The more I think about Dan Wang’s book Breakneck the less I think of it. Wang presents America as a country of lawyers — orderly, slow, nothing gets done — and China as a country of engineers, moving fast and breaking things, some of the breakages being described in detail. If only America was ruled more by engineers, or China had more lawyers involved, and we’d have two great countries instead of two deeply flawed ones.

I would suggest that the true dichotomy Wang described is not one between lawyers and engineers, but one between rule of law and rule by law. If it ever appears that projects are being bogged down in legalese, I would posit that it is not because too many lawyers are involved but rather than an appropriate number of lawyers is trying to, and I am choosing my words carefully here, stop stupid shit being done. They are not always successful but at least they try.

So if it ever appears that infrastructure in America doesn’t get built any more and that nothing ever gets done, it is because the doers of this country have, for the most part, become obsessed with doing stupid shit.

Which is to say, I would be ecstatic if any of my children wanted to pursue a career in law; and I would strongly consider disowning them if they went into finance.

📚Still reading Inventing the Renaissance, and Lorenzo de Medici’s brother Giuliano of course had a mention. Still, I wasn’t prepared for his bust being quite so metal.

This is at the (not Smithsonian!) National Art Gallery in DC, which has a rich collection of renaissance works.

📚 Some 18th century childhood doodles in a 17th century William Shakespeare first folio, as seen in the Folger collection. Kids will be kids!

Glenn Fleishman is singlehandedly keeping me interested in Kickstarter. Just this week he has set up another campaign: the proposed book title is “That One Matt Bors Comic” and it is a book about a meme which was supposedly viral but I don’t remember seeing until two days ago. Still, the concept is interesting and I would like to learn more.

And just as I finished backing Fleishman’s, I noticed that Cory Doctorow also a campaign. It is for The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI, a book based on a similarly-named essay about “reverse centaurs” — people whose job it is to augment AI instead the other way around — i.e., potentially, all of us proles. Yes, even doctors. Particularly doctors.

Note that the anti-enshittification (anti-platform?) crusader Doctorow used Kickstarter. The company is indeed a “public benefit corporation” of around 60 employees and an interesting history of unionization. A dissenting opinion from senior staff that forming a union would be “misappropriation of unions for use by privileged workers” is a delightful example of cognitive dissonance in people who tell themselves that they are good but also want to run a successful business.

Another Mother’s Day treat: a 40-minute video essay about “The Giving Tree”. Before watching, “The Giving Tree” was one of my least favorite children’s books — hate may not be too strong of a word to describe how I felt about it — but it is in fact nuanced, intentionally sad, and perfect starting material for some serious conversations.

The author, Shel Silverstein, seems to have been quite the character and I would now very much like to get his book of children’s poetry which has some fascinating illustrations. He also wrote the words for “A Boy Named Sue” and was an accomplished musician himself, though from the brief soundbite I heard his voice is an acquired taste.

All I can think of while reading Nilay Patel’s software brain essay, quoted and linked to all over the web, is the slight but dense Metaphors We Live By. Software databases — metaphoric file cabinets and manila folders — now themselves becoming metaphors for physical objects is truly Escherian.

📚 Finished reading: Dark Gods by T. E. D. Klein, a short story collection you’d get if you transported H.P. Lovecraft from 1920s New England to 1980s New York City, then asked him to water down the weirdness and narrow the horror from Cosmic to Upper East Side. Which is to say, I wasn’t impressed.

A mere 50 pages in and I can already tell that Inventing the Renaissance will be a banger of a book. Three concepts in particular stood out for there relevance far outside that particular period in history:

• Legitimacy, why it is important to have it and how to obtain it. Marrying into a noble family, graduating from a well-known program, surviving a few years in big pharma/big tech, getting linked to by a major website, etc.
• Zombie ideas as wrong theories that lead to more research that leads to correct theories but then refuse to die — cruthes that outlive their usefulness. See also: zombie medicine.
• Conflicting projections, as in the Medicis playing to role of “merchant scum” in Florence, a city which tends to banish people with ambitions towards nobility, while at the same time playing up your high status to the outsiders who view symbols of nobility as a sign of legitimacy (see above). It is a tough game to play which is why the AI companies are failing at it so spectacularly (to investors and eneterprise clients: we will eliminate the need for XX% of the work force; to the plebs: let us build data centers, it will create jobs; to themselves: why do they hate us?)

No surprise that it has been nominated for a Best Related Work Hugo Award, and kudos to Palmer for compelling me to write the first “currently reading” post in almost two years (the last one was also for a book she wrote).

• Monopolized by David Dayen, which Cory Doctorow recommended in response to my account from last week of the medical billing/phone scam rabbit-duck. Doctorow wrote about the book in more detail back in 2021 and yes it is now on the pile as is everything else below.
• The Credibility Crisis in Science ⊕ [Note: ↬ Joel Hamill ] by Thomas Plümper and Eric Neumayer, and if the subtitle “Tweakers, Fraudsters, and the Manipulation of Empirical Results” whets your appetite there is an excerpt available in Nautilus.
• The Art of Manliness by Brett and Kate McKay, who have had a blog of the same name for more than a decade, so it is a true mystery why an article in The Dispatch about the “gentlemanosphere” ⊕ [Note: ↬ Reader John ] chose to highlight overtestosteroned almost-douchebags such as Scott Galloway as the anti-manosphere crusaders rather than McKay. Haha, I’m joking, of course it’s not a mystery: Galloway gets more clicks, taps, swipes or rather the preferred method of interaction is nowadays. He also has a new book out, to which I shall not link.
• The Oxford Book of English Verse edited by Christopher Ricks, which someone recommended on The Honest Broker Podcast, a show that combines some of my least favorite things about this decade: Substack and using the word “podcast” to describe a video of two men talking. Still, the transcript makes for good reading and the book seems something worth keeping at the bedside, at least aspirationally.

📚 Finished reading: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick, so I now have no choice but to watch Blade Runner for the fourth or fifth time. I suspect that — much like with the novel — quite a few parts will “hit different” this time around.