Inch Deep, Mile Wide

Leigh Cowart, Hurts So Good: The Science and Culture of Pain on Purpose:( useful but sometimes harrowing )

Carissa Véliz, Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future, from Ancient Oracles to AI: ( prediction as act of power )

Jessica M. Lepler, Canal Dreamers: The Epic Quest to Connect the Atlantic and Pacific in the Age of Revolutions: This book would have made a fine article about the failed attempt to create a canal through, roughly, the Darien Gap in Nicaragua in the first half of the nineteenth century. At book length, it’s overwritten and too cute, though it was sort of funny to read about what it was like to be US Secretary of State back then—John Adams was busier than a one-armed paperhanger.

Bridget Read, Little Bosses Everywhere: Multi-level marketing is a scourge that American businesses exported, in the service of predatory capitalism and convincing people to blame themselves for their own failure to succeed in an incredibly rigged game. Read also highlights MLM leadership’s support of radical right-wing politics in the US—donors like the De Voses turn out to be implicated in pretty much every right-wing cause and organization. MLMs were also (shocking!) a big source of fraud in covid relief, not to mention other things like tax evasion.

C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution: Old history can be interesting to read because it shows a different way to think and write. James, writing as a really classic Marxist in the 30s, is immensely sympathetic to L’Ouverture and his contemporaries in what would become Haiti, and is clearly struggling to reconcile his Marxist historical materialism with his appreciation for L’Ouverture’s individual (world-historical) talents.

John R. Stilgoe, What Is Landscape?: I took a class with Stilgoe in college, and this did remind me of listening to one of his lectures—a relentless barrage of thematically connected observations about the places we go outside of built structures, mostly at the sea/land interface. The book has little formal structure of its own, moving from dictionaries to walks in the countryside to the Lord of the Rings (a particularly nice bit) and back again. It’s not seamless because seamless would require a fabric; this is more like everything he kept under the bed for forty years. If you listened to this on audiobook while high it would either be amazing or give you an anxiety attack because there is no tonal variation, no “point” or distillable argument. I firmly believe that this is what makes it exactly what Stilgoe wanted to offer.

David Kilcullen, The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West: Technology and the end of the Cold War led both state and non-state actors to learn how to fight unconventionally, including with misinformation and economic action. Published 2020; seems like Russia then forgot the lessons it had absorbed about how to use non-state tactics successfully to minimize the need for ground forces. Possibly would have been useful reading for, you know, anyone who wanted to start a war of choice with Iran.

Dennis C. Rasmussen, The Infidel and the Professor: David Hume, Adam Smith, and the Friendship That Shaped Modern Thought: Intellectual history, though we don’t have half the correspondence and it wasn’t as interesting to me as a work focused on where Hume and Smith agreed and disagreed would have been.

Allan J. McDonald, Truth, Lies, and O-Rings: Inside the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster: McDonald was an executive at Morton Thiokol who opposed allowing the shuttle to launch in the cold, worried about O-rings and other issues. He became a whistleblower. The book is, unfortunately, incredibly long and repetitive; he blames NASA pressure (and Morton Thiokol’s top execs for caving to it).

Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Astrotopia: The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race: Argues that the presentation of space as something for people—specifically Americans—to exploit is based on a dangerous Christianist belief in the violability of other forms of existence. If you don’t believe that rocks have interests, then it might not be super convincing; I thought that More Everything Forever did a better job.

Ted Chapin, Everything Was Possible: The Birth of the Musical Follies: A nepo baby in early 1970s NYC gets a semester-long externship as a gofer for Follies; his diary/report is the basis for this chatty behind-the-scenes book that again makes it clear the kind of fortitude and toleration for chaos required to make a musical with Stephen Sondheim.

James Morton Turner, Charged: A History of Batteries and Lessons for a Clean Energy Future: Fascinating book by an environmentalist arguing that, if we really want an energy transition, we’re going to have to accept a lot of mining—recycling alone won’t get us the specialized minerals in the volume and quality we need, and modern batteries require lots of careful processing to get their multiple components. Thus, managing how the mining is done and broadening who benefits from it are vital, not fighting the concept.

Laura Donovan, Momtistic: Autism, Motherhood, and Discovering Myself in Both:
Short, breezy memoir about a journalist turned stay-at-home mom raising two moderately autistic sons who then is diagnosed herself. I didn’t have reason to expect a lot of broader commentary on autism but I realized that I was more interested in that.

James Lapine, Putting It Together: Part oral history, part memoir of putting on Sunday in the Park with Sondheim. Main conclusion: what a nightmare Sondheim must have been to work with—he wouldn’t finish the fucking songs until the show was … well, sometimes until the show was already open. But he gave us Sunday and Sweeney and all the rest and somehow most people tolerated it (or left the production because they couldn’t).

Patrick Radden Keefe, London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth: A 19-year-old jumped off a balcony at an exclusive London apartment, but why? Keefe explores the larger context of a London steeped in oligarch money, where a kid could pretend to be a billionaire, at least long enough to get in really bad trouble, and where many of the other people in the story also faked it and often enough, made it.

Lisa Haushofer, Wonder Foods: The Science and Commerce of Nutrition: Explores 19th- and early 20th-century American/British wonder foods (Gail Borden's meat biscuit, Benger's Food, Kellogg's health foods, and Fleischmann's yeast), arguing that they were attractive because they drew on and reinforced imperialist, racist Western ideals—the meat biscuit was inspired by Native practices but promised to allow the military to exterminate Natives faster; Benger’s Food offered Britons the tools to make themselves healthy workers; Kellogg soured on predigestion (enzymatic preparations being a key part of Benger’s Food and similar) because it seemed too lazy and instead emphasized helping the body do its own work; and Fleischmann's turned to scientistic claims and invented conditions in a world of individualized responsibility for health.

David Butler & Lorimer Moseley, Explain Pain (2d ed.): Short book that repeats a lot and didn’t have the level of scientific detail I was hoping for. Main message: pain is experienced in the brain; it is real; but it can come from stuck/oversensitized nerve pathways even after an inciting injury resolves. And pain can be improved by (here is where there wasn’t enough detail except for a story about one woman’s pain and the exact movements they told her to make) movement and by cognition. Reading it I can understand why people in chronic pain would feel like they’re being told just to reimagine their pain as not-pain, even though I think that’s not what the authors thought they were doing.

Alex Wellerstein, The Most Awful Responsibility: Truman and the Secret Struggle for Control of the Atomic Age: The style is notable (the audiobook narrator is also good)—perhaps because lots has been written about dropping the bomb, Wellerstein foregrounds what we can’t know for certain but offers his opinions. Specifically, he argues that Truman didn’t know that Hiroshima wasn’t just a military base but a city, given what he was told and what he said about it beforehand; that Truman never actually gave specific orders for the second bomb dropped on Nagasaki; and that Truman remained shaken by the deaths of “innocent women and children,” which shaped his subsequent assertions of control over nuclear decisions, even though as the Cold War deepened the military attained more and more operational control.