Notes from three books I read recently:
One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger by Matthew Yglesias, read by Matthew Yglesias.
I enjoyed this book, without investing too much of myself into it. This is partly because I had the sense – from interviews he gave about the book in 2020, I think – that Yglesias had used the premise (the idea that we should roughly triple the US population) as a good-enough container into which any number of compelling and thought-provoking policy positions could be put. I enjoyed these policy positions, and was generally inclined to accept, at least for the purposes of discussion, Yglesias’ larger premise as well, and it was enjoyable to spend a couple of hours listening to his nerdy and slightly overeager thoughts on housing, transit, and technological development.
There’s also this bigger thing, which is that I don’t see how liberal policy proposals can survive in a context where liberals are seen as anti-patriotic. And Yglesias’ premise strikes me as directed squarely at this problem: He bases his whole book on an idea that is jingoistic, prideful, and a little bellicose.
Whatever you think of maximizing growth (and, in particular, birth) rates, Yglesias’ argument is conveniently agnostic to how that growth is achieved. If you’re inclined to be worried about women’s health and nervous about policies directed towards increasing family sizes, Yglesias is happy to talk instead about dramatically increasing immigration – and offers thought provoking (if unlikely) ideas about how that might be achieved. And even if you rejected his premise outright, much of One Billion Americans could be reinterpreted as a series of suggestions for improving general quality of life: Build more housing, prioritize clean mass transit over privately-owned motor vehicles, and generally enact policies that make it easier to start and grow families.
Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves by Nicola Twilley.
I’ve already published two things about this book: First a field trip report from when Nicola and I visited a commercial refrigerator store in the Bowery, and then an interview that SOW’s Reading Group had with Nicola a few months later.
I learned that Nicola was writing this book some time before it was published; I believe this is the first time in my life that I’ve had that experience. It felt special: Every so often I’d see that she had written a byline in the New Yorker or the Times, and if it was about cold stuff then I’d wonder how it would fit into the book. If it wasn’t about cold stuff, I’d wonder how it fit into the rest of her career — why it grabbed her attention, whether it helped her round out her journalistic or literary skill sets, how it impacted her relationships with her editors.
I imagine it would be helpful to regularly write in a more diverse set of publications, and about a more diverse set of topics. I also imagine that it would be helpful to have editors in the first place, and for that matter to have any role whatsoever (notwithstanding John McPhee’s mildly disparaging description of what it means to be a staff writer at the New Yorker) in a publication that’s larger than yourself. These are things that I thought about while reading Frostbite — and things that I think about while I read more or less anything, these days.
When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut, translated by Adrian Nathan West.
I didn’t particularly enjoy reading this book. I was looking forward to it, and was curious to learn more about its structure, and the way in which it blurred history and fiction. The first chapter was, per the acknowledgements at the end of the book, completely accurate to history save one paragraph. It was also completely horrifying and quite intense, dealing as it does with chemical warfare, mass suicide, and the Third Reich. The second chapter is no sunnier, nor the third, and as I reached the final chapter I found myself grappling with the reality that while I knew that much of what I was reading was deeply fictionalized, the historical people and events which inspired it were just as bleak and disgusting.
That said, I would at least gently recommend the book to anyone who has looked at, for instance, the Wikipedia page for Erwin Schrödinger or his eponymous cat. For to the extent that quantum superposition confuses me (and it does confuse me), I am ultimately distracted from the couple of paragraphs on how much of a sexual predator he was. Labatut, though, takes the liberty to dive into these headfirst, telling a story that isn’t meant to be precise but does seem to be accurate. More importantly, though, it’s memorable.
When We Cease to Understand the World concludes in a way that I didn’t expect, and I’m left with a somewhat mystical sense of the world, and knowledge. Labatut seems to have put his finger on something about the inaccessibility of history, and I think that the book’s structure — and the discomfort that reading it brought me — may have been instrumental to this. So while I didn’t enjoy reading it, I do appreciate having done so.