Currently...

Reading:

Thomas J. Sugrue - The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit

Watching:

30 Rock - Season 3 (so far, a bit disappointing)

Niall Ferguson - The Ascent of Money

Niall Ferguson normally has a knack for writing rigorous though popularly readable history. I enjoy most of what I have read of his, but this book was a disappointment, primarily, I think, because my expectations differed substantially from the content. It was billed in the subtitle as a financial history of the world, but there was very little narrative history, and most of it focused on the recent past and an explanation of the recent financial crisis. There was an entire chapter ("Safe as Houses") which focused only on recent real estate investment (out of only seven chapters). It wasn't exactly bad in the sense of bad arguments or bad scholarship, but it was uneven, and looking back on it, a clear theme did not stick with me. I would recommend his other more focused books before this one.

I believe this was a companion piece to a BBC series (entirely free on the web, though I have not watched it) that he was also involved in, so maybe the TV treatment holds together better.

Albert O. Hirschman - The Passions and the Interests

Excellent and concise. Yes, interest, as in greed, was originally seen as restraining the more dangerous of the passions, which seemed to continually plunge Europe into wars and conflict of obscene brutality. It was the passion of the prince that the Enlightenment thinkers wished to constrain, by use of his own appetites.

Gillian Tett - Fool's Gold

A good journalistic account of the J.P. Morgan investment bank. I love her FT column (I originally discovered Donald MacKenzie and others from her). However, she committed one unforgivable error: "Chicago University" rather than "The University of Chicago". And I say this not just because I went there, but because, as a financial journalist, she should be intimately familiar with The Chicago School of economics. Ms. Tett, where was your editor?

David Wessel - In Fed We Trust

A quick read. Not bad, not remarkable. The major point is that the Fed functions more or less like a fourth branch of government, and Wessel doesn't seem to think that is such a bad thing, given how slowly all of the other actors responded. Good for the same reason that Bob Woodward's books are good: his list of contacts as economics editor for the Wall Street Journal.

C. V. Wedgwood - The Thirty Years War

A classic. I must read Schiller's Wallenstein.

Robert M. Sapolsky - Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers

Excellent. Highly recommended. This book looks goofy from the cover, but it is solidly based in experimental biology, and it is quite readable. Stress is central to how we experience our lives. It is tremendously important to happiness. Going to the gym is an exercise in controlled stress. Most people are willing to take on a huge stress load for money. And it all flows from a mechanism which is good at helping a zebra get away from a lion in the short term, but self-destructive when dealing with the worries of higher cognition over a longer time frame.

Timothy Brook - The Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China

True Blood First Season

Lots of fun. Very "Vampire: The Masquerade" with cute southern charm. By Alan Ball, the same guy behind Six Feet Under. And Jason Stackhouse is amazingly hot.

A Short Guide to Facebook Privacy Settings

First, my assumption is that you pretty much want to share everything with your friends and nothing with anyone else. This really should be the default, but since Facebook wants to compete with Twitter and attract more advertising dollars, they are trying to railroad users into sharing as much information as possible. Unfortunately, to really enact an "only friends" policy, you have to give up using third-party Facebook applications. This is an arbitrary decision by Facebook, but there it is. If you still want to use third-party Facebook applications, but otherwise want to restrict content to friends, just ignore the steps below regarding applications (but realize that third-party applications will be able to access some or all of your personal information on the site and probably share it with your friends in strange and surprising ways). Personally, I have found all third-party applications worthless and a waste of time, so I am fine giving them up.

Without further ado, here are the steps you should take. At the end of each of these groups of instructions, you will probably need to click "save changes" or something similar.

1. "Settings" pull-down menu in the upper right
2. Privacy -> Profile
3. Change all entries to "Only Friends"

1. "Settings" pull-down menu in the upper right
2. Settings -> Application Settings
3. Show: Authorized
4. Then remove all of them by clicking the "X" and confirming

1. "Settings" pull-down menu in the upper right
2. Privacy -> Applications
3. Click on the "Settings" tab
4. Select "Do not share any information about me through the Facebook API" (if you want to do this, this means you won't be able to make use of Facebook applications, as described above)
5. Under "Beacon Websites" heading, select "Don't allow Beacon websites to post stories to my profile"
6. Under "Facebook Connect Applications" heading, select "Don't allow friends to view my memberships on other websites through Facebook Connect"

If you do all of these things, your privacy should be reasonably protected on Facebook. That being said, if you have something truly private, don't put it on a computer, especially a networked computer, and super-especially don't put it on the server of a company whose business model is dedicated to selling ads to you or based on you. (Given the complexity of the privacy settings pages, I am sure that I have missed one or two options, so I make no guarantees regarding whether or not this will actually protect you totally.)

Also, one more warning. The Facebook privacy mechanism seems unstable. They have been and will be experimenting with it in order to figure out how to actually turn a profit over their astronomical expenses, so this information may go out of date. Caveat emptor. Or maybe that should read freebooter beware, since users aren't really customers of Facebook.

With all that negativity out of the way, I still think that Facebook, on balance, is a net positive, as a self-updating address book, and as a way to keep tabs on the lives of friends, old and new.

Edmund Burke - A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful

The sublime, as a formal category, is based on terror, according to Burke. The modern word we are more likely to use for this concept is awe. Sublime: being dominated; beauty: dominating. A bit too schematic? Probably, but still interesting. Remember he was writing in the eighteenth century. He is a beautiful writer, though some of it is a bit dry.

"Custom reconciles us to everything"

Keynes

Can This Gay Sex Maniac Fix the Economy?

Vicki Robin - Your Money or Your Life

Periodically I like to read (or reread) a "practical" book. It helps keep me grounded.

This belongs to the same shelf category as David Allen (for me).

Sometimes I jokingly think of this as my Oprah section. A little bit of counterweight to the probably overly heavy poststructuralist et al shelves.

As Liz Lemon said about her religion: "I pretty much do whatever Oprah tells me to."

Anyways, like most personal finance books, the underlying principles are common sense, and simple (though not necessarily easy). I do like that they talk about money as life energy, and about making decisions based on respecting your life energy. Simple, yes; obvious, yes; but do most people actually act correspondingly? Of course not.

Flannery O'Connor - Wise Blood

If I had to compare this book to anything, I would say it bears some resemblance to There Will Be Blood (the movie; I've never read the Sinclair novel Oil that the movie was based on).

Nothing really fits together, and it doesn't really have a plot (though there are no tricks played with narrative). There is something of a sense of terrible, almost religious, finality. Definitely Oedipus Rex as well.

She only wrote two novels, and a few stories and essays.

Lionel Robbins - A History of Economic Thought

It would be hard for me to praise this book too highly. First, some background. This is a transcription of oral lectures edited by Mr. Robbins' students posthumously. As such, it has a breezy conversational style (though this does not mean popular or superficial, as the intended audience was the undergraduate and graduate student population at The London School of Economics). And some historical context for Robbins himself (page 327):

Keynes and Robbins, the former more radical and the latter more conservative (in the sense of eighteenth- and nineteenth -century liberalism), were for many years more or less rival candidates for the "position" of Great Britain's leading economist public intellectual.

He also has the charming style of inserting notes at any place where he sees his commentary as a value judgment rather than an exposition of some point that is justified by the historical importance of the economic thought (which, it is important to remember, is the point of the lectures: the history of economic thought, not the truth of economics). And that is really what I am interested in anyways; not the truth of ideas, but the development of ideas. So the focus is perfect (for me).

In some ways, one could consider this book to be a bibliography with running commentary. He seems to have been something of a book collector, so he is continuously going into tangents about this or that book being out of print or particularly valuable, and exhorting students not to sell certain books if they come across them. More interestingly from an academic standpoint, this also has the effect of zeroing in on the most valuable secondary literature.

Probably my favorite aspect of content of the work is his restraint regarding the ambitious claims of economics as a profession. For example, while on the topic of Irving Fisher's The Rate of Interest, he says (on page 293):

The great mathematical economists, you know, always use mathematics rather chastely. They don't end up with conclusions which can't be put into economic terms.

I would argue this is generalizable to all fields that are not mathematics as such (take note those of you that use the word "proof" in any but a formal context). And also, in a similar vein regarding general knowledge and learning (I am not sure if this comes from the editors or Robbins himself), on page 337:

The sovereign maxim for success in this branch of studies is to concentrate of the study of original texts. Most short histories of economic thought of the text book variety, with their facile generalizations and slick classifications, are to be avoided. There is a great deal of second-rate work in this field which is of no use to anybody, least of all the beginner. There are, as indicated below, valuable secondary authorities which, at a certain stage, may be consulted with great profit. And the student who knows nothing of the field may well begin with reading Blaug's Economics in Retrospect in itself a work of great intellectual excellence. But no secondary authority is a real substitute for contact with the original texts. Books about books are chiefly useful for those who know the books they are about.

I could not have said it better.

Xinjiang

If you are interested in what is going on in Xinjiang right now, James Fallows has some excellent coverage on his blog over at The Atlantic. If you want to further explore the dynamics of the situation from a more general perspective, you could do worse that to take a look at Turner's classic The Frontier In American History. Also, for a historical treatment in an explicitly Chinese context, see China Marches West, by Peter C. Perdue.

True Blood Opening

This sequence is so good.



And the singer Jace Everett live on The Tonight Show:



I'm going to have that song stuck in my head forever.

The opening borrows some visual style from Trent. Though the NIN version is a bit more desolate. Just a bit.



He was so skinny back then!

Ernest Gellner - Postmodernism, Reason, and Religion

This book is short and tendentious. It categorizes modern thought into three dominant strains, which you can derive from the title. Religion, in his case, mostly means Islam. I write this with regret, because I enjoy many of his other works.

Unfortunately, he chooses to not seriously engage with poststructuralist thought (and barely engages with modern Islam), and instead chooses to write a polemic against postmodernism. He bases his argument mostly on one book edited by Paul Rabinow, which is essentially the proceedings from a conference, I think. Could you think of a more vulnerable straw man? I don't understand how such a normally rigorous thinker (as in his work on nationalism) can make such a basic philosophical error: that is, confusing a "there exists" with "for all". He also makes a number of startling claims, for example that poststructuralist thought ignores economics (patently false). My only explanation is that he is so disconcerted by the style of the more flamboyant pomos that he is incapable of learning from the others.

I will see his positivist method and raise him a myriad of other knowledge classes. To give just one quotidian example, consider the knowledge required to decide whether or not to cross the street. There can obviously be no Popper-style falsification involved. Yet decisions get made systematically nonetheless. And there are plenty of other fields like this: memory, aesthetic judgment, historical analysis; even within science proper there are divisions between probability based analysis, mechanistic analysis, mathematical model theorizing, and many other methodologies.

His sociological ideas about how these three ways of looking at the world function are more interesting to me, but are made less pleasant by their setting.

Glass House

Slate has a photo essay of Johnson's glass house. I still have not visited it in person, though I would badly like to.

I think Philip Johnson will be remembered as far more than merely an influential impresario (though he was that); his formal accomplishments are greater than is usually admitted (probably because his work was uneven, and he was also totally shameless with adopting the styles of others when it suited him).

Anybody who thinks that the Farnsworth house and the Johnson glass house are anything other than superficially similar simply has not looked at them with any degree of seriousness. They are in fact in many ways diametrically opposed.

(Note this is in no way denigrating to Mies.)

Riff on the Clinton Campaign Slogan

It's the debt, stupid