These books and plays left an impression on me in 2024, with summaries compiled with the help of Perplexity and ChatGPT.
Books
The Accidental President. Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World. A. J. Baime
If not for the decision to drop the two bombs, Truman is the kind of leader that is hard not to respect. He did not want power; he did not want to be president, but when the moment came, he took it seriously and gave it his all.
On serving as Vice President:
The job was “a graveyard of politicians” in Washington parlance, traditionally disparaged by the men who held it. The VP before Truman, Henry Wallace, bragged that he had never had so much time to work on his tennis game. “The Vice President has not much to do,” Truman said, referring to himself as a “political Eunuch.” When asked what he would do with his “spare time,” he answered: “Study history”.
On dropping another A bomb (after the first two on August 6 and August 9!):
General Groves had communicated to the War Department on this day, saying the next bomb would be ready for delivery after August 17 or 18. But now, in the cabinet meeting, Truman said that he was ordering an end to the atomic bombing. He could not stomach the idea of wiping out another 100,000 people, of killing “all those kids,” he said to his cabinet.
Blood Meridian. Cormac McCarthy
Reading this book is a kind of nightmarish out-of-body experience. The language has the signature of a great master—original, unique, and enthralling. The violence is vivid and chilling.
Here is one of the main characters, Jidge Holder, talking about war:
It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.
This book was so disturbing that I stopped listening to it about halfway through. I think one must be in the right state of mind to consume it entirely. Maybe I will return to it.
Democracy Awakening. Notes on the State of America. Heather Cox Richardson
Richardson is a historian and a professor of history at Boston College and has over 1.7 million subscribers on Substack. For comparison, the New York Times, with close to 6,000 employees, has about 11 million subscribers, and the Washington Post has about 2.5 million subscribers.
America is at a crossroads. A country that once stood as the global symbol of democracy has been teetering on the brink of authoritarianism. How did this happen? Is the fall of democracy in the United States inevitable? And if not, how can we reclaim our democratic principles? This crisis in American democracy crept up on many of us. For generations of Americans, grainy news footage from World War II showing row upon row of Nazi soldiers goose-stepping in military parades tricked us into thinking that the Adolf Hitlers of the world arrive at the head of giant armies. So long as we didn’t see tanks in our streets, we imagined that democracy was secure. But in fact, Hitler’s rise to absolute power began with his consolidation of political influence to win 36.8 percent of the vote in 1932, which he parlayed into a deal to become German chancellor. The absolute dictatorship came afterward.
Some people on the left compare Trump to Hitler. That is a very bad analogy; the circumstances are different, and Trump and Hitler are very different types of characters. When you look at the definition of fascism, however, this administration is starting to check off a lot of the boxes.
Going Infinite, The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon. Michael Lewis
This a book about a sociopathic child prodigy known as SBF (Sam Bankman Freed), his meteoric rise to fame and fortune as part of the FTX crypto exchange, and its spectacular collapse.
I started reading Lewis, beginning with Lier Poker, a book that was read and quoted by everyone who worked or wanted to work on Wall Street. Since I am fascinated with fraud, particularly when done on a massive scale, I couldn’t pass this up and Lewis did not disappoint. Here is a typical passage.
A guy from Blackstone, the world’s biggest private investment firm, called Sam to say that he thought a valuation of $20 billion was too high—and that Blackstone would invest at a valuation of $15 billion. “Sam said, ‘If you think it is too high, I’ll let you short a billion of our stock at a valuation of twenty billion,’” recalled Ramnik. “The guy said, ‘We don’t short stock.’ And Sam said that if you worked at Jane Street you’d be fired the first week.
Ultimately, the fraud was using customer deposits from the FTX exchange to cover trades at Alameda Research, which is so obviously wrong and illegal that Enron’s Jeffrey Skilling would slap himself silly for working so hard to design much more sophisticated off-balance sheet liability schemes.
It was never clear where Alameda Research stopped and FTX started. Legally separate companies, they were both owned by the same person. They occupied the same big room on the twenty-sixth floor of an office building. They shared the same vista of the forest of high-rises surrounding Victoria Harbor and, twenty miles beyond that, China.
Everything and More. A Compact History of Infinity. By David Foster Wallace
I ran out of DFW’s fiction and essays, and so I turned to this volume to get the great writer’s take on what seems to be his favorite subject — mathematics.
DFW is not a mathematical newb, but he is not a professional mathematician either. No matter. Given his unforgettable writing style and deep fascination with the subject, reading this book is a joy.
In the following, DFW touches on the age-old question of the existence of mathematical objects, meta-questions of existence itself, and some apparently physical phenomena like motion thrown in for good measure.
What exactly do ‘motion’ and ‘existence’ denote? We know that concrete particular things exist, and that sometimes they move. Does motion per se exist? In what way? In what way do abstractions exist? Of course, that last question is itself very abstract. Now you can probably feel the headache starting. There’s a special sort of unease or impatience with stuff like this. Like ‘What exactly is existence?’ or ‘What exactly do we mean when we talk about motion?’ The unease is very distinctive and sets in only at a certain level in the abstraction process—because abstraction proceeds in levels, rather like exponents or dimensions. Let’s say ‘man’ meaning some particular man is Level One. ‘Man’ meaning the species is Level Two. Something like ‘humanity’ or ‘humanness’ is Level Three; now we’re talking about the abstract criteria for something qualifying as human. And so forth. Thinking this way can be dangerous, weird. Thinking abstractly enough about anything … surely we’ve all had the experience of thinking about a word—‘pen,’ say—and of sort of saying the word over and over to ourselves until it ceases to denote; the very strangeness of calling something a pen begins to obtrude on the consciousness in a creepy way, like an epileptic aura.
From Beirut to Jerusalem. Thomas L. Friedman
Friedman was a journalist working in the Middle East in 197os and 1980s and lived in Beirut during the Lebanese civil war.
Of Beirut, Friedman said:
Beirut’s enduring lesson for me was how thin is the veneer of civilization, how easily the ties that bind can unravel, how quickly a society that was known for generations as the Switzerland of the Middle East can break apart into a world of strangers. I have never looked at the world the same since I left Beirut. It was like catching a glimpse of the underside of a rock or the mess of wires and chips that are hidden inside a computer.
On the differences in news coverage:
When Israelis were indirectly involved in the massacre of Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut in 1982, the story was front-page news for weeks. When Lebanese Shiites were directly involved in killing Palestinians in the very same camps from 1985 to 1988, it was almost always back-page news—if it was reported at all.
The Maniac. Benjamín Labatut
“The MANIAC” by Benjamín Labatut is a 2023 novel that blends fact and fiction to explore the life of John von Neumann, a brilliant mathematician and polymath. The book is structured as a triptych, beginning with the story of physicist Paul Ehrenfest, centering on von Neumann’s life and work, and concluding with the AI program AlphaGo’s match against Go master Lee Sedol. The novel delves into von Neumann’s numerous contributions to various fields, including game theory, computer science, and artificial intelligence.
Gödel had shown him that if someone succeeded in creating a formal system of axioms that was free of all internal paradoxes and contradictions, it would always be incomplete, because it would contain truths and statements that—while being undeniably true—could never be proven within the laws of that system
Before Gödel, Von Neumann was working on axiomizing mathematics, but the incompleteness theorem had such an impact on him that all of his subsequent work had an applied nature.
All Who Go Do Not Return. Shulem Deen
Published in 2015, the book chronicles Deen’s journey from being a devout member of the Skverer Hasidic sect to losing his faith and ultimately leaving the community.
Deen was raised in the Skverer community, one of the most secluded Hasidic groups in the United States. He married at 18 through an arranged marriage and soon had five children. His first small act of rebellion was turning on a radio, which led to visits to the library and later, the Internet.
As Deen began to question his religious beliefs, he found himself caught between his growing doubts and the fear of being ostracized from the only world he knew. This eventually resulted in him abandoning his community and his faith. The memoir describes the painful consequences of Deen’s departure from the Hasidic community, including the end of his 15-year marriage and the eventual estrangement from his five children.
If the Talmud was built on the purported word of God, that word struck you as suspiciously human, with ambiguities and layers of meaning and all the arbitrariness of human language. The very idea of faith suggested something man-made–the idea that we must submit to conviction, rather than simply behold the universe in its natural order.
On the Edge. The Art of Risking Everything. Nate Silver
Published in August 2024, “On the Edge” is an exploration of risk-taking and decision-making in various domains. The book introduces the concept of “The River,” a metaphorical community of risk-takers and analytical thinkers, contrasting it with “The Village,” which represents more conventional, risk-averse mindsets.
Silver delves into multiple areas where calculated risk-taking plays a crucial role, including:
- Gambling and poker
- Financial markets and Wall Street
- Technology startups
- Artificial intelligence
- Cryptocurrency
Here is Silver quoting George Bernard Shaw.
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. —George Bernard Shaw
The Signal and the Noise. Why So Many Predictions Fail – but Some Don’t. Nate Silver
After reading “On the Edge” and liking it, I read Silver’s first book.
“The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail – but Some Don’t” is an exploration of the art and science of prediction across various fields. Published in 2012, the book examines why many predictions fail and how we can improve our forecasting abilities.
Silver draws on his experience in baseball analytics, poker, and political blogging to analyze prediction methods in diverse areas such as weather forecasting, earthquakes, economics, and terrorism. He argues that while we have access to more data than ever before, distinguishing meaningful information (the signal) from irrelevant or misleading data (the noise) has become increasingly challenging.
Key points of the book include:
- The importance of probabilistic thinking and embracing uncertainty in predictions.
- The value of the Bayesian approach to probability, updating our prior beliefs after observing evidence.
- The dangers of overfitting models to data, leading to false confidence in predictions.
- The need for humility and continuous learning in the face of complex systems.
In statistics, the name given to the act of mistaking noise for a signal is overfitting
Indeed it is.
Nine Lives. Aimen Dean
“Nine Lives” is a memoir by Aimen Dean, co-authored with Paul Cruickshank and Tim Lister, detailing Dean’s journey from al-Qaeda operative to MI6 spy. Published in 2018, the book offers a rare insider’s perspective on the world of jihadist organizations and counterterrorism efforts.
Dean, born as Ali, began his journey as a devout Muslim fighting for the Bosnian cause. His experiences in Bosnia, including witnessing atrocities and narrowly escaping death, solidified his commitment to jihad. He later joined al-Qaeda, becoming one of their respected bomb-makers and swearing allegiance to Osama bin Laden.
However, Dean’s faith in al-Qaeda’s mission began to waver. In a pivotal decision, he chose to become a double agent for British intelligence, working undercover within al-Qaeda’s chemical weapons program.
The Strangest Man. The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom. Graham Farmelo
Paul Dirac was born in 1902 in Bristol to a Swiss father and English mother. His childhood was marked by a difficult family dynamic, with a domineering father who insisted on speaking only French to his children. This led to strained relationships and traumatic experiences for young Paul.
Dirac was a pioneer in quantum mechanics and made contributions to theoretical physics:
- Generally considered to have co-discovered quantum mechanics
- Married quantum mechanics with special relativity in his theory of the electron
- Predicted the existence of antimatter, specifically the anti-electron (positron) in 1931
Dirac was known for his extreme reticence and literal-mindedness, earning him a reputation as “the strangest man” in physics. Despite his reserved nature, he married Manci Balazs (sister of physicist Eugene Wigner) in 1937 and had two daughters.
The book explores Dirac’s lasting impact on physics and his unique approach to scientific research:
- Believed in the “religion of mathematical beauty” as a guiding principle in his work
- Received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1933
- Considered one of the most influential physicists of the 20th century
Farmelo’s biography provides a detailed account of Dirac’s life against the backdrop of major historical events, including the rise of Nazism and World War II.
Plays
Prayer for the French Republic by Joshua Harmon
The core premise of “Prayer for the French Republic” is about a French-Jewish family grappling with their place in a world where antisemitism persists across generations. It explores the contrast between their ancestors’ survival during World War II and the fears they face in modern France, questioning what it means to feel safe, belong, and carry on their cultural and familial legacy in a society that often feels hostile.
The Night of the Iguana by Tennessee Williams
This play is about a disgraced former clergyman, Reverend Shannon, who seeks refuge at a remote Mexican hotel after a personal and professional breakdown. There, he encounters a group of misfit characters, including the hotel’s earthy owner, Maxine, and a lonely artist, Hannah. Through their interactions, the play explores themes of redemption, human frailty, and the longing for connection, set against the backdrop of a tropical storm that mirrors the characters’ emotional turmoil.
The Hunt by David Farr
“The Hunt” is a play adapted by David Farr from the 2012 Danish film “Jagten” by Thomas Vinterberg and Tobias Lindholm. It tells the story of Lucas, a well-liked schoolteacher in a small Danish town whose life unravels when a young student falsely accuses him of sexual abuse. As the accusation spreads, the tight-knit community descends into mass hysteria, turning against Lucas and blurring the lines between truth and suspicion. Directed by Rupert Goold and featuring Tobias Menzies, the production delves into themes of innocence, trust, and the destructive power of collective fear.
Doubt: a Parable by John Patrick Shanley
The play is set in a Bronx Catholic school in 1964, where Sister Aloysius, the strict and feared principal, suspects Father Flynn, a charismatic priest, of inappropriate conduct with a student. This suspicion sets off an exploration of morality, authority, and the elusive nature of truth as Sister Aloysius confronts Father Flynn, leading both characters and the audience to grapple with their own convictions and uncertainties.
Appropriate by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
“Appropriate” follows the dysfunctional Lafayette family as they return to a decaying plantation mansion in Arkansas to settle their recently deceased father’s estate. The play is set in the summer of 2011.
As the family gathers, they discover a shocking photo album containing images of lynched Black people among their father’s possessions. This discovery unleashes decades of resentment and forces the family to confront centuries of historical sin.
The play explores themes of legacy, race, and family secrets. It delves into the complexities of family dynamics, with each character bringing their own perspective and baggage to the situation. Toni, for instance, sees herself as a truth-teller and believes she has spent her life caring for others, including her father.
All of Me (The New Group) by Laura Winters
“All of Me” is a romantic comedy play by Laura Winters, presented by The New Group at the Pershing Square Signature Center in New York City. The play, which ran through June 16, 2024, offers a fresh take on the classic rom-com formula by centering on two disabled protagonists who use text-to-speech technology to communicate.
The story follows Lucy (played by Madison Ferris), who uses a motorized scooter, and Alfonso (played by Danny J. Gomez), who uses a motorized wheelchair. They meet outside a hospital and begin a flirtatious exchange, which leads to a budding romance. The play explores their relationship as they navigate personal challenges, family dynamics, and societal expectations.
Uncle Vanya (Lincoln Center) by Anton Chekhov
“Uncle Vanya” is a play that explores themes of disillusionment, unrequited love, and the search for meaning in life. The story centers around Ivan Voynitsky (Vanya), played by Steve Carell, who manages the rural estate of his deceased sister’s husband, Professor Serebryakov. When Serebryakov visits with his new, younger wife Yelena, tensions rise as Vanya’s resentment towards the professor’s selfishness and his own unfulfilled life boil over. Vanya’s declaration of love to Yelena is rebuffed, and his anger culminates in a failed attempt to shoot Serebryakov after the professor suggests selling the estate. Ultimately, the professor and Yelena depart, leaving Vanya and his niece Sonya to return to their monotonous lives, finding solace in the hope of a better afterlife.
I am a big fan of Chechov’s short stories, but this production did not land for me. Maybe it’s because I can’t consume it in English.
Our Class by Tadeusz Slobodzianek
“Our Class” is a powerful play that follows ten Polish classmates—five Jewish and five Catholic—over several decades. The story begins with their childhood friendships but takes a devastating turn as antisemitism and bigotry lead to betrayal and violence. Based on real events, including a 1941 pogrom in a Polish village, the play explores themes of prejudice, cruelty, and the complexities of human relationships. It traces the characters’ lives from innocence to tragedy, examining how ordinary people can become complicit in horrific acts.
Bad Kreyòl by Dominique Morisseau
The story follows Simone, a Haitian-American woman who visits Haiti to stay with her cousin Gigi, who owns a boutique in Port-au-Prince. Their grandmother’s dying wish was for the cousins to rekindle their relationship. As Simone attempts to connect with her roots and engage in social justice efforts, she encounters cultural barriers and misunderstandings that challenge her American perspective.
