A collection of essays from the man who wrote Infinite Jest, also known as the 20th century’s best 21st century book. Each one is near-to-completely brilliant and worthy of more thought than a one-line in an inconsequential blog post, but that won’t stop me:

• Big red son is the one where he attends the AVN awards as a magazine correspondent. The more absurd things become, the more encyclopedic he gets. Yes it’s funny, but also existentialist and sad as only pornography can be.
• Certainly the end of something or other, one would have to thing is long title to a short-ish review of a supposedly science fiction book by John Updike. He didn’t like it.

• Some remarks on Kafka’s funnies from which probably not enough has been removed is exactly what it says it is. Having only high-school literature class-level acquaintance with Kafka, I can’t comment.

• Authority and American usage is a review of a dictionary but also the 20th century’s (written in 1999) best 21st century essay, covering issues of political correctness, identity politics, race, alienation, and a brief history of the battle between prescriptivism and descriptivism for the hearts and minds of I don’t know who exactly, but what an exciting battle it is.

• The view from Mrs. Thompson’s is about where he was on 9/11 (spoiler alert: he was at Mrs. Thompson’s).

• How Tracey Austin broke my heart is the reason I’m even sadder than I should be about DFW not still being around, because an essay about the Federer-Đoković-Nadal tennis trio in general and the mental gymnastics going on in Novak Đoković’s head in particular would have been spectacular to read (although there has been a fairly successful attempt). Oh, and it’s also a review of a reasonably bad autobiography of the titular Ms. Austin, who is also a tennis player.
• Up, Simba is DFW following McCaine’s failed 2000 attempt in the Republican primaries, wherein he shows just how walled away from the “real” world candidates were back then, how big of a gatekeeper the media world, and just why Twitter could have made all the difference.
• Consider the lobster is where a travel essay for a cooking magazine from a food festival in Maine turns into an existential crisis and a call for veganism. It’s good
• Host is so messed up by its formatting of footnotes (fortunately there is now a web version which more than makes up for it, and the original article published in The Atlantic was also easier to read, apparently, say people who were able to find it, and yes this should also have been a footnote) that it’s hard at first to appreciate how good of a story interspersed with thoughts on infotainment and talk radio it really is, and even though it was written more than a decade ago you can sort of see what it’s protagonist will eventually become in these troubling times.

Written by David Foster Wallace, 2007

I’ve always assumed that much of the western scientific tradition is a series of That’ll-Do measures made by imperfect humans in imperfect circumstances. This monograph showed me just how imperfect were both the circumstances (the English civil war) and the humans (naive, vain, incestuous, sometimes all at once). And just how much like the present times was the whole scientific endeavor: even back then, with so much yet to be discovered, most published papers were trivialities, most scientists (and “scientists”) cared for status more than truth, and most research (and “research”) was left unheard and unread.

It’s not a mystery then why we have such a hard time changing the ways of the ancients when those ways were built out of sheep’s blood and luminescent meat. But then I realized: we don’t get the science we need, we get one that we deserve, and we’ve been deserving the same kind of science for centuries now.

Written by Adrian Tinniswood, 2019

• Francis Collins is a physician scientist who after a particularly tough patient interaction went from being atheist to agnostic to evangelical Christian. He is also kind of my boss, and while I hope that fact is not influencing my opinion of his book, it probably is.
• The books has two audiences: scientists prejudiced against (organized) religion, and Christians prejudiced against science, evolution in particular.
• The message to the scientists is: read C.S. Lewis to find out more.
• The message to the faithful: don't be narrow in your reading of the Bible, it'll come back to bite you. And also read C.S. Lewis.
• The first few chapters read like Dr. Collins' personal statement. Residency and fellowship applicants, take note.
• The scientific parts are accurate and an easy read for me and probably for the target audience as well.
• The parts on religion are vague, subjective, and rely too much on "trust me".
• The part where he turns a story of a sexual assault against his daughter into a story about his faith deserves a cringe, a face-slap, and a letter of apology in future editions.

Written by Francis S. Collins, 2007

Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel is a book with a brilliant idea, adequately presented. Collapse is also presented adequately, for an undergrad ecology course textbook. The ideas aren’t lacking, but are dull, undefined, hard to follow, and boil down to this: it is hard for a society to survive in a harsh, isolated environment, and some places tend to become harsh and isolated once humans start overexploiting resources, so better be careful. He presents several past societies that thus failed (Easter Island, Anasazi, the Greenland Norse, etc.), several that survived, and gives some not entirely plausible accounts of current societies which may be on the brink of collapse (Montana, China, Rwanda).

Diamond likes to enumerate: there is a Five-point Framework for Societies’ Collapse, but also Ten (?) Reasons Why The Vikings Failed, Seven Ways the Hard Mining Industry is Ruining the Environment, and Fifteen Things to Do in Iceland. I made-up those last three numbers, because I couldn’t remember the actual ones — he likes to enumerate, but doesn’t like lists, so it doesn’t make for a very good textbook either.

Written by Jared Diamond, 2011

“I’d like this book more if it weren’t so…”

“If it weren’t so what?”

“If it weren’t so repetitive!”

“You would have liked this book more if it weren’t so repetitive.”

“Yes, that’s what I said. Also the book is kind of meandering and takes it’s time getting to…”

“What book?”

I much preferred Slaughterhouse-Five. This one just wasn’t for me.

Written by Joseph Heller, 1961

Those things are God and religion, and Donal Knuth discussed them in a series of lectures at Harvard, the transcripts of which make this book. The lectures amount to a Director's Comment edition of another one of his books, 3:16, so if you've read that one your yield is sure to be higher than mine: I hadn't. In 3:16, he makes a thorough analysis of verse 3:16 from each book of the Bible. So yes, that makes "Things a computer scientist…" a book containing lectures about a book that deals with books of The Book.

Knuth is religious and also a brilliant computer scientist, and he brings a programmer's mind to the Bible. Alas, I don't have the mind of a programmer: the only parts of the book I could follow and enjoy were those dealing with typography, another one of Knuth's interests. It did raise my interest enough to look for a religious physician's take on Christianity, and what do you know: the boss of my boss's boss wrote one. It's on the pile now, but not before I scratch my typographic itch.

Written by Donald E. Knuth, 2003

For someone who supposedly likes science fiction I’ve been late getting to Asimov’s best known works. That’s too bad, since 20 years ago I would have enjoyed the first book much more.

• The literal title of the series could be The Decline and Fall of the Galactic Empire, and How to Survive It.

• Amazon says “Foundation” is book three. It’s not: books 1 and 2 are prequels and if you read them as published, this is the rightful Book One (you’re not one of those people who shows their kids The Phantom Menace first, are you?)

• The future has no women, save for a shrill daughter of a viceroy wedded off to a barbarian ruler. This is literally the only female character in a book that spans 80+ years and five star systems. I would not have noticed this 20 years ago.

• The Empire’s degeneracy is most evident in its approach to culture and science: our ancestors knew more that we did so we’d better maintain the status quo and not let things get too much worse on our watch. Over a few centuries of such policies things inevitably get much worse. The premise is a good counterfactual to Tyler Cowen’s Stubborn Attachments.

• The peak of science is neither interstellar travel nor advanced atomic energy: both of these survive the decline and continue to be used even by “barbarians”. What waits to be re-discovered is psychohistory (PH), an invention of Asimov’s which is to psychology what Newtonian physics is to quantum mechanics: an averaging out of individual variability in order to predict “future history”.

• PH notably can’t predict actions of individuals, yet at critical moments it’s the individuals who make the critical decisions that make the PH predictions come true. Paradox? Irony? Both?

• Also, for someone who keeps saying that PH can’t predict the future of an individual human, the inventor of PH is really good at predicting the future of individual humans. That’s neither paradox nor irony but rather bad plotting on Asimov’s part, but I’ll hold final judgment until the end of the series.

Written by Isaac Asimov, 1951

This could have and should have been the wrap-up of Sapiens rather than a book of its own. The first two thirds are a rehash of the last few chapters of Sapiens, dealing with three different flavors of humanism (liberal, social, evolutionary) in more depth. Only the last third deals with predictions, the main one being that, the postulates of liberalism being incompatible with our current understanding of biology, two other candidate “religions” may replace it: techno-humanism (out of which springs Homo Deus) and dataism (wherein humans need not apply).

So far so good; unfortunately, his claims about the current state of affairs are supported by the thinnest of cobwebs, at least where medicine is concerned:

“It is highly likely that during your lifetime many of the most momentous decisions about your body and health will be taken by computer algorithms such as IBM’s Watson.”

It isn’t.

“Google, together with the drug giant Novartis, is developing a contact lens that checks glucose levels in the blood every few seconds by analysing the composition of tears.”

Not any more.

“Twentieth-century medicine aimed to heal the sick. Twenty-first-century medicine is increasingly aiming to upgrade the healthy.”

Is he referring to the “ADHD” epidemic? Anabolic steroid use? Medicine’s record of messing with the healthy has so far been abysmal, there are no indications that this will change, and there are plenty of sick that still need healing. It’s not medicine that wants the upgrading, it’s the Silicon Valley tech bros, for the most part.

Yes, it’s only medicine, but it’s the part I understand the most and his conjectures, deductions, and extrapolations fall flat on their face.

A darker prediction: the best minds of the West are too busy monetizing the unjustified optimism and hubris of the monied classes to work on the important problems. A breakthrough, when it comes, will be out of left field and from somewhere less regulated, less devoted to a good narrative, and more prone to experimentation for its own (rather than financial) sake. It is now indescribable but will in hindsight seem inevitable, which makes it a terrible subject for a book on future history but a terrific one for true science fiction.

Written by Yuval Noah Harari, 2018

Fifty years and what feels like ten times as many people crammed into a story of physics, engineering, politics, psychology, diplomacy, and war. An awesome book about an awesome topic, and yes that’s how awesome was meant to be used.

• I enjoyed the first half of the book, about the physics of it all, much more than the second. It has fewer characters, all of them characters, and has fewer parallel stories to tell. A whole chapter is devoted to a manuscript authorship dilemma: kudos to Rhodes for making it interesting.

• Niels Bohr and Ernest Rutherford were some of those characters. So was Marie Curie: “How does it feel to be married to a genius, Mdm. Curie?” “I don’t know, ask my husband”. Indeed.

• If there’s anything that I got from the second half, about engineering and deploying the thing, it’s that large projects are messy, costly, and never completely satisfying. But that’s kind of a given.

• With all the firebombing (Dresden et al), and two atomic bombs top it off, how much worse must have the Allies behaved for their atrocities to be equal to those of the Nazis? Note that Stalin was an Ally.

• I knew little of Oppenheimer before reading this except that he got into political trouble after Los Alamos. The book doesn’t go there, but every mention of him foreshadows his troubles to come. Which would be very confusing if I knew absolutely nothing about him, and was still kind of confusing with the little knowledge I had.

• Soldiers were much more interesting to read about than politicians, and came out on top in almost every confrontation.

• I know what I wrote about the second half of the book, but the last three chapters are easily the best, and the way Rhodes covered the actual bombing of Hiroshima was masterful.

This will probably be the best book I read this year.

Written by Richard Rhodes, 1986

A speedy overview of the past 70 some millennia of humanity. Self-aware without being modest about its proclamations. Very 2014 in its optimism to dread ratio, but with enough forewarning that things might slip at any moment that it doesn’t appear naïve when being read in 2019. A few observations:

• The book’s main thesis is that civilization as we know it lies on many, many figments of our collective imagination: states, laws, human rights, religions, corporations, etc. The last hundred years have sped this up, pulling people apart from families and other tangible local communities and into fictive constructs such as nations, sports teams, organized religion, and other forms of fandom. Are Twitter and Facebook communities more or less real than these, and if more, are they why people have been having a hard time suspending their disbelief?

• Many religions are poked, proded, and pulled apart by witty turns of phrase, but Harari turns dead serious whenever buddhism is discussed. Unlike christianity and islam, buddhism gets whole running paragraphs of in-depth explanation. Did the book need a religious disclaimer?

• His go-to example for discussing nationalist myths is Serbia. It figures. Kudos for doing it respectfully.

• Another thesis is that capitalism lives by using up future resources in form of credit, which in turn produces and enlarges those very same future (now present) resources. In addition to being a very Predestination way of seeing things, does that support or conflict with Tyler Cowen’s thesis in Stubborn Attachments that we tend to — but shouldn’t — discount the future? Maybe we (or capitalists, at least) are at the same time optimists by thinking the future will be better by default, but also saying to hell with it by using those perceived future benefits now, to the detriment of future people? To this non-economist modern capitalism looks like an underbaked ideology.

• This is the best-looking and best-made soft cover edition of a non-fiction book I’ve ever read.

Written by Yuval Noah Harari, 2014