Entitled to an Opinion

I ended my last book review by writing that I “have a book selected next which will both let me alternate back to non-fiction and fit in with an October dedicated to horror (which I normally leave for just what I watch rather than read) since it was nominally adapted as a horror movie I watched back in 2017”. It turned out that the nearby public library which listed Wade Davis’ book in their online catalog actually didn’t have it on their shelves (I was told that books of that subject matter are sometimes simply taken without people formally checking them out), and I had to get it via inter-library loan (as was the case for The Closing of the American Mind, which was catalogued but missing from a different nearby library), so I only picked it up the previous weekend. I read it in a shorter time period than usual because I knew I wouldn’t be able to renew it as easily as a typical library book, but it was also quite readable for a non-fiction book by a social scientist (anthropologist in this case, though as Davis is also an ethnobotanist there is some harder science as well). For example, there are no superscript numbers giving footnotes or endnotes with citations, like Band of Brothers, and while there is an “annotated bibliography” at the end listing books he drew on for each chapter, there isn’t the same direct connection between claims he makes and their basis one would find in a normal academic (and this was ultimately sourced from a university’s library) book.

Sherwood Anderson’s 1922 book is quite far from the scifi I more often review here, but I got interested after watching Tales from the Loop (which I’m going to repeatedly reference throughout this post) and hearing that the showrunner, Nathaniel Halpern, was inspired by this short-story cycle in making his adaptation of an entirely different book consisting largely of pictures. I had been struck by how episodic the show was, while in today’s streaming era TV serialization has produced a surfeit of “[X]-hour movies” whose individual entries tend to blend together. Each episode of that show had focused on a different character in the same small town, as well as a different scifi conceit. I knew the latter would be absent from Winesburg, so what was more striking in comparison was how it clearly had a central character. While some of the early chapters were first published separately in literary magazines (and not always with the same title), reading the book one first encounters a table of contents labelled “The Tales and the Persons” which lists 24 chapters, all but the first (which could have, as it clearly focused on one character) have the chapter title followed by “concerning” and then a named character (or, in the antepenultimate chapter, “characters” as there are two). Only the last chapter is said to be concerning George Willard, but he is the central character and we get more of his POV in some earlier chapters than the characters those chapters supposedly concern. I could have suspected that Anderson wanted to avoid the same character names recurring across different chapter entries and thus distributed them to avoid that, but that’s contradicted by how both the characters for that aforementioned antepenultimate chapter both had earlier individual chapters dedicated to them.

The first time I heard of Neil Gaiman was when I read Good Omens because I was a fan of that novel’s other author, Terry Pratchett. I recall hearing that it was supposed to be obvious who wrote what because their styles were so different, but I never read any other works by Gaiman until this. In span of time between then and now I watched adaptations of his work like Coraline (plus a trio of films last year), and Sandman (whose end was chalked up by many to Gaiman’s own cancellation though the showrunner claimed it was planned that way), which I referenced in my last review of a book recommended by J. G. Keely. That review also mentioned that I had just read the first chapter of American Gods, but since I inherited it from a dead person (so people worried about others possibly “supporting” Gaiman financially can calm down) rather than checking it out from a library I felt no urge to hurry and have reviewed multiple other books since then, and wound up making most of my progress on this during a recent power outage when I couldn’t access the internet and even the local libraries tended to lack power. I pulled the trigger on actually finishing it now because tomorrow I plan on checking out another book, this time literary fiction even though I’ve already noted that when I first reviewed such a novel I said I was unlikely to do more.

More than a decade prior to reading Stephen Ambrose’s book about Easy Company, I had seen the miniseries. That was so good that when I subsequently binged the 21st century reboot of Battlestar Galactica, I enjoyed it far less than most and repeatedly thought that, by comparison, those fictional characters in an existential struggle were complete incompetents who were going to cause the extinction of their species and deserve it. More recently I’ve been trying to read books closer in time to their adaptations, but that was usually for non-fiction and I hadn’t thought to do so for this one until this year’s Memorial Day.

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I would occassionally link to the group blog by Andrew Gelman and other political scientists, but at some point it was acquired by the Washington Post and went behind a paywall, and eventually went defunct while I wasn’t reading it. Now Andrew points out that somebody has archived it (or at least much of it) at a page called Good Authority. The old links on my blog to the Monkey Cage now redirect to that domain… and to 404s there. As Andrew notes, it’s not perfect, but let’s not make that the enemy of the good.

The last time I reviewed a Heinlein novel, I linked to Josh Wimmer’s “Blogging the Hugos” review in the comments, but in this case I will do so in this first sentence because that is how I heard of Double Star in the first place. In that review Wimmer refers to it as “the first Hugo-winning novel truly worthy of the award”, and while I haven’t read either of the preceding winners, it’s certainly better than next year’s The Big Time. As noted in a preceding link, Wimmer’s review was of particular interest to me due to the anti-speciesist politics of the novel contrasting with the popular perception of Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, helped along by that stupid film “adaptation” from Paul Verhoeven (who never read it). The contrast isn’t merely in that this novel is about peacefully & equally incorporating other species into a human-dominated space Empire, but also that the voice of this novel’s narrator is far more distinctive and entertaining than the ignorant everyman Johnny Rico (a fitting blank for the intended “juvenile” audience of that), and I would add also better than the modest computer technician Manny from The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (the aforementioned last Heinlein I read). “The Great Lorenzo” is supposed to be unintentionally funny in his pomposity, and the decision to make him flawed (not merely an unshaped lump of clay like Rico) in that he can begin as a bigot against Martians makes him more interesting than an idealized Heinleinian hero, and more capable of character growth (even if the manner in which that occurs is disappointingly shallow).

I had read the Ted Chiang story which gives the title to this collection roughly a decade ago, before I watched “Arrival” (the film adapted from it). I recall having an arguably worse understanding of the film as a result, because I had interpreted the story as being about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (which I’d read Steven Pinker debunking in books like The Language Instinct or How the Mind Works) being true in that the protagonist thought of chronology differently, and thus referred to things that already happened as if they were in the future, but didn’t actually have advance knowledge of the future (even the aliens themselves don’t appear to be trying to accomplish anything for the future that would require such knowledge on their part). I later read that Gwern Branwen had the same interpretation as me, citing Chiang’s explanation for how he came up with the story, along with other stories from him. Rereading it this time, the narrator’s recollection of how much her daughter surprises her (thus establishing how different they are from each other) goes completely against the idea that such events were already known in advance, and the different causes of death (a rock climbing accident vs some congenital disorder) work completely differently in terms of how preventable they’d be with advance knowledge, which understandably would cause a divorce in the film version once that’s revealed, whereas no indication is given of that in the story.

I heard about this Rudyard Kipling book via J. G. Keely’s recommendations, the same place I heard about Dictionary of the Khazars from (the other book on that list I’ve read is Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, another public domain book I read on a Kindle, but I’d already heard of that earlier). I primarily associated Kipling with stories of India (where he was born) like his more famous “The Jungle Book”, or the few stories I have read from the similarly recommended collection “Tales of Horror and Fantasy”. That’s what makes it surprising that this is so specifically English, and about the idea of England. The character of Puck himself (of A Midsummer Night’s Dream earlier and Neil Gaiman‘s Sandman later) represents the ancient past of England, purportedly the only of the “People of the Hills” to remain after the religious changes there, and the chapters of the book (always bookended by a pair of poems from Kipling) consist of two then-modern English children visiting him, hearing a story from the distant past of the country from either him or another such (human) character who lived through it and has been magically brought to the present, then Puck causing them to magically forget it all as they return home (though they regain their memory each time they visit again).

He died earlier this month, but I didn’t think to blog about it until now. I reviewed his “The Folly of Fools” back in 2021. He was less successful a popular science author than Richard Dawkins or E. O. Wilson, despite them basing so much of their popular work on his ideas. He was also less successful an academic/scientist than you might expect, and years before he died I had heard he was unemployable due to his bipolar disorder which could manifest as threats of violence. His last graduate student, Robert Lynch, confirms in a remembrance that such threats also applied to him and that Trivers also carried a large knife everywhere he went (less irrational than behaviors like his self-confessed kleptomania from Folly, as Lynch reports he used it to defend himself against home-invaders in Jamaica). I found that remembrance via Steve Pinker’s, who takes a dimmer view of Trivers’ later accomplishments as a scientist (Lynch rather expectedly thinks there was value in the work they did together in the ’00s) and bemoans the squandering of his potential. Of course, perhaps we value too high the publication of new papers, and not enough the retraction of bad ones, where Trivers was unusual in his dedication to correcting fraudulent work he had his name attached to.

Hat-tip to Marginal Revolution for Pinker’s obituary, which in turn linked to Lynch’s.

UPDATE April 8: Jerry Coyne has a roundup of more. Lynch is also referred to as Trivers’ “only” rather than “last” grad student.

I have been reading Bryan Caplan’s blogging for decades (he was listed on my blogroll as being at EconLog when I started this blog nearly two decades ago), but of his books I had previously only read “The Myth of the Rational Voter“. It is something of a coincidence that I picked up his second less than a month after Greg Clark’s The Returns to Education: A Meta-Study (arguing that publication-bias afflicts causal estimates) was posted to SSRN. Much of what he argues I had already read before at EconLog (and a big chunk of the references in the back are to his blog posts), but I think it’s a good thing to collect all the evidence in one book vs having to individually search for things on that blog (hampered by the search function there), and indeed called that sort of thing a public service as recently as arguing with Phillip Magness on the merits of Scott Alexander’s one-stop-shop comprehensive blog posts.

I have occassionally blogged about being banned from commenting at certain sites, and in the most recent case prior to today was also blocked on twitter by the blogger. Phillip Magness is an unusual case in that he has actually liked a number of my tweets, including earlier today.

This is where he gives his reasoning for blocking me while we were arguing about COVID and lockdowns. As I wrote, nothing I said was “disingenuous”, nor did he provide an argument the alternate estimates were “junk”, nor that any of them were in the “statistical dark ages”. The irony is that this began with me pointing out that Curtis Yarvin was correct about COVID minimizers being wrong (objectively and demonstrably in cases like Richard Epstein), and the outcome which would have debunked Yarvin’s indictment of Trump’s response would be if Trump had succeeded. In the tweet I linked there I also said that Magness was correct to call out Yarvin on his BS now about “Civil Disobedience”, and I’d also noted in that thread that “Mencius Moldbug” sold out if you compare early Unqualified Reservations to what he wrote later as Curtis Yarvin. This is not a matter of me being pro-Yarvin and anti-Magness, and instead that Magness insists that the effects of lockdown are zero and thus that cost/benefit analysis is irrelevant, while actual statistician Andrew Gelman (is he in the “dark ages”?) often says that the true effect size is never zero. I would have been open to the argument that the costs weren’t worth the benefit, which someone with a background in economics should be comfortable with, but he ruled that out.

While I mostly hear about Fritz Leiber’s writing in the fantasy genre (particularly his stories of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser), I decided to start with his scifi novel “The Big Time”, after learning it was in the public domain, the only Hugo Award winning novel to be there as far as I know. The last Hugo winner I reviewed was A Canticle for Liebowitz, and it makes total sense to me that Miller’s novel from a few years later is more remembered now than Leiber’s. It’s relatively short, which was why I knew I’d be able to finish it at my convenience while watching the Netflix series “Dark” (which is about time-travel to a greater extent than this is), and I wouldn’t say the contents here are relatively weighty either. I suppose I would have been less disappointed if I’d taken more seriously Josh Wimmer’s review (as part of his “Blogging the Hugos” series), which opens by describing it as “less a time-travel tale and more Agatha Christie-style Matrix, in play form”. I didn’t notice much resemblance to The Matrix myself, but play-like confinement to a single location is apparent (Algis Budrys asserted after the Hugo win that it was a play rather than a novel for that reason), and one of the things I wound up not liking in a story with time-travel, even though I ordinarily give films extra points for being single-location.

I finished reading Charles Darwin’s first, and now lesser-known book, back in 2024. Since I’ve only been reading public domain books on my Kindle while traveling as a passenger (I read Virginia Woolf’s Orlando last year flying to the east coast and back), it took some delayed trains in the current cold snap for me to finish his follow-up, but since the two books were published roughly 20 years apart I suppose this is a relatively small gap in time. The fact that it has been such a long gap in time since I started reading it until now means I don’t have it all in my head, nor was my memory of preceding material generally fresh when I was reading. Thus, my comments will be shorter than the book deserves, and lighter on quotations than books I read at home with a laptop handy to copy passages to (I could have copied to my phone, but didn’t bother since I hadn’t started any document to add notes to until I finished).

This might be one of the most well-known books I’ve reviewed here (despite ending my last review of a novel by claiming I didn’t expect to do more literary rather than genre fiction), to the extent that the very title is now a well-known phrase for a phenomena. It’s also one whose film adaptation I enjoyed more than any other Mike Nichols movie, much less the completely overrated M*A*S*H, and I didn’t understand the detractors who complained about the book being better. Now having read it, I think they are both good examples of their respective mediums. It has admittedly been over a decade since I saw that, which meant my memory was foggy enough to still be surprised by some things that were in both (possibly it was made worse by the inferior miniseries with a completely different ending).

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Yesterday, Marginal Revolution linked to this tweet on the films with the largest “delta” in men vs women’s rankings on IMDB. I don’t know anybody else who still talks about the Double Feature podcast, since it went completely defunct a while back and had been mostly defunct for some time even prior to that, but precisely because there’s only an archived version of their complete coverage list (although the actual audio files aren’t available), that means it wouldn’t be tweaked in response to such findings.

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