Category: Books

The December Wired had an interesting-looking cover story, and a few article referrals in the queue, so I took it on the plane. Summary: despite some good articles, a reminder of why I don’t read Wired anymore.
Wired had one superb piece by Gary Wolf about an emergency warning system in Portland, Oregon, where 911 alerts are fed back to schools, hospitals, and building managers, and community members can feed back into the system. This is a working model of decentralization and openness, ready to be adopted around the country.
There were a few other good bits sprinkled around the magazine, including a graphical one page summary of government spending to keep data secret.
But the bulk of the magazine was written on autopilot. The cover story about alternatives to oil was euphoric and shallow. The claims of providers, from ethanol to oil shale to hydrogen, were repeated uncritically, summarized in a table showing the plentiful riches that await slightly higher energy prices. No mention of the critique that ethanol requires more energy to produce than it generates, and hydrogen is interesting as an energy storage medium, not a fuel.
The alternative energy story in the Economist (the other bit of airplane reading) was much better in the level of detail and critical thinking. A regular diet of blogs like The Oil Drum and the Ergosphere provide an infinitely richer picture about the opportunities and risks of post-oil energy technologies.
One effusive story about homeland security vendors was downright creepy. An ex-athlete with government connections raises venture financing with the purpose of buying out a homeland security vendor — any vendor – and selling the product to the government. Reminds me a bit about this story that broke last week in the Washington Post. It would be a fine idea to take down the names in the article and watch to see if any of the players are bankrupt or indicted in the next few years.
And the articles about media — movies, games, video, music read like product placement. It’s Entertainment Tonight with a focus on special effects. The esthetic is anti-O’Reillly — the audience is a consumer not a producer. The section on personal DVR knocks Linux versions as being “too hard” — true, linux dvrs aren’t consumer products yet, but the Wired editors are making that decision for the readers, assuming assuming their readers don’t include hackers anymore. There’s not so much critical thinking about the role of broadband and copyright policy on creative innovation, except for Xeni Jardin’s interview of Steven Soderberg, where the movie director fantasizes about mashups he can’t legally make.
I can’t remember when I stopped reading Wired Magazine. At its best, it was a heady brew of technoeuphoria, exploration of new ideas sparked by new technology, tasty tech and media tips, and gizmo ad porn.
Wired does publish some excellent work. These days, the good articles already make their way to the link inbox via blogging. External links are a better way to find those good articles than separating the glossy ad pages. The tips about gadgets and games and tech stuff can all be found sooner by blog.
This isn’t about the net killing magazines. It’s about the need to have a better product. If the issue had five or ten strong articles instead of two or three, Wired would have a regular reader.

I just read Two Lives, Vikram Seth’s holocaust memoir of the life of his great-aunt Henny and great-uncle Shanti. My favorite parts of the book are the stories set in pre-war Germany — Shanti’s early struggles as an immigrant dental student, his incorporation into the lively social circle of his landlady and her daughters, with picnics, alpine vacations, and Christmas dinners; with tension provided by the unstated romantic polygon among Lola, Henny, Henny’s presumed fiance Hans, and Shanti. From a stash of letters discovered in an attic, Seth pieces together a post-war epistolary detective story of loyalty and betrayal when Henny reconnects with old friends and finds out how they treated her mother and sister during the war. I also enjoyed the bits of first-person narrative that show Seth’s relationship to his aunt and uncle when he stayed with them as university student (the auto-biographical bits also seemed like they were excepts of an unwritten memoir).
Is there any difference between a holocaust memoir written by an Indian great-nephew rather than a Jewish one? After learning about the fate of his great-aunt’s family, Seth makes a pilgrimage to Yad Vashem, finds their names on a transport list, and is overwhelmed; after reading the inventory forms recording the confiscation of household radios and silverware; and the inventory logistics of the trains to Auschwitz, he becomes viscerally repelled by the German language. So far, his emotional reactions are those of a late but true entrant to this strange extended family.
Seth isn’t infected by the “never forget” anxiety to document the story before the protagonists all die; Seth’s research is his the usual obsessive investigation into the background of his stories rather than the ideological fetishism of the memory project. The story of Seth’s trip to Israel also includes a cameo Friday night dinner with a Jewish family, in which he brings a beautiful Indian-Muslim architect friend; on the way back they get briefly lost in east Jerusalem; the cameo creates an opportunity for a little lecture that is one part “can’t-we-get-along” humanism and one-part post-colonial propaganda.
The story, as a whole, illustrates Seth’s love for his relatives whose quiet virtues are kindness, determination and stoicism. Since Seth is great-nephew, he is not sucked into the emotional void, poisoned bickering, and persistent background fear that might come with closer relation. The displaced lives of Shanti and Henny read against the themes of exile and cosmopolitanism that animated Seth’s much earlier Golden Gate, where the vectors of displacement include homosexuality, breakup, and the transient culture of San Francisco’s adoptive families. The theme of a multi-ethnic assimilated culture split by violence is kin to the hindu/muslim theme in suitable boy and Indian history.
The bit that I liked least was the ending, where Uncle Shanti, in failing physical and mental health, starts treating his family badly. It is true that living through the daily physical and emotional pain of an isolated, sick elderly man is agonizing and tedius; Seth forces the reader to live through too much of it. What’s worse, this section still reads as personal, and not yet resolved. Seth is still mad at his uncle for turning mean at the very end of his life; Seth’s anger belongs in journals and family conversation, not for a public audience.
In the book, Seth agonizes out loud about whether it is to publish his aunt’s private letters, and decides that it was the right thing to do; this decision is right, at least literarily. But his decision to air his anger at the irrational actions of his uncle seems literarily as well as ethically askew.
Other bits which could have been cut from the book include a rambling political essay and some family stories set in India before Shanti leaves for Europe. The mostly-interpolated stories of Lola and Elly’s last months were written for Seth’s readers who have not read N holocaust memoirs, history books, and films. The stories worth reading showed distinctive lives, not dehumanized deaths. DVDs these days have “outtake” sections — it would be interesting to publish novels using that convention, putting the outtakes on the web, and only include the core story on paper.

After reading John Barry’s nonfiction epic about the great Mississippi flood of 1927, I picked up his other grand, retrospectively timely history of the 1918 influenza epidemic.
With the threat of bird flu raising the spectre of a repeat of 1918, The Great Influenza has lessons for today.

• leadership makes a difference. During the plague, communication, supplies, and basic nursing services made a big difference in the number of survivors.
• corruption kills. In Philadelphia and New York, the Tammany controlled political machines replaced competent public health administrators with unqualified cronies. When the epidemic hits, no amount of preparation will keep resources from being overwhelmed, but incompetence makes a bad situation worse.
• quarantine helps. While nothing could stop the infection, slowing the spread of infection through quarantine helped. In Wilson’s America, where military readiness counted for everything, troop transport took precedence over quarantine. At the same time, there is no evidence supporting the Bush adminstration’s proposal to use troops to enforce quarantine. The problem wasn’t the lack of ability to enforce quarantine, it was the lack of will to declare quarantine.
• communication is key. The World War 1 practices of propaganda and censorship created pseudo-news to “boost morale”. The propaganda hampered useful communication and encouraged an atmosphere of terror.

Like Rising Tide, The Great Influenza interweaves the story of the response to a great disaster with the rise of emerging science and technology of disaster prevention and response. In Rising Tide the threads came together with tragic irony — the great engineering works to control the Mississippi ended up making the disaster more severe. In the Great Influenza, the race for a cure failed. While the epidemic was raging, scientists did not find the real cause or the cure for the flu. Scientists did find the cause of the secondary bacterial infection that killed many victims, but did not isolate the virus until years after the plague. Instead, the epidemic flamed out. In the places hit by the flu, the virus flared for 4-6 weeks, and quickly exhausted the fuel of non-immune humans.
Also, it wasn’t until later that scientists discovered the reason that the 1918 epidemic was so deadly to young, healthy people. The 1918 virus triggered an extreme immune response that was more severe in the young and healthy than the old and week.
Part of the drama of Rising Tide was the conflict between the 19th century heroic engineers. The Great Influenza focuses even more strongly on the personalities of the pioneering scientists, at the expense of strong exposition of the science itself.
Also, the Great Influenza is marred by overwriting and lack of editing. Barry repeats “it was only influenza” to dramatizes the way the destructiveness of the familiar sickness was at first underestimated. The phrase is repeated over and over again across chapters, becoming overwrought and grating. One anecdote about striking miners forced into boxcars in the Arizona desert is told three different times.
As a result of these weaknesses, the book is short of brilliant, but it is well worth reading for the history and potential relevance to today’s risks.

Tim Bray writes “Seth is one of only two or three authors whose new works I buy on sight, without waiting to read reviews.”
ok, I was coveting this in a bookstore digression last weekend. Time to buy (or take out from the library).
“Vikram Seth

Rising Tide talks about the consequences of a disastrous engineering decision to control the Mississippi by means of levees alone, ignoring spillways and reservoirs to take overflow. The flood control contributed to the severity of the 1927 Great Flood. But John Barry’s book doesn’t cover the broader consequences of Mississippi flood control.
The Control of Nature, a 1990 book by by John McPhee, tells part of that story. McPhee writes about the massive project to prevent the Mississippi from jumping over to the Atchafalaya River, which has a steeper and shorter path to the sea. In the process, he describes how flood control prevents the replenishment of soil. Without the floods, the land sinks, and coastal wetlands are lost to the sea.
The Atchafalaya story is one of three stories in McPhee’s book about efforts to control nature. In Hiemaey, Iceland, residents pumped cold seawater on a volcanic lava flow, and diverted enough of the flow to save their town.
In the third story, McPhee writes about the efforts Los Angeles County to prevent the San Gabriel mountains from sliding into the valley. The County builds debris dams to catch the overflow, and carts it away. Some of the debris is ground and taken to the beaches, since the interruption of the mountain’s erosion prevents the natural replenishment of beach sand.
There is a recurring cycle of fire on the dry, steep, rocky mountainsides, followed by debris slides. The current fires in the San Gabriel foothills will likely be followed by debris slides that destroy houses in the foothills.
Many residents are newcomers who don’t remember the debris slide five or ten years ago, and don’t know about the risk. But even geologists at California State Politechnic University and county workers who clean up after debris slides live in the foothills. The risk of a catastrophe in two or five or ten years is not enough to scare them away from the clean air and quiet of the mountainside canyons.
McPhee’s zoom-out geologic time perspective lends a philosophical air to these stories, although he does not turn explicitly to philosophy, psychology, or politics. In all of these cases, nature is going to win out in geologic time. The Mississippi River is going to keep jumping beds, as it has every few thousand years. The volcanos are going to keep erupting and building mountains. And the San Gabriel Mountains are going to keep on rising, and keep on eroding into fans in the valley.
Through some combination of intelligence, persistence, hubris, and psychological blindness to risks, humans keep building defenses, and rebuilding.

I found this superb work of history from the song. Aaron Neville’s lament about the 1927 flood became a radio refrain following the New Orleans flood (and led to more diverse New Orleans music over at WWOZ). The song was written by Randy Newman, and the lyrics allude to the history that John Barry tells about human causes and social consequences of natural disaster.
“The river has busted through clear down to Plaquemines”
The Plaquemines Parish flooding in 1927 was manmade. A clique of bankers decided to protect New Orleans from flooding by breaking the levee south of New Orleans and inundate St. Bernard and Plaquemines parish, home to muskrat trappers and bootleggers. The city leaders promised to reimburse the people they flooded out, but they didn’t. They manipulated the laws and courts so people reporting damages had no recourse. In the aftermath, disgust with Louisiana’s traditional elite helped bring Huey Long to power.
President Coolidge came down in a railroad train
With a little fat man with a note-pad in his hand
The president say, ”Little fat man isn’t it a shame
What the river has done to this poor farmer’s land.”
The “little fat man” is Herbert Hoover, an engineer-turned-politico whose leadership of flood relief logistics helped win Hoover the presidency. Coolidge never did tour the flooded region, but the condescension toward the poorest flood victims was historically accurate.
In Mississippi, local aristocrats refused to allow black people to be evacuated since they feared that their source of labor would never return. Instead, the black residents lived for months on top of the 8-foot-wide levee, trapped between the river and the flood. Men were forced to work without pay on levy repair and cleanup. After the floodwaters drained, many black people did leave for Chicago and other northern towns; the flood was one of the causes of the great African-American migration.
Hoover promised black leaders that he’d redistribute land to poor sharecroppers if elected, but he lied. Barry presents the evidence and the timeline of the betrayal, and argues that disillusion with these broken promises helped shift black voters from the Republican to the Democratic party.
The flood itself was made more severe by the flood control system, which used levees to contain the river, but left out spillways and reservoirs to divert floodwaters. Barry tells the story of the hubristic 19th century engineers who designed the system, and the bureaucratic incompetence and infighting that led to the system’s poor design. However, Barry doesn’t go as far as The Control of Nature, by John McPhee, and other books about the unintended consequences of the Mississippi levees.
Rising Tide is a masterful work of history that combines dramatic stories of heroism, villainy, conflict and suspense with social, political, and economic context. The book’s stories portray how the historical characters are shaped by their circumstances, and how their choices affect the course of history.
One imperfection is the author’s attraction to the heroic myths of 19th century self-made men and deep south aristocrats. Barry is a former football coach, and admires competitive, commanding masculine power. He typically admires his heroes’ height and physical strength, and is suprised when a character is short or not physically fit. Barry does not worship power uncritically. He holds his “great men” to an ethical standard; he honors LeRoy Percy’s opposition to the Klan, and criticizes LeRoy and his son Will for putting greed ahead of humanitarian rescue. In his admiration of machismo, Barry misses some of the ways that Southern aristocracy and engineering hubris contributed to their own failures.

How and why is the US patent system so broken? News stories about dubious patents generate grumbling, annoyance, frustration, and perplexity.
An exceptionally good book, Innovation and Its Discontents explains what’s wrong with the patent system and how to fix it. Written by two economics professors at Harvard, Adam Jaffe and Josh Lerner, the book is short, clear, well-argued, and wears its erudition lightly.
Things haven’t always been this bad. But in the 1980s and 1990s, two separate reforms — of the patent courts and the patent office — combined for a pernicious result. Bad patents became much easier to get, and harder to overturn.
In 1982, the patent appeals court system was consolidated from 12 regional courts, which had vastly uneven standards, to one centralized court. The reform halted the practice of “forum-shopping”, whereby patent-owners rushed to accuse infringers in patent-friendly courts, while challengers rushed to seek hearing in patent-friendly courts.
The practices of this centralized court made it much easier to sue for patent infringement and win. The percentage of patents upheld increased from 62% to 90% in the few years after the central court started.
A few years later, in the mid-90s, the Patent Office changed from a tax-supported agency, whose mission was to ensure that patents are valid, to a fee-for-service agency, whose mission was to quickly issue patents to those who apply. The fees from the Patent office are siphoned into the general federal budget, while the office can’t keep qualified staff. 55% of patent examiners have less than two years of experience.
The result is that bad patents sneak through without good scrutiny. The average patent claim is reviewed for only 16-20 hours, which is half the time spent in the European Union. In the time available, patent examiners look for information that is easiest for them to find — other patents in patent databases. They don’t have the time or experience to look for other sources — like existing software and academic research — that prove that the “invention” is obvious, or not new.
Meanwhile, the patent review process is mostly closed — there isn’t a good way for third parties to share relevant information about prior art until after the patent is granted. Once the patent is granted, the legal system presumes that a patent is valid, and stacks the deck against attempts to overturn a patent.
A reform in 1999 was intended to create a “reexamination process”, but the process was watered down so badly that it is almost never used. The only kind of evidence that a challenger can present is other patents (not pre-existing software, evidence of historical business practices, or academic papers). The challenger doesn’t have the opportunity to explain the evidence. If a challenger applies for a patent re-examination and loses, they lose the right to sue later.
As a result, a lot of bad patents get issued, and they are very hard to protest or overturn. Technology companies use patents to gain license fees from competitors, who will settle rather than go to court, even if the patent is bad, because an infringement allegation is too costly and risky to defend. Large competitors create cross-license patent libraries that maintain the advantage of the leaders, and freeze out smaller players.
So how can the system be improved? Jaffe and Lerner recommend a tiered approval and review process, where patents can be issued quickly, but there are several stages where challengers and third parties can submit prior art and try to prove that the patent is obvious or not new. They also recommend reduced use of juries, who lack expertise to evaluate the information.
The book has interesting observations about the failure of patent reform efforts in the 90s. Talk show celebrities including Oliver North and G. Gordon Liddy used the issue to grandstand against Japan, who were competing against US manufacturers. Patent lawyers, who gain from the current system, were well-organized. At the time, the technology industry was not well-organized, and there was little public interest in patent reform.
Thanks to Doug Barnes for recommending the book, which joins my short list of favorite non-fiction. It takes a puzzling and potentially abstruse subject, and explains it clearly. It uses stories and well-chosen research data to make its points. And it shows a potential exit for the tangled mess of the US patent system.
Patent reform is in the works again in Congress. The book is very helpful context for the debate.

For a book club this weekend, I read The Plot Against America by Philip Roth. The book is set in an alternate version of 1940s America, where Charles Lindbergh defeats Roosevelt for the presidency on the platform of keeping the US out of WWII. The Lindbergh presidency sympathizes with Germany and Japan, and takes the US down a suspicious path of isolating Jews.
The book combines effective, memoir-style fiction about the role of fear in growing up, with a rather clunky and self-indulgent political thriller. The effective parts of the book to me were the anecdotes of about scary experiences made more terrifying by imagination. A kid is trapped by a stuck bathroom door; the basement haunted by feral cats and ghosts; a neighbor’s father is found dead from cancer or suicide.
The political plot takes instances of discrimination that really happened to other groups — being kept out of hotels (African-Americans); kids being taken far away for education and assimilation (Native Americans); families being relocated (Japanese) — and applies them to Jews. The plot plays effectively on the Jewish fear of persecution. It works — it’s scary. But it also feels manipulative, like a Holocaust theme park ride.
There was one aspect of the political plot that was thought-provoking and effective. In the novel, the programs taking urban Jewish kids to summer camps on farms and moving urban families out to rural communities are presented as sunny and patriotic. It’s hard to tell if the anti-semitic rhetoric, Nazi alliances, and building of a capo-style structure of Jewish adminstration of the transfer programs is truly as creepy as it looks, or whether Jews worried about the trends are having paranoid fantasies fueled by their ghetto life, as the adminstration insists.
In contemporary politics, one of the tough questions is figuring out when and how much to worry. The religious right’s rhetoric damning Democrats as being “against people of faith” is worrisome. The support for this message by the Republican leadership is more worrisome.

As the Senate heads toward a showdown over the rules governing judicial confirmations, Senator Bill Frist, the majority leader, has agreed to join a handful of prominent Christian conservatives in a telecast portraying Democrats as “against people of faith” for blocking President Bush’s nominees. Fliers for the telecast, organized by the Family Research Council and scheduled to originate at a Kentucky megachurch the evening of April 24, call the day “Justice Sunday” and depict a young man holding a Bible in one hand and a gavel in the other. The flier does not name participants, but under the heading “the filibuster against people of faith,” it reads: “The filibuster was once abused to protect racial bias, and it is now being used against people of faith.”

The issue itself — changing the Senate’s rules for confirming judges — is basic procedural politics. The political slant — casting one party for God, and one party against God — is really disturbing. It’s reassuring to watch conservatives who aren’t buying it

The US is a nation of immigrants and migrants who re-invent themselves in their adopted home; and the children of immigrants who seek authenticity in forgotten ethnic traditions. Dreams from My Father, Barack Obama’s autobiography written after graduation from Havard Law School, is part of a genre of American writing in search of roots. In Dreams from my Father, Obama goes searching for community and family, finds both, and find them to be different than he expected.

Continue reading “Barack Obama: Dreams from my Father”

Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink contains fascinating insights into the relationship between experience and intuition.
The book is about the power and limits of snap judgements. In the first chapter, a set of experts feel instantly repelled by a showy new Getty museum acquisition which turns out to be a fake. Their snap judgements trumped months of expensive studies from the Getty. The “snap judgements” of the aniquarians, though, had been honed in decades of experience with antiques.
Psychologist John Gottman is able to instantly detect the likely success of a marriage, and Paul Ekman is able to instantly read faces. The snap judgement skills of both of these psychologists has been honed by the results of years of study that taught them what signs to focus on.
In Blink, two factors play into overcoming the weaknesses of snap judgement.
Education is the first. John Gottman’s method, developed through years of study, can be taught to novices. The lethal snap judgements that led cops to kill an innocent, frightened Amadou Diallou in New York and use excessive force after car chases can be improved by police procedures that give cops extra seconds to respond to problems.
Resistance to stereotypes is the second. Classical orchestras started hiring many more women as soon as they started holding blind auditions. A superior car salesman resists pre-judging his customers based on appearance — a grimy farmer is a millionaire, and a ratty-looking teenager has wealthy parents.
This book complements (and cites) one of my favorite books, Gary Klein’s Sources of Power, which tells stories about how experts really make decisions — not with analytical process, but with educated intuition.
Gladwell’s book fills in what Klein’s book was missing — a picture of how the process of training helps to hone the intuitive process, by generating a large mental database of relevant expertise, plus a rapid feel for the salient points that jump out from a pattern.
Gladwell’s book is less explicit about the thesis than this review. Literary training and perhaps New Yorker style leads Gladwell to a lively, story-based approach. Which is a bit too bad, because it might lead some people to miss the key insight about the relationships between intuition and experience.
(Ross, this was my airplane reading from Seattle).