2019 Book Roundup
29 books I read, 11 I didn’t finish, and 10 I’m looking forward to.
Books I Finished
Here’s a ranked list of the 29 books I finished in 2019. Since I’ve described some of these in previous blog posts, I’ve just given a quick blurb about each. It’s formatted as [Title] [Score - 1/5, 1 = low]:
The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. 5/5. This is the biography of Robert Moses, acclaimed civil engineer and anti-hero. This is probably the best-researched book I’ve ever read. It’s also one of the most accurate and realistic explanations about how power is accumulated and used in America today.
The Guns of August. 5/5. A classic of World War 1 history that describes the first few weeks of the conflict. What makes this book so good is that it avoids military masturbation with all the macho acronyms, power trips, and numbers. It details the foibles, mistakes, egos, and successes of commanders, politicians, and the world at large as the Great War got started.
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. 5/5. Explains how human cognition works and why we are primarily emotional being. This substantially changed how I perceive the world and explained a long time conundrum for me: why people aren’t more rational. Turns out none of us are, and that explains a lot about how the world works.
Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture. 5/5 Tells the story of John Carmac and John Romero building ID Software - the creators of Doom and Quake. This was an incredibly fun and inspirational story. It reminded me of how fun, fulfilling, and all-consuming work can be.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values. 4/5. Pirsig’s classic philosophical investigation into what makes life worth living. I both love and hate this book. I really appreciated Pirsig’s focus on quality and have actually incorporated it into my own life. But philosophy is tough to read and there were sections of the book that were excruciating to read.
The Great Leveler. 4/5. A modern explanation for the forces that reduce income and wealth inequality. I’m writing a 10,000+ word blog series based largely on the thesis of this book, so I must like it quite a bit. Although it makes for depressing reading, I found Scheidel’s thesis convincing. The only reason it didn’t get 5/5 is that it’s such a broad and complex topic, it seems possible that more scholarship on this topic will refute or overturn his findings.
Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller Sr. 4/5. The life and times of John D. Rockefeller Sr. I learned a lot about him from this book, and it was well written. I found it very interesting to learn all about his as a person as well as industrialist. The history of Standard Oil was also more interesting than I expected.
Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI. 4/5. An incredibly interesting (and previously unknown) history of a quiet genocide on the Osage reservation at the beginning of the 20th century. I binged this in a single weekend because it was so well written and all of the information was new to me.
The Rise and Fall of American Growth. 4/5. Explains why the period between 1870-1940 witnessed the greatest rise in American GDP growth and why that period is unlikely to return. This was an incredible read for anyone interested in US economic history. I read a bunch of great economics book this year, and this was the most comprehensive and broadly accessible.
Capital in the 21st Century. 4/5. A modern historical perspective on how capital is self-perpetuating and why. Picketty’s modern classic was good, but I only just read it, and since it’s been so widely cited, I already knew most of the major points, which made for repetitive reading. The first few chapters are especially tedious, but the last half was very good.
Strangers Drowning: Grappling with Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Overpowering Urge to Help. 4/5. Tells the stories of people who are so driven to help others that they make sacrifices that would be deemed extreme or even psychotic by most standards. This book is painfully empathetic, specific, and challenging. It implicitly challenges our social beliefs about what it means to help others, and whether it’s even possible to do so.
The Old Way: A Story of the First People Global Inequality. 4/5. This history of the !Kong hunter gatherers in the Kalahari desert. What’s so remarkable about this book is how impactful it has been in shaping our understanding of premodern human societies and how readable it is.
The Psychopath Test. 4/5. Explains the history and way in which psychopaths are identified. But it goes further and provides case studies into prominent psychiatric identification and the industry of mental health. It’s a bit superficial in it’s treatment of the topic, but is highly readable.
The Butchering Art. 4/5. Tells the story of Joseph Lister, the doctor who invented and applied the first antiseptics in surgery. This has all the trademarks of a great piece of nonfiction: the history of an industry told through a single person’s life along with lots of counter-intuitive bits of medical trivia. It reads more like pop-sci than serious history, and that’s a good thing.
How to Lie with Statistics. 4/5. A dated, but incredibly engaging and short walk through the application of statistics. What’s so great about this one is that the author is lively, fun, and didn’t needlessly fluff up the length of the book with unrelated anecdotes or information. You could easily read this in a single sitting.
Frozen in Time : An Epic Story of Survival and a Modern Quest for Lost Heroes of World War II. 3/5. The story of an air force crew that crash into the Greenland ice shelf during WW 2, their rescue, and the modern search for the remains of the wreck. This is pure survival porn mixed with a bit of military history. It’s fun to read and I learned more than I expected about glaciers.
Skeletons on the Zahara. 3/5. The story of the survival of the crew of the US Commerce who were ship wrecked on the Western Coast of Africa in 1815. Mostly just survival porn, but it was fun to read and I learned about the opposite of WW 2 glaciers: deserts in the 19th century.
How Will You Measure Your Life? 3/5. A book about how to live a good life. You have to be careful with any book described as “inspirational” in the Amazon review, but there are some good tidbits in here mixed in with a huge dose of humblebrags and appeals to authority. It was a healthy meditation and reminder of what is most important in life.
Ali: A Life. 3/5. The life and times of Cassius Clay, aka Mohammed Ali. Eng does a great job of telling his life in a way that is both factually accurate and emotionally compelling. Unlike other biographies I read this year, I came away with the distinct impression that I would have strongly disliked Mohammed Ali in person.
Andrew Carnegie. 3/5. The biography of Andrew Carnegie. I probably shouldn’t have read this one, because I already knew a bunch about the guy, but this biography was engaging and it was a nice complement to the biography of Rockefeller.
Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators, Fading Empires, and the Coming Collision of the World's Superpowers. 3/5. A series of essays about everything in the title. Although I didn’t like the surface treatment that many of these received, it was still a fun book to read. I enjoyed the atomic history the most.
Over the Edge of the World. 3/5. Tells the story of Magellan’s voyage that circumnavigated the world. It turns out I didn’t know much about Magellan and his historic voyage, so this was quite a fun read. I wish it had been longer and more detailed, but that probably would have made it a bit ponderous.
The Rise and Fall of Nations: Forces of Change in the Post-Crises World. 3/5. A banker’s analysis of what makes nations rise and fall. A bit too pop-sci for me. While the author has some great points about debt ratios and innovation, it felt a bit like the book was written to sell speaking engagements, rather than inform.
The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life. 3/5. The biography of Warren Buffet. The book was well-written, but I came into the book thinking that Warren Buffet was in some way significantly different than most Wall Street traders. I came away thinking “huh, that guy got super lucky.”
Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China. 3/5. A series of long vignettes that explain modern China through the stories of individual people. It was good and avoided the common trap of hyperbolizing and generalizing an entire nation of people with the words “a land of shifting contrasts.”
Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero. 3/5. A book in support of big business. Tyler Cowen is an intentional devil’s advocate, and some of the points in this book (especially the bit in defense of CEO pay) seem very poorly researched, but some of the other points about moral comparisons between businesses and people are quite good. If this book was 2x as long, it would be terrible, but as a quick read, it was interesting.
The Death and Life of the Great Lakes. 3/5. An interesting, if a bit alarmist and un-self-aware biological history of the Great Lakes as ecosystems. The thing was so enjoyable about this was the detail provided to explaining invasive species. The bad part was that the author basically goes chapter to chapter explaining how every new invasive species has destroyed the Great Lakes completely, which grows tiresome after the 4th or 5th species is blamed for having completely destroyed the same ecosystem as the preceding few species.
Underground: A Human History of the Worlds Beneath Our Feet. 3/5. An urban explorer recalls stories of places he’s explored. This was barely a 3/5, probably more like a 2.5/5. Could have used a lot more stories about exploring stuff underground and a lot less philosophizing about why humans like/don’t like caves. That said, I kinda like illicit urban exploration, so it was fun.
Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World. A quick (and I mean very quick) explanation of how a bunch modern materials (plastics, concrete, glass, etc.) were invented, improved, and are now used in human society. I would have liked this book more if it was longer and more detailed. Some of these materials clearly have great histories and it went so fast in places, I could barely grok the chemistry. But, better short than long I guess.
Books I Started, and Didn’t Finish
I started, but didn’t finish an additional 11 books. Those are as follows (providing here to avoid file-drawer effect:
Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa
The Myth of the Strong Leader: Political Leadership in the Modern Age
This Town: Two Parties and a Funeral-Plus, Plenty of Valet Parking!-in America's Gilded Capital
What to Think about Machines that Think: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Age of Machine Intelligence
Stories of Your Life and Others
Indianapolis: The True Story of the Worst Sea Disaster in U.S. Naval History and the Fifty-Year Fight to Exonerate an Innocent Man
Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto
The Great Influenza
What Should We be Worried About?: Real Scenarios that Keep Scientists Up at Night
Lost Kingdom: The Quest for Empire and the Making of the Russian Nation
Men, Machines, and Modern Times
A Few Books I’m Looking Forward to Reading in 2020
Here are the top 10 books that I’m excited to read in 2020. Hopefully there are few good ones here!
Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail. I really liked A Walk in the Woods and I love survival stories. I’m hoping this is more about the trail than finding philosophical peace with midlife crises stuff.
Between the World and Me. As a member of the privileged majority, I don’t spend enough time thinking about race and hope that this book provides a thoughtful and challenging perspective on the topic.
Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity. I don’t have much, if any, context for what it’s like to live in poor parts of other nations. I’m hoping this book provides details about what life is like, humanizes it’s subjects, and gives me ideas for how I might be able to help.
Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams. I stayed away from this one last year because I was sleeping so little due to the kids, but am quite curious about sleep and it’s effects on the body.
Educated: A Memoir. I love everything extreme. I’m hoping that this book provides an accessible look into what it’s like to be raised with and then question extreme beliefs.
The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity. The world seems unhealthily obsessed with the politics of identity. I’m hoping this book puts some of that into perspective and provides ideas about how we can curb the worst effects of this trend.
How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence. I don’t know much about psychedelics and transcendence, or addition and would love to learn more.
Bad Blood. I know next to nothing about Theranos other than something something scandal. I’ve heard mixed reviews of this book, but think the topic is interesting and hope to cure some of my ignorance.
The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why. I love hypotheticals and want to survive disasters.
Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science. Don’t know much about modern surgery, but it seems like something that I should know more about.
Q3 Book Review
Since returning to work from paternity leave, I set out to read 4 books. I started 14, but only finished 8. This was an intentional strategy: I have made a promise to not finish books that don’t grab my attention quickly. Below I’ve rated each book (as well the ones I didn’t finish) and included some interesting tidbits I learned along the way.
The Good
Here are some interesting things I learned from 3 of the books I read:
The Old Way 4/5 In the 1950s, the co-founder of Raytheon took his family into the Kalahari desert to study a group of hunter gathers that are believed to have been living in that habitat in much the same way for the past 150,000 years.
The society they found was largely non-violent, non-hierarchical, trusting, and resourceful. In stark contrast to other ancient societies, it is believed that the !Kung had been forced by resource scarcity into extreme egalitarianism.
The !Kung used to hunt using poison-tipped arrows. Each arrow was constructed to fall apart upon impact, leaving the poisoned tip in the animal and the shaft (bearing telltale signs of the person who made it) behind. The neurotoxin poison would then slowly kill the animal over the course of the next several days. As a result, a hunt would routinely take several days and require not just skill at shooting the animal, but then tracking it for many miles across the desert. The person who’s arrow was identified as having killed the animal would have the privilege of deciding who gets to eat how much of the meat, even though several men were commonly required to track and bring the animal back to camp.
On the Kalahari desert, lions are at the top of the food chain, not people. For this reason, the !Kung would hunt during the day to avoid being attacked. This would routinely involve braving heat up to 115 degrees Fahrenheit at mid-day. Despite closely co-habitating with lions and hyenas, the !Kung had very few violent altercations. The primary killers for the !Kung were infant mortality (due to sickness) and injuries involved in hunting large game.
The Rise and Fall of Nations 3/5 Ruchir Sharma presents a framework for predicting the fate of nations based upon macro and microeconomic trends.
Historically, about 50% of a nation’s GDP growth can be attributed to growth in the working-age population. As a result of aging populations globally, GDP growth is expected to slow, but some nations will slow more quickly than others. The US is well-positioned with a workforce that is aging slower than contemporaries and strong immigration. Nations like France and the UK are going to have a tough time growing in large part due to greying populations.
Much of China’s recent growth can be attributed to domestic monetary easing and direct capital investment. Due to dodgy numbers, it’s hard to be sure, but it seems likely that in the past several years, the state has been leveraging cheap debt to invest in speculative infrastructure with little to no productivity improvements on the horizon. For this reason, as well as China’s rapidly aging population, it seems likely that the country’s yearly growth will start to fall in the coming years.
Positive press attention about national outcomes tend to be slightly negatively correlated with outcomes. Basically, if Time magazine writes about the miracle in country X, it’s more likely than not that country X’s run of good luck is coming to an end. The inverse is not necessarily true: bad press tends to signal only the beginning of a longer period of reform and reinvestment. Sharma suggests the countries that are poised to be the next miracle growth economics are not mentioned in the press at all.
How Will You Measure Your Life 3/5 This book is a thoughtful meditation on how to live a fulfilling professional and personal life. Although there are saccharine bits that are a bit over the top, and the appeals to authority are laid on pretty thick, I learned a few useful lessons:
Every job has what Clayton terms “hygiene” factors (things like salary, working hours, and prestige) as well as “motivating” factors (things like mission, people, and intrinsic interest). Every person will strive for a different mixture of the two, but it’s commonly a bad sign if you find your work skewing heavily to one side or the other. Really loving your work is more than just pay, but it’s also more than just loving a particular problem space. You need balance to find long-term satisfaction.
For those driven careerists, it can help to think about your important relationships as the most important job you have. Rather than taking the love and support you receive from your close friends, spouse, and family members for granted, always ben thinking “what job does my [friend/spouse/family member] need me to do?” Christensen posits, and I can anecdotally confirm, that deep life satisfaction and meaning come from sacrificing for others. Thinking about the job others need you to do gives you an opportunity to build love and trust while experiencing a deep sense of meaning.
I know from firsthand experience that it’s deceptively easy to shortchange your most important relationships in favor of your job, but it wasn’t until I read this book that I could quickly articulate why: long term relationships require massive investments of time, love, and presence. Because the investment is so great, at any particular moment, it’s hard to feel as though you are making progress or doing something meaningful whereas jobs are calibrated to give you an immediate sense of progress and self-importance. Basically, our society has learned how to get highly motivated people addicted to work through complicated systems of recognition and visible progress, and we’ve done the opposite for marriages and families by normalizing divorce, estrangement, and loneliness. It takes a wise person to recognize this trend, and I’ve definitely been guilty of overlooking it.
I read 5 more books that I really enjoyed. I won’t provide detailed summaries here for brevity, but here’s the TLDR cliff notes review:
The Great Leveler 4/5 This book takes the hypothesis that income inequality is only ever substantially reduced by human violence. I was so taken by this book, I’m doing more research and will post a longer blog post response later.
Strangers Drowning 4/5 This is about people who sacrifice almost everything they have to help others. The author does an amazing job at deeply empathizing with her subjects and contextualizing their sacrifices. I was enthralled.
How to Lie With Statistics 4/5 This one has held up incredibly well over the years. It’s also very fun, short, and practical. I’d strongly recommend it to anyone who wants a quick statistics refresher.
Frozen in Time 4/5 Ah, survival-porn. I do enjoy stories about the most extreme survival situations and this one delivered. It didn’t teach me anything profound and it didn’t alter my world view, but I know a lot more about glaciers, WW2 planes, and living in the arctic.
Global Inequality 4/5 Follow-up reading from the Great Leveler. This focuses on global, rather than domestic inequality. The author presents some fascinating (and well-researched) counter-culture beliefs on immigration, the US government, and how we might be able to build a better tomorrow.
The Bad
Books I couldn’t finish:
What Should We be Worried About?: Real Scenarios that Keep Scientists Up at Night 1/5 This is just a collection of short (and I mean very short), unsubstantiated suggestions from scientists about what we might want to worry about. Very little evidence is provided for their beliefs and the segments are too brief to even get into the reasons why something is worrisome.
Men, Machines, and Modern Times 1/5 The audio recording of this book is only a few hours long. The introduction, forward, and notes about this edition are 1 hour long. When I finally got to the bit about how a naval officer corrected gun sights and increased firing throughput in the last 19th century (interesting premise!), the author glossed over the entire discovery process in about 5 minutes, and returned to over-intellectualized academic philosophizing about technological progress. I know it’s a classic, but it was worse than useless.
Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa 2/5 This one was a bit better and may have actually been a good book, but it makes for a difficult audio experience. I think this is the sort of book you read with a notepad to keep track of everything. I knew I was in for trouble when the first 5 minutes of the recording was nothing by a wall-to-wall acronym glossary of rebel groups operating in the Congo over the last 30 years. Add to that a difficult time telling apart Congolese names without seeing them spelled, and I was lost almost immediately in the minutia.
This Town: Two Parties and a Funeral-Plus, Plenty of Valet Parking!-in America's Gilded Capital 2/5 This purports to be a somewhat shocking tell-all about the depravity of DC political culture, but it actually just reads like the story of any industry/city/location populated by wealthy, hyper-motivated people. I wasn’t able to learn much and after a short period, the narrative style starts to read like a disaffected barista trying to seem worldly and detached while name-dropping about all their powerful friends.
What to Think about Machines that Think: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Age of Machine Intelligence 2/5 This was slightly better than What to Worry About, but only slightly. The segments are too short, too little evidence is presented, nothing is learned.
Stories of Your Life and Others 2/5 These are supposed to be some of the best recent sci-fi stories, but I couldn’t really get into them, which is strange because I deeply enjoyed the movie adaptation of Arrival.
The 10 Best Movies I've Seen This Year
Over parental leave, I was able to indulge my inner cinephile. I watched 61 movies in 56 days - mostly while feeding my new infant. That’s ~1.08 movies/day, for a total of approximately 130 hours of film. If you think that sounds like a lot of time feeding an infant, it is.
I’ve included the full list of movies that I watched at the end of this post, but below you’ll find the top 10. For anyone not familiar with my taste in movies, these are pretty much all what my friends have euphemistically labeled “depressing indie dramas.” Look elsewhere for lighthearted comedies!
#10 - Burning
I loved the understated, ambiguous storytelling in this thriller. On the surface it’s the story of the wealth and opportunity divide in South Korea, but under the straightforward plot points there are layers of meaning that peel back and imply different interpretations. These additional layers keep interested viewers second-guessing assumptions beyond the ending credits. I consider myself a fairly sophisticated movie viewer, but I missed some major metaphors and allegories and had a satisfying time reading the Wikipedia summary afterwards only to realize that fact. Another big plus for this one: although it deals with explicit, violent themes, it’s not visually explicit. Like all good taut, psychological thrillers, the violence is left out of the frame for the viewer to imagine.
#9 - You Were Never Really Here
Like Burning, this one deals with heavy, violent, uncomfortable themes, but is more explicit in their depiction. I was initially turned off by the slow start to the story, but it’s ending can best be described as a subtle and beautiful conclusion to a nightmare. The thing I loved most about the film was the mixing of the real and the unreal to explain the character’s mental states. Unlike other films that have similar storylines (8MM for instance), the focus here is less about what happens in the real world and more about what happens inside the heads of the protagonists.
#8 - Wild Tales
This one was a blast and shares a great deal with The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (see below). The “film” is actually a collection of shorts that meditate on the theme of revenge. Most are pretty short (<20 minutes) and are darkly funny. If you like early Cohen brothers movies, comedies of the absurd, or if a towing company has ever caused you to boil over with anger, you’ll enjoy this movie.
#7 - Shoplifters
Shoplifters tells the story of a group of petty thieves eking out a living at the margin of modern Japanese society. Although they aren’t related by blood, they function as a family and the film encourages the viewer to question what really defines a family. Other movies have told a similar yarn, but they either devolve into 2D characters spouting syrupy truisms (“family are the people you choose!”) or they become absurdly dark or overly complex (think Oceans 11 but in melodrama form). Shoplifters threads the needle and tells a story that feels real every step of the way, warming your heart without sliding into postmodern cynicism.
#6 - The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
Like Wild Tales, this one is a collection of short films and it follows a similar trajectory: starting with the lightest and funniest of the bunch and ending with the most profound and touching. As someone who loves western films as a genre and aesthetic, I couldn’t get enough of these short films. They were schlocky, flawed, serious, devastating, and profound at all the right times. My favorite of the bunch was the last one, so if you’re struggling with some of the humor and gallows humor that comes first, stick around until the end.
#5 - The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
This was the first movie I finished after starting leave and it was incredible. Normally I don’t go in for movies that have extensive narrative voice-over. If you have to outright tell me what’s going on in the movie, then it’s failing to tell the story itself. But here, the interstitial narration made everything more poignant and added what felt like genuine attempts to understand the historical truth of the story. Sure, it was glamorized and sure there were large portions of fiction interspersed to fill in the holes of the real story. Yet it managed to take an event whose meaning is largely lost to modern viewers and contextualize, humanize, and dramatize it. That’s no small feat.
#4 - Winter’s Bone
Boy, did the director nail the depiction of rural, rustbelt America. I grew up in Appalachia, which isn’t quite the Ozarks, but this felt a bit like a documentary in several parts. It’s always tempting for Hollywood writers to depict poor rural people like the murders in Deliverance, and what struck me most about this movie was how nuanced and dignified the characters are. They are real humans with foibles and weakness, but also dignity and strength. I always love a movie in which “the good guys” commit transgressions and “the bad guys” partially redeem themselves, because that’s the way I perceive life: there’s a lot more grey than there is black and white. If you’re wondering whether the world of this film is accurate to reality, the answer is “yes.”
#3 - 1945
This one came completely out of left field and left me speechless. It’s a story from World War 2 that I’ve never heard told: we open on a rural village in Hungary after WW2 has ended. Two Jews get off a train and start walking from the depot into the village center. Advance notice reaches the village, where a prominent couple is preparing to be married. The villager elders don’t know whether the Jews are returning to reclaim property that was taken during the Holocaust. The uncertainty causes tensions to rise and secrets to be revealed. I loved the black and white photography, slow and deliberate pacing, and the (somewhat) twist ending.
#2 - The Handmaiden
Fair disclosure: this one was pretty twisted. That said, it was also beautifully filmed, directed, and acted, and I think that somewhat makes up for the sadism. For me, there were two elements of this film that really made it shine: the cinematography and the twists. The cinematography was so deft as to be initially invisible. The story is moved forward as much by the way the film is constructed as the dialogue and acting, and that’s always a pleasure to behold. The twists are baked in from the first few scenes: you know that you are going to be guided through the plot by an unreliable narrator, yet the hints as to what’s really going on are provided to the astute so that you don’t end the movie with a big reveal and artificial “gotcha” moment.
#1 - Roma
Roma is the story of a housemaid working for an upper-middle class Mexican family in the 1970s. It’s a simple story, but the film is tremendously nuanced and beautiful. Like Shoplifters, you end the story feeling simultaneously repulsed by some of things you’ve witnessed, but at the same time, a tremendous urge to hug the very same characters. Unlike most arthouse films, there’s enough reality and narrative to make this compelling without sacrificing the breath-taking visual meditations on daily struggles. Most of the other films on this list are too dark, too artsy, or too weird for most people to appreciate, but Roma is the rare gem that is simultaneously accessible and exquisite.
The Full List
Below is the full list of films that I watched, along with my subjective 1-10 rating:
Roma 9
The Handmaiden 9
1945 9
Winter's Bone 9
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford 9
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs 8
Shoplifters 8
Wild Tales 8
You Were Never Really Here 8
Burning 8
Mid90s 8
Ida 8
Tucker & Dale vs Evil 8
The Florida Project 8
The Last Black Man in San Francisco 8
A Separation 7
So Sorry to Bother You 7
A Most Violent Year 7
Searching 7
Nocturnal Animals 7
Leave No Trace 7
Room 7
Changeling 6
Prisoners 6
The Guilty 6
First Man 6
The Mule 6
Bad Times at the El Royal 6
Gone Girl 6
Can You Ever Forgive Me? 6
Green Book 6
Vice 6
The Old Man and the Gun 6
Hail Caesar! 6
Becoming Bond 6
The Secret In their Eyes 6
The Square 6
Fyre 5
Beasts of No Nation 5
Incendies 5
Up In the Air 5
Papillon 5
Spider Man: Into the Spiderverse 5
The Favourite 5
Suburbicon 5
They Shall Not Grow Old 5
Tully 5
Hacksaw Ridge 4
Her 4
The Post 4
Three Identical Strangers 4
The Sisters Brothers 4
Infernal Affairs 4
A Prayer Before Dawn 4
A Simple Favor 4
Bone Tomahawk 4
Upgrade 3
Won't You Be My Neighbor? 3
Dangal 3
Game Night 3
5 Books I Read on Paternity Leave
Back in May, our second child (Rose) was born. Starting on her delivery date (5/9/19), I started 12 weeks of paternity leave. Family is a great gift. I’ve been able to really get to know my daughter while not worrying about the effects of sleep deprivation on my work or career.
At the same time, family leave is a lot of repetition and grueling hours. Infants sleep a lot, but in very short bursts without respect to adult circadian rhythms, which often left me bouncing, feeding, and holding Rose for hours at a stretch in the early AM.
One of the big lessons I learned last year from the birth of my older son is the importance of distraction. It’s frustrating to have your sleep ruthlessly destroyed by an infant, much less so if you have something to distract you from the endless cycle of bouncing, feeding, changing, bouncing, and holding.
To help with that distraction, I created a goal for myself to read 3 books while out on leave. It was an intentionally modest goal because I wasn’t sure how bad the sleep deprivation was going to be, but it turned out to be too easy. I ended up reading the equivalent of more than 2,800 pages worth of nonfiction across 5 books. I “read” most of the content via Audible using Apple Airpods, which are a great way for parents to be productive while also accomplishing chores.
Below, I’ve summarized 5 things that I learned from 3 of the books that I read as well as some short notes on 123 Magic, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and the two books I started, but didn’t finish:
The Power Broker is the best biography I’ve ever read. It’s also the most detailed, realistic, and clear-eyed explanation of how politics actually work that I’ve encountered. Here are a few things I learned:
Authorities (IE “New York Transit Authority”) during the mid-century were legally not governed or subject to the whims of elected officials. I don’t know if this is still the case, but the result was that any official who directly or indirectly ran such an authority was effectively above the law. Add to the mix that authorities could both raise bonds whose covenants were strongly protected by law as well as raise money to service the bonds with tolls and you have the key to Robert Moses’ power: a massive, independent, quasi-state organ that answered only to it’s commissioner.
Robert Moses created the modern park. This doesn’t just include the parks he directly built (of which their are hundreds). He literally trained a generation of civil servants in the US and abroad in disciplines like architecture, landscaping, zoning, fundraising, PR, and budgeting. If you have been to a park that was built after the late 1920s, it was almost certainly heavily influenced, if not outright designed and built, by Robert Moses.
As with parks, the supremacy of the automobile in US cities was heavily influenced by Robert Moses’ outdated ideas about transit. He grew up wealthy in the very earliest parts of the 20th century when cars were predominantly owned by wealthy families and used for recreation. To him “driving in the car” was about relaxation and leisure. But for most mid-century drivers, cars were utilitarian and traffic was a quality of life problem. Moses built infrastructure in NYC to intentionally exclude public transit, which made people’s lives worse.
Money for public improvements has always been in short supply and the only reason that NYC has so much top-quality infrastructure is FDR’s New Deal and the federal highway programs of the 50s. These programs, despite being nationally funded, we disproportionately spent in the empire state.
If you want a more definitive, detailed study of the misuse of power, look no further. If there’s one thing I took away from The Power Broker, it is that in the real world, there is no benevolent justice and that might makes right.
I read Chernow’s “Titan” about 6 months ago, which focuses on Carnegie’s contemporary, John D. Rockefeller Sr. I’ve always been curious about Carnegie and figured I’d read the two biographies close together so that I could retain historical context. Although I personally found Nasaw’s writing to be less interesting than Chernow’s, this was still a good read.
Carnegie (like Rockefeller and many of the Gilded Age robber barons) was born poor, raised by a mother who received little to no help from her husband, and benefited greatly from being the right age at the right time in American history.
US Steel, which is the company Carnegie is remembered for, was actually only incorporated under that name upon the trust’s creation by JP Morgan in the latter portion of Carnegie’s life. For most of his professional career, the interests that we know today as “US Steel” were a lose web of companies, with the two primary being “Carnegie Steel” and “H. C. Frick & Company.” Internally, the companies were divided into works and foundries that had their own worker demographics, advantages, and challenges.
Carnegie only started in the steel business in his 30s after already having become wealthy working for Thomas Scott and the Pennsylvania Railroad. While working for the railroad, he worked his way up the corporate ladder on the basis of his work ethic and personal appeal. In a word, men in power generally liked him and gave him his first lucky breaks.
He remained a bachelor until the age of 51 because his mother exerted an outsized influence over her adult son. He and his wife Louise spent several years (a very long time for the era) in a secret courtship because their mothers disapproved of the match. Rather than anger them both, Carnegie and Louise agreed to wait until one of them passed away to get married.
He initially became wealthy by exploiting his connections at the Pennsylvania Railroad to profit from insider trading. Interestingly, insider trading was not illegal in the late 19th century. The lack of modern taxation, coupled with very few laws that regulated cartels transformed him from merely a very wealthy man into one of the wealthiest of all time.
For those of us non-sports fans, Muhammed Ali was not the boxer’s given name. He was named Cassius Clay by his parents and adopted the name Muhammed Ali after falling under the influence of Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammed’s Nation of Islam.
Everyone can judge Ali however they please, but I think he was a pretty unpleasant human. He was wildly unfaithful to his 4 wives, abused substances (primarily, but not restricted to alcohol), verbally and emotionally abused friends, lovers, and wives, had a studied inability to self-reflect, and was vain to the point of absurdity.
He was a great boxer, but probably not as great as you might assume given his legend. His early career was indeed marked by skill, athleticism, and strategy in the ring that defied the odds, but this period was relatively short-lived. Most of the fights that he’s best known for (Liston, Foreman, and Frazier to name a few) were fought past his prime and increasingly demonstrated that his competitive advantage late in life was not in his boxing skill, but in his ability to absorb damage and not fall over.
Financially, he was a typical professional athlete. At the same time as he was being paid more than any other athlete alive, he had perennial money problems. Although he rarely admitted it, there’s ample evidence that he kept fighting well past his prime for the simple reason that he’d become adapted to being a spendthrift and didn’t want to face up to mounting pressures to reign in his lifestyle.
As with most highly successful people in modern times, a large part of his success stemmed from an ability to handle and manipulate the press to his advantage. Without reading several biographies of Ali, it’s hard to tease out Eig’s bias from reality, but from the facts presented in this book, he won multiple championship fights on the basis of public approval, not skill. Further, his ability to attract contenders, generate hype, and sell tickets proved an essential element to his fame,
The Rest
The last two books I read were Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and 123 Magic. I don’t either deserves their own 5 point writeup, but if you’re interested in philosophical musings or parenting techniques, I would recommend them both.
In the spirit of avoiding publication bias, I thought I’d close by mentioning the two books I started, but couldn’t finish.
The Myth of the Strong Leader: Political Leadership in the Modern Age. The problem here was that I tried to read this directly after The Power Broker and Archie Brown was just no match for Robert Caro. Brown’s thesis statement—that charismatic leaders are less effective and dangerous to the systems in which they operate— simply felt like so much useless ivory tower idealism. Who cares whether charismatic leaders are dangerous and less effective if everyone always puts them in power anyway?
Lost Kingdom: The Quest for Empire and the Making of the Russian Nation. I really wanted to like this one because I know next to nothing about Russian history. Unfortunately, this book reads like a textbook for students studying Russian history. In other words, extremely dense, lacking in narrative structure, and with an almost glee in focusing on historical details that are either inaccessible or boring to a casual reader.
Conclusion
It’s been fun continuing to read challenging nonfiction, even while sleep deprived and I look forward to continuing for the foreseeable future. If you have any good nonfiction recommendations, ping me and I’ll add them to my list!
First Half of 2019 Goal Retro
The Backstory
In April of 2018, my first child (Greg) was born. It took a while to sink in, but the biggest thing that immediately changed in my life was a profound sense of being out of control.
Prior to being a parent, it was easy to fool myself into thinking I could control the conditions of my life. It's not that I've ever felt supremely in control, but I honestly believed that I could exert my will over large, abstract things like my career, where I lived, and generally how I spent my time.
But when fundamental elements of life -- things like sleep, hygiene, and marital satisfaction -- are taken out of your hands by a squalling baby, it becomes hard to avoid the fact that you were never in control in the first place.
I spent the six months after his birth wallowing in an ever-deepening realization that plans and effort were futile. None of my pre-kid coping strategies worked anymore. I could't just take a walk to empty my mind because Greg was crying and I told Becca I would take care of him. I couldn't rely on a good night's sleep to rejuvenate me because Greg was waking me up every 1.5 hours to feed. I couldn't listen to music because I should be trying to make up all the lost sleep. I couldn't reduce work stress by catching up on email at home because there were bottles to be cleaned, etc, etc.
I made a list of the most important elements of my life and concluded 5 were significantly worse off after Greg was born. I stopped trying to plan anything because it seemed irrelevant. Often I couldn't focus on anything for more than a few minutes anyway. What good were plans that were whole days away? People told me it would get better as Greg got older, but I honestly couldn't believe them.
Then, late in 2018, a close friend (who also has young children) shared that he kept personal goals for himself and it got me thinking that perhaps I could regain some small vestige of control and predictability. So, in November and December of 2018, I created some goals and I started working on them in January.
H1 2019 Goals
I won't share all the goals publicly because some are quite personal, but after 4 months, I can say that they have been a huge help in regaining a small sense of control again. Here's the abridged list of goals:
Personal
Be less angry at home.
Invest in my marriage through regular action.
Read 6 books, write 1 blog post about my reading.
Get better at playing Battlefield 5.
Professional
Ship the projects I committed to for this half.
Broaden my professional network at work.
Build team culture.
Report Card
Here’s a summary of how I did. I’m evaluating myself early because this week my second child is going to be born and I assume most of this is going to go by the wayside in short order once she’s around:
Exceeded My Goal
Read 6 books. I've already read 11 and this blog post satisfies the second constraint.
Get better at BF5. In January, I had a K/D ratio of about .2, now if I'm trying, I can typically hit 1.5.
Broaden my professional network at work. I originally set the goal of meeting an additional 25 people, which proved too easy and also not valuable. But by focusing on expanding my network, I made choices that exceeded the spirit of this goal.
Met My Goal
Ship my projects at work. I intentionally constrained this to be delivered before I went out on leave, and I hit it.
Did Not Meet My Goal
Be less angry at home. The way this goal was written was great, but it wasn't formed in a way that I could actually make good progress towards it. I essentially stopped trying to accomplish this in January.
Build team culture. I got to February and realized that this wasn't a goal that was worth completing. As a result, I didn't accomplish it.
Invest in my marriage through regular action. I had planned to be more intentional about spending time with Becca and for reasons discussed below, that didn't work.
Summary
So, I had mixed success at the specific goals that I set, but I had very high success at regaining a sense of small-scale control and excitement to achieve things of personal importance again.
What’s Am I Going to Change?
Shorten the goal horizon. I set myself the goal of accomplishing these items over 6 months, but then quickly realized that two of the goals weren't really actionable and/or I hadn't set myself up for success to accomplish them. But to honor the system I'd set up, I'd have to wait another 4 months to change and revise my goals. I'll be changing to quarterly goals on 6/30.
Setup a weekly tracker. I was on-track for my marital improvement goal until about 6 weeks in when I realized the format of my tracker didn't let me see whether I'd actually done something nice for Becca for the preceding 6 weeks. I thought I had, but that didn't feel satisfying or convincing and I lost steam. Next time, I'll setup a weekly tracker so that I can track my progress more closely.
Don't include work goals. I have a separate system at work for tracking my career goals, and the redundancy was more confusing than helpful.
Have fewer goals. I had 7 goals for this six month period and that was probably 2-3 too many. If I can't easily enumerate my goals while walking from my car to the office, I probably have too many.
Add a fitness goal. I avoided doing that this time because in the past, fitness goals just haven't been a good use of my time. Other people claim regular workouts make them feel good. I can honestly say that's never been true for me. But, it's become obvious that if I do nothing, I start actively feeling bad after a while, so I need to do something physical, even if it's not the typical “train for a marathon/crossfit/rock climbing” thing, so I'll be adding that in for next quarter.
3 Things I Learned From Each Book
I decided to make it easy for myself just write out three of the neatest/most impactful things I learned from each book that I read:
Almost all of the value of education is signaling, so curricula doesn't really matter. Also, there's no strong evidence that attending prestigious schools (high school + college) have any significant positive impact on opportunities and earnings.
For good to excellent students, it probably makes sense to attend a public university and get an engineering degree.
For average or below average students, college doesn't make sense and learning practical skills (like a trade) as early as high school is a good idea.
Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.
The difference between John D. Rockefeller and other less prosperous businessmen from his generation was mostly luck.
Despite contemporary reporting, Rockefeller was a virtuous person with few vices outside of his ruthlessness in business.
The antitrust breakup of Standard Oil not only failed to stem Standard Oil's control of the market, it was the major event that catapulted Rockefeller from being a wealthy industrialist to one of the wealthiest men in all of recorded history.
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion
Humans are not built for rational thought. We evolved to impress other primates and pass on our genes. It is a modern conceit that we are capable of making rational choices.
Most rational argument is in defense of intuitive reasoning, not the other way around.
We make almost all of our choices based upon emotion and intuition. We are so dependent upon emotion and intuition that people without the capacity to emote or intuit become fundamentally incapable of making choices and functioning in society.
Nothing Like it in the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad
The transcontinental railroad was started during the American Civil War and was enabled by the US government and Abraham Lincoln in particular.
Prior to the transcontinental railroad, it took months to travel from New York to San Francisco. Travelers could cut the voyage short by as much as a month by traveling overland across Panama, but for most Americans, the odds of dying from yellow fever, dengue fever, malaria, or other tropical illness during the crossing was between 20-33%.
As with most huge construction projects, there was a phenomenal amount of graft, brinksmanship, and political maneuvering required to span the continent.
Master of Doom: How Two Guys Created An Empire and Transformer Pop Culture
John Romero and John Carmack both had troubled youths and started ID software out of Shreveport Louisiana, rather than of the current tech hotbeds.
Shareware was a largely untested publishing path before Commander Keen and Doom.
History appears to have vindicated Carmack's game-engine-first style of development.
Killers of the Flower Moon: the Osage Murders the Birth of the FBI
In the early 1920s, oil was discovered in vast quantities under the Osage Indian reservation in Kansas, and made individuals in the tribe millionaires overnight.
Through a system of racism, bigotry, and greed, white landowners and politicians stealthily killed and stole the mineral rights from hundreds of Osage Indians.
The oil fields became exhausted in the 1940s and today the tribe and their reservation has largely been forgotten.
Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding And the Meaning of Things
People who compulsively collect things often treat their possessions are physically part of them.
It is very difficult, if not impossible, to cure hoarding behaviors.
Goat trails is a term that refers to the narrow paths through piles of hoarded belongings that hoarders create to navigate their homes.
Accidental Superpower: The Next Generation of American Preeminence and the Coming Global Disorder
Through numerous quirks of geography, the United States is predisposed to having a larger, more dynamic, and more stable economy than any other nation on earth.
Due to technological breakthroughs (fracking, automation, et al) and rapidly aging populations outside of the US, the US will have diminishing incentives to protect and invest in global trade in the 21st century.
The same forces that cause the US to de-prioritize participating in the economy of the world will make it more attractive to live here in the coming decades.
During the mid-1500s, Christian Europe and the Ottoman empire were fighting for supremacy of the known world in the first ever large-scale maritime battles on the Mediterranean sea.
To secure the western Mediterranean, the Turks needed to capture Malta, but Christian Knights (the order of St. John in particular) held the island despite battles of almost inhuman savagery.
The violence and disregard for human life by both empires contrasts so strongly with our current world views about human rights that certain elements are hard to believe.
Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets
Randomness in all things is the rule, not the exception, and accounting for that fact can often mean the difference between catastrophic failure and incredible success.
It is easy to be fooled into linking cause and effect in complex systems, especially over relatively short periods of time (like a market cycle).
Even what would be considered traditionally "safe" investing strategies incorporate enormous risk in the form of extremely high impact low probability events, that are actually fairly probable when compounded over a person's lifetime. (And example would be a country defaulting on their debt and ruining the currency or environmental degradation causing large areas to become rapidly depopulated.)
Cribsheet: A Data-Driven Guide to Better, More Relaxed Parenting, from Birth to Preschool
There is no definitive, reproducible evidence that breastfeeding improves outcomes for children apart from moderate reductions in infant rashes and diarrhea. This includes the infamous Belarus study that claims the opposite.
Sleep training is effective, can be implemented as early as 3 months of age and has no documented long-term negative effects.
Children that talk earlier test slightly higher on verbal skills in high school, but the effect size is not huge.
The Best 3 Books I Read
The Righteous Mind
Fooled by Randomness
Killers of the Flower Moon