1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare

I like this kind of history. James Shapiro's 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare puts Shakespeare in context, describing the political issues that most concerned the English in 1599, which Shapiro believes to be the most consequential of Shakespeare's writing career.

I like putting things in context. I've never warmed to the school of literary criticism that states that you should focus solely on the text itself, and all else is irrelevant. I like to know why an author wrote something the way he did, particularly if the reason is something he expected his readers to know because it was common knowledge at the time. I love annotated editions of classics, even when they end up diminishing the work somewhat. (I'm thinking of the heavily annotated collection of Sherlock Holmes stories I read, where the annotation dutifully pointed out every instance where an obscure fact at Holmes' disposal turned out to be something Conan Doyle just made up.)

I should point out that I'm not a Shakespearean scholar by any stretch of the imagination. I've read three of his plays in their entirety (A Midsummer Night's Dream, Macbeth, and Othello), in each case because it was assigned for school. As for the rest, I've picked up bits and pieces of cultural knowledge through the years.

So anyway, what sorts of issues were the English talking and fretting about in 1599?

- Queen Elizabeth was getting old and there was no official heir. It was widely expected that when the Queen died, James, King of Scots, would come down and take over in London. This is indeed what eventually happened. But while we, in retrospect, know that the transition of power was accomplished smoothly and without bloodshed, nervous English of the latter part of Elizabeth's reign were not so sure. It didn't help matters much that the Palace and its network of spies were not happy when people openly discussed Elizabeth's anticipated death.

- There was a rebellion in Ireland. Catholic rebels had bested all English attempts to rule Ireland with an iron fist. In the early part of 1599, Robert Devereux, the mighty and powerful Earl of Essex, went to Ireland with a huge army to crush the rebellion once and for all. It was widely expected that he would return to England a conquering hero and reap the benefits of fame and fortune. He would be the greatest man in England, a symbol of English national might. As the Queen was old and there was no official heir to the throne, the implications of this are obvious.

- But what actually happened was that the Earl's forces got bogged down and were unable to secure a decisive victory. Scores of English soliders died on the battlefield and nothing much was gained. The Earl of Essex returned to England, against the Queen's wishes, his reputation in tatters. Two years later, he would attempt a coup d'etat, fail, and become the last man ever beheaded in the Tower of London.

- Meanwhile, all of England braced for a massive Spanish invasion. The best English intelligence said that Philip III had assembled a mighty armada, to try to succeed where his father had failed in 1588. London spent a panicked summer waiting for an invasion fleet that never materialized.

What Shapiro does is examine the four plays he believes Shakespeare wrote in 1599 (Henry V, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, and Hamlet) in light of contemporary events, Elizabethan culture, and Shakespeare's own life and career.

There's a lot of conjecture in Shapiro's book. Exact details on aspects of Shakespeare's life and career are notoriously hard to come by. (If Wikipedia is accurate, there's no good reason to think Shakespeare wrote As You Like It in 1599 -- scholars have been unable to ascertain in what year it was first performed, much less written. But there's no reason he couldn't have written it in 1599.) That's fine. As I made clear in a recent post, I don't want to read a list of proven facts about history. I want to read a narrative.

Henry V has an interesting context. Elizabethans had far different expectations for their historical dramas than we do. They expected Henry V to be full of clowning around and merry-making and romantic comedy with Henry romancing the French queen. They wanted, in other words, a sequel to the two Henry IV plays.

Shakespeare didn't give that to them. He wanted to write something grittier. This may or may not have caused a rift among his theatre company.

As most Shakespeare fans know, Shakespeare wrote most of his famous roles with specific actors in mind. Throughout the 1590s, Shakespeare worked with a famous comedian named Will Kemp. Kemp was probably a far bigger celebrity in his day than Shakespeare was. He specialized in a sort of rustic, bawdy, countryside clowning-about, and if you saw a Shakespeare play in the 1590s it probably would have ended with a Kemp comedy performance which may or may not have been related to the plot of the play.

Shakespeare wrote comic characters such as Dogberry and Bottom and Falstaff specifically for Kemp. Around the beginning of 1599, Kemp and Shakespeare's company had a falling-out and Kemp left to do his own thing. Shakespeare's next play was Henry V, in which Falstaff fails to appear; instead, a character reports that he died off-stage.

It's easy to read a causal connection there, although scholars will probably never determine what occurred first, Kemp's departure or Falstaff's 'death'.

Henry V is the story of an English king making war in France. When it premiered in London, the powerful and kingly Earl of Essex had just departed to make war in Ireland. Contemporary politics and references are easy to find in Henry V. Shakespeare didn't have the liberty of full freedom of speech (his plays would have been vetted by censors), and modern scholars have never been able to determine his own political views, but his plays are certainly better understood in the context of the issues of the day.

Given the political situation of the time, I'm somewhat surprised that Shakespeare dared have his next play be about the assassination of a successful general who (it was feared) wanted to make himself king. Julius Caesar is also analyzed in Shapiro's book terms of the political situation, as well as in light of fascinating aspects of Elizabethan culture.

Shakespeare's next play (if we believe Shapiro's chronology) was, by contrast, remarkably apolitical. As You Like It is a romantic comedy in which nothing much happens, if we go by old-timey traditional standards for what constitutes plot developments, such as murders, kidnappings, betrayals, etc. What action there is, is only there to set up the play's premise. This is pure character-based plotting, and Shapiro represents it as something new in the world of 1599.

Finally, there's Hamlet. What I didn't realize before is that there are two full-length versions of Hamlet out there, both of them far too long to be performed: the version published in 1604, nowadays called Q2 (for 2nd Quarto; Q1 was a far shorter version published in 1603 either as a stage-friendly version or a knockoff assembled from an actor's recollections), and the version in the First Folio of 1623, called F1. Shapiro believes Q2 was Shakespeare's first complete version, and F1 was the result of heavy editing and re-writing in subsequent years. Many latter-day published versions of Hamlet blend the two together, which Shapiro is opposed to; he thinks that muddles the development of Hamlet's motivations. The two plays are fairly different, and opinions vary among Shakespeare scholars which is preferred.

And that's all that I'll say about that, because I'm out of my depth, never having read the original Hamlet in any form. I keep meaning to, and I probably will at some point, but for now I'm just smiling and nodding my head.

Original Zinn by Howard Zinn

Original Zinn is a collection of interviews with Howard Zinn from approximately the years 2002-2005, in which the historian holds forth on his opinions on the United States, the state of the world, and the political Left.

I read it in a couple of hours while in Patara, Turkey. That was about two months ago. I don't think I can remember much that is specific to this book, especially as it's already thoroughly blended together in my mind with other opinion-esque pieces I've read, by Zinn and by other like-minded people.

So, sorry everyone. I'm not going to talk about Howard Zinn in this post.

Instead, I'm going to rant a bit on a related topic. I'm going to create a fictitious commenter, pretend he's left a comment, and then reply to that comment.

Strawman2011 says:

LOL don't you know zinn wasn't a real historian? he was just a hippie lefty activist who twisted history to fit his ideological biases. why don't you read a real historian sometime hahahahaha

Thank you, Strawman2011. In response, let me tell you about an episode of The Daily Show I saw earlier this year.

The guest was Mike Huckabee. My politics differs from Huckabee's quite a bit, but I will admit he was gregarious and charming on Jon Stewart's show.

(This can be attributed to the fact that he was not, at the moment, running for president. A few months ago I watched Tim Pawlenty on The Daily Show. Pawlenty was indeed running for president at the time, and as a result he was stiff and delivered only preprogrammed responses. He was Politico-Bot and at that time I believe he would have failed the Turing Test.)

Stewart brought up the historian David Barton. Barton is a figure whom Huckabee has praised in highly complimentary terms. People who like to think the USA was founded as a Christian nation generally tend to like Barton's work. In contrast, proponents of the separation of church and state have tended to dismiss him as an ideological crank. In all fairness I should mention that I've never read a thing he wrote.

I haven't seen the interview since it first aired -- apologies if I'm about to get some details wrong. Huckabee's defense basically boiled down to, 'Look, Barton's telling the truth -- he's not just making stuff up. Look at the primary sources for yourself if you don't believe me.'

This bothered me, and I was disappointed that Stewart didn't pursue the matter further.

It bothered me because not making stuff up, and convincingly demonstrating that what you claim happened, really happened, is not the mark of a first-class historian.

It's more like the absolute minimum that's expected of you.

The role of the historian is not just to say, 'Here's a bunch of stuff that happened in the past.' True, saying that is indeed part of the job of being a historian. I'm sure there are plenty of incompetent history teachers who do that part, clock out, and go home.

But the truth, as touchy-feely and unscientific as it may sound, is that being a historian is largely about storytelling. It's about constructing a narrative.

When there's a great deal of material, a historian must choose what to focus on. That's especially true when a historian is writing for a popular audience and needs to create a compelling narrative. I read Her Little Majesty, Carolly Erickson's 267-page biography of Queen Victoria, and when I finished I was quite unsure of just how much I had really learned about the old queen. Erickson's a wonderful writer, but in order to fit a readable narrative of a person's life into 267 pages, an author must choose what to emphasize, what to spin into a narrative, and what to leave out. Her Little Majesty is nonfiction, but it could be read as an unusually fact-based novel. I'm not criticizing Erickson -- she couldn't have done any differently, given the format she was working in.

And sometimes there isn't a lot of material. Many prominent people's lives are astonishingly poorly documented. It's amazing how little firsthand information we have on the life of Alexander the Great, for instance; most of our information comes from historians who lived long after his death. Any historian who tackles that period of history is going to have to pull together separate sources and conjecture a lot.

And of course, no historian can truly know what any given person was thinking at any given time. No historian can know what a person's subjective experience was like, no matter how well documented the person was.

That's why I was disappointed with Mike Huckabee's defense of David Barton. It's not enough to say a historian is factually correct. What you really need to defend is his interpretation. The narrative he strings together. His spin, if you will. Huckabee defended Barton by saying he got the basic building blocks right, when he should have defended his interpretation.

Huckabee pretended that the job of a historian is to tell us a bunch of stuff that happened. That's just not true.

Everyone who writes or talks about history creates a narrative. Good historians are honest about it. I'm a big fan of Dan Carlin's history podcast, Hardcore History. In the first installment of his series on the decline and fall of the Roman Republic, he straightforwardly says that this is a period of history that's been written about and analyzed many times before, but now his listeners are going to get the Dan Carlin version of what happened. I respect that.

Let's bring this back around to Howard Zinn. You might respect Zinn's politics and his take on history, or you might not. Fair enough.

But to attack Zinn (or David Barton, for that matter) for delivering his own version of history? Sorry, but that's just what historians do. Unless you want to wait until after the Singularity, when posthuman HistoryBots will presumably create narratives based solely on a probabilistic calculation of how things must have progressed given certain parameters in order to create the world that they exist in.

Granted, there are historians whose biases shape their work to the point that the narrative is more about themselves than objective reality. And that's a problem. But there's a continuum between a historian blinded by his own biases, and HistoryBot 4000. Every person trying to construct honest narratives about the past falls somewhere on that continuum.

If you think your favorite historian tells history 100% objectively, I'd have to say that a) you're not familiar enough with that period of history to know the whole story, b) the historian's personal biases happen to match yours, or most likely c) both.

I'm not offended by historians who wear their politics on their sleeve, as long as they honestly and sincerely try to work within the real world as it is (and was). We should all just remember that the issue isn't whether their interpretations are factually correct, because that's the absolute minimum standard that they should be achieving anyway. The issue is whether their interpretations, their narratives, are actually useful in understanding the past. And the present.

Jan Wong's China

My first book on China by Canadian journalist Jan Wong was her Red China Blues, a look back on the author's complicated relationship with China. As a student during the Cultural Revolution, Wong swallowed the Communist Party line unquestioningly and traveled to Beijing to become one of the few capitalist bloc residents to study there.

Her faith in the Communist Party managed to continue for a couple of years, but it didn't last forever. Wong ended up quite disillusioned with the whole Communist experiment.

Years passed. In the second part of the book, Wong describes her return to China in the 1980s as a journalist, now cynical and no longer willing to accept the Chinese government's viewpoint uncritically. Red China Blues' climax comes when Wong describes the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, which she witnessed, in graphic detail.

Not quite so autobiographical is Wong's later book, Jan Wong's China, a collection of stories of Wong's experiences working as a journalist in China in the 1990s. The book was published at the end of that decade, so the impression I got of China was already a decade out of date. One should hope that impression is somewhat divorced from present-day reality, because the picture Wong paints is a grim one.

My total experience inside China (excluding Hong Kong and Macau) amounts to five days in Beijing in 2003, so I have little personal experience to draw on. My own thoughts on China are somewhat ambivalent; as I wrote earlier this year, China lurks on a great barely-known entity on the edge of my consciousness. (Living in Taiwan, I can hardly help it.)

I read books about China fairly often, and they tend to paint a rather alarming picture in terms of life within China's borders, particularly in the less wealthy areas. Jan Wong's stories of China in the 1990s, which I read two months ago (which is why I'm a bit hazy on details), do a good job humanizing the the individuals who live in China, while not shying away from the grittier details of life there.

After the generally grim view of China presented elsewhere in the book, the chapter on Tibet presented a remarkably - and unexpectedly - balanced picture. The Chinese authorities are not depicted as the benevolent liberators they would like foreigners to think they are. But neither are they depicted as evil overlords determined to stamp out Tibetan culture. I'm no expert on Tibet so I can't judge where the truth lies (it's probably really complicated) but Wong's treatment of Tibet, a land with half-Han, half-Tibetan citizens who voluntarily choose to remain officially Tibetan in the state records because they find it advantageous under Chinese law, hits a plausible note of fairness.

100 Essential Things You Didn't Know You Didn't Know by John D. Barrow

Note to all Monty Hall Problem fanatics who found this page through a search engine: My interpretation of the problem begins several paragraphs down. Please do not get bored and wander elsewhere while I'm going on about virtual monkeys.

John D. Barrow, professor of mathematics at Cambridge, has presented us laypeople with 100 Essential Things You Didn't Know You Didn't Know: Math Explains Your World.

This book is, happily, not dumbed down. He doesn’t presuppose you know calculus, but some of the 100 chapters are heavy with equations. If equations cause your eyes to fog over, you can skip past them; if they really and truly bug you, the chapters are short and you can always move on to the next one, but bear in mind that equations encode objective reality and becoming comfortable with them is one way to show respect to the universe.

I will admit my eyes fog over at the sight of long equations. This may be a factor in the unhappy fact that, despite having something of a natural aptitude for math, I crashed and burned in college calculus. I am not proud of this and I hope to overcome my foggy-mindedness.

Chapter 3 was a particular favorite of mine. We’ve all heard that with a million monkeys typing away at a million typewriters, eventually we’d get the works of Shakespeare. Only with the advent of modern supercomputers and the virtual monkeys contained therein could we actually put this to the test.

The Monkey Shakespeare Simulator Project eventually produced 10^35 pages of random typing. If you don’t have a good sense of how many pages 10^35 is, don’t worry; that only means you’re human. Human brains didn’t evolve to easily conceive of such numbers.

They checked the output against the collected works of Shakespeare, and the most substantive match was a 24-character string from Henry IV, Part 2: “RUMOUR. Open your ears;”

Then it quickly descends back into gibberish.

It’s not something that Babbage’s book deals with, but I couldn’t help but wonder what if they hadn’t limited themselves to Shakespeare (and in a case-sensitive fashion, at that). There must have been longer strings of legible English (or Spanish, French, pinyin Mandarin, etc.) in that 10^35 pages, particularly if you’re willing to overlook the occasional misspelling. What nuggets of wisdom are in there? I know the answer: none, because it’s just random typing. But if you can dredge a sufficiently auspicious longer string from the nonsense, think of the cult you could found around it.

But that's not what I want to write about today. I want to write about the topic of chapter 30, which Barrow titled "I Do Not Believe It!".

The chapter is about one of the most contentious and controversial word problems in mathematics. Although Barrow doesn't use the name, there's a good chance you know it as the "Monty Hall Problem". It's controversial because (apparently) most people find the correct answer to be so counter-intuitive and so obviously wrong that they can not accept it. Some of these people are highly educated in mathematics and consider themselves experts on probability, and they have carried on heated arguments online to argue against what is actually the correct answer.

But not me. Ever since I came across the Monty Hall Problem, I have never understood why the incorrect answer is meant to be the intuitive one. The right answer seems correct to me. It feels correct, all the way down to my bones.

I appear to be in a minority of one. Everybody else, including Barrow, thinks the wrong answer seems more correct.

I see two possibilities here:

a). I am mentally bizarre.

b). Something about the way I was originally introduced to the problem makes the right answer seem intuitive, and I have subconsciously been approaching the problem in that same way ever since.

I choose to believe b). Before I explain why, let me describe the infamous problem for everyone's edification. Since I slapped John D. Barrow's name at the top of this post, this will sound more like his representation of the problem than the most common representation, but it's in my own words.

THE MONTY HALL PROBLEM

A game show host has presented me with three identical closed boxes. There is a prize inside one of the boxes. The game show host knows which box it's in. The other two are empty. I randomly choose one of the boxes. Possibility that I am correct: 1/3.

Now the game show host opens up one of the two boxes I didn't pick. It's empty. Now there are only two boxes. I have a choice: I can stay with my original pick, or I can switch to the other remaining box.

Is it to my advantage to switch boxes?

Plausible Wrong Answer #1: No, it is not to your advantage. The prize could have been in any of the three boxes, so no matter which box you pick the probability is still 1/3.

Plausible Wrong Answer #2: No, it is not to your advantage. There is a 50/50 chance of the prize being in either of the two remaining boxes, so the odds are the same either way.

Plausible Wrong Answer #3: No, it is not to your advantage. Word problems are useless, simplified caricatures of reality and you won't get any benefit from working them out.

Actual Correct Answer: Yes, you should switch to the other unopened box. There is a 2/3 chance that the prize is in there.

At this point the audience explodes in an uproar, and Dr. Theodore Q. Figglebottom, Professor of Mathematics, proceeds to spend the next couple of hours ranting on the Internet about how everybody who thinks I should switch boxes is an uneducated fool who doesn't understand probability.

From my point of view, the Professor Figglebottoms of the world (and there are many of them) are so intent on proving themselves correct that they're missing two very important points:

1. The game show host knows which box has the prize.

2. The game show host was always going to open an empty box.

If the game show host had the same limited knowledge as me, and there was a 1 in 3 chance that he was going to wreck the whole game by opening the prize box himself, then the answer would be much different. Then there would indeed be a 50/50 chance my box had the prize, and a 50/50 chance the other box had the prize.

But he knew.

Had I chosen correctly at the beginning, then I'm just unlucky and making the best choice of action is going to lose me the game. But in the more likely event that I chose wrongly at the beginning, switching boxes now will guarantee my victory.

The game show host consolidated both of my "roads not taken" into one and gave me a guarantee against the bad outcome that would have awaited me at the end of one of those roads. Of course, I'll still lose if I chose right at the beginning, but that's why it's a game show and not a "free money" show.

And that seems intuitively obvious to me. I don't recall exactly under what circumstances I first came across the Monty Hall Problem, but I do know that the above interpretation has always been central to my understanding of it, so it was probably part of how it was originally presented to me. It's not that I'm weird; it's that in this particular problem I was innoculated early on from emphasizing the wrong part.

The Logic of Life by Tim Harford

Tim Harford published The Logic of Life, his defense of human rationality, in 2008. This was after he made his name and his reputation with The Undercover Economist, but before he wrote his brilliant Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure.

I read it after the both of them, so it is perhaps unfair of me to be slightly disappointed that it doesn't show the same freshness of The Undercover Economist or the same unity of purpose as Adapt. If The Logic of Life has a common thread linking its anecdotes and explanations, it is that human beings apply rationality and logic in making decisions, even if they don't generally appear to be doing so.

Whether human beings are truly as rational as economists say has been a topic of debate, and it is a debate that I am not interested in pursuing, because I feel it hinges more on semantics than philosophy and psychology. Take the classic example of a person who buys a pair of brand-name jeans that are three times as expensive as generic jeans of comparable quality, because he feels there's something intangible about the brand-name jeans that makes them better. Is that rational? I don't know, but I bet any discussion will boil down to how, precisely, one defines 'rational', and I don't care enough to suffer through that discussion.

So what we've got is a collection of anecdotes and studies. Make no mistake, it's a well-written and interesting collection of anecdotes and studies. I was midway through when I decided it was the perfect book for the kind of person who likes to bond with you at cocktail parties by spouting fascinatingly unconventional and contrarian points of view that, upon a moment's reflection, make more sense than the conventional wisdom. In fact, reading Tim Harford's prose here is like finding yourself talking to an outgoing example of that sort of person. I wonder what he's like at cocktail parties.

I perked up at the latter chapters as Harford delves into politics, where he explains how it is that in many industrial countries, particularly the U.S. and Western Europe, rural areas are able to essentially siphon money and resources from urban areas using agricultural subsidies.

The basic reason is that because a subsidy benefits a small group of people in a big way, they have no trouble mobilizing their political resources to make sure they get what they think they deserve. And as for the vast majority who derive no benefit from the subsidy (or negative benefit - take sugar subsidies, which Harford feels are harming the overall U.S. economy), the cost is dispersed over too many people for anyone to really get up in arms over it.

The dynamic doesn't necessarily have to be rural vs. urban. It was the exact reverse in some developing countries in the '60s and '70s that had recently achieved independence, where most people lived in rural areas (and tended to be ill-informed) and the national government was a direct successor to the old colonial authorities who had milked the countryside for all they could get.

Anyway, can I recommend The Logic of Life, Harford's awkward middle child of a book? Sure, why not. At the very least, it'll supply you with food for thought, not to mention material for your next cocktail party.

You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto by Jaron Lanier

Jaron Lanier, famed pioneer of virtual reality and virtuoso of exotic musical instruments, has become known in recent years as an skeptic - on deep philosophical grounds - of what many in Silicon Valley say is the future, particularly the open source movement, free culture, and 'Web 2.0'.

In You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, the dreadlocked one lays out his philosophy and the reasons why he takes a dim view of what the Internet is becoming. He calls his book a 'manifesto', although I think you'd have to look at it sideways and squint a little to really see the resemblance. What it is, is a collection of ideas that made me stop and think. Even if you disagree, if you read his book with an open mind, you may stop and think too.

So what is his argument?

Basically, that the prevailing ideology driving much of contemporary online culture devalues human individuality in favor of a vast anonymous collective. Social networks encourage us to present simplified versions of ourselves, the better to fit ourselves to the existing options the sites give us. The free culture movement is devaluing individual creativity; despite the claims of free culture advocates, it is still difficult to find evidence of a diverse and solid middle class of musical artists using online tools to make a living directly from their fans. And although the open-source movement may have done some good, promoting incremental progress across a wide spectrum of disciplines, it has also probably hindered major innovation.

The Internet didn't have to develop this way, Lanier says. It still doesn't have to develop this way. Our future is still open, but because of the phenomenon of 'lock-in', in which design decisions that seem minor and temporary today become more and more difficult to change as technology progresses, the direction we're headed in is getting entrenched. But we can't let contemporary prevailing ideology blind us to the full range of choices that we have.

Specifics? Well, people often cite him as a Wikipedia skeptic. He doesn't hate Wikipedia, but he thinks it's has been given an exalted respect that it does not deserve, and indeed would not deserve even if its myriad trivial imperfections were all addressed and fixed.

The fact that it is such a common go-to for information, and is more often than not the first result a search engine gives you, means it has marginalized other, more idiosyncratic online sources of information -- ones which weren't 'just transferring material that already existed into a more regularized, anonymous form'.

Wikipedia regularizes and anonymizes individual effort on a massive scale and turns it into a product that millions of people find convenient to use. It's a triumph of the open-source movement. Lanier doesn't outright condemn the open-source movement (aside from flashes of rhetoric, he doesn't actually issue many blanket condemnations) but he finds it overrated and thinks its adoption as an ideology is stifling creativity.

The two great triumphs of open-source are Wikipedia and Linux, and neither is an entirely new thing -- he calls Linux a 'superbly polished copy of an antique' (UNIX). The open-source movement has not shown itself to be capable of true innovation.

Lanier is a musician, and he writes unhappily that the past decade has been the least innovative in the history of recorded pop music. Even the biggest music geek, he contends, upon hearing an unfamiliar song, is unable to discern whether it was recorded in 2008 or 1998. He's not denigrating the individual creativity of musical artists working today; they're being failed by their cultural environment.

It's not just music. If you look at artistic expression as posted on big cultural blogs such as BoingBoing, 'it's as if culture froze just before it became digitally open, and all we can do now is mine the past like salvagers picking over a garbage dump'.

I dearly love BoingBoing, and Lanier's criticism deeply hurt. It hurt because I can't deny he has a point. It just so happens, by luck, that the day I read that sentence for the first time, this work of art was at the very top of BoingBoing.

It's a gorgeous picture, as I think even Lanier would have to admit. And I can't think of any bit of modern artistic achievement that would help his argument more. Thank you, Mr. Lanier, for helping ruin BoingBoing for me a bit.

Lanier is not an ideologue. (One theme he keeps returning to is how he hates ideology.) Unfortunately, this isn't always obvious.

I suspect he's done himself a disservice with his propensity for saying things that make him sound like a fuddy-duddy conservative reactionary. Then, in the next few sentences, he either softens his tone considerably, or he explains that despite the way he makes it sound, he actually doesn't mind what these kids today are doing.

This is fine if his reader is receptive to his ideas, but given that there are people reading him looking for things to criticize, he hasn't done himself any favors.

Also, I really wish he hadn't invented the term 'Digital Maoism'. I understand the logic behind it, but I think it's tone-deaf and teases the edges of Godwin's Law. But then, I've got an interest in Chinese history, and the words Maoism and Maoist to me evoke the horrific realities of 20th century Chinese existence more than an abstract ideology being debated in a coffee shop in the West. So my sensibilities are not everybody's.

Lanier knows full well he is inviting criticism. I've already read a couple of commentaries on his opinions, many of them written by people who seemingly intended to cut him to ribbons even before they read a word he wrote. More reasonably, Michael Agger wrote a review for Slate that is not unfair, although he is unconvinced. He writes in the penultimate paragraph:

But his critique is ultimately just a particular brand of snobbery. Lanier is a Romantic snob. He believes in individual genius and creativity, whether it's Steve Jobs driving a company to create the iPhone or a girl in a basement composing a song on an unusual musical instrument.

I know snobbery's supposed to be a bad thing and all, but I honestly can't figure out what's supposed to be so horrible about the attitude Agger's describing as snobbish.

I'm not qualified to comment critically on many aspects of Lanier's argument. Don't ask me what I really think of free culture or the open source movement; I tend to be most persuaded by whoever I read most recently.

So my frustratingly vague verdict is that one may certainly quibble with many of Lanier's statements, but his arguments have value and if we don't hear them from him, we're sure to hear something similar from someone else. Lanier may well be the best possible person to raise these points. He's not dissing Web 2.0 in order to advance some objectionable ideology, and although some of his rhetorical flourishes make it seem otherwise, he doesn't think in intolerant absolutes. He's friends with many of the Silicon Valley thinkers he criticizes.

Kevin Kelly of Wired magazine, who said things Lanier criticized in his book, gets thanked non-ironically in the acknowledgements, which I hope has confused the hell out of many single-minded online commenter types.

You don't have to agree with everything a person says to take their arguments seriously. Lanier is someone who we need to take seriously.

Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure by Tim Harford

I’ve been a Tim Harford fan ever since I read The Undercover Economist several years ago. He’s quite good at that elusive, valuable art:

He has the ability to articulate insights into how the world works that you intuitively recognize as true immediately. You only needed someone to come along and put them into words.

A few weeks ago he did an interview for The Browser in which he recommended five books for people to better understand the practical side of economics. I’ve already pledged to read all five by the end of this year, and the fact that he includes a Cory Doctorow novel and a book written in cartoon format only makes me more confident in his choices.

His book Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure is full of wisdom. Harford explores the lives and careers of several people, but the one figure he keeps coming back to, the chief protagonist of the book if it has one, is Russian economist Peter Palchinsky. Palchinsky was an advisor to many of the gigantic Soviet public works projects in the 1920s. If a project was not going well, or even worse, judged ill-conceived from the beginning and doomed to be an expensive failure, he told his superiors this in no uncertain terms. This turned out to be an unhealthy habit. In 1928, he was taken away by the secret police and executed.

Palchinsky’s three principles, distilled by Harford and referenced repeatedly throughout the book, are as follows: First, seek out new ideas and try new things. Second, when trying something new, do it on a scale where failure is survivable. Third, seek out feedback and learn from your mistakes as you go along.

The Soviet Union’s institutional inability to follow these three principles, Harford argues, was the main reason why it was never able to catch up to the Western economies. Yes, there were other flaws, moral flaws, but it was the country's inability to innovate effectively that led to its economic downfall.

Harford has made articles available for free online that offer a taste of what Adapt is about; book trailers, if you will. Slate offers “The Airplane that Saved the World”, all about the RAF’s Spitfire, an experimental aircraft design that nearly got killed in the early 1930s, long before it went on to help win the Battle of Britain. Moral: We should encourage environments where crazy new ideas are fostered and protected from capricious management.

Also see “Positive Black Swans”, about funding scientific research so as to produce maximum good. Moral: Allocating funding to “safe” lines of research that promise incremental advancement is all well and good and necessary for society. But we’ll be even better off if, in addition to safe, highly promising research, we also encourage and fund what Harford calls “lottery tickets”: far riskier avenues of research that may well lead nowhere, but also hold the promise of revolutionizing their fields if they succeed. Harford argues it’s most effective to fund both types.

Eventually, of course, he comes to the financial crisis.

We shouldn't bail out massive companies that are about to go under. Which is not to say we should heap all our blame on the Bush and Obama administrations for doing so; they felt they had no choice because, to use the infamous quote, they were ‘too big to fail’. Maybe they were, but that itself was the problem. No company should be too big to fail. The whole point of a limited liability corporation is that it can collapse without destroying human lives. Companies aren’t people. If a company is going to fail, let it fail. A single tree shouldn’t be so important that its collapse would bring down half the forest with it. (Note: My words, not Harford's.) Creative destruction is a good thing - high rates of failure can presage economic growth.

The second Palchinsky principle says that failure must be survivable; an organization (or a life?) ought to be structured so that a singe catastrophe can't bring down the entire structure. In 1995, an employee making unsupervised trades at Barings Bank managed to singlehandedly destroy his 300-year-old company. He had made wildly speculative trades with the bank's capital without supervision. He had broken the law (and did a stint in prison as a result), but he hadn't really acted maliciously. The whole time he probably thought, "I know what I'm doing." There will always be reckless people. There will always be setbacks and disasters. They should be anticipated and planned for.

Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded by Simon Winchester

Krakatoa is, of course, a volcano south of Sumatra and west of Java that violently exploded in 1883.

Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded is a book by Simon Winchester which offers us the following parallel stories, which go far beyond the scope of Krakatoa's mere Wikipedia article:

- The establishment and rise of the Dutch empire in Southeast Asia, and a description of the Dutch East Indies capital of Batavia (now Jakarta) in the late nineteenth century, on the eve of the eruption;

- The story of European science concerning the Indonesian archipelago, including a great deal on Alfred Russel Wallace, of Wallace Line fame;

- An overview of the science of plate tectonics as it relates to the eruption;

- A history of the science of plate tectonics, from its beginnings in the 1920s when it was espoused primarily by one tireless scientist (Alfred Lothar Wegener) to the 1960s, when it finally won wide acceptance due to overwhelming evidence;

- A brief run-down of events in the Dutch East Indies after the eruption, which included increasing violent rebellion by locals against Dutch rule, and how they may have been helped along substantially by Krakatoa;

- And a history of global telecommunications, as it developed in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Krakatoa was the first major calamity to be reported worldwide in real time; in addition, the eruption caused disturbances in air pressure that were recorded on scientific instruments throughout the world. This may have contributed to a nascent sense in Westerners' minds that the world was one interconnected village.

This was my fourth Simon Winchester book, and by far the most impressive. Of my previous Winchester books, The Map That Changed the World is an excellent biography and a decent history of 19th-century geology. Korea: A Walk through the Land of Miracles, on the other hand, is almost embarrassingly first-person. The Professor and the Madman is very well-done. It's not a lesser book than Krakatoa; it's only less awesomely ambitious.

Winchester is one of those pop nonfiction writers, like Malcolm Gladwell, who is well-known and idiosyncratic enough to be easily mocked or spoofed. But a few months ago in Slate, Nathan Heller wrote a pretty fair analysis of why Winchester is so popular. He didn't mention Krakatoa, but his thoughts apply to this book as well.

Here's a final thought: as I mentioned, Krakatoa was the first major natural disaster which got reported around the world in real time. There hasn't been a comparable volcanic eruption since 1883, but utterly massive eruptions probably happen more often than we think. There's pretty good circumstantial evidence (which Winchester delves into) that Krakatoa erupted even more violently in 535. More recently, elsewhere in Indonesia, in 1815, Mt. Tambora erupted and dumped so much ash into the atmosphere that crops failed in Europe and North America and people starved. We human beings are terrible at putting things in historical context. If another titanic eruption happens within the next few years, a disaster on the scale of the Boxing Day tsunami or the Tohoku earthquake but with global effects, how is our news media going to flail about trying to explain it? How are politicians going to react? How are we going to react?

A History of Reading by Alberto Manguel

A group of academics in a sixteenth-century Islamic school discuss the laws of optics. Saint Augustine is at his lectern, in a rough eleventh-century drawing. An ancient Greek woman reads her scroll by unrolling with one hand and simultaneously rolling up the other end with the other. A fifteenth-century illustration shows a stern teacher with a briar, ready to discipline the student who is reciting before him. And there is an edition of the complete works of William Shakespeare in CD-ROM form, from the 1990s.

These are all illustrations from just one short section of Alberto Manguel's A History of Reading. These illustrations are not gratuitous. Every one of them is referenced naturally in the text, and is described with Manguel's intelligent and perceptive eye.

Manguel has filled his book with fascinating historical anecdotes and insights. Which is not to say that he has merely slapped together a collection of factoids and tidbits. On the contrary. Manguel, more erudite and better-read than I will ever be, has composed chapters with themes ranging from the evolution of the physical shape of the book, to individuals who have valued books to the extent that they have become compulsive book thieves, to the challenges of translating poetry.

Future generations will be able to precisely date Manguel's book by the references to technology. Mention is made of books being stored on CD-ROM, and there is a short bit on hypertext, but there is no discussion of how the Internet has impacted people's reading habits. One would correctly estimate the year of publication to be around 1996.

One way in which the Internet may have a long-term impact that no one (except perhaps for Marshall McLuhan's ghost) could have predicted in 1996 came to mind when I came across the chapter on reading out loud. Pliny the Younger lived during a time when poets were expected to give readings before flocks of their adoring public; far more people knew these writers' works through having them read to them, in fact, than through reading them on their own. In the nineteenth century, Charles Dickens gave hugely popular performances in which he read from his novels. From our vantage point, we see these performances as publicity stunts meant to promote his main product: the novels themselves, in printed book form. But Dickens was by all accounts a masterful public showman, and it's likely that for many of the attendees, his readings were his main product, and if you could buy printed text versions to take home with you, they were primarily expensive souvenirs.

This form of entertainment has largely died out. I can't think of anything quite similar in today's live performances. And with the advent of television in the latter half of the 20th century, it was widely assumed that texts being read aloud was dead as a form of mass entertainment.

Then, in the fifteen years that have passed since Manguel's book was published, the Internet exploded and things changed. I didn't even know the word "podcast" until 2006, but now we're at the point where no individual human being has the time to keep up with every audio fiction podcast that caters to people with an appetite for SF/fantasy/horror/weird fiction, just to name one of several possible genre examples. These exist because there is a demand for them. This isn't a bubble -- I predict the market will continue to grow.

It seems all it took was the smashing of the barriers of distance and geography, and people's instinctive desire to have stories read to them was re-awakened.

Some other assorted tidbits that stuck in my mind, in no particular order:

- In the fourth century, St. Augustine wrote of watching St. Ambrose read, and thought it quite notable that Ambrose read silently -- his eyes took in the text and he understood every word, but he did not make a sound. Reading out loud was the norm in the West, and would remain so for several centuries more.

- Late medieval schools in Europe were horrors that would make a modern critic of rote learning cry out in despair. Memorization was the order of the day, not learning. And while this might be somewhat justified as it was a society where books were rare and precious and an educated person was expected to have accumulated huge amounts of memorized knowledge, one prominent product of the system, Jakob Wimpfeling, said that his former classmates generally "could neither speak Latin nor compose a letter or a poem, nor even explain one of the prayers used at Mass".

Among the Headhunters of Formosa by Janet B. Montgomery McGovern

From 1916 to 1918, Western anthropologist Janet B. Montgomery McGovern lived in Taihoku, capital of the Japanese colony of Formosa. She offficially worked as an English teacher in the employ of the Japanese government, but she had come because of a strong anthropological interest in the native peoples of the island's interior and east coast: the "headhunters". (She does use the modern term "aborigines" as well, along with the more dated word "savages", and the German "Naturvölker". Needless to say, this book contains plenty of terms which are now very far out of fashion.)

Among the Headhunters of Formosa, published in 1922, is written with an early 20th-century anthropologist's eye, and even apart from the insights into Aboriginal culture it is chock-full of fascinating historical tidbits on Taiwan as it was a century ago. The author discusses the name "Taiwan" for the island, a Chinese word she expects few Western readers will be familiar with.

1. Janet B. Montgomery McGovern in Formosa

Having lived in Taipei, er, Taihoku for the past several years, I just ate up the first couple of chapters, in which the author records some of her initial impressions of Formosa.

She alights at Keelung - a dirty port city, as she describes it - and is taken by the natural beauty of the countryside, dotted with little villages and tall bamboo trees. She witnesses this on her journey by train from Keelung into Taihoku. (Compare her description to the scenery you get on the modern train ride through Badu, Xizhi, etc.)

I was mildly surprised (perhaps I shouldn't have been) by her observation that most of the Chinese-Formosan women that she sees have bound feet. It was a practice that she had assumed was limited to the upper classes in China, but it turned out most Chinese-Formosan women (Hakkas notably excluded) in 1916 Formosa tottered along on little feet, as bizarre as it is to imagine a working-class woman engaging in hard physical labor in such a state.

(If footbinding was still ubiquitous here in 1916, that raises the question of whether there are creaky old women still living in Taiwan with bound feet. I don't believe I've ever seen one, but I've seen plenty of extremely ancient women here walking with apparent unsteadiness, and I'm not sure I'd recognize a bound-foot gait.)

About Japanese rule of Formosa, the author has nothing good to say. Completely apart from their cruel treatment of the aborigines, she finds that the Japanese cruelly exploit the local population as they harvest Formosa's substantial natural treasures:

During my residence in Formosa I personally saw instances of the most hideous cruelty on the part of the Japanese toward the Chinese-Formosans, and of barbaric torture, officially inflicted, as punishment for the most trivial offences (as later -- in the spring of 1919 -- I saw the same thing in the other Japanese colony, Korea, on the part of the Japanese toward the gentle Koreans). But this is an aspect of Japanese colonization with which in the book I shall not deal. (p. 89)

Japanese rule of Formosa is depicted as paranoid. The fact that she brought a "photographic apparatus" to the heavily fortified port of Keelung was recorded by the police, and on one occasion she is harassed by a Japanese policeman in Keelung who is afraid she is up to no good; upon realizing she is harmless, he mollifies her by explaining that she could easily have been a German spy (which she finds ridiculous).

But, of course, Mrs. Montgomery McGovern is not in Formosa to investigate how the Japanese manage this little corner of their empire, so she looks into venturing inland to meet some Aborigines. The Japanese Director of Schools, quite the blustering buffoon, warns her that unspecified people will "talk" if she travels on her own; when he realizes she is not worried about her reputation as a lady, he suggests she take up tennis if she wants exercise so badly.

Fortunately other Japanese officials were more sympathetic. The author extends particular thanks to two uncommonly helpful examples of Japanese officialdom, explaining further in a disconcertingly worded footnote, "It is due to the efforts of Mr. Hosui and Mr. Marui that the skull of a recently decapitated member of the Taiyal tribe has been presented to the Museum of Oxford University". (p. 70)

2. Janet B. Montgomery McGovern among the Head-hunters

First, let's dispose of one piece of antique rumor. The Aborigines may be head-hunters, but they are not cannibals. In his preface, in fact, Professor R. R. Marett tells us that he heard from a Japanese expert that it is the Chinese of Formosa who will occasionally partake of Aboriginal flesh. I personally choose to take this tidbit of information with some extremely large grains of salt.

While there is some information on the cultures of the Ami, the Paiwan, the Yami, and the Bunun people, it is clearly the Taiyal (nowadays spelled Atayal) people that the author became most familiar with, as they get the most detailed descriptions. Most of this takes the form of anthropological descriptions of their culture, including religious beliefs, festivals, tattooing and body modification, and of course headhunting, the better to tweak the middle-class Western sensibilities of the 1920s.

This is a description of a way of life -- of ways of life, since what went for the Atayal would not necessarily have gone for the Paiwan -- that, while they haven't completely vanished, are certainly not what they once were. Obviously I don't have to say that men don't go on headhunting expeditions in modern Taiwan. The Aboriginal villages the author photographed presumably don't exist anymore (although I have heard of isolated Aboriginal settlements, high in the mountains, that do not welcome outsiders).

In my four years in Taiwan, I have been to some of the excellent museums that showcase Aboriginal life and culture, I have eaten in Aboriginal restaurants, and I have seen the occasional Aborigine in the newspaper showing off their facial tattoos (not that I recall seeing many facially-tattooed individuals in person). That has been about the limits of my own experiences. I feel very unqualified to comment on the author's description of Aboriginal culture, which is frustrating, as it, not railing against the Japanese, is the real heart of the book. I'm equally unqualified to comment on her speculation about the ethnic origins of the Aborigines, or about the possible remnants of extinct pygmy tribes.

An exception to my disengagement from Aboriginal culture is the two consecutive Pasta'ais I attended. The Pasta'ai is a festival held every two years by the Saisiyat tribe, in which they dance, drink copiously, and try to placate the spirits of a tribe of short, dark people (pygmies?) they are said to have massacred centuries ago. The Saisiyat tribe (which she spells "Saisett") gets very little mention from Mrs. Montgomery McGovern, except for when she notes that they are very few in number and not likely to exist for much longer.

You see, Janet B. Montgomery McGovern is very pessimistic about the continued existence of the Formosan Head-hunters. They were despised by the Chinese, she writes, and as for the Japanese:

The Japanese, when questioned about the aborigines, were either curiously uncommunicative, or else launched at once into panegyrics concerning the nobility of the Japanese authorities in Formosa in allowing dirty, head-hunting savages to live, especially as some of the dirty head-hunters had dared to rebel against the Japanese Government of the island. (p. 31)

The only colonial power, the author writes, who showed consistent kindness to the Aborigines were the Dutch, who ruled Formosa for several decades in the 17th century. She found that as a result the Dutch were still fondly remembered in tribal oral histories. They had introduced Romanized writing to the tribes they dealt with, although it had fallen into disuse and she was unable to find any examples, tribal records having been confiscated by the Japanese. (See Wikipedia: Sinckan Manuscripts.)

Overall, writing in 1922, the author feels Aboriginal cultures are probably doomed. No native culture, she writes, could survive the steady marginalization and extermination that the Aborigines have suffered at the hands of the Chinese and then the Japanese.

3. Janet B. Montgomery McGovern as a Person

Now, a word on the author. To my great frustration, even intensive Googling failed to turn up much information on the elusive Janet B. Montgomery McGovern. Among the Headhunters of Formosa appears to be the best-known thing she ever wrote.

I did find, tantalizingly, that a Janet B. Montgomery McGovern was the mother of William Montgomery McGovern. Born in 1897, William Montgomery McGovern was an amazing, Indiana Jones-like university professor. He was said to be the first Westerner to visit Lhasa (disguised as a local coolie), among many other distinctions. He's one of the best-known American experts on East Asia from the first half of the 20th Century.

I can find nothing online that states that the Janet B. Montgomery McGovern who wrote Among the Headhunters of Formosa was indeed William's mother. But although she does not make any mention of family in the body of her book, it opens with the following dedication:

TO

W. M. M.

MY SON AND THE COMPANION

OF MY WANDERINGS

That's about all I can dig up on this woman, although if this gravesite is her, she was born in 1874 and died in 1938. Those are plausible enough dates -- if she is that person.

My Stroke of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor

Jill Bolte Taylor was a well-respected neuroanatomist affiliated with the Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center. In 1996, she suffered a severe stroke. The stroke quickly robbed her of her ability to speak, understand much language, move normally, or perform basic tasks.

She made a full recovery, although it took her eight years. She still is a well-respected neuroanatomist, currently at the Indiana University School of Medicine.

Her knowledge and training as a neurologist, not to mention the fact that she remembers every bit of the process, has given her a unique insight. Her book, My Stroke of Insight, is valuable in two ways. First, it contains advice for stroke patients, as well as for caregivers, family, and friends who interact with people who have recently been disabled by strokes.

Second, it contains fascinating insights into how brains tick, and the differences between the left and right hemispheres. Taylor's stroke knocked her left hemisphere largely out of commission. She slowly recovered its functions over the following months and years. So here we have a trained neurologist who can speak articulately about what it feels like to only have the right side of your brain functioning.

Anybody interested in the neurological underpinnings of spirituality will find a lot to think about here. With her left hemisphere out of service, Taylor experienced a feeling of peace, of oneness with all things, of nirvana. Her brain was no longer capable of differentiating between self and not-self. Was this a brain defect? Or was it something we can try to emulate occasionally? Can it be both? Is it possible?

Even before reading Taylor's book, I knew her story from the talk she gave on TED.com in 2008. Here she is, on her stroke:

The Ages of Gaia by James Lovelock

We humans are puny creatures. With our short lifespans we have no innate feel for processes that happen over thousands, tens of thousands, or millions of years.

We think a hundred years is a very long time.

Ha.

James Lovelock's Gaia Hypothesis, the idea that the biosphere is a single, huge, self-regulating organism (remember the phrase "self-regulating" - it's going to be on the test), has been around since the late 1970s. By the time he wrote The Ages of Gaia in the late 1980s, it had been subjected to the first barrage of controversy already, and Lovelock had had several years in which to develop the idea through exchanging ideas with his fellow scientists and thinkers. Global warming was just beginning to intrude upon the global consciousness as a threat. The hole in the ozone layer and regulation of CFCs grabbed the headlines. That's the cultural climate Lovelock was writing in.

I read the book in the year 2011. The climate change debate has grown, developed, moved in a great many directions. The distinguished sixty-nine year old scientist who wrote The Ages of Gaia is now ninety-one years old, as sharp as ever, and has found himself a reputation as a prophet of doom.

The weather forecast for this holiday weekend is wildly unsettled. We had better get used to it.

According to the climate change scientist James Lovelock, this is the beginning of the end of a peaceful phase in evolution.

By 2040, the world population of more than six billion will have been culled by floods, drought and famine.

The people of Southern Europe, as well as South-East Asia, will be fighting their way into countries such as Canada, Australia and Britain.

But all that was in the future when Lovelock was writing The Ages of Gaia. Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister and the Soviet Union still existed. Lovelock's book was full of warnings that the human race ought to respect Mother Nature, but there was little sense that DOOM was just around the corner.

So what was the book about? Well, it included a recap of the Gaia hypothesis, including the Daisyworld thought experiment, that gave me a severe childhood flashback. You see, as a kid I played a Maxis computer game called SimEarth, which included a simulation based on Daisyworld and also taught me the word "albedo". SimEarth lets you take charge of an entire planetary biosphere and lets you play with it. You can rain down meteors or make volcanoes erupt, to see what happens. You can try to nudge your planet's indigenous life forms along towards sentience. (You know mollusks have achieved civilization when you see the little octopus carrying a stick.)

Anyway, Daisyworld is an extremely simplified biosphere where the only life forms are daisies of various colors (no octopi with clubs). Light-colored daisies reflect heat, dark-colored daisies absorb heat, and via computer models you can show how this system regulates itself. No religious dogma required.

Lovelock then takes us through the development of Gaia and the history of our planet, from the Archean Age, to the Proterozoic, to the Phanerozoic (a relatively short Age compared to the other three, but contains the entire history of what we would recognize as animals and plants). I'll admit that I zoned out on occasion, and probably couldn't pass a test on the topic now. The specifics of microorganisms and atmospheric gases did not grab my attention. That said, Lovelock admits that he's filled the middle section of the book mostly with informed speculation, owing to a general lack of hard evidence. But he's not wasting anyone's time: he's showing how Gaia plausibly could have evolved, given what we know of the early history of the Earth.

In the book's final sections, he discusses the possibility of terraforming Mars (essentially starting up a second Gaia), as well as the philosophical and religious implications of Gaia.

So how did Lovelock come to be considered such a doomsayer? Remember that Gaia naturally regulates itself. If we tinker too much with the amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, we run the risk of triggering a reaction that could be very, very bad for us.

I don't think humanity is really going to destroy all life on Earth. I don't doubt we could, if we set our minds to it, but I don't think it's likely. I do think we have the capability to really muck things up for ourselves, though.

Let's say we trigger slight climate shifts, of the sort that a visiting alien scientist ten million years from now would not even notice in the geological record. Let's say we can sail from Canada to Russia over the pole, and sip our pina coladas at Scottish beach resorts. That doesn't sound bad, does it?

Now think of the large percentage of this planet's poor underclass that lives in parts of the world that are extremely vulnerable to shifts in climate that are pretty minor, by geological standards. (Did someone mention Bangladesh?)

Maybe you don't care about poor people that you can't see. Well, okay then; I'm not trying to spread empathy to empathy-poor parts of the populace.

But I've got two words for you: political unrest. If a land becomes too full to hold its teeming millions, those people are going to spill over into lands that may be only marginally better off. You think eastern India, for instance, is going to be able to easily cope if Bangladesh starts overflowing with refugees?

The Middle Ages are over. There is no place on Earth where you can settle and feel disconnected from political instability elsewhere. You're not going to be able to forget the plight of the displaced masses in the tropics as you're relaxing in your new pleasant summer home in Greenland. Global interconnectedness won't let you.

And as sad as it sounds, Gaia really doesn't care about us as individuals.

The Elephant, the Tiger, and the Cell Phone by Shashi Tharoor

Shashi Tharoor's The Elephant, the Tiger, and the Cell Phone is not a coherent single work; it's a collection of short articles and newspaper columns from the last decade (the book was published in 2007). The unifying theme running through the book is the development of India in recent years, as well as the development of the West's perceptions of India.

Tharoor's a writer with a couple of novels under his belt, but I think of him as a politician first and foremost. He retired from a successful career at the U.N. a few years ago, and started a career in Indian politics as an MP. Judging from his Wikipedia bio, he's been enmeshed in a variety of controversies and scandal since. (Probably impossible for a high-profile MP to do otherwise.)

I'd already read his previous nonfiction book, India: From Midnight to the Millennium, which laid out his vision of a liberalized, multicultural, cosmopolitan future India (in which his own Congress Party is the least bad political option). The theme is continued in his more recent book.

A believing Hindu himself, Tharoor strongly rejects the notion that India, 83% Hindu by population, ought to be a "Hindu country" (for pretty much the same reasons why the USA is not and should not be a "Christian country"). He makes his outrage at the fundamentalist Hindus who occupy positions of great influence in Indian society very clear.

For Tharoor, Hinduism is an innately tolerant and pluralistic religion: a religion that has no central dogma and does not claim to be the universe's only route to salvation.

If the future of his country is determined by fundamentalists, who elevate Hinduism above all other religions, Tharoor says, the Indian society that he loves will be in great danger.

Many of the chapters read like they started out as the text of speeches. Tharoor's got a love of the anecdote, the hook, the fascinating statistic. He spoke at TED about India's international influence through soft power, a theme he often touches on in his writing. I'll admit that reading Tharoor's books and articles, he sometimes strikes me as the smiling, liberal, optimistic, pro-globalization, pro-free market, pro-inclusiveness figure that every Western investor wishes to believe is the face of India.

I hope his vision of India percolates throughout his country. What very little I saw during the short time I was in India made me hopeful. While we were in Karnataka, a scandal erupted in the city of Mangalore: a gang of Hindu fundamentalist thugs commandeered a pub one night and roughed up the patrons because they'd heard women were drinking and acting shamelessly inside. Afterwards, outrage erupted on English-language TV and in newspapers that such a thing could happen in urban Karnataka. An English-language TV news station shared messages that locals had texted in with their cell phones, every one expressing shock at the thugs' actions.

I admit it's possible my impression is being skewed by my inability to understand any Indian language apart from English. The English-language media might cater to a more broad-minded segment of the population. But still, I was heartened by what I heard and read.

Scoop-Wallah: Life on a Delhi Daily by Justine Hardy

In which we read English journalist Justine Hardy's account of her time working as a staff reporter for the Indian Express. She mixes the standard foreigner-eye-view of life in a big, dusty Indian city with accounts of editors who want her to do fluffy feature stories rather than the hard news she prefers, and upper-class Indians who wonder why she is even doing a job that they feel an Indian journalist could do just as well.

Overall I enjoyed Scoop-Wallah quite a bit for its descriptions of 1990s-era upper-crust Delhi society, and for the stories of the northern half of India -- the geographical half I have yet to visit. The writing was a bit odd for a memoir. The first section, dealing with her move to Delhi, reads like any other obligatory "Westerner arrives in strange new country of India" chapter. But later in the book it's made clear in asides and background information that she hadn't been a complete India newbie at the time; in fact she'd already had substantial experience in the country. Shouldn't there have been a few sentences inserted in the first chapter to make this clear?

That said, Hardy does a decent job balancing High Society (she likes polo, she's got friends in high places, and the Dalai Lama even makes an appearance) and The Common People (particularly in the chapter dealing with Gautam Vohra and his organic farm project). I'll probably visit Delhi myself one day, and while it'll undoubtedly be a different city from the Delhi of the 1990s that Hardy writes about, there are, as they say, no full stops in India.

Nonfiction 10: In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

Ever since I got Instapaper for my iPod Touch, I've been reading more long-form journalism than ever before. One of the classic genres of feature writing is the crime story. A detailed study of a particularly gruesome or memorable crime makes for absolutely gripping reading. The genre can be trashy and exploitive. It's also insanely compelling. How many TV dramas are basically televised fictional versions of the journalistic crime story?

Truman Capote's In Cold Blood is the ur-example of the genre. In November 1959, a family of four in western Kansas was brutally murdered in their home, and the lack of obvious suspects or an apparent motive perplexed local law enforcement for weeks. The perpetrators were identified and caught the following January. They were convicted after a brief trial, and after a five-year appeals process they were hanged.

Capote didn't invent the genre from nothing, but every piece of true crime feature writing since is descended from his book. Of course, Capote wrote a full-length book, rather than the magazine-length article one senses he would have written today. Would In Cold Blood be better if it were a lot shorter? That depends on what you're hoping to get from it. If you're used to reading modern-day feature-length crime journalism, and you're primarily interested in the details of the crime and the hunt for the killers, you're likely to find In Cold Blood to be padded and slightly tedious.

But Capote was able to write a full book where most writers would have stopped after a couple of thousand words because he delves deep into the psyches of the two perpetrators, Perry Smith and Dick Hickock. Capote got to know them both extremely well through visiting them in prison, and he treats us readers to lengthy descriptions of their formative experiences, personalities, and the psychology of their relationship. They, not the victims or the law enforcement officials, are the real stars of the book.

I've never seen the 1967 movie based on the book, but I have seen the 2005 film Capote, for which Philip Seymour Hoffman won an Oscar. Not quite the biopic it was advertised as, Capote is entirely about Capote's experiences writing In Cold Blood. More sardonic filmmakers would have given the movie Capote the same title as the book it's about -- the movie depicts Capote developing a severely coldblooded streak as he balances the close emotional relationship that's developed between him and Perry Smith, with the fact that he's going to have to see Smith and Hickock hang before he can finish his book. Excellent movie -- devastating portrayal of the man.

Capote keeps himself out of his own book, which never ventures into the first person. But it's quite fun to imagine what the juxtaposition must have looked like: these straight-laced, upright Midwestern farmers in 1959, and this man from the extreme opposite end of the American cultural spectrum who has come from New York to document them for posterity.

Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama

I was tempted to write this post pretending that the author of this book was still a lawyer and relatively small-time politician in Chicago. That would simplify things. I'll try it for a few paragraphs.

After graduating from Harvard Law, young Chicago-based lawyer Barack Obama wrote his memoir Dreams from My Father. The book is divided into three parts. The first third deals with Obama's childhood in Hawaii and Indonesia, including the only time he meets his own father, Barack Obama Sr.

In the second part, Obama lightly touches on his time living in New York City before delving in detail into the beginnings of his political career in 1980s Chicago. Here we have his community organizer days. Relatively small-scale stuff, but it's more than I've ever done.

In the final third, Obama to Kenya for the first time to connect with his (by now late) father's family. It concludes the memoir's themes of family, identity, and race.

Yes, race is an issue. How can it not be one? American society insists on making it an issue. When it comes to race in America, I can only hope not to sound like an idiot. I grew up in one of the whitest states in the country, and went to college in Washington DC, which is very diverse and also very segregated. I interacted with countless black people and actually knew very, very few. How can I be proud of that? In the years I lived in DC, how often did I venture into the most strongly African-American neighborhoods? Never. (I don't mean neighborhoods like U St. or Shaw, which I often visited. I mean Wards 7 and 8, which weren't even on my radar.)

The middle section of Dreams from My Father, about the local politics and problems of the black community in Chicago, really drove home the realities of urban segregation in the United States. Yes, Obama's experiences date from the 1980s. But Chicago is still highly segregated -- the most racially segregated city in the US.

So there's that. Well-written, thought-provoking. But it's hard to grapple with the book the way I would if Barack Obama had remained a lawyer and constitutional law professor, prominent within his own circles but unknown outside of Illinois. At the same time, I would never have encountered the book if Obama hadn't gone on to much bigger things.

There's a disconnect between my impression of the guy who wrote Dreams from My Father and my impression of the current President of the United States. The author of Dreams from My Father comes across as a real person. I have a hard time perceiving the President that way. The idea of becoming a professional politician, running for President, and then being President is so distasteful to me that I have a hard time relating to or trusting people who would voluntarily debase themselves that way. Here we see a problem with modern democracy.

If you want to be President, you have to be okay with the fact that a huge segment of America will really, truly believe that the most mature and intelligent way to show they care about their country is to compare you to Hitler and tell preposterous lies about you. I couldn't make myself okay with that. I don't know how anyone could.

But Dreams from My Father wasn't written by the President of the United States. It was written by a person with political ambition, but if Obama really expected, back in 1994, to become President one day, he was delusional. I think that makes the book valuable; Obama wasn't censoring himself as much as he would if he wrote the same book 15 years later.

I don't have any desire to read Obama's later book, The Audacity of Hope. I don't know what I would get out of a book written by a successful politician seeking to become a more successful politician. But Dreams from My Father is a different sort of animal.

President Obama didn't write Dreams from My Father. Neither did Senator Obama. Barack Obama did. He's a different person now, shifted into a different sort of existence that I can't sympathize with easily.

Dreams from My Father is a valuable account of one man's view of race in the late 2oth century. It's also a valuable look at a man who would go on to be President. I might need to re-read the book in order to properly integrate those two impressions in my mind.