Ryan Cooper

Every time I open Amazon and Audible they recommend J.D. Vance's dumb book Hillbilly Elegy , and it reminds me to make a point I failed to mention in my previous post on it. This is about his story about attending a private function while he was attending Yale Law School, and his social anxiety at trying to navigate the weird norms of the upper class. It's a great microcosm of the book's jarring contrast between fairly well-done memoir and idiotic political interpretation thereof. He relates going to some kind of Yale-sponsored dinner, and at one point having to hide in the bathroom to call his girlfriend and ask why there were four different kinds of forks, and just what in God's name he's supposed to do with each one. It's funny, charming, and relatable. Yet later he includes this sort of thing as part of the list of hillbilly cultural deficiencies. If these poor white people would drop their brash and unsophisticated fork practices, they might be able to...

During Thanksgiving, a relative happened to have JD Vance's book Hillbilly Elegy lying around, and so I picked it up out of curiosity. As other reviewers have said , the politics in it are pretty terrible. However it was better than I was expecting it to be. Mainly, it's a book about growing up in a fucked-up family, and Vance ends up emphasizing how his surroundings more or less controlled what kind of a person he ended up being. He made it out of Kentucky and Ohio and ended up graduating from Yale Law school, but unlike most conservatives, he doesn't paint that as some Randian heroic act of self-bootstrapping. Over and over he notes how lucky he was to have people to help him sort out his problems. "I am one lucky son of a bitch," he concludes. The few areas of explicit conservatism — whining about white welfare queens, or dumbass libertarian notions about being coerced into paying taxes — fit very poorly with the overall thrust of the book. (Don't read Nat...

This was a couple weeks ago, so much that I'm already almost through my next audiobook (Anthony Beevor's Second World War ), but I do want to note that Middlemarch  was a doozy. So, so good. I'm certain that I can't have had any thoughts that haven't been already been had better and sharper, so I won't bother with more than a few disconnected points. 1) As I just said, it was stupendously good. The only thing I can think to compare it to is War and Peace . Slightly less epic scale, but balanced by more penetrating psychological insight, more fully realized characters, better plotting, and less goofy historical theorizing. This is a work of extreme skill and brilliance. 2) That said, there were slightly too many coincidences driving the plot for my taste. The very last one, where one character walks in on two others having a conversation and comes away with what seemed like an unjustified idea of what was happening, grated quite a bit. (I suspect this is just...

I don't know that much about the historical context of Middlemarch , but I know it was published well before the women's rights revolution had got up much steam, and I reckon it's fair to say she had some revolutionary ideas swirling beneath all that glorious insight. Dig this little jab: Dorothea had gathered emotion as she went on, and had forgotten everything except the relief of pouring forth her feelings, unchecked: an experience once habitual with her, but hardly ever present since her marriage, which had been a perpetual struggle of energy with fear. For the moment, Will's admiration was accompanied with a chilling sense of remoteness. A man is seldom ashamed of feeling that he cannot love a woman so well when he sees a certain greatness in her: nature having intended greatness for men. But nature has sometimes made sad oversights in carrying out her intention ; as in the case of good Mr. Brooke, whose masculine consciousness was at this moment in rather a st...

The other day I learned quite to my shame that "George Eliot" was the pen name of a woman named Mary Anne Evans. I had been resolving for quite some time to get back into the audiobook routine for walking to work, and on brief research her books seemed well-suited to being read aloud, so I picked up a copy of Middlemarch . I'm not too far in, but so far (while it is rather plodding at times) it's about the most penetrating and insightful book from a psychological standpoint that I've read in years. It's like what Freedom  could have been if it had the full human experience, and not just the shitty, awkward parts. Eliot's work seem to be of that type which a patriarchal society deems (still does, to some extent) "women's issues," things like love, romance, family, emotions, etc. It sounds dumb stated outright, but those stereotypes still hold true today, to some extent, and I think they do serious damage to males in our society. Because ...

This is going to sound strange, but I've been reading some damned fine Harry Potter fan fiction recently. It's a work in progress called Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality . I picked it up on the recommendation of the recently-deceased hacker genius Aaron Swartz, who had this to say : This is a book whose title still makes me laugh and yet it may just turn out to be one of the greatest books ever written. The writing is shockingly good, the plotting is some of the best in all of literature, and the stories are simply pure genius. I fear this book may never get the accolades it deserves, because it’s too hard to look past the silly name and publishing model, but I hope you, dear reader, are wiser than that! A must-read. As it says at the beginning, you really need to give it a couple chapters to get started before passing judgment — the first bunch are quite silly and it doesn’t seem worth sticking with until you’ve gotten past them. It's really funny and reall...

That's the title of our ebook we just put out, available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble . It's made of several articles from the Monthly  back in the Bush years. I formatted and typeset all the articles, which because I got to use the Atavist's tool was pretty easy—way easier than using LaTeX to do the Setwana grammar manual during back in South Africa. I honestly recommend it, as I was putting it together I read the articles several times, and there are some remarkably good ones in there. I particularly recommend "Why Conservatives Can't Govern," by Alan Wolfe, which is towards the end. I learned a lot putting the book together and self-publishing it, but that will have to wait for another post.

Since I've been walking to and from work a lot recently, and it takes about an hour each way, I've been burning through episodes of This American Life and Radiolab. I'd like to get back into the audiobook zone, but since the reader makes all the difference I'd like to ask the hive mind if there are any particular favorites you've got. Also, if you've got particularly good podcasts (aside from the above), that would be appreciated as well.

On the recommendation of Henry Farrell, I picked up Doug Henwood's Wall Street , and I agree with Farrell that it's really good. Here's a taste: In a soundbite, the U.S. financial system performs dismally at its advertised task, that of efficiently directing society’s savings towards their opti-mal investment pursuits. The system is stupefyingly expensive, gives terrible signals for the allocation of capital, and has surprisingly little to do with real investment. Most money managers can barely match market averages — and there’s evidence that active trading reduces performance rather than improving it — yet they still haul in big fees, and their brokers, big commissions (Lakonishok, Shleifer, and Vishny 1992). Over the long haul, almost all corporate capital expenditures are internally financed, through profits and depreciation allowances. And instead of promoting investment, the U.S. financial system seems to do quite the opposite; U.S. inves...

So, I'm heading off for a vacation for the next few days, so posting will be pretty light until next week. In the meantime I'd like to announce that I'll be putting a book out, probably sometime in the next several months. It's a collection of short stories from my father and myself. Longtime readers know that I've been posting my dad's stuff here for a long time, and it will be some of that material. It's partly to just get all that collected in the same place, but there will be some new stuff as well. It will be self-published (if you're a publisher, feel free to contact me), done as a family thing and to see how the system works. If you like good adventure stories, you'll like it. More news to follow as I finish compiling and editing. Happy Fourth everyone, and I hope all is well out there. As always, thanks for reading and commenting.

As regular readers are aware, I'm a huge fan of Chris Hayes. Accordingly, I went to his event at Politics and Prose last night (an hour early to get a good seat), and for the first time in I can't remember how long, bought a new, hardcover copy of a book I've already read for solidarity reasons. I wasn't disappointed. Hayes, as you might expect from a TV man, is very good at talking, and gave a good talk. I've already written a lot about his book, so I won't rehash the content, but it was well done. Somewhat more surprisingly, he was also very good at working the microphone, even leaning into it and dropping his voice to make a punchline standup comedian-style. And he was very kind and gracious at the signing, remembering my review of his book and complimenting my writing, which caused my brain to seize up like a flash-frozen halibut. Anyway, listening to one of the fans ahead of me in line last night I was reminded of the reason why I liked it so much. Not...

On Twitter Alec MacGillis graciously responded to my previous post , making the appropriate point that I had not addressed Caro's support for the filibuster. Here's the quote, from a WSJ  profile : In 2004, when Senate Republicans were threatening to end Democrats' filibustering of judicial nominees by implementing "the nuclear option," Kennedy called Mr. Caro "out of the blue" and asked if he would come to Washington, D.C., and explain to the freshman senators the importance of preserving the filibuster. After their joint lobbying effort succeeded, Kennedy asked Mr. Caro to introduce him for a speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. I agree, that's a foolish speech in hindsight, but I'm not sure we can take this at face value. Here's the thing. Caro says his books are about power, and he is well known for having an extremely  realistic view of how power actually operates in this country. His portrayals of Johnson and Robert M...

Alec MacGillis is not a fan of Caro's attachment to the "great man" theory of history: But it’s also been clear to me for some time now that Caro’s exhaustive, colorful depiction of Johnson’s rise to power in Washington has not exactly been helpful when it comes to our country’s weakness for the Great Man Theory of politics and history. How many times in the past few years did you hear pundits and liberals lamenting that Barack Obama was unable to get more of his agenda passed because he lacked the strong-arm, big-cojones gumption of ole LBJ? Never mind that the Congress of LBJ’s day was vastly less polarized by party (Southern Democrats had not yet flipped to Republican) or that the filibuster was reserved for only certain matters (say, blocking civil rights legislation) rather than as a matter of routine. No, all this country needs is a true ball-busting leader to save the day. Reading Caro's books and listening to him talk, it's definitely the case that he ...

Here's the video of last night's event with Robert Caro and Mike Allen. It was very good, despite what were mostly insipid DC insider questions from the insipid DC insider Allen. Caro was so charming and genuine and took Allen's dumbass questions so seriously that there was a great discussion almost in spite of the moderator. It was interesting to me that despite Allen's self-conscious attempts to be clever and witty, Caro was by far the funnier participant. He has this great self-effacing genuineness that is hard to find these days. Anyway, that's one big benefit of living in an important city. Furthermore, I got a copy of the book signed by the author!

Bruce Schneier, probably the most prominent critic of TSA and America's security theater madness, has written a book , not just on security, but about trust and our crisis of authority. It's surprisingly well-written and timely. I've started it and it's pretty good. You should check it out!

Felix Salmon was flipping through a recent book by David Rothkopf, and found some striking evidence for Chris Hayes' theory of rot in the meritocracy recently: Later there's a similar interview with Robert Rubin. Both Summers and Rubin are clearly brilliant people, and the products of the most prestigious educational institutions in the world. Summers entered MIT at 16, and was a tenured professor at Harvard by 28, one of the youngest of those in history. Rubin has degrees from Harvard, the London School of Economics, and Yale. Yet they both espouse beliefs that I am quite confident in labeling total horseshit. Am I so arrogant to think I'm smarter than these two? Nah. I bet either of them would whup me good on the SAT. These men are just being human. To admit that deregulation is a problem would be to say a large part of their lives' work--probably the most important part--was a terrible, catastrophic mistake. It's an extraordinary person indeed that wil...

The central problem of society is the problem of power. Any society much beyond subsistence level is too complex to governed without delegation. A leadership of some sort must be given power so that the basic functionality of government can be provided--security, transportation, etc. People ain't got time for that stuff. This means an elite must be developed, a class of people with extra power. The trouble is that power is dangerous. People tend to use it for their own benefit, especially if no one is stopping them. This is the thesis of Why Nations Fail : countries which cannot restrain their elites are robbed blind by them and remain poor. Their institutions are extractive . Successful countries, on the other hand, dole out power while restraining corruption and self-dealing. This well-delegated power allows the construction of complex public services: trains, highways, intercontinental ballistic missiles, spaceships, etc. Their institutions are inclusive . WNF  gives a fa...

Apparently Paul Krugman is going to be published in a reader called The Occupy Handbook , which made me think of a couple books that are perfect for a rebirth of the Occupy movement. 1. The Great Divergence , by Tim Noah. This isn't too polemical, it's just a good overview of inequality that digs deep into the details of just what is happening and how. 2. Why Nations Fail , by Acemoglu and Robinson. This is nominally a big-picture history book, but it gives a good, hard look a just why some governments suck and others don't. Suffice to say it's not hard to apply their thesis to the US. 3. Twilight of the Elites , by Chris Hayes. This is the best of the lot. It's nominally about how our meritocracy has become just another self-perpetuating elite concerned solely with their own power and money, but really it's a beautiful, fiery testament to what he calls the "fail decade." Nothing else I've read grasps our crumbling institutions half so well. ...

[ For a primer, check out Kevin Drum's critique  here and Mooney's response here . ] This is the latest from Chris Mooney, the man that brought us the book The Republican War on Science , which was quite good. This time he's trying to figure out why not just science denial but straight-up reality denial (e.g., birtherism) has taken such a firm hold on the right. I don't think this one is quite as good as TRWOS , but it's an admirable effort. The plain fact is that denialism is not just common on the right but mandatory . Look at what happened to Jon Huntsman. Mitt Romney has given in to it on climate. These are facts that cry out for an explanation, and Mooney offers a pretty convincing one on the merits. The argument is all heavily hedged, which is entirely appropriate given the infant state of the field, but basically it says that because conservatives are more closed, fixed, and certain in their views, they are more prone to the universal human traits of...

Check it out, three bucks for Desert Solitaire  or  The Monkey Wrench Gang . Good stuff! The first is still probably my favorite book (though, to be fair, most people I hand it to hate it).