The Club (Women Need Not Apply)

If you had your druthers (and you were a white man) where would would you choose to hang out on a Friday evening in the late 18th century?

The Turk's Head Tavern, a venerable London establishment located at 9 Gerrard Street-- just off the Strand-- would be a good choice.

This is where-- starting in 1764-- intellectual and artistic notables such as Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, Edmund Burke, David Garrick, Edward Gibbon and Adam Smith met regularly. Quite a crew.

Leo Damrosch describes this era in his tour-de-force book the Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age. He also includes a group excluded from club membership, but constantly present in these lives: the women.

Especially the prostitutes.

Boswell frequented a lot of prostitutes. And he recorded the encounters in his journal, which his wife would sometimes inadvertently stumble upon and read. He had a very forgiving wife.

 Boswell is the author of Life of Johnson, which is considered to be one of the greatest biographies ever written. A game-changer. It is a highly entertaining book. Boswell is Dr. Johnson's drunken sidekick and records everything that the great man says and does. But there's much more to this pair than meets the eye.

                                       

Damrosch thinks Boswell may have been bipolar. His mood swings are wild. He often self-medicates with copious amounts of alcohol and "promiscuous concubinage." Dr. Johnson exhibits symptoms of OCD, depression, and rheumatoid arthritis-- which leads him to become an opium addict later in life.

This is one of those books that I started thinking full well I wouldn't finish. But I made it all the way through, mainly because of Boswell's misadventures. Stuff like this:

Boswell seldom frequented the brothels around Covent Gardens. His usual practice was to rush out into the night after having plenty to drink, pick up a streetwalker, and grapple with her briefly in one of the parks or some dark alley. he may have enjoyed the sense of risk.

                                 

Boswell really struggled with his inveterate transgressions. He wanted to believe "in an authentic core of self," but David Hume's Treatise on Human Nature taught him otherwise. Boswell was happiest just going with the flow of impressions and perceptions of the moment, which made him such an amiable companion (but often a buffoon). Boswell's biographer insists that he wasn't a full-blown alcoholic-- because he could abstain from alcohol for long periods of time (as did other members of The Club . . . overindulgence and sobriety seem to be a pattern that has been around for a long time). But there are a lot of blackout injurious episodes that sound like they happened at a fraternity party.

After consuming five bottles of claret with just one companion, "I walked off very gravely, though much intoxicated. Ranged through the streets till, having run hard down the Advocate's Close, which is very steep, I found myself sudden bouncing down an almost perpendicular stone stair. I could not stop,but when I came to the bottom of it fell with a good deal of violence, which sobered me much." A later fall damaged his ankle so badly he was hobbling around for months.   

Boswell is constantly swinging between intellectual pursuits-- the law, writing, and pondering free will and determinism, and concupiscent and inebriated episodes, such as getting caught by his wife while fondling a "fresh, plump, and comely" fifteen-year-old.

While Johnson and Boswell are at the heart of the book, I really liked Damrosch's portrayals of David Garrick and Edward Gibbon. Garrick was the greatest actor of the age, and he perfects a naturalistic style that was quite different from the typical strutting and speechifying player of the time. "He could make every thought and gesture seem perfectly spontaneous." This sort of acting was appreciated by the critics, but out in the country, "naturalistic acting would strike provincial audiences as no acting at all. Garrick is also remembered for organizing the Shakespeare Jubilee of 1769, which put Stafford-upon-Avon on the map and demarcated when Shakespeare went from being a competent playwright to a god. It also rained so much that Damrosch's description of the event smacks of a festival that happened two hundred years later: Woodstock.

For all their curiosity and intellect, Johnson and Boswell were men of their time. Johnson could often be religiously and politically conservative. His take on the American settlers was: "They are a race of convicts, and ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging." Oddly, Johnson sympathized with the Native Americans more than the colonials (though he didn't think the colonists should give them their land back). He felt the same about the Irish, and Irish rights. Rebellion was to be punished severely, he explained to Irish clergyman Thomas Campbell. When they had the chance, the British should have burned the Irish cities and "roasted you in the flames of them."

Boswell wrote a weird poem extolling slavery, in which he surmises at the end "For slavery there must ever be, while we have mistresses like thee!" And both Boswell and Johnson loathed Edward Gibbon, who wrote the classic historical treatise History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. They found this work scandalous because Gibbon was skeptical about the spread of Christianity due to miraculous events. Gibbon argued that there were plenty of "secular explanations" for Christian promulgation. Boswell and Johnson referred to Gibbon as "The Infidel." This is too bad, because Gibbon changed how history was written in the same way that Boswell changed how biography was written. They laid bare the sources and the journey to knowledge, the personal references and ambiguity that accompany all non-fiction writing, which many authors tried to hide under the guise of omniscience. 

                                 

Damrosch's tour of the times is accompanied by many historical pictures. There are color plates in the center and various drawings, caricatures, portraits, and sketches throughout. This helps set the scene so much. The book alternates between great doings and anecdotes, so you get compelling portraits of men who are certainly great, but also flawed and silly (at one point, there is a description of Dr. Johnson imitating a kangaroo). And this is the same time as the framers were writing the Constitution. King George III actually makes a brief cameo. So it's a great view of what was happening on the other side of the ocean, as we were preparing to rebel. And there are a lot of prostitutes. What's not to enjoy?

A Case For Reading Novels (With Some Help from Steven Johnson andGeorge Eliot)

Two roads diverge in a yellow wood . . . which one do you take?

You have time to ponder. You're not being chased by a lion, tiger, or bear. So do you choose the road less traveled by? Or head down the well trodden one? Either way, your choice will make all the difference.

Steven Johnson discusses these life-altering moments in his new book Farsighted: How We Make the Decisions That Matter the Most. He thinks we are woefully unprepared for these kinds of choices. He's probably right. We read "The Road Not Taken" in my Creative Writing class, and then we discuss times when we made these kinds of decisions. We all readily concede that once you journey down a particular fork in the road, you probably won't backtrack and take another path, but I don't advise them prescriptively on how to navigate these crucial moments. Instead, I present them with a literary example. We read it, discuss it, and run through the variables and options. It turns out-- according to Steven Johnson-- that this may be the best tactic imaginable.

Aunt Belle's Two Roads

I use an example from a book of anecdotes and recipes called Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression by Mildred Armstrong Kalish. It's not fiction, but for folks in suburban New Jersey in 2019, it might as well be. It's damn close to a time travel story. If you haven't guessed, Mildred Armstrong Kalish is very old. She's 96. Coincidentally, my grandmother also goes by Mildred (though her Christian name is Carmella) and she's also 96.

When Mildred was a child, Aunt Belle tells her a story.

Once, before Aunt Belle died, I got up enough courage to ask her a very personal question.

"Aunt Belle, how come you never got married?"

She looked at me for a long time. She was standing by the kitchen stove, her delicate hands clasping and unclasping the stove handle, and she told me the following story:

"Well, I did have one beau. He told Art (her brother and my grandpa) to tell me Barkis is willin' and that he would be over Saturday night. Well, that made me so mad! I thought he had a lot of nerve asking me to marry him through Art like that! So when he came over Saturday night I wouldn't take his hat; I wouldn't take his coat. I wouldn't ask him to sit down. I treated him just as cold. I treated him so bad he never came back."

She stood absolutely still for a long time; then she continued:

"I'm kind of sorry I was so cold to him; he went and married Abbie Cross, made her a good home and was a good husband to her. They had a nice family."

She remained contemplative for a while and then continued, "It's been kind of lonesome sometimes."

Talk about roads not taken.
                   


Aunt Belle obviously regrets her decision. She made it out of spite, and-- by choosing a moment of indignant retribution over a lifetime of possible happiness/contentedness -- she impulsively inverts Pascal's famous wager. After we read this, I remind my students that they are lucky to live in a densely populated area, where they will have plenty of opportunities for courtship and marriage. They probably won't have to resort to marrying a first cousin (which is apparently legal in New Jersey) but in Depression-era Iowa the pickin's were slim.

We're Talking About Practice

Big decisions are tough. We don't get enough practice. Most people only get married once . . . or twice . . . but rarely thrice. The same goes for buying a home. I got lucky with my marriage, but we all know the divorce rates; marriage is a coin-flip. Buying a home is similar (and often simultaneous). If I had more practice with home buying, I would have checked out the concrete more thoroughly. I would have been more annoyed by the basement crawl space. I would have found the roof suspect. I would have known just what an ordeal it is to redo a kitchen. But I knew none of this, and simply liked the location and the deck. Next time . . . if there is one, I will be more discerning.

I learned an easy technique to help with this decision-making-dilemma on The Art of Manliness (Podcast #465: The Powerful Questions That Will Help You Decide, Create, Connect, and Lead) The guest, Warren Berger, suggests imagining yourself in the new scenario-- whether it be a new house, a new marriage, a new location, a new wife, a new job. Really vividly imagine this new life. And then ask yourself: would you go back to your old life? Would you make the switch in reverse?

Or perhaps you could follow the advice of way-finding guru Dave Evans and do some "odyssey planning." This involves imagining three possible lives that you could genuinely live and sincerely considering all of them. Recognizing that there is no "one true path" for you to tread so you can engage in all the possibilities.

Many times we get hung up on the small details and anxiety of change, and fail to think about the consequences of the actual decision. Aunt Belle got hung up on the way Art asked her to marry, but she never imagined married life with Art and compared this long-term scenario to spinster-life on a farm in Depression-era Iowa. If she had done that, she might have overlooked Art's graceless go-between proposal and thought more about the big picture.

Advice for the President

The most notable thing about Steven Johnson's Farsighted is that he lauds the power of literary novels to help us imagine and simulate these big decisions. Johnson also has more typical fare in the book: the history of weather forecasting and the theoretical, strategic, and tactical planning of the raid on Osama bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. But his main example is George Eliot's Middlemarch.

I'm an English teacher, and I often wonder if my job is bullshit. Do kids really need to read Beowulf? The answer might be no. Lately, the Language Arts curriculum has been moving toward more practical coursework, non-fiction texts, and synthesis essays. I see the value in this. But the Johnson book validates the traditional inclination of English class: reading novels. The ideas he presents feel groundbreaking and pushing them on both my students and my colleagues. Sometimes we need a reminder of why it's worth it to read literature with kids. While there is a myriad of reasons to do this, Johnson makes the compelling case that people faced with big decisions should hone their skills by reading literary fiction. I'll explain why later in the post, but someone should pass this advice along to our fearless leader, Donald Trump. According to this list, Trump is not a fan of fiction, literary or otherwise.

Victorian Spoilers Ahead!

Johnson made Middlemarch sound so intriguing-- despite the fact that it's a 900 page Victorian novel-- that I decided to read it in tandem with Farsighted. This was no easy task, and while I recommend Middlemarch, I definitely had to use the internet to understand several parts. It's often dense. The sentences are beautiful, but often long and wandering. I'm guessing you're not going to read it (and the synopsis in Farsighted will suffice) but I still should warn you that there will be spoilers ahead.

Many years ago, my friend and colleague Dan saw me reading Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. I was five hundred pages in.

"Why are you reading that?" he asked me. "She's just going to throw herself in front of a train."

"What? Why did you tell me that!"

"Everyone knows that," he said.

I did not know that.

When in Doubt, Wait and Think Anew

The biggest decision (among many big decisions) in Middlemarch is whether recently widowed Dorothea Casaubon should follow the codicil in her dead husband's will and lose her fortune, or ignore the codicil and marry the man she truly loves . . . a man her dead husband despised. Mary Anne Evans doesn't make it easy. She details all the forces that might weigh on a life decision of this magnitude. Johnson explains charts these forces:


At its core, Dorothea's choice is simply binary: Should she marry Ladislaw or not? But Eliot allows us to see the rich web of influence and consequences that surrounds that decision. A full spectrum map of the novel would look something like this:

MIND → FAMILY → CAREER → COMMUNITY → ECONOMY → TECHNOLOGY → HISTORY

In Middlemarch, each of these levels plays a defining role in the story.

Johnson then points out the difference in scope between Middlemarch and a more narrowly bound (but still wonderful) literary novel like Pride and Prejudice. We get insight into the personal lives of the characters in Pride and Prejudice, but we are "limited to the upper realm of the scale diagram: the emotional connections between the two lovers, and the apparent approval or disapproval of their immediate family and a handful of neighbors." Mary Anne Evans goes all the way. Things get so complicated that all we can do is what Dorothea does: "wait and think anew."

Great novels don't give us prescriptions for what to do in complex situations. They are not morality plays or fables. There is no set of invariable rules. Once again, Johnson explains this better than I can:

Great novels-- or at least novels that are not didactic in their moralizing-- give us something fundamentally similar to what we get out of simulations of war games or ensemble forecasts: they let us experience parallel lives, and see the complexity of those experiences in vivid detail. They let us see the choice in all its intricacies. They map all the thread-like pressures; they chart the impact pathways as the choice ripples through families, communities, and the wider society. They give us practice, not prepackaged instructions.


It's a lot easier to read literary novels than it is to amass the experiences within them. My buddy Whitney recently reflected on these moments in a numerically epic post . . . he's lived a life that might encompass several novels, and so he's got more moments like this under his belt than most folks. Most of us don't get this much practice, and Johnson suggests that the next best thing is to ingest fiction, things that never happened.

Just the Fiction, Ma'am

Why fiction? Why not stick to the facts? We could spend out lives in the world of reality, watching documentaries and reading non-fiction, and never want for compelling stories. Why involve ourselves in lives and worlds and decisions that don't exist? Johnson takes a guess: "Stories exercise and rehearse the facility for juggling different frames of truth, in part, because they themselves occupy a complicated position on the map of truth and falsehood, and in part because stories often involve us observing other (fictional) beings going through their own juggling act."

Glitch in the Matrix?

We can run our limited perspective through many other minds and fictional lives, hypothesizing both about the reality of truthfulness of that world and the reality and truthfulness of the decision making within it. It's why I love Middlemarch and Brothers Karamazov and it's why I think the TV show Ozark -- though it's well acted, set in an interesting location, and looks like quality work-- might be totally stupid. Something is off with the simulation. There's a glitch in the matrix. There's something foggy floating in the suspension of disbelief.

The new novel An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, by Hank Green, handles this in an incredibly in-your-face manner. While the book is ostensibly a first-contact, robots-from-space sci-fi story, the irony is that the weirdest, most alien technology is actually the social-media-verse created by the humans. April May, the heroically awkward anti-hero, has to navigate her viral first contact fame and make several big decisions about the arc of her life. The novel inhabits the same space maturity-wise as the works by John Green, the author's brother. The story is sophisticated enough for adults to enjoy it, but the portrayal of politics and the dialogue can be a little schlocky. And the ending devolves into more of a Ready Player One puzzle-fest. While the book is probably more suited for a an advanced young-adult reader, I still like how it tackles decision-making . . . it literally exemplifies Johnson's reason for reading fiction. Here's how April May breaks down her first big moment:

Option 1 (the sane option):

I could detach from all this as much as possible. Stop doing TV things, definitely do not meet a strange science girl at Walmart in Southern California to buy smoke detectors, never do anything on the internet again, pay off my loans. Buy a big house with a gate with the licensing revenue that would, no doubt, if this were real, keep flowing for the entire rest of my life, and have dinner parties with clever people until I died.

Option 2 (the not-sane option):

Keep doing TV, spice up my Twitter and my Instagram and have opinions. Basically, use the platform that I was given by random chance to have a voice and maybe make a difference. What kind of difference? I had no idea, but I did know another chance wasn't going to come along . . . ever.

Hank Green

Don't Be Shallow and Pedantic

I'm going to let Steven Johnson finish this post off, with an especially long passage that I really think you should read. I made my students read it, and I gave it to a number of English teachers in my department. It's a great explanation of why we should spend time reading novels . . . literary novels. What designates a "literary" novel is another question for another post, but for now we can use the same benchmark that Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart used to recognize hard-core pornography. He said he couldn't easily define it but, "I know it when I see it." The same goes for literature. As long as it's not "shallow and pedantic," then I think anything goes.

The novel is a better tool for simulating decision-making than a movie or TV show. Images move too fast and we never get to truly inhabit the interior of a character's mind. A novel allows for turning back and contemplation. It allows you to stop and hypothesize whenever you like. It's literally your world. Netflix tried to emulate a bit of this contemplative freedom with the choose-your-own-adventure Black Mirror episode "Bandersnatch", and while it was fun to make the choices, the story felt a bit contrived, and you never felt the threads and pressures that George Eliot portrays with such accuracy. You just picked a path so you could see what happened. The stakes were low. But when you invest in a challenging novel, and really live inside it, then profound things might happen.

This is the other reason novel reading turns out to enhance our decision-making skills . . . many studies have confirmed that a lifelong habit of reading literary fiction correlates strongly with an enhanced theory of mind skills. We don't know if other-minded people are drawn to literary fiction, or if the act of reading actually improves their ability to build those mental models. Most likely, it is a bit of both. But whatever the causal relationship, it is clear that one of the defining experiences of reading literary novels involves the immersion in an alternate subjectivity . . . The novel is an empathy machine. We can imagine all sorts of half-truths and hypotheticals: what-she-will-think-if-this-happens, what-he-thinks-I'm-feeling. Reading literary novels trains the mind for that kind of analysis. You can't run a thousand parallel simulations of your own life, the way meteorologists do, but you can read a thousand novels over the course of that life. It's true that the stories that unfold in those novels do not directly mirror the stories in our own lives. Most of us will never confront a choice between our late husband's estate and the matrimonial bliss with our radical lover. But the point of reading this kind of literary fiction is not to acquire a ready-made formula for your own hard choices. If you are contemplating a move to the suburbs, Middlemarch does not tell you what to do. No form of outside advice-- whether it takes the form of a novel or a cognitive science study or pop-psychology paperback-- can tell you what to do on these kinds of situations, because these situations contain, by definition, their own unique configuration of threadlike pressures. What the novel--along with some of the other forms of mapping and simulating that we have explored-- does teach you to do is to see the situation with what Eliot called "a keen vision and feeling," and keep you from the tendency to "walk about well wadded with stupidity." The novel doesn't give you answers. But it does make you better at following the threads . . . more than any other creative form, novels give us an opportunity to simulate and rehearse the hard choices of life before we actually make one ourselves. They give us an unrivaled vista into the interior life of someone wrestling with a complex, multi-layered choice, even if the choice happens to be a fictional one . . . the path of a human life, changing and being changed by the world around it.

Steven Johnson

Where Good Ideas Come From: Steven Johnson

It took someone far smarter than me-- the polymath Steven Johnson-- to explain what I am doing here at Sentence of Dave . . . though you would never guess, I am actually continuing a 17th and 18th century intellectual tradition . . . seriously . . . in Johnson's new book Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, he discusses the English Enlightenment habit of keeping a "commonplace book" full of inspirational quotations, desultory thoughts, reactions to one's reading, opinions on current events, and a "vast miscellany of hunches," and most of the commonplace book keepers (such as Erasmus and Charles Darwin, Joseph Priestley, and John Locke) attempted to index their varied writings . . . but none of their indexing efforts worked as well as the internet, which Johnson believes has the right balance of organization and chaotic tension to spur new thoughts . . . and Johnson uses various "long view" examples-- including an awesome four squared grid categorizing two hundred major inventions from antiquity until now-- to show that good ideas often take a long time to form, with help from lots of different people and events, some serendipity, and often without the constraints of patents and corporations, and without the need for a single solitary genius who sees far beyond all others of his time; on the last page of his book he advises us to "go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle, reinvent."

Johnson vs. Box: Wyoming (Zone of) Death Match

Craig Johnson and C.J Box both write mystery novels set in Wyoming, but Craig Johnson's Longmire series is more small-town and has an archetypal Western-tone, while C. J. Box-- judging by the Joe Pickett novel FreeFire-- is tackling much more modern and political subjects; FreeFire reads a bit like a Michael Crichton thriller and I thought it was pretty far-fetched, but apparently Box does his research, so . . .

1) apparently, there actually is a "Zone of Death" within Yellowstone National Park, where an enterprising criminal could commit the perfect crime . . . although it hasn't happened yet;

2) Yellowstone's heat resistant microbes are valuable resources being used (exploited? contracted?) by international companies, and there is a debate as to whether this is "bio-mining" or "bio-piracy" and as to who should get the profits;

3) bio-stimulation in coal seams might produce natural gas or liquified fuel . . .

anyway, as far as the Wyoming detective novel shoot-out goes, Joe Pickett and Walt Longmire are different animals . . . so if you're looking for something more evocative and slower-paced, with a lot of charm, then go for the Craig Johnson mystery, but if you want fast-paced action with politics, conspiracy, and wild plot-lines, then C.J. Box is for you . . . FreeFire even has a gun moll from Jersey and the book gets into this kind of stuff:

"There are so many factions . . . Zephyr versus the Park Service . . . environmentalists against resource users . . . hunters outside the park versus park policy . . . the three states fighting with the Feds . . . even in the park service, it's law enforcement versus interpretation, and seasonal rangers against full-timers . . . it's bureaucracy run amok."

Craig Johnson vs. C.J. Box: Wyoming (Zone of) Death Match

Craig Johnson and C.J Box both write mystery novels set in Wyoming, but Craig Johnson's Longmire series is more small-town and has an archetypal Western-tone, while C. J. Box-- judging by the Joe Pickett novel FreeFire-- is tackling much more modern and political subjects; FreeFire reads a bit like a Michael Crichton thriller and I thought it was pretty far-fetched, but apparently Box does his research, so . . .

1) there actually is a "Zone of Death" within Yellowstone National Park, where an enterprising criminal could commit the perfect crime . . . although it hasn't happened yet;

2) Yellowstone's heat resistant microbes are valuable resources being used (exploited? contracted?) by international companies, and there is a debate as to whether this is "bio-mining" or "bio-piracy" and as to who should get the profits;

3) bio-stimulation in coal seams might produce natural gas or liquified fuel . . .

anyway, as far as the Wyoming detective novel shoot-out goes, Joe Pickett and Walt Longmire are different animals . . . so if you're looking for something more evocative and slower-paced, with a lot of charm, then go for the Craig Johnson mystery, but if you want fast-paced action with politics, conspiracy, and wild plot-lines, then C.J. Box is for you . . . FreeFire even has a gun moll from Jersey and the book gets into this kind of stuff:

"There are so many factions . . . Zephyr versus the Park Service . . . environmentalists against resource users . . . hunters outside the park versus park policy . . . the three states fighting with the Feds . . . even in the park service, it's law enforcement versus interpretation, and seasonal rangers against full-timers . . . it's bureaucracy run amok."

Dave's 2019 Book List

Another year, another book list . . .

I read forty books in 2019-- a number which seems about average-- and for the most part, I kept it eclectic: fiction, non-fiction, genre stuff, graphic novels, economics, history, and even some self-help. My friend and fellow English teacher Kevin pointed out that I don't read enough books by women. While I definitely consume some chick-lit every year, he is right. Only six of the forty books were by women authors (but several of the books by men are about women, so that should count for something). I might remedy this in 2020 . . . but I might not. Books are one of the few things in life that you have control over. If books by women appeal to me, I'll read them. If not, Kevin can fuck off.

I did go down a couple of rabbit holes.

I read the entire Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy by Cixin Liu . . . and it wasn't easy. I'm quite proud of this and highly recommend these books to diehard sci-fi fans. I also read four mystery novels set in Wyoming. I don't know how this happened, but I really enjoyed the Longmire stuff by Craig Johnson.

I wrote about my seven favorite books of the year over at Gheorghe:The Blog, so you can check that post out if you like, but if you want just one book to read, here it is:

Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe.

This selection may be a result of the serial positioning effect, but the best book I read in 2019 is the last book I read in 2019.

The book is about the Troubles in Northern Ireland, mainly during the 1970s and 1980s, but there is a frame story that is completely topical. The story is scary and compelling and violent and incredibly researched. It will dispel any romanticized notions you have about the IRA. The British are portrayed as no better.

These books provided a lot of material for me to write about. If it wasn't for books, my dog, my wife, and my absurd children, this blog would have died long ago.

Thank you books!

1) The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis

2) An Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green

3) The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu

4) God Save Texas: A Journey into the Soul of the Lone Star State by Lawrence Wright

5) Marching Powder: A True Story of Friendship, Cocaine, and South America's Strangest Jail by Rusty Young (and Thomas McFadden)

6) The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu

7) The Tears of Autumn by Charles McCarry

8) The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester

9) Death's End by Cixin Liu

10) Atomic Habits by James Clear

11) Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and The Drug Company That Addicted America by Beth Macy

12) Glasshouse by Charles Stross

13) Educated by Tara Westbrook

14) The Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan

15) Redshirts by John Scalzi

16) Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life by Nicholas Nassim Taleb

17) The Cold Dish by Craig Johnson

18) The Walking Dead 31: The Rotten Core by Robert Kirkman

19) The Walking Dead 32: Rest in Peace by Robert Kirkman

20) The Dark Horse by Craig Johnson

21) FreeFire by C.J. Box

22) Old Man's War by John Scalzi

23) Hell is Empty by Craig Johnson

24) Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain

25) The Sins of the Fathers by Lawrence Block

26) Ask Again, Yes by Mary Beth Keane

27) Unfu*k Yourself: Get Out of Your Head and into Your Life by Gary John Bishop

28) The Last Colony by John Scalzi

29) Locke and Key by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez

30) Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell

31) Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World by Tim Marshall

32) The Turn of the Key by Ruth Ware

33) Real Tigers by Mick Herron

34) Fentanyl, Inc.: How Rogue Chemists Are Creating the Deadliest Wave of the Opioid Epidemic by Ben Westhoff

35) Slow Horses by Mick Herron

36) Giants of the Monsoon Forest by Jacob Shell

37) Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About The People We Don’t Know by Malcolm Gladwell

38) Fleishman Is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

39) Original Gangstas: The Untold Story of Dr. Dre, Eazy-E, Ice Cube, Tupac Shakur, and the Birth of West Coast Rap by Ben Westhoff

40) Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe

Pirates? Not the Disney Version

Great non-fiction writers can make any topic interesting and Steven Johnson is one of the great ones, he's done it over and over with various topics-- innovations and ideas, cholera, the history of air, organized complexity, decision-making, video games and TV, etcetera-- and in his new book, he astounded me by taking a topic that I always thought was kind played out and juvenile: pirates-- but Johnson's take on pirates is different . . . he puts  them in global context, but I should warn you, Enemy of All Mankind: A True Story of Piracy, Power, and History's First Global Manhunt is not a book that focuses on swashbuckling and sword-fighting-- although that stuff comes up-- instead it portrays pirates (specifically Henry Every) as a bundle of contradictions: democratic rapists; multi-cultural xenophobes; contract abiding torturers; free-spirited slave traders . . . it's a lot to take in, but Johnson does it in a fast breezy style and the history of the Mughal Dynasty and the East India Company goes down fairly easy.

Book List 2022

Here are the books I finished (possibly with some skimming) this year . . . I started plenty of others and quit them because . . . well because I wanted to . . . that's what's great about reading-- if you've got access to a library, you aren't beholden to any particular book:

1) Depth of Winter by Craig Johnson

2) Lazarus Volumes 1-6

3) Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law by Mary Roach

4) Kindness Goes Unpunished by Craig Johnson

5) The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain by Annie Murphy Paul

6) The Given Day by Dennis LeHane

7) Live by Night by Dennis LeHane

8) A Little History of the World by Ernst Gombrich

9) Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey

10) Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr

11) Caliban's War by James A. Corey

12) Batman: The Long Halloween by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale

13) The Nineties by Chuck Klosterman

14) Tochi Onyebuchi's Goliath

15) We Are Never Meeting in Real Life by Samantha Irby

16) Abbadon's Gate by James S.A. Corey

17) The Paradox Hotel by Rob Hart

18) The Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

19) One-Shot Harry by Gary Philips

20) The Last Days of Roger Federer and Other Endings by Geoff Dyer

21) The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow

22) Cibola Burn by James S.A. Corey

23) The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West by David McCullough

24) Harrow by Joy Williams

25) The Quick and the Dead by Joy Williams

26) Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead

27) The Foundling  by Ann Leary

28) Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America by Jill Leovy

29) Fugitive Telemetry: The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells

30) Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen

31) Last Orgy of the Divine Hermit by Mark Leyner

32) The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era by Gary Gerstle

33) Tracy Flick Can't Win by Tom Perrotta

34) Dark Matter by Blake Crouch

35) Nemesis Games by James S.A. Corey

36) The Daughter of Doctor Moreau by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

37) The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells

38) City on Fire by Don Winslow

39) Happy-Go-Lucky by David Sedaris

40) what if? SERIOUS SCIENTIFIC ANSWERS to Absurd Hypothetical Questions by Randall Monroe

41) Enemy of All Mankind: A True Story of Piracy, Power, and History's First Global Manhunt by Stephen Johnson

42) The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music by Dave Grohl

43) The Tomorrow Game: Rival Teenagers, Their Race For a Gun, and The Community United to Save Them by Sudhir Venkatesh

44) Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon

45) A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller

46) Blacktop Wasteland by S.A. Cosby

47) Razorblade Tears by S.A. Cosby

48) Liberation Day by George Saunders

49) Upgrade by Blake Crouch

50) Carrie Soto is Back by Taylor Jenkins Reid

51) Adrift: America in 100 Charts by Scott Galloway

52) Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World by Cal Newport

53) Pines by Blake Crouch

54) The Rise and Reign of the Mammals by Steve Brusatte

55) Lapvona by Ottessa Moshfegh

56) Starry Messenger: Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization by Neil deGrasse Tyson

57) Fantastic Four: Full Circle by Alex Ross

Six Ways to Annoy Your Friends (Now!)

If you read the new Steven Johnson book How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World then you will learn lots of annoying facts about his six topics of invention: glass, cold, sound, clean, time, and light . . . but I won't bore you with pedantry (though Johnson's writing can make anything exciting, even the history of refrigeration) and I'll just summarize his theme instead: to be extraordinarily innovative, you don't want to remain true to yourself and your unorthodox principles -- you might improve the world slightly that way-- but Johnson strives to dispel this "lone genius" myth; instead, if you really want to do something groundbreaking, you've got a little lost and form new connections, explore uncharted terrain, break your routine, and let yourself be buffeted by the new ideas circulating in the ether . . . and it still might take a LONG time before the world catches up with you . . . but the inventions are out there, just waiting for the right suite of technologies to become available, and the right brains to combine them (the same way Shakespeare went about "smashing words together" to make Elizabethan English into something more modern).

A Good Way to Visit Wyoming

A Cold Dish by Craig Johnson is a great book to read if you're stress-free and hardly-working-- which is the state I'm in right now-- it's the first in the Longmire series, and while it rambles a bit for a mystery novel, that's to be expected because the main character of the book is Wyoming-- which is a state that rambles on and on and on-- with Walt Longmire a close second (and various guns-- modern and antique-- a distant third) but Johnson seems to hit his stride better in the the fifth installment, The Dark Horse, which is a much faster read (and I tried the Netflix series, just because, and that's not too bad either).

Everything, Everywhere, All at Once?

I've listened to several interesting podcasts lately-- and I also can't help connecting them to the non-fiction texts we read in my College Writing synthesis class . . . I suppose this is because we're constantly teaching the kids to make connections between the texts and to everything else in the world, to support some kind of argument-- eventually, you start to see connections between everything, like the conspiracy theorist with all the diagrams, pictures, symbols, pins, and strings on his study wall . . . anyway, the podcasts are good even if you haven't read this year's College Writing texts, here they are:

1) The Billionaires’ Secret Plan to Solve California’s Housing Crisis (The Daily) is a fascinating conundrum that connects to Stephen Johnson's writing about organized complexity and emergence--the question is: can a bunch of tech billionaires build a model city in California that feels like a European city? a city that feels like it emerged from a culture that values public transportation, locality, walking, biking, and mixed housing-- and does NOT value traffic and automobiles-- usually these kinds of places are built from the bottom up- they emerge from millions of tiny individual decisions of the city dwellers, over time-- and reflect the evolving core values of the city . . . but these dudes want to do it from the top down-- and they are meeting some resistance . . . an interesting investigative journalistic foray into an ongoing story;

2) Lean In (If Books Could Kill) tells the story of Sheryl Sandberg-- who was an upper-level manager at Facebook-- and wrote a book explaining how to move up in a man's world-- but her version of feminism doesn't address systemic issues, it's just very specific (and often lousy or useless) advice for upper-middle-class women trying to make it in a hyper-accelerated capitalist culture . . . and this really connects to Anand Girdharadas's description of Amy Cuddy's journey from academic to thought leader and Jia Tolentino's chapter "Always Be Optimizing," which discusses how she grapples with the unending expectations of modern feminism;

3) How Do We Survive the Media Apocalypse (Search Engine) is Ezra Klein's generally depressing take on the direction journalism, the internet, and the media are heading-- this episode gets into the costs of market-based competition, the unbundling of advertisements and your local newspaper, the benefits of inefficiency and local media monopolies and the idea that news worked much better when car ads and movie ads were paying for war reporting-- these ideas really complement Anand Giridhaardas's book "Winners Takes All" and Steven Johnson's ideas in "Emergence"-- we've collectively created a system that is incredibly and perfectly competitive-- the online world-- where Netflix competes with the best journalism and Pitchfork and Buzzfeed and YouTube videos about losing your belly fat--  and the result is that a bunch of social media companies make money; AI might cannibalize journalistic sources and therefore destroy the ecosystem that it relies on for information; ideas that are bite-sized, palatable, and digestible win out over the truth; and whatever you direct your attention to on the internet-- and in media in general-- is going to survive and what you neglect will die . . . so read some real books, magazines, and local news-- get off those social media sites, support longform investigative journalism, and recognize that the only reason that many of the fun sites that are now going extinct-- Gawker, Pitchfork, Vox, Buzzfeed-- were often supported by venture capitalists and had no real model to make money in this awful media environment . . . what is slowly emerging on the internet is exactly what we asked for and deserve, a bunch of bullshit.

Weird Quarantine Workouts (Governor Murphy, Open the Parks!)

State and County Parks are still closed in New Jersey; so as far as outdoor activities go, my family is making the best of what is available.

Yesterday, my wife and I went on a bike ride to New Brunswick because we heard Buccleuch Park was open (this turned out to be true, as it is a city park). I would have preferred to bike in Donaldson Park, which is right next to my house-- especially because then I can attach the dog to my bike.

It would also have been nice to bike through Johnson Park and cross the Landing Lane Bridge, but Johnson Park has also closed-- even the roads that cut through the park. So instead, my wife and I crossed the Albany Street Bridge and ducked down under the bridge (this is where the homeless people gather). We took a claustrophobic graffiti and garbage-strewn path between Route 18 and the Raritan River. This is apparently where the "river rats"-- or homeless folk-- camp out. We were stuck between chain link fence and the cliff heading down to the river, biking through clouds of gnats and odd liquids. It was pretty gross.

Once we got to the park, things improved. it was crowded, but people were keeping their distance. We chose to avoid the weird gross path on the way home. Instead, we cut through Rutgers. College Avenue was oddly empty. Emptier than a hot day in July. It was weird (but great for biking . . . no cars and no people). A quiet apocalypse.

 

Today, Ian and I walked down the street to Dead Man's Hill and did seven repeats . . . a new record. Last week, we did six of them, and I nearly had a heart attack. Ian was pretty tired as well. This week, we were fine all the way through.

The hill is one-tenth of a mile, at a ten percent grade. It's steep. Ian was running each repeat in around 33 seconds. Each hill took me about forty seconds (although I did the last one in 35 seconds).

Here is a video of repeat number seven.




Next week, barring injury, sickness, or whatever the hell else might happen in these weird times, we will do eight.

And Now For Something Completely Different

I made a vet appointment for my dog weeks ago, and I thought I scheduled it during a "B-Day" of remote school-- because on B-Days I have a free period before lunch . . . but I didn't realize that we started back from break on a B-Day rather than the more logical A-Day so my math was thrown off . . . long story short, I had to take my College Writing class on the road today, I ran my Team meeting on my phone while I drove to the vet . . . and as I was driving, a snow squall blew in-- so I was conferencing with a girl about her thesis, discussing Anand Giridharadas's explanation of the plutocratic tendency to "Pinker" things-- to take the long view of history and claim that because the human condition is improving, individual inequalities are not important-- and how this connects to the unfettered emergence that Steven Johnson is mesmerized by (but is Johnson a thought leader or a public intellectual? who knows? I was trying not to veer off the road) and I'm happy to say that I helped the girl through a rough patch of writing, I made it through the blizzard intact, and Lola had a successful visit at the vet . . . who knew I would be able to do all these things simultaneously?

2020: A Good Year For Reading Books

I read 54 books in 2020-- the most since I've been keeping this list-- and one of those books was The History of Tom Jones: A Foundling, a monstrous time that should count as two books-- and while there are a number of good reads on the list, if I had to pick three favorites, they would be:

Best Literary Fiction:  Deacon King Kong by James McBride

Best Non-fiction: Why We're Polarized by Ezra Klein

Best Sci-fi: The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers

and the best detective series would be the first three Easy Rawlins books by Walter Mosley

here's the complete list, happy reading . . .

1) The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story by Douglas Preston

2) The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age by Leo Damrosch

3) Our Kind of Traitor by John le Carré

4) Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

5) This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

6) Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley

7) Wilmington's Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy by David Zucchino

8) A Red Death by Walter Mosley

9) White Butterfly by Walter Mosley

10) Death Without Company by Craig Johnson

11) Best Movie Year Ever: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen by Brian Rafferty

12) The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie

13) Dead Men's Trousers by Irvine Welsh

14) The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling by Henry Fielding

15) The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey

16) A Shilling for Candles by Josephine Tey

17) The Secret History by Donna Tartt

18) Phil Gordon's Little Green Book by Phil Gordon 

19) Elements of Poker by Tommy Angelo

20) Harrington on Hold'em Vol I by Dan Harrington

21) The Bat by Jo Nesbø

22) Small Stakes No-Limit Hold'em by Ed Miller, Sunny Mehta, Matt Flynn

23) Hold'em Poker by David Sklansky

24) Harrington on Hold'em Vol II by Dan Harrington

25) To Love and Be Wise by Josephine Tey

26) Waiting for Straighters by Tommy Angelo

27) American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America by Colin Woodard

28) Townie by Andre Dubus III

29) Every Hand Revealed by Gus Hansen

30) The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers

31) Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie

32) Do Not Resuscitate by Nicholas Ponticello 

33) The Biggest Game in Town by Al Alvarez

34) The Cipher by Kathe Koja

35) Bad Boy Brawly Brown by Walter Mosely

36) Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas

37) "H" is For Homicide by Sue Grafton

38) The Perfect Nanny by Leila Slimani

39) Strategies for Beating Small Stakes Poker Tournaments by Jonathan Little

40) Soccer Systems and Strategies by Jens Bangsbo and Birger Peitersen

41) The Full Tilt Poker Strategy Guide edited by Michael Craig

42) Orphans of the Sky by Robert A. Heinlein

43) The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

44) Tightrope: Americans Reaching For Hope by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn

45) The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie

46) The Peripheral by William Gibson

47) Set My Heart To Five by Simon Stephenson

48) The Inner Game of Tennis by W. Timothy Gallwey

49) A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine

50) Why We're Polarized by Ezra Klein

51) Deacon King Kong by James McBride

52) Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked by Adam Alter

53) Agency by William Gibson

54) The Fifth Season by J.K. Jemisin  

A Good Way to Visit Wyoming

A Cold Dish by Craig Johnson is a great book to read if you're stress-free and hardly-working-- which is the state I'm in right now-- it's the first in the Longmire series, and while it rambles a bit for a mystery novel, that's to be expected because the main character of the book is Wyoming-- which is a state that rambles on and on and on-- with Walt Longmire a close second (and various guns-- modern and antique-- a distant third) but Johnson seems to hit his stride better in the the fifth installment, The Dark Horse, which is a much faster read (and I tried the Netflix series, just because, and that's not too bad either).

Good Students = Actually Having to Teach

My College Writing students are hard-working and wonderful this year, which-- on the one hand is a good thing-- but on the other hand, it means that during these last days before the essay is due, they ask me a lot of questions on how to synthesize these disparate non-fiction texts we read ("The Myth of the Ant Queen" by Steven Johnson, "The Critic and the Thought Leader" by Anand Giridharadas and "Always Be Optimizing" by Jia Tolentino) and they have me look at a lot of thesis statements and topic sentences, and so by the end of the day, my brain is swimming in ants and emergence and self-organizing systems and million-ball billiards tables and new feminism and ever-increasing beauty standards and increasing plutocratic influence and shrieking daemonic mini-programs and the costs of evolutionary solutions and the convergence of MarketWorld and decentralized ant dynamics and the polluted miracle of Industrial Revolution Manchester and the dystopian potential of the cyborg and the juxtaposition of a hundred other strange concepts and while I am wholeheartedly behind the Rutgers model of non-fiction synthesis-- of making children aware of these big contemporary ideas and having them grapple with the terminology and concepts of the post-modern world (even though Rutgers seems to be abandoning the model they created and dumbing down the course because kids have lost their minds since COVID and the cell-phone revolution) I still miss teaching books while I like the abstract and conceptual conversations we have about this stuff-- and the connections we make to reality-- the top-down and bottom-up power dynamics really applies to what is happening with abortion right now, etc.-- it will be nice to switch over to something like Twelfth Night.

The Singularity vs. Nightfall

Ian Morris begins his massive history of Eastern and Western social development, Why the West Rules-- for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future, at the very beginning --15,000 years ago, deep in prehistory-- and he runs through the typical Guns, Germs, and Steel stuff (with more details about Chinese history) but he comes at this massive scale of time from the perspective of an archaeologist, and on the "maps vs. chaps" debate, he's firmly on the side of the maps (unlike someone like Paul Johnson, who goes more for the chaps) which might be offensive to some because he takes the humanity out of history, and views the span of human achievement as something of a Civilization computer game, with an algorithm for social development based on energy capture, urbanization, information technology, and war-making capacity . . . so you're going to get a lot of numbers, as societies advance, which is sometimes disconcerting but it all eventually makes sense and if you can't figure out how to break through the hard ceiling-- perhaps this occurs at a social development index of 24-- then you don't get to stagnate at whatever glory you have achieved, instead things tend to spiral out of control and your civilization collapses . . . you can't turn away the four horsemen of the apocalypse: climate change, famine, state failure and migration (occasionally, there is a fifth horseman: disease) and you need particular resources to defeat these horsemen, and of your geographical and technological situation doesn't possess them, then you're screwed . . . no matter who is making the decisions . . . but with great collapse comes great resilience and great recovery-- so you might as well embrace the impending apocalypse, because while a few good decisions might head off or postpone a collapse, if it's going to happen, no individual human-- brilliant leader, scientist, thinker, moral crusader, or whatever-- is going to defeat the lazy, scared, concerned masses . . . you might be able to temporarily plug the dike, but you're not going to stop the flood . . . and Morris doesn't see any inherent superior value to Western culture-- there's no cultural bias here-- the East surges ahead of the West at times (541 AD to 1100 AD in particular) and then hits a hard ceiling and it takes the Industrial Revolution for the West to make the big move ahead and it really didn't matter who invented what or when (Stigler's Law of Eponymy) and then, finally, Morris gets to now and that's when the book really takes off-- he explains the economic marriage of America and China (we buy Chinese products and China buys our debt, making the America dollar more valuable and the Chinese renminbi less so and if we stopped buying Chinese products, they could dump all the US dollars they own on the market, thus totally devaluing our currency . . . so we're stuck with each other) and how we are headed towards an uncharted future as far as social development-- we might hit 5000!-- which could result in cities of 140 million people or more, but we're hitting a hard ceiling around 1000 points, and we can't go on this way-- all the citizens of earth can't live the way the richest countries live-- we're burning too much fossil fuel, contributing to what Morris calls "global weirding" and as the world becomes smaller and flatter, developed nations are becoming more concerned with immigration (a prescient prediction of Trump's victory and Brexit . . . the book was published in 2011) and because we are at such a technological high point, the stakes are infinite . . . we may see a transformation in the next fifty years that makes the Industrial Revolution look like the domestication of the goat, a singularity situation where AI and energy capture make the world so small that geography and nations are meaningless . . . or we may be staggering towards a collapse like no other, where-- as Einstein pithily predicted-- we fight World War IV with rocks . . . the scary thing is that, with the technology we now possess, it only takes one thing to go wrong and then we are shrouded in nuclear winter or enduring the desert of the real, while it will take incredible diplomacy and cooperation to make everything go right, so that we break through the next hard ceiling and propel ourselves into a phenomenal future . . . I'm rooting for humanity to do it, but I'm not sure we've got it in us, but if we don't succeed, there's always the hope that some other life form-- cockroaches? rats?-- will step up to the plate and eventually swing for the fences . . . anyway, this is a must read, but when you get bored of the ancient Chinese history, skip a bit brother, and get to the conclusion (which a good hundred pages in itself).

Holes in the Loop

Not much to complain about with Rian Johnson's new time travel movie Looper -- the visual effects are gritty and realistic, Bruce Willis is still Bruce Willis (though he's a lot older than when he did my favorite time travel movie, Twelve Monkeys) and the plot is far easier to navigate than Primer . . . but it's still a time travel movie, which means when you think too hard about it, it doesn't make complete logical sense . . . I won't get into any spoilers here, but my advice is this: watch it, but don't think too hard about it . . . Bruce Willis gives his younger self the same sort of advice that Al  -- the time travelling diner owner in Stephen King's time travel novel 11/22/63 -- gives Jake Epping: "If we start talking about it, we'll be here all day, making diagrams with straws."

Dave Stays in Wyoming (Because Jersey Sucks Right Now)

I'm charging to the finish of Craig Johnson's fifth book in the Longmire series, The Dark Horse,  and after reading two of these, I'm noticing some patterns-- snow, cold, wind, cowboy stuff, horses, guns, damsels that might not be in as much distress as the knights think, Clint Eastwood-style fistfights, drunks, and Walt Longmire taking the brunt of it all . . . and I'm enjoying fantasizing about the bleak chill of Wyoming so much, as I sit inside during the Jersey heat wave, that I actually checked out a C.J. Box mystery from the library today-- a Joe Pickett novel called FreeFire, which is also set in Wyoming . . . so there's going to be a head-to-head match up of Wyoming detective mysteries, I'll let them duke it out and elect a winner later in the week.

The Invention of Air: A Solid Review

Steven Johnson's excellent new book The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America is mainly the story of scientist and philosopher Joseph Priestly, who had a Forrest Gump-like ability to be in the right place at the right time (until the rioters burned his house down and he had to seek sanctuary in America) but it's also a reminder, for me, at least, of how radical the founding fathers were as thinkers, and how much science and logic were a part of their thought process . . . to the point where Jefferson expunged all the magic and mysticism out of the Bible and created his own edition and the usually optimistic and chipper Ben Franklin, drawn away from his cherished science and into politics at the end of his life, ended up writing sentences like this (thus making him a compatriot of mine in both opinion and style): "Men I find to be a Sort of Beings very badly constructed, as they are generally more easily provoked than reconciled, more disposed to do Mischief to each other than to make Reparation, much more easily deceived than undeceived, and having more Pride & Pleasure in killing than in begetting one another, for without a Blush they assemble in great armies at Noon Day to destroy, and when they have killed as many as they can, they exaggerate the Number to augment the fancied Glory; but they creep into Corners or cover themselves with the Darkness of Night, when they mean to beget, as being ashamed of Virtuous Action."