"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.

Joker: Folie à Deux

In this instalment, the system takes revenge on freedom. 

Freedom is the plurality of stories: the human stories that run in parallel in society, the stories that one man is capable of living concurrently, and the stories that are capable of coexisting in one man's head. Identity is the inability to be free.