Trying to keep this up.
Author: Rutger Bregman
Date published: 2014
Date read: July 6th 2022
I struggle thinking about happiness. I’m not sure why, but of the torrent of ideas that flow past, my memory seems to want to act as a particular kind of sieve, dreamcatching the various ideas of happiness that drift through it. Of the random fish left in the trawl are some webcomics about the experience machine. There’s the most recent article about whether more money makes you happier. Of all of the ideas presented in Sapiens, the one that actually got caught was the nagging question of whether technological progress means that people are happier.
And with a filter, so finely tuned, it would only be appropriate that the argument that resounded the most in Utopia was the argument against the GDP. The GDP was one of those things that I never questioned. Bigger meant better; its progression up and to the right was a good sign; drops not only reflected bad outcomes but was a bad outcome. The GDP was not a measure of gross domestic product; it was a measure of the good. But the emperor had no clothes and I immediately found the idea that GDP wasn’t those things compelling.
Perhaps it is my general anxiety or perhaps it is the constant barrage of articles I see about income inequality, a declining life expectancy, and the increase in loneliness and deaths of despair that causes me to think that the world is falling apart for people. If not for the immediate people around me in my bubble, but people in general. The connection between general economic activity and general human happiness feels like it is fraying - what with economic gains concentrating into the hands of very few and novel tools like LLMs and diffusion models presenting the opportunity for that to occur even faster. That general wellspring of doom and gloom makes me think that having a separate measure of human happiness may indeed be a bounty.
After all, I suspect that my sense of that impending harbinger could be fueled entirely by media’s relentless pursuit of anxiety-powered views. And I provide at least one set of eyeballs fueling the metric driven reporting of hikikomori and incels. Such a happiness index, or better yet–a happiness distribution, could provide water for the fire, demonstrating that there is no decrease in overall human happiness.
Of course, the problem is that we already have such attempts at that metric. I suspect we don’t use them over GDP because they either don’t provide much actionable information or because we don’t actually agree that what it is measuring is what we want to target. And I have no idea how to actually generate a metric that is all of those things - useful, actionable, and accurate. I hope that it can exist and become widely adopted but I can only cheer from the sidelines.
Author: Jane Mayer
Date published: January 2016
Date listened: May 20th 2022
I just mailed in my California’s 2022 midterm primary ballot. In addition to the voter guide that had brief statements from most of the candidates for each office, I relied on CalMatters which gave brief side by side comparisons of the candidates. Interestingly, perhaps as a result of California’s election disclosure regulations, you could see how much money each candidate had raised for their campaigns. The sums sometimes surprised me; millions of dollars were raised by multiple Democratic candidates for State Controller, a position that, in all honesty, I had only learned about from trying to research the positions on the ballot. For instance, Yvonne Yiu spent around 6 million of her own money self funding her campaign, while four other candidates have raised at least 1 million dollars a piece. Which, overall, seems like a shocking aount of money for a role that I cannot imagine gets much time in the spotlight, unless blame is to be assigned. Of course, for a state of 40 million individuals and for a role overseeing around 50 million dollars, the amount of money spent on campaigning and running could be justified. But I have a hard time wrapping my head around money and politics.
There is obviously quite a bit of money spent on politics. A lot of money is spent by extremely wealthy donors, such as the Koch brothers. It is hard for me to imagine that the people spending the money view it as wasteful. But it was not always clear to me that the donors always got their way when it came to the results. Certainly the side spending the most amount of money did not always win - though the number of instances off the back of my hand that I can point to are few and far between. But Mayer helped me think about the results of spending money not just on the top line result (X candidate or X initiative wins or loses), but also on the infrastructure bouying up the structure. Think tanks, institutes, summer camps, field offices. Established ecosystems that persist long after a particular race is over, that work between the elections to set public opinion or distribute new ideas or perspectives are valuable commodities that money buys. In addition to controlling ideas, it is clear that because of money’s role in politics, the people pushing those ideas can be artificially selected by moneyed interests long before voters see their names on the ballot.
Even after finishing Dark Money, I have a hard time fathoming the money spent and the infrastructure developed or even putting it into context. I started to think about ways that one might create visualizations or interactive companion pieces to the book. Perhaps at the start of each chapter or near the page number, a running tally of the total money spent by the the Koch brothers could be kept. Chapter 2: 10,000,000$. Chapter 10: 500,000,000, etc. Or perhaps diagrams connecting the various organizations and people to the funding Kochtopus. There is so much data described in the book that I am sure that there would be stunning ways to analyze and illustrate it.
At the end of the day, it is hard for me to feel any amount of good from any of this. I don’t particularly like the sort of dynamics displayed on the level of the Kochs and other moneyed interests and I have virtually no power to make changes there as I am not wealthy. And on the more local level - I am not connected or motivated enough to even do much cursory research of a role as important as the State Controller beyond reading some toothless answers to stock questions. In the end, it seems I treat politics as entertainment more than information and my relationship to it does not seem productive nor particularly healthy despite me desperately wanting to reach a different conclusion here.
Author: Mieko Kawakami (川上未映子)
Translators: Sam Bett, David Boyd
Date published: April 7th 2020
Date read: March 25th 2022
I was wondering about the “men” in “menarche.” Turns out it’s the same as the “men” in “menstruation.” It means “month,” which comes from “moon,” and has to do with women and their monthly cycle. Moon has all kinds of meanings. In addition to being the thing orbiting the earth, it can involve time, or tides, like the ebb and flow of the ocean. So, “menarche” has absolutely nothing to do with “men.” So why spell it that way? What happened to the “o”?
And I think the book does an excellent job of covering the whole spectrum of moon meanings. Undoubtedly, a core component involves motherhood and children - being a mother, being a child. But motherhood is so intertwined, complicated, and essential an aspect of life that the scope of topics the book covers is tremendous. Depression and loneliness, cancer and death, beauty and self awareness.
“But I let myself believe that maybe I didn’t have to be alone, like maybe I could have this thing in my life, this special thing.”
Sometimes I felt like it would help things if I died. I just watched the cars go by, thinking how with one less mouth to feed, Mom wouldn’t have to work so hard. But I could never do it. What would have happened if I got hit by a car and died? Komi would have been sad. Mom would have been sad, too, but maybe she could have stopped working so hard. If she had less on her mind, and had had a chance to live her life, maybe she wouldn’t have gotten cancer… Who knows. Hard to say.
Part of me never even conceived of writing and creation as having to do with motherhood until the two were put in proximity as Kawakami does.
I recognize that luck, effort, and ability are often indistinguishable. And I know that, in the end, I’m just another human being, who’s born only to die. I know that in reality, it makes no difference whether I write novels, and it makes no difference if anyone cares. With all the countless books already out there, the world won’t notice if I fail to publish even one book with my name on it. That’s no tragedy. I know that. I get that.
I don’t think it is possible for me to fully understand the full breadth of experiences the book is trying to convey. I just don’t think I can. But there are parts that I know deeply and fully myself. The idea that they offer some connection to the parts I will never understand represents a fresh perspective for me.
Finally, although it is a translation, there were a couple of unusual turns of phrase that leapt out at me. Like a shock to the system, these two novel constructions of words stay on my mind, just as I tend to think about the phrase “sad making”, I think I will forever think about the term “everything about her danced.”
Like a row of white boxes, all lined up, the same shape and the same weight, the days of November came and went.
Not the sort of woman that people would label drop-dead gorgeous, but everything about her danced.
Author: B.J. Novak
Date read: March 16 2022
Date published: February 4 2014
From the very first story, The Rematch, the genesis of each story is plain. What if the tortoise and the hare from The Tortoise and the Hare had a rematch. What if Nelson Mandela had a roast on Comedy Central. What if the stock market were the narrator. What if Chris Hansen went to a Justin Beiber concert. What if Encyclopedia Brown were actually Wikipedia Brown.
Given the variety of these ideas, not all generate the same volume of material. So rather than drop an idea or prolong its length, the result is sometimes stories like:
If you love something, let it go.
If you don’t love something, definitely let it go.
Basically, just drop everything, who cares.
Which can be less stories and more little jokes. More than any other short stories collection so far, these stories rely more on the constant stream of fresh ideas and different circumstances than the particular prose that they are conveyed. That is not to say that the writing itself is subpar. But unlike a story from Ted Chiang, where its intricate structure and arrangement is half of the effect, or a story from Salinger, where the language is rewarding, the stories in One More Thing feel the most approachable.
Novak does not shy away from short ideas, nor does he shy away from crass language, nor unconventional vestiges. At the end of one story, he includes
Discussion question:
Do you think Julie should fuck the warlord? Why or why not?
Saying that Novak is not aiming to write high literature does not seem offensive in part because it would seem almost offensive to Novak to suggest that was his intention. Part of me thinks that explicitly ruling out that goal lends one a sense of freedom in their work. One can include references to their own work in other media without making a decision to determine whether this is actually the right literary decision.
Niagara Falls was a disaster. My eight-year-old daughter was the one who had begged to see it because a couple from a television show she watched got married there.
And not focusing on being high art may be best overall. After all, isn’t high art inherently classist and unwelcoming?
The new translation of Don Quixote wasn’t read by readers, but by everyone. For the first time since Spain at the turn of the seventeenth century, it became not-strange for a friend or a neighbor to snort out loud with an involuntary laugh over an image from Don Quixote or for someone to say on a second date, “You know how in Don Quixote when …?” out of an attempt to connect, not an attempt to impress.
Every idea, no matter how small or how simple, is worth exploring. Which I think is deeply motivating and freeing.
Author: Elif Batuman
Date read: March 8 2022
Date published: March 2017
Could be summarized as–nothing really happens even though it feels frantic at times. Which may be a frustrating experience. There’s a motto the company uses that goes along the lines of, “don’t mistake motion for progress” which is often posted superimposed over a picture of a rocking horse. But there is a reason rocking horses, roller coasters, and racetracks exist, despite all ending up in the same position they started. That feeling of frenzy and motion can be thrilling. It also almost perfectly captures a feeling of being a college freshman - the conceit of The Idiot.
And neither the structure nor the plot really sets up the novel for success. It does not seem easy to craft an engaging story when the slow moving action is conveyed through a college freshman’s observations of events, often unrelated, and ideas, often random. After all, while I spend a lot of time in my head with my own thoughts and while I think my internal skull sessions are captivating, I can safely assert that people would not be interested in actually reading a continuous stream of it. (Follow me on Twitter @internalskullsessions). But Selin managed to keep me engaged by being a combination: self-aware, witty, clever, novel, uncertain, judgmental, and honest while also discussing subjects that I want to have an interest in. She jumps breathlessly from Anna Karenina and literature
The professor often talked about the inadequacy of published translations, reading us passages from novels in French and Russian, to show how bad the translations were. I didn’t understand anything he said in French or Russian, so I preferred the translations.
to emacs and the mechanical turk to self narrative and self evaluation
It was a mystery to me how Svetlana generated so many opinions. Any piece of information seemed to produce an opinion on contact. Meanwhile, I went from class to class, read hundreds, thousands of pages of the distilled ideas of the great thinkers of human history, and nothing happened.
to unanswerable questions about life
Was that narrative economy, or was it a statement about the way of the world–about how the jilted had to suffice for one another?
And most of that was fun to listen in on. It works in part because those seemingly spontaneous thoughts are carefully composed and edited into seemingly spontaneous thoughts. This metaknowledge makes reading and interpreting and analyzing and hypothesizing about language’s meaning engaging. And The Idiot does a good job of reminding me that I hold a special part of my romantic heart for letters and emails for that very reason. The emails that Selin and Ivan write to each other are, at times, cryptic, avoidant, and reserved. They are also creative and engaging.
Most in person conversations allow each side a moderate amount of time to say a moderate amount of stuff. Exceeding either seems to give the conversation an odd quality about it. Conversation over text messaging gives people more time to say a little less. But letters – letters almost have an opposite effect. They almost require an extensive amount of time to craft. To write and edit. And re-edit. Which gives the recipient cause to interpret and reinterpret. Hidden somewhere in there is meaning, or so it may seem. Which can be frustrating.
Perhaps the central meaning in this entire novel is about that search for meaning in text. Quite alot points to that.
Everything the professors said seemed to be somehow beside the point. You wanted to know why Anna had to die, and instead they told you that nineteenth-century Russian landowners felt conflicted about whether they were really a part of Europe. The implication was that it was somehow naive to want to talk about anything interesting, or to think that you would ever know anything important.
I wasn’t interested in society, or ancient people’s money troubles. I wanted to know what books really meant. That was how my mother and I had always talked about literature. “I need you to read this, too,” she would say, handing me a New Yorker story in which an unhappily married man had to get a rabies shot, “so you can tell me what it really means.” She believed, and I did, too, that every story had a central meaning. You could get that meaning, or you could miss it completely.
But maybe I have missed the point completely.
Author: Michael Lewis
Date read: February 12 2022
Date published: March 15 2010
There is something deeply attractive about the irreverent truth teller - especially when they are shedding light on a, at least from their telling, deeply corrupt, deceitful subject.
Bond market terminology was designed less to convey meaning than to bewilder outsiders. Overpriced bonds were not “Expensive” overpriced bonds were “rich,” which almost made them sound like something you should buy. The floors of subprime mortgage bonds were not called floors–or anything else that might lead the bond buyer to form any sort of concrete image in his mind–but tranches. The bottom tranche–the risky ground floor–was not called the ground floor but the mezzanine, or the mezz, which made it sound less like a dangerous investment and more like a highly prized seat in a domed stadium.
It is this direct, unapologetic commentary, in combination with the decision to frame the subject as a story about people and characters instead of directly about a complicated bond market that makes this story so readable. It is not hard to imagine a book, written by some professor emeritus with one or four awards for achievement in economics, that is so dense that it wouldn’t understand this quip about it. Instead of a long dissertation on synthetic CDOs, instead, there is a short explanation with more intense focus on the people
Eisman had a curious way of listening; he didn’t so much listen to what you were saying as subcontract to some remote region of his brain the task of deciding whether whatever you were saying was worth listening to, while his mind went off to play on its own. As a result, he never actually heard what you said to him the first time you said it. If his mental subcontractor detected a level of interest in what you had just said, it radioed a signal to the mother ship, which then wheeled around with the most intense focus. “Say that again,” he’d say. And you would! Because now Eisman was so obviously listening to you, and, as he listened so selectively, you felt flattered.
And it certainly helps that the quotes that he got are incredible.
“Senior management’s job is to pay people,” he’d say. “If they fuck a hundred guys out of a hundred grand each, that’s ten million more for them. They have four categories: happy, satisfied, dissatisfied, disgusted. If they hit happy, they’ve screwed up: They never want you happy. On the other hand, they don’t want you so disgusted you quit. The sweet spot is somewhere between dissatisfied and disgusted.”
“There were more morons than crooks, but the crooks were higher up.”
“Because his memory is so selective, he has no scars from prior experience,” said Vinny.