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Book Review: The Expats

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A great CIA thriller set in Europe, which I conveniently read while in Paris: The Expats by Chris Pavone.

Mostly it’s a plot-driven page turner, but there were some juicy quotes, which I re-produce below:

Kate was taken aback by this excessive garrulousness. People who were too outgoing made her suspicious. She couldn’t help but presume that all the loud noise was created to hide quiet lies. And the more distinct a surface personality appeared, the more Kate was convinced that it was a veneer.

…

Conversations with Julia often became much more personal than Kate wanted. Julia wore her need for intimacy on her sleeve, practically begging Kate to open up to her. Despite Julia’s bluff of outgoing confidence, she was tremendously insecure. She’d been unlucky in love, unconfident in relationships, and uncomfortable in intimacy. She’d been lonely her whole life, much like Kate, until she’d chanced into Bill. But she was still operating on lonely-person principles, still worried that her happiness could be wrenched away at any moment, for reasons out of her control.

…

She was worried — no, it was beyond the uncertainty of worry; it was awareness — that this would cross some line in their marriage, a line that no one acknowledged until you were there on its precipice. You know the lines are there, you feel them: the things you don’t discuss. The sexual fantasies. The flirtations with other people. The deep-seated distrusts, misgivings, resentments. You go about your business, as far away from these lines as possible, pretending they’re not there. So when you eventually find yourself at one of these lines, your toe inching over, it’s not only shocking and horrifying, it’s banal. Because you’ve always been aware that the lines were there, where you were trying with all your might not to see them, knowing that sooner or later you would.

…

All people have secrets. Part of being human is having secrets, and being curious about other people’s secrets. Dirty fetishes and debilitating fascinations and shameful defeats and ill-begotten triumphs, humiliating selfishness and repulsive inhumanity. The horrible things that people have thought and done, the lowest points in their lives.

Chinese Prison Torture, 2013 Edition

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(That said, credits in World of Warcraft are valuable enough that Chinese prison guards reportedly force convicts to perform monotonous tasks within the game for 12-hour stretches at a time, building up credits which can then be sold for many times the guards’ official salary.)

That’s a parenthetical in Felix Salmon’s excellent discussion of the Bitcoin bubble and the future of currencies in general.

Subtle Inaccuracies and Reader Trust

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The most recent Vanity Fair has a long piece on Facebook and their new algorithims and processes for serving better ads. In it, there’s this paragraph:

Moreover, the company has created a computer framework that allows it to constantly revise the Facebook site. At any time of day, hundreds of different versions of Facebook are running on the Internet—with a changed color here, a moved button there—and the user response to each variation is measured. And the same is done with advertising. Through what executives call A/B tests, a company can run different ads at the same time, have Facebook engineers measure the response, then ditch whichever ones had less of an impact.

Vanity Fair is a general interest publication, so it’s fine that they explain A/B tests to the uninitiated. But the piece loses credibility with a single phrase: “…what executives call A/B tests..” Wait, did Facebook execs invent A/B tests? No way. The sentence should have read: “Through what’s called A/B tests…” so as not to imply that A/B testing is in any way unique to Facebook.

It’s a tiny word thing. But it caused me pause, and made me not trust the rest of the article in terms of insight. To be sure, had the thrust of the piece been a profile of an exec or an examination of the company’s public policy efforts or any number of other things — it’d be a forgivable slip up. But it in fact centers on the company’s ability to serve targeted ads and monetize user behavior, and the A/B testing point is held up as evidence of innovation. And the author subtly overstates the newness and interestingness of that point, which conveniently supports his broader thesis. I ask myself, “What else could he be getting wrong?” and switch from reading to skimming.

Quick Impressions of Paris, 2013 Edition

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Some quick, mostly banal impressions after a week spent hanging out with a couple good friends in Paris:

  • As a general point about travel, I prefer nature and outdoors to old buildings, churches, and museums. I am in awe when absorbing a tremendous nature scene, whereas being in the presence a church with great historical meaning doesn’t do much for me. But still, it’s hard to complain about Paris as a city. It’s an A-list destination for a reason: beautiful, functional, full of pretty people, and super easy to get around in.
  • Everything felt small for my oversized body. The chairs at the cafes, the tables at the cafes, the hotel rooms, the apartments, the cars, the sidewalks.
  • The trip was primarily about spending time with two friends. To that end, I arranged few meetings or other commitments, which allowed me to stay on Pacific Time while there — my friend (from New York) and I went to bed at 4 or 5 AM, and woke up at around 12 noon. I experienced basically no jet lag when I came back.
  • A highlight was going for runs along the Seine river listening to music on my iPod — so beautiful, so relaxing.
  • The Airbnb apartment in the heart of Saint Germaine worked out well. It was my first Airbnb rental as a traveler; I’d do it again in a heartbeat.

Bottom Line: Paris in the spring is totally easy. An excellent mini-vacation spending quality time with good friends.

Quote of the Day

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“If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.” – E.B. White