"The Strange Career of Jim Crow" by C. Vann Woodward (2001)

The book's view of history is the standard one, of the one-damned-thing-after-another variety, unadulterated by theorising, which is but laziness in the archives. Radical things were happening in race relations, but the book offers little by way of explanation. Slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Jim Crow backlash, and the Civil Rights Movement in its peaceful and its violent forms are described but never explained.   

The Declaration of Independence, The Federalist Papers, and the U.S. Constitution embody principles. These principles are responsible for Reconstruction and the eventual success of the Civil Rights Movement. They explain progress at low frequencies. The high-frequency oscillations remain unexplained—at least by the book. Just as the principles laid out by the Founding Fathers determine the long-term path of progress, a certain entrepreneurial spirit appears to be responsible for the violent fluctuations along this path.

"Pulphead: Essays" by John Jeremiah Sullivan (2011)

John Sullivan is a photographer. He makes photography look easy, just as Truman Capote did. 

Sullivan has little interest in a narrative. His is impressionistic, photographic writing driven by an open, curious mind. He is especially good at writing about people, for people supply their own narrative by virtue of living. In the “Career of an Eccentric Naturalist,” his writing is akin to a stack of B&W street photographs. The narrative the protagonist's life supplies culminates in exposing secular humanism as self-evident. 

Sullivan's non-biographical writing lacks a narrative, which makes it hard to deduce the subject matter. Was “American Grotesque” about Obamacare? Was it about the American right? It is unclear.

Is Sullivan's writing particularly Southern? Adam Gopnik wrote that science was competitive storytelling. Sullivan does not compete. He is nonjudgemental and kind. Is Southern excellence achieved by means other than competition?

"Churchill: Walking with Destiny" by Andrew Roberts (2018)

Throughout his life, Churchill held remarkably modern, enlightened views. Many prominent figures throughout history—including the Founding Fathers—did. Enlightened views possess universality, by definition of Enlightenment.

Churchill remained consistent in his views throughout his life. This consistency is typical of great men. They perfect their views all while betting that their time will come instead of scheming how to best take advantage of prevailing political fashions.

Churchill respected tradition but challenged norms. This quality would have helped him in American politics, had he been born there.

Churchill's privileged upbringing prepared him well to thrive on adversity. Perhaps the same upbringing has also taught him what kind of adversity the British people were willing to endure and what kind they would have had none of. Only a great man can live with the enormous responsibility of choosing action over inaction: of sending his people to fight in a world war instead of surrendering. A defining feature of greatness is the willingness to accept responsibility.

"107 Days" by Kamala Harris (2025)

Harris's writing is sincere. She sincerely believes all politics is identity politics. She believes that identity trumps policy, certainly during an election campaign and possibly even when in office. She believes in campaigning by reciting only those talking points that have been tested by party pollsters. She possibly believes that being powered by a pollster algorithm continues to be the winning strategy once in office. Harris describes in detail how a political machine driven by these beliefs operates.

Surrendering agency to an algorithm may prove to be the winning strategy one day, but for now, the algorithm lacks vision and fails to imbue candidates with character traits that people have come to admire in leaders. Algorithm-generated policy stances also tend to lack coherence, as Arrow's impossibility theorem would predict. An AI-powered candidate ought to do better on this front.

The author's recounting of her religious domestic rituals and of cooking in sweatpants is an odd instance of oversharing by a political figure. Americans take regular showers more seriously than Europeans have historically done, but one would not normally expect to read about shower hacks from a vice-president.

Harris fairly apportions responsibility for failing to be elected president this time around. There appears to be a mighty force at work that prevents subordinates from delivering bad news and unfavourable takes to their superiors. Harris's entourage was not immune to this force. The hope is that the fear of truth would bend reality if masqueraded as optimism. It does not always work this way.

"Washington: A Life " by Ron Chernow (2010)

The Founding Fathers have devised the spectacular game that the United States Constitution describes. This game has multiple equilibria. The singular accomplishment of George Washington was to coordinate his contemporaries and successors alike on a particularly beneficent equilibrium, the equilibrium that he thought it wise for future generations to play.

The character of the Founding Fathers affected the character of the country. Individuals and their character matter.

The American colonies rebelled when Britain betrayed its British values and stopped treating equals equally. A system that does not treat equals equally does not survive. The system that treats equals equally is a meritocracy.

Chernow is obsessed with Washington's sex life and slaveholding. The former obsession is particularly odd, for Washington's sex life is poorly documented. So, avocationally, Chernow resorts to armchair psychoanalysis.  

Chernow's interest in slavery is understandable, but his analysis is economically illiterate. For instance, there is nothing odd about Washington's desire to restrict the importation of slaves in order to drive up their prices and then profit from the sale of his own slaves. (Restrictive building codes serve the same purpose.) Washington may have entertained multiple contradictory ideas on slavery (thereby passing F. Scott Fitzgerald's test for first-rate intelligence), but restricting the slave trade while hoping to sell his own slaves were not among them.

"Poor Charlie's Almanack" by Charles T. Munger (2023)

The book is a compendium of Munger's talks. The final talk summarises it all. The remaining talks are incomplete drafts thereof. The omissions do not constitute a bug. When addressing a restive audience, it is wise to say less. As Munger observes in a Q&A session after one of the talks, he criticises psychology without saying how exactly psychology should be done because any such revelation would do little for the listener. The lesson will stick only if the listener stumbles upon it himself. Munger's only job is to make the audience curious and sceptical.

These are generalists who succeed in business. Extrapolating from this, Munger finds it hard to understand specialisation in academic departments. Specialisation is liable to generate economies of scale from working on the same topic and favours a status hierarchy that persuades academics that they are better off being paid with status rather than cash. This is a great deal for society. Munger is right, however, in that most students are not going to become academics and, therefore, would benefit from a more generalist perspective than that which universities nudge them into.

Munger is also right about the diminished role that social status plays in social science: economics, politics, and psychology. The final talk in the volume summarises what else is missing from academic psychology. The greatest omission, though, is the lack of a unifying, general-equilibrium theory.

"What Technology Wants" by Kevin Kelly (2010)

Humans and technology co-evolve. There is no stopping it. Subcultures can survive with little technology as long as other, early-adopter subcultures support them by trading with them. Markets furnish the freedom to choose to be Amish or to live on an Italian island, traditionally yet comfortably. Country size enhances this freedom to the extent that markets are more vigorous within a country than across countries. Amishness is a matter of degree: all curate which technology and how much technology to consume.

Kelly is an optimist. He believes technology emerges in response to problems, of which it solves more than it creates.

Kelly views innovation as a funnel. The existing state of technology suggests the next obvious steps to all who would listen. It is easy to invent a lightbulb once the technological conditions are ripe, and many do. What is hard to do is to see a project through from an idea to implementation. That is where the true genius of technological innovation lies.

"On Democracies and Death Cults" by Douglas Murray (2025)

The book traces out the empirical implications of a country's policy that puts an arbitrarily high weight on the lives of one's own citizens. The punishment inflicted on the adversary is rather discontinuous. The consequences to the adversary from miscalculating the threshold at which the discontinuity occurs are disastrous.

The book engages with neither theoretical nor empirical implications of the premise that one is dealing with an adversary who values death more than life. The book does articulate this premise, though.

Can it be immoral to do the morally right thing? Perhaps it can be, if the moral act is so traumatic that it will impair one's ability to act morally in future. Is it immoral to refrain from doing the morally right thing in order to preserve the ability to act morally in future? The book rightly refrains from exploiting a human tragedy as fodder for philosophy porn. The book's focus is the recent history of the ongoing conflict.

"Zero to One" by Peter Thiel with Blake Masters (2014)

In Zero to One, Peter Thiel argues that being a generalist is overrated. The generalist refuses to commit. The generalist assumes that progress will take care of itself, and that all he must do is to simply show up. Schools are designed to churn out generalists. This is not how one succeeds. One succeeds by leaning into one’s comparative advantage, one’s passion, one’s desperation. One must spread oneself out thinly. One must not diversify.

According to Thiel, there are two kinds of optimism: the belief in better future through intelligent design and the belief in better future through evolution. The 1970s witnessed a vibe shift in the nature of optimism, away from the former and towards the latter. The latter is unsustainable because it essentially consists in evoking a miracle by holding one’s fingers crossed. The way one usually holds one’s fingers crossed is by getting a law degree.

Optimism through evolution sets one up for a failure, says Thiel. People ought not to think of themselves as random quantities bereft of agency, which is what optimism-through-evolution would have one believe. One cannot start a business and hope that evolution will make it succeed. Entrepreneurship via evolution consists in designing a minimal viable product and then listening to the market for ways to improve it. Nothing great has ever come out of this approach---not in business and not in art. Says Thiel.

(Is ChatGPT an intelligent-design optimist or an evolutionary optimism? In 2020 one would have bet on the latter. In 2025, it is wise to bet on the former. Thiel wrote From Zero to One in the seriously pre-ChatGPT times. While the book does not explicitly specify a position on the matter, when writing, Thiel seems to have bet on the latter as revealed by his belief that AI would complement human skills instead of replacing them.)

Just as the strategy of iterating on the minimal viable product is doomed in business, it is doomed in politics, says Thiel. He hopes that one day polls lose their significance (be it by design or by accident), and politicians have no choice but to design policies intelligently. The grounds for believing that polls vanish are unclear. Nor is it clear that the qualities that compel a political candidate to seek an office and help him win it are the same qualities that would make one a visionary policy designer. At best, the qualities conducive to running and winning are conducive to reading the room and iterating on an idea. Furthermore, while to promote wild entrepreneurial visions is what society would want a startup to do, society ought to be rather more cautious about encouraging the same behaviour in a statesman. Most visions are terrible and fail.

Thiel points out, correctly, that the competitive paradigm in economics is used to make both literal and metaphorical points, with the metaphorical points being the most valuable ones while inconsistent with the competitive paradigm’s assumptions. Unfettered markets will lead to prosperity through innovation, goes the metaphorical point. But innovation requires monopoly rather than perfect competition.

It is hard not to admire someone who advocates for, and succeeds at, creating immeasurable value for society by inventing something entirely new (“from zero to one”). Government regulations and taxes tend to catch up with the inventions that improve the products that are already there (“one to n”). In a well-designed polity, the government cannot regulate or tax that which does not yet exist.

"American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson" by Joseph J. Ellis (1998)

What makes America exceptional is the fact that it had founders. America was a startup, and the Founders have given it a head start. Thomas Jefferson was concerned about America's ability to continue operating in the founder mode. He feared that, as the country developed, its government would swell and would eventually catch up with its European counterparts in size and the degree of tyranny.

For Jefferson, territorial expansion was a safety valve, a check on the uncontrolled growth of the powers of the Federal government. Territorial expansion would bring competition, as citizens would flee westward in search of freedoms. The threat of citizens voting with their feet and the competition from neighbouring states would keep American governments in check, Jefferson thought.

Jefferson's belief in the escape valve that is the West is echoed in the Silicon Valley ethos. Once it became impossible to move westward physically, American businesses and many of America's denizens moved into the tech sector, in search of novelty and in the hope that it would take time for the regulatory state to catch up.

America will remain exceptional as long as there always remains another frontier to settle.

"The Creative Act: A Way of Being" by Rick Rubin (2024)

Craftsmanship is the mastery of gradient descent, which does well at zeroing in on local optima. Creativity is the ability to reliably find global optima. One interpretation is that artistic life consists in daring to seek the global optimum of the only function one knows: one's felicity function. The artist excels at controlling the tuning parameter: first, searching for the optimum globally, broadly, and then becoming a craftsman and searching locally, finely. This description of the artistic life misses the social aspect of creativity, however.

Suppose instead that an artist is but a node in a neural net, an ever-evolving activation function, an ever-shifting perspective. He filters other artists' outputs, art, through his perspective and passes it on, for other artists to soak up. One is not an artist if one refuses to output, to share art. But then, is everyone an artist? And what is the objective that is being optimised, that is, what is the task that the neural net is learning to perform? And where does the training algorithm come from? Who is in charge of it? 

"We are like the dreamer, who dreams and then lives inside a dream. But who is the dreamer?" Perhaps, it is the Ultimate Artist himself.

"The Lives of Lee Miller" by Antony Penrose (2021)

The story is a sad one, for it ends in death, the death of its protagonist. It did not have to be that way. Perhaps the author did not see the need for letting Lee Miller's story continue, for he himself is the story's legitimate continuation. 

"Deep Utopia" by Nick Bostrom (2024)

It is refreshing to read a book written if not by a human, then at least by an entity that is not the same condescending ghost-writer who appears to be authoring a bulk of big- and small-name popular science books that mix uncredited academic ideas with the irrelevant personal anecdote. Indirectly, the book argues for not caring very much about "us" in the faraway utopian future, for these won't be us anymore. The spotlight thus pivots to the immediate present: a snapshot of a mortal college don, clever and eloquent, caught anxious at the crossroads of history. The moment is fleeting, fragile, and beautiful. And it is gone.

Peter Lindbergh: On Fashion Photography (2020)

Portrait photography bares the soul. The soul is the sitter's or the photographer's. Some souls look most bare when the body is nude. Some bodies look more naked when dressed. Fashion photography relies on clothes to enhance nakedness.

"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.

"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.