"What the Constitution Means to Me" by Heidi Schreck (2017)

The play occupies an amorphous middle ground between a serious discussion of the merits and the demerits of the Constitution, and... a polemic? political activism? entertainment? art? It is hard to classify. As written, the play is not persuasive enough as a serious discussion and is not engaging enough as a work of art. The play is too literal, too topical (e.g., in its celebration of victimhood), which are understandable obstacles that arise on the path to timelessness should the playwright happen to come from a time and a place.

As John Updike mused in an interview, "Perhaps I have written fiction because everything unambiguously expressed seems somehow crass to me."

"Nuclear War" by Annie Jocobsen (2024)

The novel explores one branch in a tree of possibilities that spans various nuclear war scenarios. The novel has no central protagonist. Indeed, billions will die in the end (the examined branch is pessimal); it would be immoral to encourage special attachment to just one among many. The good news is that all is over and done in under an hour. Except perhaps for the old New Zealanders and the new ones, the arrivals on the nuclear submarines. These people would get to watch the show for a little longer, until the mass extinction does them all in, too.

The novel's style is the kind of vernacular that ChatGPT would happily disgorge if directed towards the romans de gare aisle at a local airport.

"On Democracy" by E. B White (2019)

White might as well have written all these essays in the last four years. Had he done so, the contemporary discourse would have much benefited from his calm, dignified, aristocratic tone. The clarity of vision is not hard to attain if one is prepared to step away from the mob and reflect a little. Voices unadulterated by political activism existed and were heard in the past, exist and are heard today, and will in all likelihood persist far into the future.

"And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle" by Jon Meacham (2022)

The book’s moral is that it pays to have principles, even in politics. One may lose a score of elections because of principles, but in the end, should one ever be elected, it will be thanks to them principles. And if one is never elected, then at least one can console oneself with the thought that at least one has been true to one’s principles. Staying loyal to principles is the winning strategy—as long as one does not mind a chance of being slightly killed because of them.

Oddly, the book’s author constantly hedges, as if scared of being accused of complicity in Lincoln’s lack of clairvoyance or of being held accountable for Lincoln’s refusal to pander to the sensibilities of modern book-reading audiences.

Meacham purveys facts. He does not bring debates about ideas to life. In his narrative, ideas are dogmas. Some dogmas win, some lose. Thanks to Lincoln’s dogmatism, the deserving dogma has won.

"Streets of Gold: America's Untold Story of Immigrant Success" by Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan (2022)

The book first fleshes out a handful of immigration myths that some people purportedly hold only to debunk them by appealing to the authors' and their colleagues' academic research. One myth is that immigrants today are slow to assimilate. Another myth is that immigrants impoverish the communities that they join. The book's ambition is to engage with the political debates of the day; those interested in science, can read the papers. This ambition comes at the price of necessarily dating the book.

The book could have been shorter. It prides itself on not needing to rely on anecdotes in order to uncover general tendencies, and yet indulges in anecdotes galore. The book sets out not to weigh in on policy matters, and yet does not miss the opportunity to nudge the reader to accept open borders. At the same time, the book's provocative policy proposals also make the book memorable, raise bigger questions beyond the book's scope, and set the book apart from the presumably dry academic prose on which it is based.

Drácula

(26 October 2024, Un Teatro)

Power is not freedom. Power is the ability to affect change. The powerful unfree do not get to choose whether to affect change and, if so, which change to affect. One is powerful but unfree if one's passions or convictions leave one no choice but to act.

"Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways" in America by David Hackett Fischer (1989)

There is much to be admired about each of the four tribes that migrated to America. There is much to be admired about their mutual suspicion and incomprehension. There is much to be admired about their offspring's ability to eventually agree on building a new country together. A substantial degree of conflict is certainly a feature, not a bug, of American politics. 

“One is occasionally tempted to abandon the role of the historian and to frame what social scientists call a theory,” remarks David Hackett Fischer. And yet he does not succumb to this temptation. As a result, there is nothing to disagree with in the book. A fact is a fact.