After Saving The City, I thought it would be interesting to read about the collapse of 2008 and the failure of Shearson. Instead, I accidentally grabbed this well-written book about the Lehman Brothers’s decision to sell itself to American Express in 1983. This is a nicely-written take of feudal revolt in a staid Wall Street institution, with lots of infighting between bankers and traders. A good read, but irrelevant to the questions I wanted to pursue.

April 22, 2025 (permalink)

Revisited this fine book on a day when, once again, the world’s financial machinery appeared to be breaking down. A significant difference now is that the people in charge are fools and poltroons, some of them actively seeking to end civilization.

Here’s what I wrote before:

A fascinating and detailed study of the financial crisis that struck London in 1914 and engulfed the world. World Trade in 1914 was highly globalized – far more so than at any time before, and world trade only surpassed this mark recently. Back then, the Pound Sterling was the international reference currency, all major currencies were pegged explicitly to gold and implicitly to sterling, and trade was based on bills that could be settled for sterling in London and subsequently converted at the Bank of England to gold. (In practice, settled bills went into accounts and gold was only shipped for arbitrage.)

The problem was that, as war approached, everyone wanted safety, and so everyone bought up London bills. There were soon no bills available, and that meant if you wanted to make a routine transaction, like paying for a shipload of shirts you’d ordered, you couldn’t: you could have plenty of money but you couldn’t get any of the de facto international currency because there wasn’t any to get.

It’s a complex and technical story with some interesting characters, and Roberts tells it skillfully.

April 22, 2025 (permalink)

This memoir by David Chang. the chef behind Momofuku, is dominated by Chang’s chronic and nearly unmanageable depression. A problem is that Chang is a very thoughtful fellow with some very intriguing ideas about food, and these keep being pushed to the side as he writes about the experience of being depressed. It’s hard to find a narrative shape to depression, and Chang’s insights on the topic are limited.

April 18, 2025 (permalink)

A portrait of U.S. Figure Skating at the end of the 20th century, the years after Harding/Kerrigan and just before the Salt Lake City Olympics made the old, corrupt 6-point scoring system insupportable. The early chapters have a certain air of John McPhee with quick cuts and interesting pacing. Later, as the World Championships approach, the book veers more closely to a sports exposé, and ultimately the author herself is declared persona non grata by the figure skating officials. Her employer, The Washington Post, fought hard for her, and her numerous colleagues rallied behind her; the past is a foreign country.

April 5, 2025 (permalink)

We know that some things are connected. For example, Mark Bernstein is the author of the weblog that you are reading. (And that sentence connects in a different way to the opening of Italo Calvino’s if on a winter night a traveller.) That some things are connected to other things cannot be denied, but are these connections exceptional and instrumental, or are they ubiquitous? As a rule, I find that people who believe in ubiquitous connection embrace tools like Tinderbox, while those who disagree do not.

Leibniz (1646-1716) remains a central figure in the philosophical question of connectionism. Postulating that God is perfect and perfectly kind, Leibniz tried to deduce the natural laws that would follow. Famously, he reasoned that a perfect God would not create an inferior universe, nor one that inflicted unnecessary suffering on its inhabitants: ours must be the best of all possible worlds. Because stupidity and suffering are not hard to find, Leibniz concludes that they must be necessary, and intuits that they are necessary because paradise would not be paradise unless it were achieved by universal effort. So, for Leibniz, everything must be connected because it is God’s plan not to build a garden for his creation, but to allow his creation to build a better one.

In his work on automatic calculators and on languages, Leibniz discovered the trick of representing any text as a very large number. This is one of the crucial connections that Gödel and then Turing made in demonstrating the incompleteness of formal systems. Leibniz didn’t quite get there — he did not quite figure out that there is more than one infinity, and that focus on the one perfect God was a distratction. Still, Leibniz did understand that, if the events in life could be represented as texts (like the Sybil’s book), then eventually everything (and everyone) happening right now would happen again. (Leibniz eventually embraced the alternative view that events must be continuous in the way time seems to be, more like the Fate’s weaving than the Sybil’s writing.)

March 20, 2025 (permalink)

I’ve been reading and watching a lot of material on figure skating to prepare for seeing the Worlds next week, and this was a pleasant part of that immersion. Alina Adams, a sports television researcher, was approached to do a mystery about the figure skating world. Naturally, the investigator in this PI procedural is Rebecca “Bex” Levy, a TV researcher covering the Nationals. After a controversial ruling, an Italian judge is found dead under suspicious circumstances, and Bex’s loathsome producer is eager to have her deliver the answer in time for the closing gala.

One oddity here is that Murder On Ice doesn’t quite meet the technical requirements of the genre: there is no second body. Nor is it a thriller, because Bex never really leaves her element; she’s an intelligent and (mildly) analytical observer of a sport and a medium for which she feels little affinity, and even when she’s most worried, her concerns are chiefly about losing a job that she doesn’t much like. We have good — even great — books that flutz the formal requirements of the mystery, but I found it odd here because figure skating is so concerned with formal requirements.

March 17, 2025 (permalink)

A beautifully-produced and evocative book by an Alsatian farm boy who became a famous New York fine dining chef. The book combines two separate books. The first is a nice cookbook about traditional foods in Alsace with an emphasis on home cooking. The second is an ambitious cookbook that takes ideas from traditional dishes and adds elegant ingredients and modernist technique. It makes for good reading.

March 8, 2025 (permalink)

An engaging, informal treatment of the natural history of the owl. People like owls, because owls look like people. (In some places, people mistrust owls for the same reason, thinking that they prophecy death and disaster.) They’re fascinating creatures with some curious habits; Burrowing Owls, for example, like to decorate their burrows with pretty little things. Some owls keep blind snakes as pets in order to help clean their nest. Some male Snowy Owls summer in the arctic and then, when the cold really sets in, fly even further North to hunt ducks and geese.

We’re learning a lot from some ingenious equipment — remote cameras, tiny little owl-sized backpacks, in-flight brain scans. I’d hoped to learn more about what owls know, because a lot of progress is being made right now in animal cognition. We just don’t know very much, alas, not yet.

March 7, 2025 (permalink)

This fascinating (and gorgeous) book examines Adler & Sullivan’s lost masterpiece. Built in 1891, this was briefly the world’s tallest building. Demolished in 1961, it had become an unwanted derelict, soon to be replaced by a grimy parking garage.

John Vinci, the editor, had recently finished college when he got a temporary job with photographer Richard Nickel, to work on salvaging some of the building’s amazing terra-cotta and plaster ornamentation. This three-man crew worked just steps ahead of the wreckers, but their notes offer fascinating insights into how the building worked, how it was built, and how its design was compromised by neglect and bad taste. Chris Ware, the comic book artist, designed the book, and it’s simply amazing.

March 5, 2025 (permalink)

A terrific book, through which I am cooking. I’m not religious about this, and I’m not planning a Julia, but this is a fun book, and since it seems I can withstand pie crusts as well as plain bread, pies are more fun.

So far I’ve tried short rib pie, chicken pot pie (biscuits), chorizo and goat cheese pie (twice), and smoked turkey pot pie (with extra leeks and no celery — oops). Really good.

February 23, 2025 (permalink)

A fascinating discussion of features that make Tokyo a unique and livable city. The discussion of yokochō alleyways is particularly interesting. These narrow streets of tiny two-story bars and restaurants grew from a postwar effort to shut down the black market traffic that centered on Tokyo rail stations. Black-market vendors were removed from their haunts and sent off to new-built market stalls, and these grew into entertainment districts that people like and that show up all the time in movies. This is very on-trend: there’s maybe space for five customers at a time, but rents are low and you can cater to very specialized interests. If you squint, you can see the germ of Robuchon’s atelier and David Chang’s noodle bar.

I’m interested because a small group of us are reviving an old idea of the imaginary city as a view of a hypertext.

Photo: Lan Pham

January 10, 2025 (permalink)

An interesting examination of the libretto of Messiah and how it relates to Georgian England, with an emphasis on slavery. Messiah started as Charles Jennens’s commonplace book, with headings on hope, suffering, and redemption. Jennens was a Handel superfan and had money, and he worked out a deal with his favorite composer, whom he call “The Prodigious”. I wish the book said more about the music, but you can’t have everything.

Question: King makes a point that the first contralto aria in the Dublin premiere was “He Was Despised”, and that Mrs. Cibber’s exquisite acting (and, I presume, phrasing) more the compensated for the shortcomings of her voice. But don’t you need an alto in Part I for “For who may abide the day of his coming?” and “O thou that tallest good tidings to Zion?”

December 6, 2024 (permalink)

A. J. Liebling wrote wonderful columns about food for The New Yorker in a time when food writing was seldom considered suitable for anything but the women’s pages. His account of being an impoverished art student in interwar Paris and choosing between good food and good wine is memorable, and is also a modern morality.

December 2, 2024 (permalink)

A beautiful book of immense erudition and perception, this book has influenced my work deeply. It does things I did not think possible, and draws connections I did not think could be drawn. Yet, it is plainspoken, considerate, and unfailingly entertaining.

November 12, 2024 (permalink)

A fascinating study of Vienna between the wars and its immense contributions to modernism and to computing. Vienna was a huge capital city that governed what had become a small country. Austria had lost her empire and her markets, the economy had been shredded, and vast numbers of people from the former provinces converged on a city with insufficient housing, a place that had long seen itself as governed by schleppers. Yet, for a decade, it became the intellectual center of the world, before the Viennese threw it all away for the satisfactions of Fascism.

November 12, 2024 (permalink)

A wonderful and thorough history of the intersecting philosophical and mathematical circles in Vienna from the early 1920s to their end in Austrian Fascism and the Anschluss. Sigmund offers sensitive and intelligent portrayals of the most notable participants (though he rather neglect John von Neumann) as well as those who, like the note-taking Dr. Rose Rand, were ill-treated in life and neglected afterward. This deserves special praise because, in this broad group biography, few of the characters are easy to identify with. Sigmund is equally at home with the ideas with which these circles wrestled, and if he occasionally despairs of explaining set theory to a general audience, his effort to explain Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem by way of Sudoko is both clever and effective.

November 11, 2024 (permalink)

From 1912 to 1915, Venetia Stanley, then inn her 20s, carried on an intense, primarily epistolary, romance with Prime Minister H. H. Asquith, who was considerably older. He called Venetia “dearest”; she called him “Prime”. He wrote to her several times a day, often including state secrets in the letters. Incredibly, his half of the correspondence survives. From these letter. Robert Harris has crafted a thriller which is often fascinating, if inevitably tinged with sadness.

November 11, 2024 (permalink)

A delightful and fascinating contemplation of two threads that run through nearly three thousand years of historical writing. Herodotus tries to tell us about the world; if he knows something interesting about a place he will tell you about it. Thucydides tries to tell us what happened in the great war in which he himself played a part; if something important happened when he was elsewhere, he works to find a source who knows about it. If it wasn’t important to the war, to hell with it. Thucydides became the patron of historians, Herodotus the patron of antiquarians; Momigliano, a historian, is gracious to antiquarians and fast to point out that, today, some of the most interesting and important historical writing is attuned to Herodotus while we may have had our fill of political and military chronicles.

November 9, 2024 (permalink)

Ruskin was an early Modernist critic and a great fan of Turner’s brilliant colors. Whistler was a late modernist, eager to explore fog and darkness. They did not like each other, and Ruskin eventually took the opportunity to deplore Whistler’s painting.

Whistler, who was having a terrible time getting people interested in his experimental painting, sued for libel. The result was a spectacular trial, which Murphy covers very well indeed. Whistler still couldn't sell his work; eventually, he did manage to make some big sales to Americans, and some of his critical work now hangs in the Harvard Art Museums.

November 9, 2024 (permalink)

A surprising treatment of Engelbart’s crucial and influential (though short-lived) effort to augment human intelligence. Engelbart’s group really got started in the mid-60s, and broke apart in the 70s. Bardini is exceptional in trying to understand the collapse as well as the glory days. A lot of evidence is drawn from a roman a clef, which is discomforting, but it is reinforced by the group’s copious electronic records.

A key lesson is that Engelbart was not alarmed by the prospect that this line of research might bring about the apocalypse of the singularity. Indeed, Engelbart welcomed that: if there were to be a singularity, why not face it with better intellectual tools? Bardini makes this fairly clear, where in several conversations he and I had at various conferences, Doug could not.

October 26, 2024 (permalink)