Books and Literature – The Scholar's Stage

Book Notes: Stoner (1965)

20 June, 2025Books and Literature, Possessions For All Time

NEITHER THE MALE AUTHORS NOR THE MALE READERS most preoccupied with middle age are inclined to face it cleanly. The male author depicts the mid-life crisis to escape his own. His novels and screenplays are an adolescent retort to the anxieties of ease. Thus the implausible sexscapades, couture bloodletting, and whiny retreats into solipsism that have defined so much of American literature over the last seven decades. In this tradition, there is little difference between a literary and a demeaning depiction of the middle class man.

John Williams’ 1965 novel Stoner is different.

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Science Proceeds One Question at a Time

01 January, 2025Books and Literature, Nature Red in Tooth and Claw, Small and Simple Things

MIDWAY through his 900 page history of biology, zoologist Ernst Mayr considers the problem posed by Alfred Wallace. Wallace was a contemporary of Charles Darwin who independently developed a theory of speciation by means of natural selection. By the time Wallace came on the scene Darwin had been sitting on his evolutionary theory for two decades. Reading Wallace’s 1858 paper “On the Tendency of Species to Form Varities” spooked Darwin. He did not want to be scooped. Within a year Darwin had rushed his material into an “abstract which… must necessarily be imperfect” as it only gave “the general conclusions” of his theory, and offered only a “few facts in illustration” to support them. We know this abstract well: it was published as The Origin of Species.

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The Silicon Valley Canon: On the Paıdeía of the American Tech Elite

21 August, 2024Books and Literature, Community, Complex Systems, The Cybernetic Web

I often draw a distinction between the political elites of Washington DC and the industrial elites of Silicon Valley with a joke: in San Francisco reading books, and talking about what you have read, is a matter of high prestige. Not so in Washington DC. In Washington people never read books—they just write them.

To write a book, of course, one must read a good few. But the distinction I drive at is quite real. In Washington, the man of ideas is a wonk. The wonk is not a generalist. The ideal wonk knows more about his or her chosen topic than you ever will. She can comment on every line of a select arms limitation treaty, recite all Chinese human rights violations that occurred in the year 2023, or explain to you the exact implications of the new residential clean energy tax credit—but never all at once.

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Soviets, Cybernetics, and China: A Reading Program

01 July, 2023Books and Literature, Complex Systems, Futuristics, History, Russia, Small and Simple Things, Things I Do Other Than Blogging

Two years ago I ran a small reading group that met over zoom. Our reading topic: Leninism. Curious about the claims that modern Chinese politics are an outgrowth of Marxist ideas and practice yet feeling insufficiently familiar with the Leninist political tradition to properly judge its influence on contemporary Chinese politics, I organized a group of China-watching politicos to read both classic Marxist texts and historical studies of the Soviet Union and Maoist China.

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Every Book I Read in 2022

01 February, 2023Books and Literature

My annual list of books arrives a bit later than usual. However, this delay is in some ways fortunate. Now my list will not be seen as an extended comment on the Lex Friedman reading list discourse. Those not on Twitter will have heard little about this. I envy you: we would all be better off if none of us had seen Friedman tweet out a proposed list of books to read in 2023—some as simple as The Little Prince, others as long and complex as Brothers Karazamov—and the avalanche of snobbery that followed. The entire brouhaha strikes me as a strange upper middle class status game. It seems that an attachment to books normally assigned in 10th grade English is the literary equivalent of glitter mascara or an overcooked steak. All three belong on that select list of items the commentariat can gleefully make fun without fear of “being the asshole.”

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Has Technological Progress Stalled?

02 August, 2022Books and Literature, Complex Systems, Futuristics, History, Wealth

Or Comments on the Thiel Thesis, Part I

Last week Mary Harrington published a long interview with Peter Thiel in the online magazine Unherd. Much of her article centers on Thiel’s conviction that meaningful technological progress stopped a good half century ago. This view is not unique to Thiel. In many ways it is the starting point for the entire “Progress Studies” movement. The Thielites and the Progress Studies folk take this shared premise to different end points, but both deem scientific inertia as the defining feature of the 21^st century. Both also see technological and material stagnation as the root source of myriad ills tearing at America’s social fabric.

Here is Thiel’s description of the problem, as written up by Harrington:

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A Guide Map for Reading the East Asian Canon

01 July, 2022Books and Literature, Culture, History, Japan, The Middle Kingdom

Readers may remember my stab at a global Great Books list. Recently a reader contacted me asking for guidance: they wanted to read through the books on the “East Asian” section of that list, but did not believe he had the proper historical knowledge to understand or contextualize what they were reading. What do I recommend they read to make sense of the list?

What follows will not make sense if you have not looked at that original post. Here is what I told him:

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The Rise and Fall of Civilizations: A Reader Course

13 January, 2022Arabia, Bactria, Bharat, Books and Literature, Complex Systems, Culture, Diplomacy, Dogs of War, Europa Regina, History, Narrative, Near East, On Humanity, Political Theory, Romans and Grecians, Small and Simple Things, Southeast Asia, Steppe and Sown, The Middle Kingdom, Wealth

A Scholar’s Stage forum member reports that he and a friend recently finished reading John Darwin’s After Tamerlane. Enraptured by Darwin’s account of flourish and fall, they ask what else they might read to understand the rise and decline of peoples and powers over the course of human history.

In my mind there are four central parts to this tale:

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Every Book I Read in 2021

06 January, 2022Books and Literature, Russia, The Middle Kingdom

Every year I post a list of every book I read the year previous, with my ten favorites bolded.. As in those posts, I list the books in the approximate order in which I finished them. Some of these books I read bit by bit over several months. Others I finished the day I started them. All include a url, but the ten best (according to nothing but my own subjective judgement) are bolded and given a link. I only count books that I finished for the first time this year as eligible for “ten best books of the year.” A more condensed list of books that I started but read only in excerpt (or did not finish) can be found at the bottom of the post.

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Learning From Our Defeat: The Assumptions of Donald Rumsfeld

07 September, 2021Bactria, Bargaining and Balancing, Books and Literature, Dogs of War, History, Iraq

One hopes for statesmen chastened by defeat. In this world of our hopes, the authors of catastrophe would discuss their mistakes with the humility, introspection, and sense of disgrace these mistakes deserve. Decisions that led to death—death in its thousands and hundreds of thousands—would be examined with probing honesty. The decision makers behind them would be seized with a fierce guilt and urgency. They would quest to understand the nature of their errors. They would incessantly press upon us the lessons of experience, gripped with fear that the next generation might repeat their calamities.

One can imagine such a statesman, chastened by defeat. Douglas Feith is not he.

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