Angela Ambroz
Defeated! DNF. This book defeated me, and I assumed that was my problem. But it defeated even my (usually very diligent) book club! And, even though I read through this at a sluggish, slogging pace, I did genuinely enjoy it! Ah, what to do.
Ehhh. I get what it's trying to go for. Math is expansive - a huge cultural thing that encompasses so many activities and tools and practices and problems. But this just comes across as vague. Math is eveeeryyyythiiingggg. I feel like a kid would be like, “uh okay”.
That said, we don't have books that are like “What is literacy?”/”What is reading?” Which would also be hard. I mean, maybe we do have those books. But they can't possibly be any more successful in conveying it?
This is a lively, even frisky account of the 2001 Argentine financial crash. Written by a journalist with great passion and brio, it enlivens what can sometimes seem the most dull of disciplines (macroeconomics) - reminding us that macro isn't just impenetrable dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models (why, God, whyyy), it's people and money and market panic. It's big, and it can have huge, rippling effects throughout countries and the world. Indeed, I haven't seen dismal science humanized this well since n+1's excellent Diary of a Very Bad Year (about the 2008 global financial crisis).
Blustein's pen is wide-ranging, knowledgeable, sardonic and scathing: it spares no one. We get some great peeks into the inner workings, and culture, of the IMF. We get a fairly damning critique of the IMF for being too circumspect in dealing with zombie countries: countries with enormous foreign debt, floundering in a recession, unwilling to loosen their dollar-peso currency peg. Indeed, Blustein's main message is that Argentina should have cut the cord much sooner, letting the Argentine peso float and then, presumably, plummet. The wings here are clearly burning, the best we can do is cushion the fall!
There are similarly damning portrayals of Wall Street emerging market traders; and then vulture-like “rogue creditors”, who hunt for the heavily indebted in order to buy the debt cheap and then sue the debtor for the full amount later, thereby reaping great profit. Did you know the Styrofoam billionaire (via inheritance, ahem), Kenneth Dart, is basically a vulture creditor on Argentina? Suing them when they underwent this massive country-level default, holding out for ten years (!), and trying to seize Argentine assets? This blew my mind. Blew. My. Mind. Make a better little white crumbly cup, Kenneth, for the love of Jesus! Stop capitalizing on the economic agony of millions! This is not what capitalism is about! My Lord. Talk about parasite. (And no wonder Argentina doesn't like him and has called him “enemy number one”.) Blustein, indeed, uses Dart as an unsavory symbol for the collective action problem: when creditors refuse to accept revised terms when a country is in free-fall, unable to pay its bills. And damn, Kenneth. Just damn. I still can't wrap my head around this complete moral vacuum, this incredible greed.
Phew. Shake it off. Shake it off.
ANYWAY. So, as you can see, macro can be something which empassions, fellow microeconomists! And what of ye, non-economist people? Will you like and enjoy this book? I think yes, as long as you (like me) clarify early on what the difference between “deficit” and “debt” is (hey, it's been YEARS since my last macro class). But even then, Blustein is a journalist, and so he writes for the general reader. And this is a great primer, and great fodder, on the big issues of macro, globalization, and our increasingly, crazily interconnected financial systems. Recommended.
Remember that one scene, in Swades, where SRK pulls up to a train station and buys water from a little kid selling it? And then he cries, and then I cry, and he re-commits himself to India's economic development?
This children's book is not about that, but it does feature Indian railways, and buying chai from a guy at the station. And thus I FRICKIN. LOVED. IT.
Gorgeous reference book. Cleared up some very basic confusion I have about chemistry (VERY. BASIC. my chemistry education is 1 class, 20+ years ago, that I can safely say went totally over my head).
The current configuration of my brain could not - would not! - accept this as an input. Maybe in a few years/decades.
Humorously, this book both got me PUMPED aaand raised my hackles. 3.5 stars!
A sibling to Carol Dweck's Mindset, and a cousin to the work of Aaron Beck and cognitive behavioral theapy, Angela (great name) Duckworth's thesis is basically: grit - i.e. tenacity - i.e. the ability to stick with things - is a huge driver of success. More than talent. Much more!
I'm down with that. Sounds great. The book's format is kinda classic (capitalist) self-help: there are stories of heroes in business, sports, and the military. There are inspiring tales of rags to riches, of people overcoming great odds. I got verklempt. Every story is meant to illuminate, ahem, TRUE GRIT. (Obligatory fave scene.)
I would say I spent 70% of this book GALVANIZED and PUMPED and ready to go out there and conquer the world. The other 30%, I spent with research eyebrows strongly furrowed. Like - okay: the “grit scale” is a self-assessment that basically asks permutations of the question, “How gritty are you?” Furthermore, when you boil it down, this research finding feels like lots of other BIG important social research findings: kind of tautological and redundant? Like, people who are able to complete things more enjoy success in life - as defined by completing more things? I did appreciate the quote that “decisions are made by the people that show up”, and that way more people call themselves a “writer” and have in-progress manuscripts compared to those who actually have things to submit. Yeah, follow-through. Completing things! That's important.
But I found Carol Dweck's book more stimulating, and less fluff. Dweck's work on mindset also raised the interesting idea of talent as a disadvantage - that is, when you have a fixed mindset + talent, you start to AVOID things that could lead to failure. And hence you don't grow! That was really interesting.
Magisterial and electrifying, as all Charles Mann's books are!
As with 1491 and 1493, this book is a god's-eye-view of some very big issues indeed: here, whether humans are going to survive or not in this (possibly finite?) ecosystem. The “possibly finite?” is the crux of the book: “prophets”, embodied in the book by the father of modern environmentalism, William Vogt, predict that we're on the road to assured self-destruction. “Wizards”, embodied by Nobel Peace Prize-winning, Green Revolution revolutionary Norman Bourlag, believe technology can and will (and should! morally!) save us. Because Mann is so good at everything, even after setting up this dichotomy, he skewers it - maybe humans are (as Kolbert would argue) just biologically predetermined to destroy ecosystems? Mann frequently invokes Lynn Margulis as this third view: maybe ALL species are biologically predetermined to overwhelm their ecosystems, if given half a chance?
Along the way, as Mann explores these competing viewpoints, we learn SO MUCH about (1) agriculture and food production, (2) energy (particularly the history of renewal energy, the history of “Peak Oil”, etc), (3) demography and (4) climate change. Honestly, I would place these books on the shelf with Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, since Robinson's scientist characters perfectly embody these wizards vs. prophets vs. Margulis-style Zen fatalists in their ambitious terraforming projects. (And, actually, Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt is a similarly wonderful companion to Mann's 1491 and 1493 books.) I was VERY excited to hear about these insane geoengineering ideas: let's shoot sulfur into the sky so that it reflects the sun!
As with his other books, this one could be a semester-long course. It was packed so densely with information, and that information was presented with such lively brio, that I wanted to restart it as soon as I finished. The length of it (~500 pages, ~24 hours audiobook) gave me pause. But ugh. IT'S SO GOOD. I love these books. HE'S SO GOOD. He's like James C. Scott - he just completely realigns your brain!
Indeed, so electrified and agitated did I become while reading this that I immediately started researching how to apply both prophetic (COMPOST...) and wizardly (...POWERED BY RASPBERRY PIS) and Zen fatalist (climate change mitigation for the inevitable apocalypse!) projects in my own life.
HIGHLY recommend!!
A harrowing, multi-generational story of one family weathering the storms of 20th century political/cultural upheaval. Really, well, gloomy. Very salt of the earth. Fugui - the protagonist - is born rich, gambles it all away as an asshole 20something, and spends the rest of his life as a poor farmer, just trying to make it in a fast-changing China. This was one of those books that I read in a flash and then just kinda sat and stared and felt empty inside. Oof.
A straightforward, easy-to-fall-into novelization of what MIGHT have happened in the early 1600s, in the lives of Pocahontas and John Smith.
Picture, if you will, a swampy bog near Washington DC. The year is 1600mumble mumble. The English - rancidly smelly in their rancid ass wool - have just disembarked in the shittiest part of what-is-to-become-Virginia and are seeking (1) GOLD, (2) A PASSAGE TO INDIA, and (3) GOLD? Meanwhile, you, dear reader, are a feisty, ambitious prepubescent hellion named Amonute - you do NOT smell like rancid ass wool, but are instead super cool and interesting and fun, running around your pretty damn idyllic Tidewater/Tsenacomoco/world.
This book is a vivid portrayal of what life may have been like. I keep emphasizing the “might” and “may” because I actually felt a little uneasy about Libbie Hawker (sorry, Libbie Hawker) cuz I was like, wait, are you Native American? wait, are you a historian? wait, ahem, what gives you the right? But, after doing some extremely minimal googling, I was satisfied that this was, if anything, well-intentioned, reasonably well-informed (?), and, above all, REASONABLE. Like, obviously we don't have access to Pocahontas's inner life, and John Smith's diaries are all apparently like “and they were just jealous and I was awesome again and everyone clapped”, but we do know the commonly-agreed on facts: Pocahontas's 3 names (Amonute, Mataoka, Rebecca), her conversion to Christianity and her visit to England. And just the popularity of her myth is telling; something about her left a deep impression on the English.
I found the story itself very beautiful and sad. I was reminded, just like after reading Charles Mann's 1491 and Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt, of what an enormous, unforgivable loss the Columbian exchange was: an entire hemisphere of culture that was almost entirely wiped out. I just wanted to learn more about Tsenacomoco, and Pocahontas's realization and pain when she visited London - and what a dystopian nightmare that felt like!! - was so, so acute. I really felt for her. And I wish we (the white/Euro settlers of the New World) could have better integrated into this indigenous world.
In fact. An aside on colonialism. After finishing this book and crying for a bit, I then asked ChatGPT about the differences between the colonization of the New World vs. the Indian subcontinent. Like, today, indigenous Americans live on reservations, a tiny fraction of their previous populations, their culture very very marginalized. Meanwhile, South Asian culture is thriving and has, indeed, deeply influenced the UK (wonderful British-Asian literature, food, etc). WHY? ChatGPT gave me garbage vanilla answers. I thought if it was maybe Acemoglu and Robinson's institutionalist theories: that is, extractive colonies vs. inclusive colonies. But the latter - inclusive colonies - basically meant, “we'll (Euros) come and build and stay”. Which may have led to, indeed, better GDP outcomes for these eventual colony-countries than the extractive colony-countries, but at tremendous cost - the near-extinction of indigenous societies? e.g. USA, Canada, Australia, etc...
Anyway, as you can see, this got me thinking. The book itself is much more human-sized and it's very touching and, tbh, I loved all the characters and really felt for them. Pocahontas was one of those people who stood at the intersection of history and really, frickin, just SAW IT ALL. What an amazing life.
This should really be called Best American Indie Autobiographical Adult Comics That Are Not Graphic Novels or Ongoing Comics like Saga.
I was pretty disappointed; there was a very heavy weighting towards autobiographical zine-style web comics, many with just okay craft (in other words, ugly drawings :/). I find that whole sub-genre incredibly self-indulgent and boring. Like, dudes, we can aaalll draw shitty drawings about how we feel shitty sometimes - or (EVEN WORSE) felt shitty once when we were teens (OMG PLZ NO MORE ABOUT HOW EMO YOUR TEENAGE YEARS WERE). Aaghh. I feel like an asshole, since the autobio comix are often “pour your heart out about your gritty mental health issue”, and so it feels especially mean to dislike it. BUT I DO.
I think there's more to the craft of comix than just panel pacing and panel structure. The actual art inside, the dialogue, and A PLOT!
Even the relatively better-crafted stuff, like the comic by Adrian Tomine, was centered around an excruciatingly painful family dynamic (stuttering, deluded daughter trying her hand at amateur standup while cancer-ridden mom is super supportive and cynical dad is frustrated and NOT supportive). That was one of the better ones - there was a lot of skill in how Tomine unveiled the dynamic, and the drawings were great. But I was, by the end of the book and having read N more similar emo-gutter-porn, like, JEEZ IS THERE ONLY ONE SETTING ON THIS THING?
A fun, fluffy, fast read, this was basically Bridget Jones Goes to Washington. And I say that with affection. But I say that because, when I read Bridget Jones back in like 1999 or whatever it was, I laughed SO HARD. SOOOO HARD. I remember tears. And while I didn't laugh-cry at this, I did laugh a LOT, much more than I expected, much more than I have at any other book recently. And, like Bridget Jones, there is a gratuitous Colin Firth cameo. And, ALSO like Bridget Jones, there was that niggling guilty feeling that this was kinda not full fledged feminism? Like, damn, is it okay to be this girly? Can I admit I kinda loved hearing about Alyssa Mastromonaco's consignment dress shopping and her makeup routine and such? Does that undermine The Good Fight? I hope not. This book is all over the place. It's kind of a memoir, though things jump around a lot. Basically: Mastromonaco was this crunchy jam band-loving UVermont undergrad who interned for Bernie (I imagine lots of 1990s world music playing) and got really into politics and ended up, 15 years later, working at the White House as one of Obama's Chosen Few. Also as one of fewwwww women in the building, which is bullshit (and which she calls out, rightly and constantly). Mastromonaco (gosh, that name is hard to type) wasn't a policy wonk, but more logistics/entourage-management, and her portrayal of the Obama Administration is basically West Wing (pause to appreciate the wonderful Toby Ziegler). She imparts lessons of preparedness, leadership, and so on, and, late in the book, mentions wanting to write something to inspire Millennial 15-25 year old women to get involved in politics. Oohh, that explains the fluff. Well, even this 30something was inspired! This one is very very closely related to Katy Tur's wonderful book about covering the Trump campaign, and it's slightly more distant cousin to Hillary's campaign memoir and Sonia Sotomayor's memoir: 2017 seems to be my year reading about women in politics! All of these books are great, highly recommend. And here is your Colin Firth cameo. I recently re-watched this movie and was struck by how hilariously awful he is: mwah mwah, we love you, Colin, even as you age!
** Oh yes, Mastromonaco was married in a civil ceremony officiated by Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan I DIED OF JEALOUSY.
3.5 stars, but rounding up since all my friends like this, ha.
A short, trashy, fun sci-fi novella, this follows Murderbot, a cyborg security person, as he/she/it/they helps a group of humans on some mining expedition on some random planet in some indeterminate far future. Murderbot is a lovable protagonist, as they're intensely socially awkward around humans and intensely dedicated to their fandoms (they sneak-watch “serials” - soap operas? endless anime series? - on their private eyeball internet). In other words, they're super relatable to the average sci-fi reader!
There's some violence (it is called a “Murderbot”, after all), but the tone is overall very light and fun. It's like a more relaxed, less self-serious version of Altered Carbon. I was actually strongly reminded of the wonderful Ancillary [something] series - maybe because of the focus on socializing ARGH SOCIALIZING and the lovable non-human-person protagonist.
Ruthless injustice. Coupled with fourth wall breaking + silly slapstick humor. Getting pumped about Buddhism. YEAHHHHHH!!!
An incredibly stimulating collection of essays, exploring the philosophy of art from a variety of angles. A couple of very fun essays include the philosophy/analysis of humor, and of music. Read this in one sitting (well, I was stuck on a flight). Marvelous.
Mmmmeh. This is my second Tank Girl, and I came away feeling much the same: whatever. It looks great on (figurative) paper: 1990s, Australian riot grrrl, influenced in equal parts by Mad Max and gutter punk (or maybe I mean crustie) aesthetics. Yo, I'm down with all of this in theory. I'm also down with clever classical references to Odysseus et al. - which this book has loads of - and with smug/clever fourth-wall breaking. But, in practice, actually reading it, I was just like... meh.
One good thing: it did spur me to re-Google this old doc about 13 year old riot grrrls in California. Amazing!
Was Patrick Humphries high when he wrote this? Was he channeling a particularly abstract Tom Waits song? It just didn't make any sense; and I don't think it's intended to be a post-modern non-fiction piece. Needs a good edit!
Not actually pitched towards babies, but pitched mostly to their parents. Actually, scratch that. Not even pitched to parents (since this is boring to read), but to parents' friends. This is a gag baby registry gift and a gag shelf-warmer and a gag photo prop and that's about it. And I say this as an Expert, as a person that has run import PyTorch in my day.
Super short novelette - short story, even - from the same near future, cli-fi, solarpunk universe as The Lost Cause. This story dives into a brief expedition by some Blue Helmets (presumably climate emergency first responders deployed by the UN? Or maybe it's just Canada? ELBOWS UP, EH) as they try to help Oxford, Mississippi, recover from some (unnamed) climate disaster. As with the longer book, this is densely packed with political ideas, technological ideas (I liked the drones using computer vision/AI to find lost pets - since the training data had so many dog and cat images), and food (Cory is SO into writing food, lately!). It was fine, very short.
There is a scene where a giant shark possessed by a demon breathes demon poisonous sake-gas-breath on the hero, Hyakkimaru, drunkening him in combat.
Hyakkimaru is missing 48 body parts, bartered away by his Faustian, butthead dad to 48 demons. He now has, and I am not making any of this up, bamboo-prosthetic arms and legs that house shiny swords which he uses to kill evil-doers with. He also has glass eyes, a fake nose, and no voice box: so his ‘voice' is his ability to speak telepathically. Oh, I forgot to mention: he's also telepathic.
So basically this manga is amazing. It's also titled after Hyakkimaru's sidekick, Dororo, which is tender and sweet, because their companionship is tender and sweet. In classic Tezuka style, cartoonish people are juxtaposed against hyper-realistic backgrounds and grotesque plot turns. Horror and comedy intermingle, always with a sort of Buddhisty, dharma-ish vibe of “life is suffering”.
Not as good as Tezuka's Buddha series, but a very fun romp through ghouls, monsters, medieval Japan, and sake-gas-breath demon-sharks.
Brutal Buddhism continues, in vol 2! Now Siddhartha takes center stage, and we follow his adolescence: he's mostly a sensitive young dude with a sensitive stomach (something that was true! the historical Siddhartha died from a stomach illness), and he's mostly trying to flee from his obligations as a prince, son, and - by the end of the book - married man and father. Side stories are, as ever, crazy sauce, full of cosmically random injustices juxtaposed against caste system injustices. Crazy and good.
More like every page a perfection! Every recipe a hit!
I've made a handful of the recipes and every single one of them has been (1) quick and easy, and (2) sooo tasty. I've been to several dinner parties with friends where all we did was cook a bunch of dishes from this. These recipes feel celebratory enough for a dinner party with friends (oh, the post-covid horizon...!), but also easy enough for the weeknight. GLORIOUS.
I covet Sichuan cooking especially, and have lately been disappointed with the insufficiently numbing-heat options near me. This book (a) has some Sichuan options (though lately I am thinking my Sichuan peppercorns are too old, since they are insufficiently numbing my mouth) and (b) has so many extremely tasty other regional options as well.
Stocking your pantry can be an initial adventure (I found Shaoxing wine on walmart.com...), but once you have those essentials, these recipes really are just simple, straightforward “home cooking” applications of wondrous flavor to fresh stuff.
Special shout-out to the chicken and chestnuts dish - u + me = <3.
Right, so I haven't played every single song from this songbook, but I have gone through and played a bunch, basically all the ones I recognized. This songbook is okay. It's good (maybe even great) for a beginning guitar student, who would benefit from lots and lots of generally charismatic songs using open chords. If you've mastered open chords and bar chords, you'll find most of the songs not very challenging. They're all just combinations of the same three open chords: A, D, E. Sometimes A-minor. That's fine. I think this is useful for (a) warming up with some easy, fun song (hello, House of Rising Sun) and (b) building a repertoire of “should I need to break out my guitar at the campfire or dinner party” songs.
One more frustrating aspect of the book, though, is that a lot of the songs are in the wrong key - and I'm guessing this is because Shipton was just trying to keep things reeeeal simple. But, dude, not every single song in the history of baby boomer rock is literally an open chord at the top of the neck. It's like Shipton assumed that the reader was (a) still struggling with bar chords (fair; I think the book's great for a starting guitarist, as I said), and (b) doesn't own a capo? So that kinda sucked. I kept doubting my (tinny) ear but, when playing along to the songs on Spotify, it was confirmed that some of the keys are way wack - and some of the chords are also weirdly wack (“Help” by the Beatles is one example of this, it sounds kiiinda right when you play it alone - though that G chord is weird - but try playing it with the actual Beatles version, yo that is wrong wrong wrong).
So, decent for beginners. Okay for “intermediate” players. Not super challenging.
Also, why is all guitar culture pitched towards mainstream baby boomer dudes? This is my main beef, since picking my guitars back up after many years. >:/
Much more realistic than the previous Ciao Baby! book, in this book, Baby and Nonna do one simple, standard outing: the park. There, they see lots of animals and attempt to CIAO! them. The animals flee. Very realistic.
For some reason, I absolutely loathe reading the “scrunch push, scrunch scoot” crawling interludes. JUST MOVE, BABY. DAI, ANDIAMO. Clap, clap. Chop, chop. I am so impatient.
Meh, fine, okay.
A short (100-page) booklet using some light economic theorizing to model how rumors spread. Poignant because this was written BEFORE that one time when fake news ruined our democracy ho ho. Interesting because Sunstein discards the notion of a “marketplace for ideas” being inoculation enough - and for the same reason that all markets fail: behavioral economics (and, well, externalities :)). That is, “markets” assume homo economicus, i.e. humans as rational and selfish beings. Given that we're, as Dan Ariely would say, predictably irrational - i.e. we make systematic cognitive errors (hello, what is the therapy industry all about!) - praying to some invisible hand where Truth and Profit always win out is dumb dumb dumb.
Examples of our predictable irrationality, when it comes to processing information:
- Experiments have shown that, when people believe X and are shown strong evidence that ‘not X', they will - on average - BELIEVE MORE STRONGLY IN X.
- Information processing is totally social. One experiment has participants identifying how long a string is (short/medium/long), in a group. The group is “in on” the experiment and, after everyone identifying strings correctly, the group suddenly switches and - all together - says the wrong thing. Does the experiment's participant point out the Truth? No, more often than not, THEY SWITCH TOO. i.e. People will perpetuate stuff they KNOW TO BE FALSE just for social conformism.
- Polarization leads to radicalization/more extreme thinking.
- Confirmation bias.
I mean, it's like, in our current age of extreme political polarization, where everyone is self-radicalizing themselves in their perfectly curated Facebook echo chambers, none of this is new/surprising. Sunstein's proposed solution - stronger libel laws that lead to a “chilling effect” to rumor-mongerers - seems meh. I would just shut down Facebook, honestly. It's a net loss, people! You can EMAIL your old high school friends, if you really want to keep in touch, for the love of God.