Tag: Books

On Escaping the Self

Posted on by Marie Snyder

by Marie Snyder

The quest for the answer to Who am I? is often an attempt to separate ourselves from our influences. Do I like to garden, or is that just a suburban social convention that has influenced me towards an action so I fit in. If I pave my yard to be unique, is that what I want, or am I just copying non-conformists? Where is the line between what I like for real and what I’ve been persuaded to like? That line of investigation culminates in the ultimate question: Can we know ourselves with any certainty? 

However, I’ve noticed that when people talk about wanting to let out their real self, often the “real” version they want to foster is actually the instinctive or reflexive version — the part that rises up by impulse unfiltered by any inhibitions. But those inhibitions are from our capacity for reason. They come from our complex pre-frontal cortex. If the real self is just our impulses, then we’re discarding reason as if it’s artificial, and as if our impulses have been unaffected by society. Being real is then reduced to being licentious. We can also see the troubling place where this notion has led: people satisfying their every whim in order to be true to themselves. This is just giving license to the id (Freud) or appetitive (Plato) parts of ourselves, which requires no forethought. We might feel most real with our best friend because it’s only there that we can say our most offensive thoughts, but is that being our real self or is that just cultivating the worst version of ourselves? 

But maybe there is no self that’s real.  

Alexander Douglas’s book, Against Identity: The Wisdom of Escaping the Self, explores the overlapping theories of three men: Zhuangzi (aka Chuang-tzu), a 3rd century BCE Taoist, Baruch Spinoza, a 17th century Dutch philosopher, and Réne Girard, a 20th century French academic. They all take a similar stance against the notion of a fixed and rigid identity. Douglas writes in a thorough yet entertaining way. The writing is teacherly, repeating and consolidating ideas as he dives deeper into the arguments and refutes potentially opposing ideas to help us understand how it can possibly be the case that we don’t have a distinct and solid identity.  Read more »

Sunday, August 23, 2026

A Search for Meaning, A Quest for Purpose

Posted on by Bonnie McCune

by Bonnie McCune

“The world is so full of a number of things, I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.” —Robert Louis Stevenson

Over what is slowly becoming a lengthy session of being alive, I’ve found this statement to be absolutely true. I’m usually thrilled with the variety and my experiences so far. However, those things the world is full of aren’t necessarily always pleasant. Or desirable. We’re thrust, will we, nil we, into a stew of unknowns.

One of the mixed blessings of our contemporary way of life is the instantaneous nature of communications. We don’t have to search for the status of bad weather and storms near us; we get the news complete with visuals, sounds, quotes and opinions. Ditto for horrid happenings—from deadly crashes to wars to terrorists to epidemics.

On a more personal level, experiences of individuals. Yes, occurrences like falling in love or having a baby can make you euphoric. But the death of a loved one, the loss of a pet, getting fired from a good job does the opposite. We have a euphemism for these: we might call them challenges, not setbacks or evils. They shouldn’t plunge us into desperate thoughts. We should rise above them, learn from them.

This admonition doesn’t usually affect my inner status, which is easy to send into a panic. Several weeks ago, I spent the entire night nagged by the thought that I hadn’t paid my state property tax. Which I hadn’t. But throughout the night, I envisioned the tax man pounding on my door to levy penalty after penalty as the days passed because the state hadn’t deposited my delinquent check. Then I figured a whole line of checks would bounce because my bank account would be overdrawn. I’d have no way to appeal these decisions; it says so right on the tax website. My luck in getting a human to answer an official phone is zero, despite my customary plea to the automated responder to “I want a human, I want to talk to a human.” Read more »

Monday, January 26, 2026

A Room For Books

Posted on by Herbert Harris

by Herbert Harris

The greatest privilege of my childhood was growing up in a house where books had their own room.

My father’s library occupied the second floor, the only room without a window air-conditioning unit. On summer afternoons in Washington, DC, when the heat and humidity pressed down like a weight, the rest of the house hummed and rattled with machines straining to keep up. The air in the library stayed stubbornly still. It was the early 1970s, and I was on summer break after tenth grade, retreating there to find the peculiar solitude this room alone offered. Each book I opened sent up a cloud of dust that glittered in the angled sunlight. Shutting the door turned the room into a sauna, but in that quiet stillness, I didn’t mind. It felt like the price of admission to a different world.

The previous summer had unfolded differently. I had just finished ninth grade, where we surveyed the classics of English literature and retraced the decisive moments of Western civilization, reliving the deeds of its great men and women. I spent long afternoons in the library, sinking into those books as the heat pooled around me. I melted into a reclining chair and wandered through the past. That immersion had felt complete, even sufficient. But this summer, I arrived with a different appetite. I was growing skeptical of the Eurocentric narratives threaded through everything I was learning. I sensed there were other stories and vantage points, and I came looking for them.

I picked up the book I had been reading a few days earlier and turned to the page marked with an index card. I searched for the sentence I remembered, but at first the words slipped past me. James Baldwin was writing about a Swiss village, about children shouting “Neger” as he walked through the snow. Seeing the word on the page registered instantly, not as surprise but as recognition. I had learned early what it meant to be called that name in its American form. That knowledge had settled into my body long before I could articulate it. Read more »

Friday, January 9, 2026

“By The Book” — My Way

Posted on by Barbara Fischkin

by Barbara Fischkin

Since its debut in 2013, I have been a fan of “By the Book,” a “Q and A” feature, in The New York Times Book Review. Google AI describes it as a look into “select authors’ reading habits and favorite books.” I’d always been so eager to read the text, that it was only recently I noticed the pun in the title. A word play on a phrase I had used umpteenth times to push sales, after the first of my three books was published in 1997. Duh.

Late last year one of those “select, authors did a slight stumble over the often-posed question about who to invite to a literary dinner party. He said he had been reading the feature for years—which I took as a big hint that he had long hoped to be a subject one day. I don’t know any writers who wouldn’t jump at the chance, myself included.

For me, one major problem: My last book was published in 2006, seven years before this feature appeared. Like many writers, my heart and soul are joyous about my successes yet tainted with bitterness and blame. In regard to my lack of a fourth book, I blame the editor—and supposed friend—who refused to acquire an in-depth look at the children of the autism surge growing into adulthood, as was my elder son. A similar tome, written by Washington insiders, was a Pulitzer prize finalist. With a little less bite, I blame the handful of non-writers with great stories, who chickened out when it came to partnering with me to write their books. To be fair they did this after editing, book proposals and early chapters were written—and after they paid me for my work. But when it came to publicly telling their stories, they got cold feet.

Most of all, though, I blame my current obscurity on myself and on a manuscript-creature titled The Digger Resistance. My yet unborn historical novel. Read more »

Sunday, July 6, 2025

The Novel Endures: A Conversation with Ross Barkan

Posted on by Philip Graham

by Philip Graham 

Ross Barkan is certainly having a moment. His third and most ambitious novel, Glass Century, set in New York and encompassing over fifty years of the city’s history, has recently been published and is enjoying a raucously enthusiastic critical reception.

I wasn’t surprised by the praise for Glass Century. Having been a New York City cabdriver in the ’70s, a volunteer near Ground Zero in 2001, and the father of a daughter who refused to abandon her West Village apartment and beloved city during the Covid crisis, I found myself utterly convinced on every page by Barkan’s long game of interweaving intimate family secrets with the public unfolding of the city’s historic crises. And he can write a mean tennis match, too.

Meanwhile, this week Barkan’s long-time friend and political comrade-in-arms, Zohran Mamdani, has triumphed in the Democratic primary for New York City mayor. One might say that Ross Barkan, a 35-year-old novelist, journalist, essayist and political commentator, is feeling the warm embrace of the zeitgeist.

Philip Graham: Your novel Glass Century begins with the two main characters, Mona Glass and Saul Plotz, as they prepare the final arrangements of a false marriage. That their wedding will be staged is a secret built on another secret: Saul is already married and has two children. Mona believes this fictional wedding with her lover will fool her parents, who are relentless in their insistence that their fiercely independent daughter settle down and start a family.

Somehow, they manage to pull off the deception, not only for the wedding but for the many years of their actual committed relationship. A lot of people in this novel have to maintain the secret, and at least an equal number need to ignore or adopt a complicit silence about their suspicions—Mona’s parents and Saul’s wife and children, in particular. And somehow you manage as author to maintain this tightrope trick throughout the novel. It certainly rang true for me. Every family, I believe, cloaks some truth or truths that must remain silent.

Ross Barkan: Secrets are everything: shameful, powerful, ennobling, destructive. There isn’t a family without secrets. It’s only a matter of how large they are. Secrets were on my mind as I wrote Glass Century. How do we keep them? Whom do they hurt? Who benefits? A secret, sometimes, offers something of a counter-life. You slip in and live in a way you might not have otherwise. Already married Saul, in this instance, finds Mona to be something like his counter-life. And Mona, in turn, has the image of marriage, which was so important to her traditional parents in the 1970s. Of course, what makes this all interesting, as you point out, is that there are others aware of the ruse. There’s complicity. It’s plausible, certainly, to be skeptical of all of this—how is it possible? In a fictional world, there can be a just-so quality to events but I wanted to write in a manner where it didn’t seem so fantastical for secrets like these to be held. Men and women do have affairs, lives are carved out within lives, and families, in a way not so dissimilar from organisms, must adapt gradually to all of it. As I wrote the novel, I considered image versus reality, and how, from the outside, we know so very little about people. That’s the beauty of the novel form, and why I love it so: there’s the ability to excavate that interiority, that consciousness. I loved living in the pages with Mona and Saul. Read more »

Thursday, February 20, 2025

The Natural Selection of Books

Posted on by Christopher Horner

by Christopher Horner

Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last – Dr. Johnson.

Where are the authors of yesterday? And where will today’s be tomorrow? Look for some principle of sorting, some logic to the winnowing process that consigns this to the bin and that to perpetual presence. You won’t find it. I wish the reliable answer was ‘quality’, but it doesn’t seem so. Nor is popularity: plenty of best sellers are consigned to oblivion.  Is there a kind of ‘natural selection’ going on? Is it just luck?

Some writers are strongly identified with a decade or so, are popular, wildly so in some cases, and then completely fade. Others survive and are still read, though sometimes only via one book – the rest of their output goes into the dark. Getting on a school or University reading list can help, or having a film version, but even that isn’t always enough. When I was boy certain writers were ubiquitous, but seem very dated now: Neville Shute, John Wyndham, Paul Gallico, Lawrence Durrell.  They were all set texts in their time. Does anyone think they’ll be revived? Steinbeck, though, is regularly set for students, and lives on. Not in all of his books, though: only about half a dozen of his 33 books are often read. But this is more than enough for immortality: it’s hard to imagine The Grapes of Wrath, for instance, ever going out of print: it is too clearly a very great novel for that. Or so it seems to us.

Orwell has surely been safe for ages – through just two famous books, neither of which is Keep the Aspidistra Flying. His essays seem alive too.  Ideology plays a role here: he was saying things in Animal Farm and 1984 that influential people wanted disseminated. You couldn’t get through school in Britain without being made to read him. I persist in thinking him overrated. Will he fade without the Cold War? There’s no sign of it yet.

This is all very hit or miss. Dr Johnson was famously wrong about Lawrence Sterne. Yet can we imagine the novels of John Fowles, once the big thing in 70s, getting his The Magus read in 2525, or next year? Even The French Lieutenant’s Woman seems irretrievable. But stranger things have happened. Read more »

Monday, April 8, 2024

Third Places and American Libraries

Posted on by Mark Harvey

by Mark Harvey

Don’t join the book burners. Don’t think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book…  —President Dwight Eisenhower, 1953

Andrew Carnegie

The other day I stopped in at one of those coworking spaces to see if it would be worth joining in an effort to increase my productivity. Productivity, in my case, is a fancy word to describe getting my taxes done on time, answering a few emails, staying atop some small businesses, and doing a little writing. I’m not exactly a threat to mainland China.

Unfortunately the place I visited had all the charm of a gulag in far east Russia, with poor lighting, and about four pale characters staring at their computer screens as if they could see the eternal void in the universe and had a longing to visit. No thanks.

It did get me thinking about “third places,” and libraries in particular. I believe the term, third place, was coined by the writer Ray Oldenburg in his book The Great Good Place. First places are our homes, second places are where we work, and third places are where we go to get relief from the first and second places. They include churches, libraries, pubs, cafes, parks, gyms, and clubs.

My second place is a beautiful ranch in Colorado, so I have little to complain about, but when it comes to the close work of being on a computer, I really value third places. Scholars have described Oldenburg’s third place as having eight features including neutrality, leveling qualities, accommodation, a low profile, and a sense of home. In short, it’s a place that is welcoming, not fancy, free of social hierarchies, free of dues, and imparts no obligation to be there. That perfectly describes American libraries, one of our greatest institutions. Read more »

Monday, October 2, 2023

Artists and Craftsmen In Science Writing

Posted on by Ashutosh Jogalekar

by Ashutosh Jogalekar

Jacob Bronowski and Isaac Asimov, one a master artist and the other a master craftsman among science writers (Images: Wikimedia Commons)

There are two kinds of science writers which I will call “artists” and “craftsmen”. Since I might face the opprobrium of both groups by attaching these labels to them, and especially because the two categories may overlap considerably, let me elaborate a little. Artists are big on literary science writing; craftsmen are big on explanatory science writing. Artists write beautiful prose; craftsmen write clear prose. Artists write relatively few books and are likely to win big book awards like the Pulitzer Prize; craftsmen are content to be merely prolific, often writing dozens or even hundreds of books.

Let me quote from a master craftsman of the trade to put the discussion into context. Isaac Asimov who wrote more than 500 books, seemingly on every subject conceivable, had the following to say about his writing style:

“I made up my mind long ago to follow one cardinal rule in all my writing—to be ‘clear’. I have given up all thought of writing poetically or symbolically or experimentally, or in any of the other modes that might (if I were good enough) get me a Pulitzer prize. I would write merely clearly and in this way establish a warm relationship between myself and my readers, and the professional critics—Well, they can do whatever they wish.”

Asimov wasn’t just a great science fiction writer but a great science writer. He was known as “The Great Explainer” for his ability to explain complex, sweeping scientific topics to laypeople. But Asimov’s quote above also illustrates a central dilemma of science writing. That dilemma was best captured by the physicist Paul Dirac when he expressed puzzlement to Robert Oppenheimer who he had befriended while the two were researchers at the University of Göttingen in the 1920s. Oppenheimer, a man with broad interests across science and the humanities, studied both physics and poetry. Befuddled, Dirac once asked him, “Oppenheimer, they tell me you are writing poetry. I do not see how a man can work on the frontiers of physics and write poetry at the same time. In science you want to say something that nobody knew before, in words which everyone can understand. In poetry it seems to be the opposite”. Dirac had a point. In science a tiger is a striped mammal and an apex predator. In poetry a tiger is a “tyger”, with an “immortal hand or eye framing thy symmetry”. Read more »

Monday, March 13, 2023

Why Johnny Can’t Read Now; An Elegy

Posted on by Deanna Kreisel

by Deanna Kreisel [Dr. Waffle Blog]

About a third of the way through a first-year humanities honors course, one of my more engaged and talkative students pulled me aside after class for a private chat. She waited, clearly anxious, while the rest of her classmates filed out and then turned to me with her eyes already filling up with tears.

“I can’t read,” she said, her voice shaking.

I waited for her to elaborate, but nothing else was coming out. “Do you mean you’re having trouble finding time to do the assigned reading?” I ventured.

“No. I mean, yes, I am, but that’s not what I mean. I’m trying to read Pride and Prejudice,[1] I really am, but I don’t understand it.”

“Yes, well, as I’ve explained the language is antiquated and it takes some time to—”

“No, no!” she cried impatiently. “I know that. I mean I don’t know how to read a novel, a whole book. I can’t concentrate on it; my mind wanders. And then I can’t remember what happened, and I feel lost. It doesn’t make any sense to me. I just….can’t read,” she trailed off.

I clucked sympathetically as I tried to figure out what on earth to say.

“I’ve called my mom a bunch of times and cried on the phone to her. I am just so embarrassed. She said I should talk to you. Also, she suggested I listen to the audiobook. But I mean, is that cheating?”

I seized on the idea like a lifeline. “No, that would be fine,” I reassured her. “I suggest that you do both, though—listen to the audiobook as you’re following along with the text, so that you can eventually get better at comprehension.”

She was grateful; I gave her some tips on dealing with distractions and suggested she work with a tutor; she struggled through Jane Austen; tragedy and disaster were both averted. She got a little better at reading the assigned texts but continued to worry that it didn’t come naturally or easily to her.

This was an honors student. Read more »

Monday, October 31, 2022

What Freeman Dyson taught the world

Posted on by Ashutosh Jogalekar

by Ashutosh Jogalekar

Freeman Dyson combined a luminous intelligence with a genuine sensitivity toward human problems that was unprecedented among his generation’s scientists. In his contributions to mathematics and theoretical physics he was second to none in the 20th century, but in the range of his thinking and writing he was probably unique. He made seminal contributions to science, advised the U.S government on critical national security issues and won almost every award for his contributions that a scientist could. His understanding of human problems found expression in elegant prose dispersed in an autobiography and in essays and book reviews in the New Yorker and other sources. Along with being a great scientist he was also a cherished friend and family man who raised six children. He was one of a kind. Those of us who could call him a friend, colleague or mentor were blessed.

Now there is a volume commemorating his remarkable mind from MIT Press that is a must-read for anyone who wants to appreciate the sheer diversity of ideas he generated and lives he touched. From spaceships powered by exploding nuclear bombs to the eponymous “Dyson spheres” that could be used by advanced alien civilizations to capture energy from their suns, from his seminal work in quantum electrodynamics to his unique theories for the origins of life, from advising the United States government to writing far-ranging books for the public that were in equal parts science and poetry, Dyson’s roving mind roamed across the physical and human universe. All these aspects of his life and career are described by a group of well-known scientists and science writers, including his son, George and daughter, Esther. Edited by the eminent physicist and historian of science David Kaiser, the volume brings it all together.  I myself was privileged to write a chapter about Dyson’s little-known but fascinating foray into the origins of life. Read more »

Monday, April 4, 2022

The Shame Machine: Author Cathy O’Neil Interviewed by Danielle Spencer

Posted on by Danielle Spencer

by Danielle Spencer

The Shame Machine

Cathy O’Neil’s The Shame Machine: Who Profits in the New Age of Humiliation (Crown) was released on March 22, 2022. O’Neil is the author of the bestselling Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy (Crown 2016) which won the Euler Book Prize and was longlisted for the National Book Award. She received her PhD in mathematics from Harvard and has worked in finance, tech, and academia. She launched the Lede Program for data journalism at Columbia University and recently founded ORCAA, an algorithmic auditing company. O’Neil is a regular contributor to Bloomberg Opinion.

Danielle Spencer: Can you speak a bit about your background and what led you to write this book?

Cathy O’Neil: I’m a mathematician and a child of two mathematicians. Very nerd-centered childhood, where science was the religion of the household. They were otherwise atheists. I became a data scientist at some point, also a hedge fund analyst.

Weapons of Math DestructionAnd then I started trying to warn people about the dangers of algorithms when we trust them blindly. I wrote a book called Weapons of Math Destruction, and in doing so I interviewed a series of teachers and principals who were being tested by this new-fangled algorithm called the value-added model for teachers. And it was high stakes. They were being denied tenure or even fired based on low scores, but nobody could explain their scores. Or shall I say, when I asked them, “Did you ask for an explanation of the score you got?” They often said, “Well, I asked, but they told me it was math and I wouldn’t understand it.”

That was the first moment I thought, “Oh my God, shame is so powerful.” That was math shame, evidently, because it wouldn’t have worked on me. [laughs] I’m a mathematician. You’re not going to shame me on math. If you tell me I wouldn’t understand something because it’s math, I’d say, “Dude, buster, if you can’t explain it to me, that’s your problem—not mine.” I would just be bulletproof to math-shaming. Read more »

Monday, December 20, 2021

Decoding A Language: An Interview With Andrea Scrima About Her New Novel “Like Lips, Like Skins”

Posted on by Andrea Scrima

Like Lips, Like Skins, Andrea Scrima’s second novel (German edition: Kreisläufe, Literaturverlag Droschl 2021), is a diptych; the first half of the book is dedicated to the first-person narrator’s mother, the second half to her late father. We meet Felice in the early eighties as a young art student in New York and as a newcomer to West Berlin before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall; ten years later, she returns to New York to install an exhibition of her work. Another fifteen years pass and we encounter her as a single mother poring over her father’s journals in search of her family’s past. Like Lips, Like Skins is about art, memory, and the repetitions of trauma. The first chapter was published in issue 232 of the Austrian literary magazine manuskripte; English-language excerpts have appeared in Trafika Europe, StatORec, and Zyzzyva. The German version of this interview appeared in issue 234 of manuskripte. Ally Klein interviewed the author over the course of several weeks via email.

Ally Klein: There’s a scene in Like Lips, Like Skins in which the first-person narrator, Felice, recalls studying the Sunday comics as a child. She buries her nose in the newsprint; when she fetches a magnifying glass to get closer, she discovers an “accumulation of tiny dots.” Individually, they’re no more than “lopsided splotch[es],” but together give rise to a bigger picture. I see a parallel here to the way the novel is stylistically conceived. Memories pop up seemingly at random, and in the end, they produce an image that works intuitively. The book eludes a stringent retelling, but leaves the reader with a sense of understanding something that can’t be expressed in terms of an idea or concept. The discoveries, if that’s what they can be called, are situated elsewhere.

Andrea Scrima: As a child, Felice doesn’t yet know that the interaction between the eye and brain fills in the gaps, the missing information between disparate points; for her, it’s just magic. I use language to create imagery that can exist outside of description or symbolism. In literature, images often have a function, they’re there to convey a certain idea. But some images are irreducible, they’re not all that easy to explain. And these are the ones that interest me most: they’re autonomous, they have a life of their own. Sometimes they’re a bit uncanny.

I’m interested in literature’s resilience, its ability to find a formal language for phenomena that can’t be easily captured in words. A language the reader somehow perceives as “true,” even if they can’t necessarily say how or why. Read more »

Monday, July 12, 2021

Kurt Gödel’s Open World

Posted on by Ashutosh Jogalekar

by Ashutosh Jogalekar

Gödel and Einstein in Princeton (Source: Emilio Segre Visual Archives)

Two men walking in Princeton, New Jersey on a stuffy day. One shaggy-looking with unkempt hair, avuncular, wearing a hat and suspenders, looking like an old farmer. The other an elfin man, trim, owl-like, also wearing a fedora and a slim white suit, looking like a banker. The elfin man and the shaggy man used to make their way home from work every day. Passersby and motorists would strain their heads to look. Everyone knew who the shaggy man was; almost nobody knew who his elfin companion was. And yet when asked, the shaggy man would say that his own work no longer meant much to him, and the only reason he came to work was to have the privilege of walking home with the elfin man. The shaggy man was Albert Einstein. His walking companion was Kurt Gödel.

What made Gödel, a figure unknown to the public, so revered among his colleagues? The superlatives kept coming. Einstein called him the greatest logician since Aristotle. The legendary mathematician John von Neumann who was his colleague argued for his extraction from fascism-riddled Europe, writing a letter to the director of his institute saying that “Gödel is absolutely irreplaceable; he is the only mathematician about whom I dare make this assertion.” And when I made a pilgrimage to Gödel’s house during a trip to his native Vienna a few years ago, the plaque in front of the house made his claim to posterity clear: “In this house lived from 1930-1937, the great mathematician and logician Kurt Gödel. Here he discovered his famous incompleteness theorem, the most significant mathematical discovery of the twentieth century.”

The author in front of the house in Vienna where Gödel was living with his mother and brother when he proved his Incompleteness Theorems

The reason Gödel drew gasps of awe from colleagues as brilliant as Einstein and von Neumann was because he revealed a seismic fissure in the foundations of that most perfect, rational and crystal-clear of all creations – mathematics. Of all the fields of human inquiry, mathematics is considered the most exact. Unlike politics or economics, or even the more quantifiable disciplines of chemistry and physics, every question in mathematics has a definite yes or no answer. The answer to a question such as whether there is an infinitude of prime numbers leaves absolutely no room for ambiguity or error – it’s a simple yes or no (yes in this case). Not surprisingly, mathematicians around the beginning of the 20th century started thinking that every mathematical question that can be posed should have a definite yes or no answer. In addition, no mathematical question should have both answers. The first requirement was called completeness, the second one was called consistency. Read more »

Monday, February 15, 2021

Does belief in God make you rich?

Posted on by Ashutosh Jogalekar

by Ashutosh Jogalekar

Religion has always had an uneasy relationship with money-making. A lot of religions, at least in principle, are about charity and self-improvement. Money does not directly figure in seeking either of these goals. Yet one has to contend with the stark fact that over the last 500 years or so, Europe and the United States in particular acquired wealth and enabled a rise in people’s standard of living to an extent that was unprecedented in human history. And during the same period, while religiosity in these countries varied there is no doubt, especially in Europe, that religion played a role in people’s everyday lives whose centrality would be hard to imagine today. Could the rise of religion in first Europe and then the United States somehow be connected with the rise of money and especially the free-market system that has brought not just prosperity but freedom to so many of these nations’ citizens? Benjamin Friedman who is a professor of political economy at Harvard explores this fascinating connection in his book “Religion and the Rise of Capitalism”. The book is a masterclass on understanding the improbable links between the most secular country in the world and the most economically developed one.

Friedman’s account starts with Adam Smith, the father of capitalism, whose “The Wealth of Nations” is one of the most important books in history. But the theme of the book really starts, as many such themes must, with The Fall. When Adam and Eve sinned, they were cast out from the Garden of Eden and they and their offspring were consigned to a life of hardship. As punishment for their deeds, all women were to deal with the pain of childbearing while all men were to deal with the pain of backbreaking manual labor – “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground”, God told Adam. Ever since Christianity took root in the Roman Empire and then in the rest of Europe, the Fall has been a defining lens through which Christians thought about their purpose in life and their fate in death. Read more »

Monday, October 5, 2020

Analogia: A Conversation with George Dyson

Posted on by Ashutosh Jogalekar

by Ashutosh Jogalekar

George Dyson is a historian of science and technology who has written books about topics ranging from the building of a native kayak (“Baidarka”) to the building of a spaceship powered by nuclear bombs (“Project Orion”). He is the author of the bestselling books “Turing’s Cathedral” and “Darwin Among the Machines” which explore the multifaceted ramifications of intelligence, both natural and artificial. George is also the son of the late physicist, mathematician and writer Freeman Dyson, a friend whose wisdom and thinking we both miss.

George’s latest book is called “Analogia: The Emergence of Technology Beyond Programmable Human Control”. It is in part a fascinating and wonderfully eclectic foray into the history of diverse technological innovations leading to the promises and perils of AI, from the communications network that allowed the United States army to gain control over the Apache Indians to the invention of the vacuum tube to the resurrection of analog computing. It is also a deep personal exploration of George’s own background in which he lived in a treehouse and gained mastery over the ancient art of Aleut baidarka building. I am very pleased to speak with George about these ruminations. I would highly recommend that readers listen to the entire conversation, but if you want to jump to snippets of specific topics, you can click on the timestamps below, after the video.

7:51 We talk about lost technological knowledge. George makes the point that it’s really the details that matter, and through the gradual extinction of practitioners and practice we stand in real danger of losing knowledge that can elevate humanity. Whether it’s the art of building native kayaks or building nuclear bombs for peaceful purposes, we need ways to preserve the details of knowledge of technology.

12:49 Digital versus analog computing. The distinction is fuzzy: As George says, “You can have digital computers made out of wood and you can have analog computers made out of silicon.” We talk about how digital computing became so popular in part because it was so cheap and made so much money. Ironically, we are now witnessing the growth of giant analog network systems built on a digital substrate.

21:22 We talk about Leo Szilard, the pioneering, far-sighted physicist who was the first to think of a nuclear chain reaction while crossing a traffic light in London in 1933. Szilard wrote a novel titled “The Voice of the Dolphins” which describes a group of dolphins trying to rescue humanity from its own ill-conceived inventions, an oddly appropriate metaphor for our own age. George talks about the formative influence of Trudy Szilard, Leo’s wife, who used to snatch him out of boring school lessons and take him to lunch, where she would have a pink martini and they would talk. Read more »

Monday, April 13, 2020

The greatest artist

Posted on by Ashutosh Jogalekar

by Ashutosh Jogalekar

A dinosaur fossil found in China with a clearly visible feathered exterior (Cosmos Magazine)

Neil Shubin’s “Some Assembly Required” is a delightful book whose thesis can be summarized in one word – “repurposing”. As Steve Jobs once put it, “Good artists create. Great artists steal”. By that reckoning Nature is undoubtedly the most magnificent thief and the greatest artist of all time. Repurposing in the history of life will undoubtedly become one of the great paradigms of science, and its discovery has not only provided immense insights into evolutionary biology but also promises to make key contributions to our understanding and treatment of human disease.

Among many other achievements of Darwin’s great theory was the explanation and prediction that similar parts of organisms had similar functions even if they might have looked different. One of the truly remarkable features of “On the Origin of Species” is how Darwin gets almost everything right, how even throwaway lines attest to a level of understanding of life that was solidified only decades after this death. The idea of repurposing came about in the “Origin” partly as a reply to objections raised by  a man named St. George Jackson Mivart. Mivart was in the curious position of being a man of the cloth who had first wholeheartedly embraced Darwin’s theory and studied with Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin’s most ardent champion, before then rejecting it and mounting an attack on it, timidly at first and then vociferously. Mivart’s own tract on the subject, “On the Genesis of Species” made his not-so-subtle dig at Darwin’s book clear.

Darwin’s response to Mivart’s objections in the “Origin of Species” (from the author’s collection; 1882 edition)

Mivart’s basic objection was similar to that raised then and later by creationists. Darwin’s theory crucially relied on transitional forms that enabled major leaps in life’s history; from fish to amphibian for instance or from arboreal life to terrestrial life. But in Mivart’s view, any such major transition would involve not just a sudden change in one crucial body part, say from gills to lungs, but a change in multiple body parts. Clearly the transition from water to land for instance involved hundreds if not thousands of changes in organs and structures for locomotion, feeding and breathing. But how could all these changes arise out of thin air? How could gills for instance suddenly turn into lungs in the first lucky fish that crawled out of water and learnt how to survive on land? This problem according to Mivart was insurmountable and a fatal flaw in Darwin’s theory. Darwin took Mivart’s objections seriously enough to include a substantial section addressing them in the sixth and definitive edition of his book, first published in 1872. In it he acknowledged Mivart’s problems with his theory, and then did away with them succinctly: There is no problem imagining organs being used in different species, Darwin said, as long as they are “accompanied by a change in function.” In writing this Darwin was even further ahead of his time than he imagined. Read more »

Monday, March 16, 2020

The last great contrarian?

Posted on by Ashutosh Jogalekar

by Ashutosh Jogalekar

Freeman Dyson, photographed in 2013 in his office by the author

On February 28th this year, the world lost a remarkable scientist, thinker, writer and humanist, and many of us also lost a beloved, generous mentor and friend. Freeman Dyson was one of the last greats from the age of Einstein and Dirac who shaped our understanding of the physical universe in the language of mathematics. But what truly made him unique was his ability to bridge C. P. Snow’s two cultures with aplomb, with one foot firmly planted in the world of hard science and the other in the world of history, poetry and letters. Men like him come along very rarely indeed, and we are poorer for his absence.

The world at large, however, knew Dyson not only as a leading scientist but as a “contrarian”. He didn’t like the word himself; he preferred to think of himself as a rebel. One of his best essays is called “The Scientist as Rebel”. In it he wrote, “Science is an alliance of free spirits in all cultures rebelling against the local tyranny that each culture imposes on its children.” The essay describes pioneers like Kurt Gödel, Albert Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer and Francis Crick who cast aside the chains of conventional wisdom, challenging beliefs and systems that were sometimes age-old, beliefs both scientific and social. Dyson could count himself as a member of this pantheon.

Although Dyson did not like to think of himself as particularly controversial, he was quite certainly a very unconventional thinker and someone who liked to go against the grain. His friend and fellow physicist Steven Weinberg said that when consensus was forming like ice on a surface, Dyson would start chipping away at it. In a roomful of nodding heads, he would be the one who would have his hand raised, asking counterfactual questions and pointing out where the logic was weak, where the evidence was lacking. And he did this without a trace of one-upmanship or wanting to put anyone down, with genuine curiosity, playfulness and warmth. His favorite motto was the founding motto of the Royal Society: “Nullius in verba”, or “Nobody’s word is final”. Read more »

Monday, October 28, 2019

Making far out the norm: Or how to nurture loonshots

Posted on by Ashutosh Jogalekar

by Ashutosh Jogalekar

Vannevar Bush – loonshot pioneer (Picture credit- TIME magazine)

What makes a revolutionary scientific or technological breakthrough by an individual, an organization or even a country possible? In his thought provoking book “Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas that Win Wars, Cure Diseases and Transform Industries”, physicist and biotechnology entrepreneur Safi Bahcall dwells on the ideas, dynamics and human factors that have enabled a select few organizations and nations in history to rise above the fray and make contributions of lasting impact to modern society. Bahcall calls such seminal, unintuitive, sometimes vehemently opposed ideas “Loonshots”. Loonshots is a play on “moonshots” because the people who come up with these ideas are often regarded as crazy or anti-establishment, troublemakers who want to rattle the status quo.

Bahcall focuses on a handful of individuals and companies to illustrate the kind of unconventional, out of the box thinking that makes breakthrough discoveries possible. Among his favorite individuals are Vannevar Bush, Akira Endo and Edwin Land, and among his favorite organizations are Bell Labs and American Airlines. Each of these individuals or organizations possessed the kind of hardy spirit that’s necessary to till their own field, often against the advice of their peers and superiors. Each possessed the imagination to figure out how to think unconventionally or orthogonal to the conventional wisdom. And each courageously pushed ahead with their ideas, even in the face of contradictory or discouraging data. Read more »

Monday, September 30, 2019

This book should transform your outlook on cancer research

Posted on by Ashutosh Jogalekar

by Ashutosh Jogalekar

A few days ago I finished watching a new documentary on Bill Gates’ life and work. One of the episodes narrated the sad story of the death of his mother in the mid 1990s from late stage breast cancer. She was a great philanthropist and a doting parent who managed to see Bill get married just before she died. At that point her son was already one of the most successful and wealthiest individuals in the world, but with all his resources and wealth, her life could not be saved. Steve Jobs, another person who had access to every medical treatment that money can buy, died early from cancer. These two stories tell us how great the leveling effect of cancer is, taking poor and rich alike without discrimination. Like war, cancer is the father of us all.

Today breast cancer can be treated much better than it was in the 1990s. There are better drugs and better radiation treatment options available, but for resistant late stage breast cancer the prognosis isn’t much better. In fact, as Dr. Azra Raza who is a distinguished oncologist at Columbia University tells us in this eloquent, thought-provoking and immensely sobering book, what’s true for breast cancer is true for most other kinds of cancer except for a few rare exceptions. The hard hitting truth is that in spite of tens of billions of dollars fueled into research around the world done by some of the smartest people in the field, the truly relevant endpoint for cancer – the increase in someone’s life span – has not changed much even after thirty years. For instance, a study of FDA-approved drugs from 2002 to 2014 showed that these drugs extended people’s lives by an average of only 2 months. Dozens of Nobel Prizes have been given out for basic cancer discoveries, cancer ‘moonshots’ have been promoted by politicians, startups and hospitals working on cancer continue to spend countless dollars and hours on a cure for the disease, but the two things that matter most for patients and their loved ones – extension and quality of life – haven’t changed much.

To know why this depressing scenario persists, Raza offers a simple reason with a hard answer: we are focusing too much on late stage cancer treatment, when the disease has already progressed and spread throughout the body, and much less on early stage detection and prevention. In spite of purported cancer breakthroughs in the media, the treatment is essentially the same as it has been for decades – slash (surgery), poison (chemotherapy) and burn (radiation), a triad of interventions sounding like they have been imported from the Stone Age, used because we can’t use anything better. Read more »

Monday, April 15, 2019

Robert Caro: (Obsessively) Working

Posted on by Ashutosh Jogalekar

by Ashutosh Jogalekar

Robert Caro might well go down in history as the greatest American biographer of all time. Through two monumental biographies, one of Robert Moses – perhaps the most powerful man in New York City’s history – and the other an epic multivolume treatment of the life and times of Lyndon Johnson – perhaps the president who wielded the greatest political power of any in American history – Caro has illuminated what power and especially political power is all about, and the lengths men will go to acquire and hold on to it. Part deep psychological profiles, part grand portraits of their times, Caro has made the men and the places and times indelible. His treatment of individuals, while as complete as any that can be found, is in some sense only a lens through which one understands the world at large, but because he is such an uncontested master of his trade, he makes the man indistinguishable from the time and place, so that understanding Robert Moses through “The Power Broker” effectively means understanding New York City in the first half of the 20th century, and understanding Lyndon Johnson through “The Years of Lyndon Johnson” effectively means understanding America in the mid 20th century.

By drawing up this grand landscape, Caro has become one of the most obsessive and exhaustive non-fiction writers of all time, going to great lengths to acquire the most minute details about his subject, whether it’s tracking down every individual connected with a specific topic or interviewing them or spending six days a week in the archives. He worked for seven years on the Moses biography, and has worked an incredible forty-five years on the years of Lyndon Johnson. At 83 his fans are worried, and they are imploring him to finish the fifth and last volume as soon as possible. But Caro shows no sign of slowing down.

In “Working”, Caro takes the reader behind the scenes of some of his most important research, but this is not an autobiography – he helpfully informs us that that long book is coming soon (and anyone who has read Caro would know just how long it will be). He describes being overwhelmed by the 45 million documents in the LBJ library and the almost equal number in the New York Public Library, and obsessively combing through them every day from 9 AM to 6 PM cross-referencing memos, letters, government reports, phone call transcripts, the dreariest and most exciting written material and every kind of formal and informal piece of papers with individuals who he would then call or visit to interview. Read more »