Steven White

Ronson’s worst

Revisado: 05-20-23

I love Jon Ronson. This podcast, packaged as an audiobook, is a fun listen, but the reporting is terrible. It reminds me of his The Last Days of August in that he hints that he found something of substance throughout the podcast, but what he actually uncovered is that the mundane conventional wisdom holds up under scrutiny. He openly admits this in the final minutes of the final chapter. In this case, however, Ronson’s reporting is surprisingly shoddy. One oversight stands out: He makes frequent reference to the unsolved mystery of John Doe #2, the man seen with “Tim McVeigh” when he rented the truck used in the bombing, noting that the FBI gave up on its search for this key witness. Shockingly he never notes why the FBI stopped its search: they found him. John Doe #2 rented a truck at the store the day after McVeigh along with John Doe #1, the man in the police sketch who was not McVeigh but looked a lot like him. These guys had nothing to do with the bombing and the witnesses who identified them acknowledged that they made a mistake, confusing Doe #1 with McVeigh due to their similar appearance. Ronson has no excuse for not including this in the final episode where he admits that what he founds is a nothing burger.

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Title is misleading

Revisado: 09-29-22

This is a general introduction to the cabinet and it’s history and function. It doesn’t focus on particularly bad cabinets except in a lecture on corruption and it brings up good cabinets mostly to illustrate a general theme (e.g how cabinets can be teams of rivals). It isn’t a bad Great Course but it wasn’t what I expected.

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Good but not great

Revisado: 09-24-20

I like all of the "The Great Courses" about the law but this one fell a little flat for me. Some of it might be because there is a lot of very basic material, esp. if you have heard the "Law School for Everyone" series or have a background in law, but even the discussion of the cases I often found myself not caring. I think it has something to do with the pacing, which is generally very slow but over without any time to reflect, or even understand too much of the context, when discussing the big cases. I don't know.

If there were a 3.5 star option that is what I could give this one. I wanted to like it more, but I didn't.

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Great performance

Revisado: 09-24-20

Jeffrey Toobin's books are all good but among those this one is in the middle of the pack. It runs a little long, but at 2x it never gets boring. Rob Shapiro's narration is stellar, esp. when reading quotes from the characters. I laughed when I heard his rendition of Jerome Corsi and I didn't know whether to act or cry when he read a long except of a Trump speech that closes the book.

I only have one criticism: Toobin dishes out some harsh criticism about Mueller's work but he also adds some glowing praise about his general character to ease the sting. I didn't understand that. Mueller is a Marine. He can take the very deserved crticism.

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Good portraits of public servants

Revisado: 06-10-20

The book starts by discussing the lack of effort the Trump team put into the presidential transition. The subtext is that many Americans don't value what the federal government does for them but that it is incredibly valuable. Unfortunately, the book does a poor job of selling that point because of its lack of cohesion.

The basic structure of the book is that we meet people at the Department of Energy, USDA, Dept. of Commerce, and (in the epilogue) the Coast Guard and learn about what they did with their lives and, occasionally, what they did in government. The one is the epilogue about a oceanographer's effort to build better data systems helped improve search and rescue in the oceans. It is by far the best part of the book. Unfortunately, the book is undermined by the fact that probably more than half of the discussion of what these people did was done before they worked in the government or has nothing to do with research or bureaucracy. We meet a data scientist, for example, who coined the term "data scientist," a USDA administrator who was an entrepreneur, and a female astronaut who later did something so forgettable that I can't remember why she is actually in the book. (Some of these side stories are interesting, including the discussion of that astronauts experience at NASA and about how weather prediction has improved so dramatically, but it doesn't add up to much.)

The book is also hurt by some weak arguments. The author quotes a data scientist saying that the U.S. wouldn't know about the opioid epidemic without Obama administration efforts to release data on opioid shipments in the mid-2010, but the truth is that people knew it was a problem for at least a decade beforehand. Epidemiologists had been warning about rising numbers of overdoses (fatal and non-fatal) for a decade before that. Of course, that doesn't undermine the point--all of that data for collected by state/local governments and collated by the CDC--but the claim is so obviously wrong it sticks out as a sore thumb and makes me wonder what else is wrong.

Lewis also tells us that American's who don't live in rural areas love the rural lifestyle and want to heavily subsidize it, but are crippled by opposition from voters in rural areas. That seems wildly improbable. I'm sure Republicans in rural areas use earmarks and other means to bring home plenty of bacon for their communities and are rewarded for it and I doubt the Congresspeople from NYC are doing that much to subsidize rural life.

This book is definitely less than the sum of its parts.

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Not that fun or educational

Revisado: 06-10-20

This short book is the author has an interesting frame: the author is quitting caffeine cold-turkey, hoping its absence will teach him something about its importance and effects. He circles back to his experience staying off caffeine for months a couple times in the book, including at the end. It's a good frame.

Otherwise, there isn't much worth learning from this book. There are a few cute historical facts (King Charles II banned coffeehouses because he thought they fostered a spirit of rebellion) and stories (one about stealing a coffee plant from Java), but a lot of the historical discussion goes in very broad strokes and suggests caffeine and coffee were incredibly important without any real evidence. The main thing I learned from this book is that caffeine has a long elimination half-life (about 6 hours) and that it works in your brain by competing to bind in adenosine receptors. I didn't even know adenosine was an important ligand!

Basically, this book is ok but I got the feeling it was supposed to be a lot more fun than it is.

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Jude for the 21st century

Revisado: 05-31-20

(This review uses a variety of insults from the first few pages to illustrate the tone of the book.)

This is not a book that should detain anyone for very long. The author explicitly states that he makes "no attempt here to convert anyone to anything" and in context convert clearly means "convince." Instead, as he describes it, it is a personal essay, basically a recklessly ambitious undergraduate essay, from a top tier student of the Jude and 2 Peter school of argument by invective. It mostly serves to prove that Christians can be just as nasty as any other person.

What about the actual content? It is basically a bunch of empty generalities, vacuously true. Here is an example: "some kill because they have no faith and hence believe all things are permitted to them" Wait, that is wrong. Having no faith doesn't imply you think you are permitted to do anything. Maybe he made a mistake and the "hence" there is by accident due to his rhetorical recklessness. But a better explanation is that Hart has a talent for intellectual caricature that greatly exceeds his mastery of logic.

Will you learn anything from reading this book? No. If you believe that "ethical monotheism . . . has been ["but for" causally] responsible for most of the wars and bigotry in history" then you are an idiot and the book will let you know that but it won't help you understand why due to Hart's embarrassing incapacity for reasoning.

I bought this book and then returned it.

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Big disappointment for this author

Revisado: 04-11-20

Urofsky is both a lawyer and a historian, but a large portion of this book is on topics well outside his expertise. He notes that is conflicted about affirmative action early in the book, and in the closing chapter acknowledges that the research literature can't answer important questions that people would like to know in order to evaluate "affirmative action" yet he wrote a book that often seems like it is going to give us answers about how it works, what it does, and whether it is good. This leads him to often cites this literature in misleading ways and as if it gives definitive answers to important questions. It is too bad that more of the book doesn't focus on genuine history and law, like the chapters on on the Bakke and Defunis cases and the one that is largely about the implementation and politics of early affirmative action in CUNY. There is another good chapter, mostly filled with legal analysis of gerrymandering cases, about majority-minority districts.

An illustration of this confusing and thin reviews of the evidence: he notes, correctly, that most colleges have nearly open admissions policies, including all community colleges and that because of this affirmative action is mostly only a significant factor in top tier schools. As such it is impossible that a majority or white (or black) people are impacted by affirmative action in college admissions. Yet he later cites a study that says affirmative action tripled the number of minority (or maybe Black) students in colleges.

His own policy analysis is often vague and thin and clearly not his comparative advantage. He tells us that he personally doesn't like quotas and explains that a "goal" and "target" often just means a minimum quota. I can understand that, but few organizations use hard numerical quotas or goals. They use race as a subjective "plus" factor in hiring and admissions and his description and analysis of these problems is nearly incoherent, sometimes saying that race is just "one of many factors" and sometimes emphasizing that is it is pivotal in most cases at most top schools. "One of many factors" sounds like it isn't a big deal. Pivotal, which means that the student would not have been admitted if they were white, makes it sound like a big deal. Numbers or illustrative examples here would help us understand how these systems work, but we rarely get them, just vague handwaving.

Urofsky picked a topic that had a lot of potential, but the fact that he hasn't made up his mind and that he chose to focus on areas where has no expertise hamper the book. I can't give it more than 1 star in the current form, but if you only read the chapters mentioned above it could get 3-4. The performance by Dan Woren is solid.

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Author is an idiot

Revisado: 02-25-20

It is easy to beat on psychiatrists. They have a difficult job that anyone would struggle to do. They also got into their job for money and many sold out for more of it. Some of them are total idiots.

Somehow Davies nevertheless struggles to beat on them. He interrogates the head a psychiatrist professional organization toward the end of the book and gets ends up looking like a schoolboy. He includes an appendix where he discusses how people who take pills tend to be sicker than people who don't and draws the conclusion that the pills made them sick. I think he says a few times that maybe, perhaps, the people are taking the pills because they are sick but we should just ignore that possibility because it is so improbable. His discussion of Irving Kirsche work makes subtle statistical errors, but those are probably forgivable. He does a pretty good job discussing the obvious problems with the DSM.

Psychiatrists win this round, but they really shouldn't have.

Read Mind Fixers by Anne Harrington or The Book of Woe by Gary Greenburg instead.

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Very basic

Revisado: 04-26-16

This is a very short and very basic introduction to philosophy. I would recommend it to high school students but I'm not sure so for adults. It might have benefited from cutting out a few philosophers (Searle, Lierkegaard, Schopenhauer) to leave more space for other ideas.

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