. Would recommend most highly.
Very worthwhile — profiles people who have figured out that you don’t change minds by trying to force people to let go of their beliefs in favor of yours, but rather by using normal professional sales techniques (believe in what you’re selling, sell the benefits, don’t adopt your competitors’ frames, etc.) and listening to people to find out what THEIR concerns are, rather than just insisting that they should be concerned with what you are concerned with. Quite a hopeful book all in all. I was impressed, liked it much more than I thought I would. Would recommend most highly.
Homesick
Heartfelt book, occasionally lyrical, occasionally tedious and hectoring. It doesn’t fully deliver on its promise or spend nearly enough space on trying to understand exactly how the spiders in private equity funds spin webs around cities and towns to keep the game of musical chairs going (always making sure there is less housing than people so as to keep people desperate for a place they can be safe in). He doesn’t wrestle at all with city/county budgeting or where the money is supposed to come from to create these community land trusts that he places so much reliance on for a better future. He alludes briefly to neighbor NIMBYs who profess that “housing is a human right” while doing everything possible to ensure that no one builds any near them, especially if it’s for poor people.
Perhaps the best part of the book is his clear-eyed realization that a system built around private profit will always configure itself to optimize the net profit from the system — not the amount of housing. This is an insight that far too many who write about housing miss — they rail about “market failures” in the housing arena, not realizing that an unstable market that whipsaws people (booms and busts) is not a failure at all for those with capital who like to buy low and sell high, and for whom boom-bust cycles are necessary. Talking about market failures while a few are becoming rich off of the housing market means you don’t understand — a market that is generating profits is no failure, it’s working just as designed. So of course change is hard, because the few who benefit enormously from this system have every incentive to spend big buying politicians who only attack housing shortages (intentional and unintentional) with ineffective solutions that are only capable of perpetuating the problem on an ever-larger scale (while they make comforting but useless noises about “caring” and “fighting for” affordable housing).
Heartfelt book, occasionally lyrical, occasionally tedious and hectoring. It doesn’t fully deliver on its promise or spend nearly enough space on trying to understand exactly how the spiders in private equity funds spin webs around cities and towns to keep the game of musical chairs going (always making sure there is less housing than people so as to keep people desperate for a place they can be safe in). He doesn’t wrestle at all with city/county budgeting or where the money is supposed to come from to create these community land trusts that he places so much reliance on for a better future. He alludes briefly to neighbor NIMBYs who profess that “housing is a human right” while doing everything possible to ensure that no one builds any near them, especially if it’s for poor people.
Perhaps the best part of the book is his clear-eyed realization that a system built around private profit will always configure itself to optimize the net profit from the system — not the amount of housing. This is an insight that far too many who write about housing miss — they rail about “market failures” in the housing arena, not realizing that an unstable market that whipsaws people (booms and busts) is not a failure at all for those with capital who like to buy low and sell high, and for whom boom-bust cycles are necessary. Talking about market failures while a few are becoming rich off of the housing market means you don’t understand — a market that is generating profits is no failure, it’s working just as designed. So of course change is hard, because the few who benefit enormously from this system have every incentive to spend big buying politicians who only attack housing shortages (intentional and unintentional) with ineffective solutions that are only capable of perpetuating the problem on an ever-larger scale (while they make comforting but useless noises about “caring” and “fighting for” affordable housing).
Actually should be a five star review for the quality of writing and for the chills it delivers, and the quality of analysis. The last chapter cost it a star — basically, it’s “Well, those minorities who enjoy all this excess power that is structurally theirs because of big defects in our system might agree to give that up one day.” It was like reading a gripping book about climate change and then having a chapter at the end that says “Don’t despair, fossil fuel interests and the wealthy folks who cause the most emissions will come around one day for sure!”
Actually should be a five star review for the quality of writing and for the chills it delivers, and the quality of analysis. The last chapter cost it a star — basically, it’s “Well, those minorities who enjoy all this excess power that is structurally theirs because of big defects in our system might agree to give that up one day.” It was like reading a gripping book about climate change and then having a chapter at the end that says “Don’t despair, fossil fuel interests and the wealthy folks who cause the most emissions will come around one day for sure!”
Powerful powerful book. Hard to put down, and I think of it often.
Powerful powerful book. Hard to put down, and I think of it often.
Very surprising to me that Mother Jones writer Schulman could write such a boring book, at least the first third of it. This is another book that is made fat with needless pages because of the refusal to use pictures and diagrams. Family Trees would’ve been amazingly helpful For keeping the people sorted out, and Trees illustrating the corporate mergers among all the Banking entities would have spared us readers many, many paragraphs and confusion about who we were reading about. Imagine trying to solve a crossword puzzle where you only have the clues in words and you don’t have a graphic showing where the blanks are and where the dead squares are. That’s what much of this book is like. There’s some fascinating material in there but it’s really hard to access and keep organized in your mind.
When they do the post-Mortem on printed books and why people stopped reading them in printed form, this book will be discussed. I usually prefer printed books, but this is one where I kept wanting to have access to Wikipedia and other resources to try to fill the gaps in the presentation of this material. The biggest problem is that the book is really about one particular banker, Schiff, and that’s when the book starts to pick up and get a lot more interesting. It ends very strongly In the chapters about the gross antisemitism of the Gilded Age, and the rise of Hitler in Germany. If the author had simply focused the book on the story of Schiff from the start, much of the rest could’ve been told in digressions, and then backstory in a much more comprehensible and interesting way.
Very surprising to me that Mother Jones writer Schulman could write such a boring book, at least the first third of it. This is another book that is made fat with needless pages because of the refusal to use pictures and diagrams. Family Trees would’ve been amazingly helpful For keeping the people sorted out, and Trees illustrating the corporate mergers among all the Banking entities would have spared us readers many, many paragraphs and confusion about who we were reading about. Imagine trying to solve a crossword puzzle where you only have the clues in words and you don’t have a graphic showing where the blanks are and where the dead squares are. That’s what much of this book is like. There’s some fascinating material in there but it’s really hard to access and keep organized in your mind.
When they do the post-Mortem on printed books and why people stopped reading them in printed form, this book will be discussed. I usually prefer printed books, but this is one where I kept wanting to have access to Wikipedia and other resources to try to fill the gaps in the presentation of this material. The biggest problem is that the book is really about one particular banker, Schiff, and that’s when the book starts to pick up and get a lot more interesting. It ends very strongly In the chapters about the gross antisemitism of the Gilded Age, and the rise of Hitler in Germany. If the author had simply focused the book on the story of Schiff from the start, much of the rest could’ve been told in digressions, and then backstory in a much more comprehensible and interesting way.
There is a great, long magazine article concealed in this book. The best part is at the end when she makes the connection between fringe beliefs, and The rich fertile Ground of antisemitism.
There is a great, long magazine article concealed in this book. The best part is at the end when she makes the connection between fringe beliefs, and The rich fertile Ground of antisemitism.
