Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro is a wonderful novel about a child’s Artificial Friend. Perfect for this current AI moment — even though it was authored before the current AI craze. It’s sensitive and thought provoking. NPR’s review called it “a masterpiece that will make you think about life, mortality, the saving grace of love: in short, the all of it.”

From The Atlantic’s review:

All fiction is an exercise in world-building, but science fiction lays new foundations, and that means shattering the old ones. It partakes of creation, but also of destruction. Klara trails a radiance that calls to mind the radiance also shed by Victor Frankenstein’s creature. He is another intelligent newborn in awe of God’s resplendence, until a vengeful rage at his abusive creator overcomes him. In Klara and the Sun, Ishiguro leaves us suspended over a rift in the presumptive order of things. Whose consciousness is limited, ours or a machine’s? Whose love is more true? If we ever do give robots the power to feel the beauty and anguish of the world we bring them into, will they murder us for it or lead us toward the light?

Vladimir by Julia May Jones is examines the marital dynamics of a post-menopausal middle aged couple, reveals much about the nature of desire, and casts nuanced judgment on the moral crusading of young people ostensibly upset about on-campus sexual shenanigans. The novel’s protagonist is a woman professor who’s aging and thus losing her powers of attraction. But she still desires others — namely, a male colleague in her department. Meanwhile, she grapples with being the other half of marriage where the man, with her tacit permission, slept around a bit, but now is under fire from ex lovers who allege he abused his power (while she maintains, in her husband’s defense, that it was his power that attracted their naive student souls in the first place). Wonderfully drawn characters throughout.

Some Kindle highlights below:

I remembered my thirties, as a young mother, meeting young fathers, talking about where their sons or daughters were going to elementary school, or whether they were going to try out karate, and how thrilled it made me to see them adjusting their hair or clothing subconsciously: a nervous nod to the powers of attraction I possessed at the time.

I felt a growing excitement and wildness creep up into my nervous system—a prickly awareness that started in my bones and radiated outward. I thought of Vladimir Vladinski using his large, rough hands to hold my hair back from my face. On the far side of our property, behind the chain-link fence that enclosed the yard, the eyes of a stray cat or a fox reflected the porch light. They glowed like the eyes of a demon.

When I was reading in the library, I was overwhelmed with a mixture of genuine admiration and seething jealousy. The book was funny, clear, awake, vivid. The prose was spare but the voice was not sacrificed in his exact word choice. It felt both like life and beyond life. He was a truly great writer, and though this book, an epigrammatic roman à clef, might not have catapulted him into fame, I had no doubt, reading it, that he would have it all—the bestseller; the interviews; the columns; the articles not only about his writing but about the decoration of his home, his fitness routines, his office, his food consumption, his work habits and sleep habits and opinions on politics.

I felt I knew about the kind of life that involved a begrudging and humorous acceptance of sadness as the invariable state of experience.

Perhaps it was this idea of self-expression and this thought that if we were fully to release this sadness, or if we were to alter it too much—if we were to give up all the obsessions and anxieties that caused us pain—then we would become a kind of person we disdained, someone content with an abstract idea of the littleness of their lives. For our lives were, as writers, essentially little by nature. Writers have to lead little lives, otherwise you can’t find time for writing. Was depression simply a hanging on to grandeur?

I was too happy that we were speaking again to let her annoyance feel like anything other than the feeble blows that daughters lob against their mothers to make sure they’ll still be loved, even at their most peevish.

“Can I sit next to you?” I asked her. In an effort to teach her about the independence of her own body, I had, from the time she was a small child, asked her whenever I wanted to kiss her or lift her up or give her a hug. My mother and sisters had put their hands all over me, I was their little pet to poke and prod at. I didn’t ever want Sidney to feel that way—to feel as though her body belonged to me, or to anyone.

I also wanted to keep my own secrets. It was a pact I held with myself, a game. If I didn’t tell anybody about certain things in my life (notably the things that I would most like to divulge) then, like the men who hold themselves back from orgasm to preserve their life force, I would accumulate some inexplicable strength.

He dressed as an afterthought—I am sure his wife bought shirts and slacks for him in bulk and he accepted them like a prisoner accepts their uniform.

For so long, this was how it felt with John. If he came to me lightheartedly, I would want seriousness. If he came to me gravely, I would feel irritated. If he came to me lovingly, I would react icily. If I came to him in supplication, he would mock me. If I came to him in strength, he would ignore me. We were so pitted against each other. Perhaps because we were so desperate to hang on to our own identities, our own separate I’s. We insisted on living our own lives in our own minds and could never truly merge.

No wonder that I perceived, mostly from their short stories, that my students found nothing more romantic than lusting after a platonic member of their social group.

“I love your clip,” I said. Awkward around most women, I had trained myself to notice something on their person I could compliment. Compliments made you supplicant, equal, and master all at once. Supplicant because you are below, admiring; equal because you have the same taste; and master because you are bestowing your approval. In my life I’ve been wounded more by compliments than I have by insults. (Once when I asked an acquaintance what they thought of my second novel they said, “I can tell you worked so hard on it.”)

She had even, unlined skin and straight white teeth. She had attended the most prestigious writing program in the country, and her work would be better reviewed than mine ever was. She was the survivor of great trauma, she had something to say. I was jealous of every bone in her body, every moment of her history. She was acting wildly, I was jealous of that—jealous of her extremity, the fact that she was drawn to John, for who was the baddest boy on campus right now, who was the ultimate taboo?

As enthralled as I was with Vladimir, he took too much melodramatic ownership over Cynthia’s psychological well-being. He acted as though it were his burden and his alone. I felt umbrage, as a fellow female, that Vlad insisted on bringing up her troubles nearly whenever she was mentioned. It smelled of condescension and a gooey fetishizing of her suffering.

I turned out the lights and lay in the darkness. At first it seemed like real sleep might elude me, but I eventually slid off. The air coming in from the open window was cool, the lake water lapping.

I remembered a fellow cohort in my graduate program all those years ago—male and tall and reasonably attractive—who told me he pursued ugly women because he was fascinated by the grateful way they made love.

Or we could relocate to Mexico, where our dollars would last forever, and live that yellow-dusted expatriate life, wearing linen and hats and crisping in the sun.

A young Walter Isaacson in 1992 published a wonderful biography of Henry Kissinger, which I read this week. It’s a sweeping history of Kissinger’s life and his consequential years in public service. Despite its level of detail, Isaacson writes lucidly with the skills of a journalist, so there’s good forward momentum over the course of the 800+ pages even for a hobbyist like me. You walk away with a deep view into both the man and the era he shaped. Highly recommended. (The Richard Holbrooke biography is another compelling look at a statesman who shaped our current foreign policy.)

I came to this biography after spending time in Cambodia and Vietnam, where Kissinger’s legacy looms large. His decisions with regards to both countries play a central role in the biography. My other personal interest here is Chile, where I lived more than a decade ago — another country where Kissinger exercised arguably problematic moral judgment.

The biography is balanced, according to people more expert than me who reviewed the book when it came out 20 years ago. And, all in all, it’s devastating to Kissinger. It’s obvious why Kissinger refused to speak with Isaacson for several years after the biography came out.

The theme that would recur throughout Kissinger’s career: the tension that often exists, at least in his view, between morality and realism. This is Isaacson’s bottom line:

But Kissinger’s power-oriented realism and focus on national interests faltered because it was too dismissive of the role of morality. The secret bombing and then invasion of Cambodia, the Christmas bombing of Hanoi, the destabilization of Chile—these and other brutal actions betrayed a callous attitude toward what Americans like to believe is the historic foundation of their foreign policy: a respect for human rights, international law, democracy, and other idealistic values. The setbacks Kissinger encountered as a statesman, and the antagonism he engendered as a person, stemmed from the perceived amorality of his geopolitical calculations.

…Kissinger’s legacy turned out to be one of brilliance more than solidity, of masterful structures built of bricks that were made without straw.

On the man himself and his mind and personality, a few excerpts from Isaacson:

“Kissinger came across as a chameleon—emphasizing different shadings to different listeners and attempting to ingratiate himself to one person by disparaging another. It was more than a negotiating tactic; it was a character flaw. His style with the Arabs and Israelis was not all that different from his style within the White House or at Washington dinner parties. In order to create a sense of intimacy, to hornswoggle as well as to charm, he shared denigrating confidences about other people. Intellectually he realized that people compared notes. But instinctively he never understood that swapping tales about encounters with Kissinger—and perhaps exaggerating the loose comments he made—was a prime amusement from Araby to Georgetown. In fact, rather than being a master manipulator, Kissinger seemed quite a maladroit one. If he had been better at it, fewer people would have accused him of it.”

“He had a fantastically strong ego,” said Professor Wylie. “Exceptionally pompous,” according to Schelling. “More arrogant and vain than any man I’ve ever met,” was Hoffmann’s first impression. Yet each developed complex, mixed feelings about him. He was, after all, a respected friend with a mind of undisputed brilliance. His personality, however annoying, was at least always worthy of fascination.

Rockefeller knew how to make people feel important, how to create an aura of fellowship, how to listen, and how to be frank and straightforward about his wishes in a way that put people at ease. Kissinger mastered none of these attributes, but respected them all.

Gelb would thenceforth consider Kissinger to be “the typical product of an authoritarian background—devious with his peers, domineering with his subordinates, obsequious to his superiors.”

With an acidic tone, Nixon spoke of Kissinger’s fascination with the celebrity set and his emotional instability when hit by good and then bad news.

I thought Kissinger’s own answer to the question “Are you shy?” was interesting, in his own words:

“Fairly so. But as compensation I think I’m pretty well balanced. You see, there are those who depict me as a mysterious, tormented character, and those who depict me as an almost cheerful fellow who’s always smiling, always laughing. Both those images are incorrect. I’m neither one nor the other. I’m . . . I won’t tell you what I am. I’ll never tell anyone.”

His relationship with critics was interesting: “He was drawn to his detractors like a moth to a flame. He craved their approval and felt compelled to convert or charm them.”

Overall, the theme is an unbelievable level of paranoia and secrecy coupled with high IQ brilliance and a historic grasp of grand strategy and negotiation.

The secret bombings of Cambodia, kept from congress and the American people, were clearly bad, and it’s stunning that Kissinger hasn’t profoundly apologized for his role in this:

• “In the history of civilization, few countries have ever endured a greater hell than the holocaust that engulfed Cambodia in the 1970s. The blame falls foremost on the genocidal Khmer Rouge communists, who took power in 1975. But the creation of the killing fields had many causes, and there was more than enough blood to stain many hands. The American share of the blame, and Kissinger’s, arises not from insidious intent, but from a moral callousness that placed America’s perceived needs in Vietnam above what would be best for a vulnerable neighboring nation.”
• “Even in this most genocidal of all centuries, the Khmer Rouge stand on a par with the Nazis as being the most murderous of all. When they took over Cambodia in 1975, its population (after five hundred thousand or so deaths in the war that began at the time of the 1970 invasions) stood at about 8 million. By the time they were ousted in 1979, more than 3 million had died, many of them brutally, in a land turned into killing fields.” (Angelina Jolie’s film is a good one on this topic.)

The Christmas bombing in Vietnam – another moral atrocity: “The December 1972 decision to bomb targets in the urban areas of North Vietnam was an action that should and does haunt the United States, and Kissinger, to this day.”

The Middle East is a different story. Kissinger’s success at cultivating the Egyptians and the Israelis, among others, was remarkable, and Isaacson tells those stories in great detail, too.

Some other descriptions of other characters I enjoyed:

• “He is the compleat cosmopolitan, urbane without swagger, self-centered without smugness.”
• “He was equally at home in philosophic sweeps, historical analysis, tactical probing, light repartee”
• “Discreet yet forthright, unflappable and able to keep human foibles in perspective, with a balanced and wise mind rather than a brilliant conceptual one, the air force general was decidedly different from his boss, which made both of them comfortable.”

Other random highlights from Kindle:

Kissinger’s ego, combined with the seriousness with which he took himself, enhanced his reputation for arrogance. He always seemed busy with something gravely important, impatient with such trivialities as making small talk in the halls or advising his students.

When challenges arose, Kissinger became intellectually engaged, almost obsessively so; Nixon became detached, almost eerily so. Kissinger’s mind mastered details; Nixon remained aloof from even some of the major components of issues he faced. Kissinger’s analytic lucidity took him straight to the core of any problem; Nixon’s more intuitive approach led him to roll a problem around for hours on end as he brooded on various conflicting options.

During his five and a half years in office, Nixon’s admiration for Kissinger would gradually become more infected by jealousy and suspicions of disloyalty. With no personal affection to serve as a foundation for their relationship, what had been a love-hate alliance eventually tilted toward the latter. As the president’s dependency on Kissinger grew, his resentment and bitterness increased.

William Safire was summoned back to write the speech. He was in New Orleans watching Dallas beat Miami in the 1972 Super Bowl when suddenly, as if he were an obstetrician, the public address system paged him to call his office. “This has to be absolutely top secret, but get back here fast,” said Lawrence Higby when Safire called. If it was so secret, Safire asked in response, why had he been paged before eighty thousand fans? Worse than that, Higby conceded, the page had been picked up on television, so 60 million others had heard it. Safire later noted: “We agreed that nobody would suspect I was being called back for a secret assignment because not even the Presidential staff of a banana republic would bumble like that.”

The line between diplomacy and duplicity, like that between charm and hypocrisy, is a fine one.

Some recent reading. My intro in italics; direct highlights from the book follow.

Index of Self-Destructive Acts

by Christopher Beha

A wonderfully rich novel encompassing “I haven’t thought about it in a long time, but Bill James developed a stat. It adds up balks, hit batsmen, wild pitches, errors—all the things a pitcher does that are entirely in his control, that don’t require the batter to do anything at all. The Index of Self-Destructive Acts.”

My Kindle highlights are pasted below; all Beha’s words:

Her banking friends knew that interesting people—a few novelists and poets, perhaps a painter or playwright, along with the usual collection of journalists and media personalities—would be there. The interesting people were drawn in turn by proximity to wealth. (For painters and poets, nothing was more interesting than real money.)

– 

As always during such moments, cameras roved about the stands, training themselves on excitable fans and projecting their faces onto the jumbotron. The spectator briefly became the event. What followed was something Frank had watched with puzzlement ever since these enormous electronic scoreboards had started to appear in every arena and stadium. For most of the fans caught on camera, the thirty, forty, fifty thousand others looking up at the screen were the biggest audience they’d ever have. This incited a strange dilemma: if you looked into the lens and properly played the part of screaming celebrant, the camera would linger on the performance, but you would never see it; alternatively, if you looked up at the screen to witness your public moment, you saw only a face looking distractedly up at the screen until the camera hurried on to someone who would better inhabit the role.

– 

His enthusiasm was so guileless that it could only be laughed at or urged along, and she decided on the latter.

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“The sophisticated view basically amounts to insisting that God exists while admitting that his existence doesn’t change anything. You want to believe in that God, fine with me. For all I know, maybe there is this pulsing invisible world beneath or above or within the physical world, but if it doesn’t actually do anything in this world, it might as well not exist. If it does do something, we ought to be able to see it, to measure it.”

– 

But when it came to the profile, everything he’d learned about working felt useless. The rules were entirely different for the magazine. It was an odd paradox: the work had to be better to appear in print, though it had a fraction of the website’s readership and the web was all anyone ever talked about. Perhaps the very fact that print stories couldn’t be measured by their Teeser score forced people to hold them to a higher standard while also taking for granted that they didn’t actually matter. Print, he’d heard Blakeman tell someone, was where quality went to die. If he’d known this in advance, he wouldn’t have insisted on including these longer assignments in his contract, but he hadn’t known, and now he needed to produce. 

– 

Control over our passions—continence, the ancients called it—is what makes a productive civilization possible. How much of Western thought, going back to Plato, has been dedicated to overcoming our animal urges, helping reason to maintain the upper hand? By all means control them, Margo responded. Just know that they’re there. Or have you got no passions to master?

– 

She wasn’t complaining. That passion was not among Sam’s great qualities was sometimes a private disappointment to her—though it also had its advantages. She didn’t have to force herself into the mood at all hours to make sure she was keeping him satisfied. She didn’t fear the day when he would stop finding her sufficiently alluring and leave her for someone younger or prettier. She knew girls who took cheating men as just a part of life, but Lucy never gave the possibility a thought.

– 

The sun was setting by the time they arranged themselves around the long wooden table. Orange and pink light seeped out spectacularly from the water and the trees. Lucy suspected that Frank had been waiting for this striking display before letting them sit for the meal. He seemed to have a great instinct for presentation. He took the head of the table and insisted that she sit next to him. “What did you think of your husband’s profile?” he asked. It was rather ingenious: a question about himself disguised as a question about her husband that might almost have been a question about her. She recognized a chance to test her commitment to honesty. “He went far too easy on you.” She gave the remark the tone of a joke, and Doyle laughed eagerly.

– 

“You statheads want formulas that will settle every argument, but these arguments can’t be settled. One day you’ll succeed in objectively answering every question that can be objectively answered, and we’ll still be left with everything that actually matters. We’ll see that the things that can’t be proven are the only things worth talking about in the first place.

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No emotion was less willing to appear on demand than a sense of the sublime.

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This was all so typical of Frank, who did what he wanted when he wanted but could be irremediably wounded if someone else exercised the least bit of contrary will.

– 

Most people raised the subject as a kind of test. Either Justin was meant to prove his loyalty by defending Frank or he was meant to prove his integrity by disavowing him. His honest answer—a man he cared about had said something hateful, which had hurt Justin to hear but hadn’t made him stop caring about that man—was bound to disappoint in either case.

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She was making the very mistake that Eisen had warned him about—judging the unpolished surface instead of the truth at the core.

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In Amy’s view, you didn’t spend several afternoons a week walking around aimlessly with a person you didn’t want to fuck, no matter how good the conversation.

– 

(This last was meant to sound not cold but irreverent. She refused to take too seriously the desperate dance of an aging satyr. If she didn’t stay light on her feet, she was apt to get trampled.)

– 

Margo looked at the email address and imagined hitting send. She told herself it had been a terrible mistake, a technological cautionary tale. An astonishing bit of carelessness. She hadn’t meant Richard any harm, she’d just wanted to be left alone. She would never have forwarded the email to this address on purpose. If there were only some way to unsend it, she would give anything to make it happen, but the past could not be rewritten. She savored briefly this delicious regret over something she hadn’t even done, and just when it started going stale in her mouth, she clicked send.

– 

So it was almost a relief to hear Lucy lie. He knew that she was a good person; he was sure of it. If she was lying to him, this meant that lying to your spouse did not necessarily make you bad.

– 

Of course she suspected the truth, but he might still be able to convince her otherwise. On the other hand, she might suspect quite a bit more than the truth, and if he lied now he might never convince her how little had actually happened.

– 

She thought she was about to cry, and she didn’t want to do it in front of the girls. She knew they would be perfectly sympathetic, but she didn’t want their sympathy at the moment.

– 

She already knew that she would be a wreck the next day, but she didn’t really mind. Krista and Danielle made it seem as though hungover mornings—sitting around in pajamas; watching TV; ordering bacon, egg, and cheese sandwiches from the deli on the corner; complaining how terrible you felt while laughing about what had happened the night before—were the real point of it all, that this business of the party was just a necessary preliminary.

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She imagined herself in forty years being like her father—a distinguished figure in her field who was nonetheless haunted by the realization that she had not done her real work, that she had wasted all her time. She didn’t even know what her real work was, but she knew it wasn’t teaching Byron to undergraduates.

– 

You couldn’t plan your endings out in advance. Often you couldn’t even recognize them when they happened. If her family was indeed over, it had ended some time ago, when Kit went off to prison, or when Frank fell down in the backwoods, or on the day of the Ballpark Incident, when Margo lost faith in her father. It had ended when Eddie went off to war.

– 

Everything was always ending, and nothing simply ended outright.

– 

“Listen, the next little patch is going to be pretty rough for you. But there’s something you need to remember.” “What’s that?” Waxworth asked. For the first time that day, Blakeman’s old smile came back. As angry as Waxworth was, he found the sight of it comforting. “Everyone loves a redemption story.”

– 

There had been other opportunities over the years, but their life was so comfortable. He traveled with Brzezinski to Beijing, with Baker to Berlin. The great men of the world wanted his ear and eagerly offered him theirs. How easy to think of himself as great, rather than just a spectator to greatness.

World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments

by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

A fun and quirky sort of book that explains the joys of unusual animals. Full of fun facts.

My Kindle highlights are pasted below; all Nezhukumatathil’s words:

The narwhal’s “horn” is actually a tooth with about 10 million nerve endings—a loooong, helix-spiraled tooth that pokes through the upper left “lip” into the chilly arctic ocean. It’s one of only two teeth they’ll ever get in their lifetimes.

–

Scientists believe that a narwhal can make up to 1,000 “clicks” per second that can be then transmitted out in narrow or wide rays to search for food or avoid ice. The tusk is also a sensory wand—it is sensitive to salt levels of the ocean and temperature changes, too. The tooth is surrounded by a soft and porous outer layer and filled with a dense inner core packed with delicate nerve endings connected to the brain.

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Who are these toothy creatures’ predators? Orcas and the occasional polar bear sometimes hunt baby narwhals. When orcas go after an entire pod, the narwhals just dive, dive, dive—they can survive at almost five thousand feet below sea level.

– 

This smell is basically what I imagine emanates from the bottom of a used diaper pail left out in the late August sun, after someone has also emptied a tin of sardines and a bottle of blue cheese salad dressing on top and left it there to sit for a day or three. But that smell—and the deep, meaty red of the spathe—is what attracts insects to pollinate the flower before it goes dormant for several years, folding back up into itself.

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In those moments I held it, how many things it might have felt or known about me. Could it sense the love and exhilaration I felt for it or my sheer despair once I realized it was dying in my hands? I only know that I had never been looked at, consumed, or questioned so carefully by another being.

– 

To get to this intensely colored fruit, we begin with one of the most ethereal displays of blossoming I have ever witnessed. The flowers bloom in full for just one evening. That means they have one precious night to be pollinated by a bat or bee, and turn the flower into a dragon fruit. Otherwise the six-inch, greenish-white bloom wilts by sunrise—a whisper of heat and bat wing rattling the crumpled, pale blossom.

– 

The ones who move the most succeed in finding mates in a dance of mimicry and rhythm that is marvelous—especially in gatherings of upward of several hundred thousand birds. It’s a search for the right partner who wants to step together through one of the longest bird lives on the planet: about fifty or so years together.

– 

Under a brilliant moon, and unbeknownst to us, the darkened world silvers and shimmers from pink and ebony wings, a small thunder. We can’t possibly hear such an astonishing wind while we try to keep in step with our small dances on this earth. But we should try. We should try.

– 

Ribbon eels are all born jet black males—they are protandric, changing to female only when necessary to reproduce.

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If while you are scuba diving a ribbon eel happens to wriggle and flick its way over you, you might not even see it—its underbelly is perfectly camouflaged against the refracted sky above.

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These newts are one of the only amphibians to contain a ferromagnetic mineral in their bodies, and that, combined with their incredible capacity to memorize sun- and starlight patterns to return to their original pond waters, make them an animal on par with salmon for their excellent homing capabilities.

Such a Fun Age

by Kiley Reid

Entertaining and thought provoking story. Easy to read. Highly recommend.

Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family

by Robert Kolker

Sad yet ultra informative story about one family wrecked by mental illness.

My Kindle highlights are pasted below; all Kolker’s words:

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In the 1950s and 1960s, it became hard to find any emotional or mental disorder that was not, in one way or another, attributed by therapists to the actions of the patient’s mother. Autism was blamed on “refrigerator mothers” who failed to show enough affection to their infants. Obsessive-compulsive disorder was blamed on problems in the second to third year of life, clashing with the mother around toilet training. The public conception of madness became hopelessly intertwined with the idea of the mother-as-monster.

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Going back even further, of course, that idea of whatever society deems to be mental illness sharing the same wellspring as the creative, artistic impulse has been with us for centuries: the artist as iconoclast and truth-teller, the only sane one in an insane world.

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At Dorado Beach, Rosenthal declared that biology, not proximity to people with a history of schizophrenia, appeared to explain nearly every single documented instance of the illness. Where you grew up, or the people who raised you, seemed to have nothing to do with it at all. On the whole, families with a history of schizophrenia seemed more than four times as likely as the rest of the population to pass along the condition to future generations—even if, as ever, the illness rarely passed straight from parent to child.

Making Numbers Count: The Art and Science of Communicating Numbers

by Chip Heath and Karla Starr

How can you communicate better when it comes to numbers, statistics, data points? This book is chock full of tips from the wonderful Chip Heath.

My Kindle highlights are pasted below; all Heath and Starr’s words:

We’ve come to believe, after working with these principles for years, that almost every gnarly number has something—an analogy, a comparison, another dimension—that will allow us to translate it into something we can remember, use, and discuss with others.

– 

The secret to translating numbers is simple: avoid using them. Translate them into concrete, vivid, meaningful messages that are clear enough to make numbers unnecessary.

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You might be tempted to make an apples-to-apples comparison here, and say Olympus Mons is more than twice the height of Mount Everest. But what is Everest to most of us? It’s something we read about. It’s rare we meet even one person who’s seen it directly (if we did, we’d know—they’d never shut up about it).

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Moving back to Earth, in 2018, the New York Times published a long article showing data, field by field (politics, Hollywood, journalism), that demonstrated how far our society is from equality. But rather than quoting a dense wall of numbers, they cleverly illustrated the disparities by using some striking comparisons. A very small percentage of Fortune 500 CEOs are women. Among Fortune 500 CEOs, there are more men named James than there are women.

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Throughout the first 18 years of his career in the NBA, LeBron James scored over 35,000 points. Throughout the first 18 years of his career in the NBA, LeBron James scored an average of over 27 points per game.

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For numbers less than 1, you can use a method we call “counting in baskets” to make things start to show up as whole numbers. If you find that .2% of people have a certain trait, use a basket size of at least 500, maybe 1,000, to make them show up as real people. “1 out of 500” or “2 out of 1,000” makes these abstract percentages into real things.

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The amount of meat recommended as part of a healthy meal is 3 to 4 ounces. The amount of meat recommended as part of a healthy meal is 3 to 4 ounces, which looks about the same size as a deck of cards.

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Replace your lights with CFLs when your child is learning how to walk. The next time you’d have to replace the bulb, your child would be in second grade, learning about oxygen. The next time, they’d be taking driver’s ed.

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Imagine if Earth’s 7.7 billion people were shrunk to a village of 100: » 26 villagers would be children (14 years old or younger). 5 villagers would come from North America, 8 from Latin America, 10 from Europe, 17 from Africa, and 60 from Asia.

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What if Reagan had used the power of 1 instead, and said that every man, woman, and child in the United States owed $4,000 or—probably more useful—if he had grouped people and said that every household owed about $12,000?

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Translating 1%: Ways to feel/sense/understand 1%: It’s 1 Pringle in a can of 100. It’s 1 card between 2 decks. It’s 4 days out of the year. It’s 1 meter in a 100-meter dash. It’s one minute out of an average-length movie.

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Back in his youth, Arnold Schwarzenegger, bodybuilder turned celebrity turned governor of the state Nation of California, once said of another bodybuilder who was a formidable competitor, “Those aren’t arms, they’re legs.” Arms as big as legs, cities as big as nations, a sister as annoying as an entire elementary-school lunchroom. Category jumpers bring extra emotion and extra respect back to their interactions in their home category.

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Use whole numbers, not too many. Preferably small. Whenever possible, count real things, not decimals or fractions.

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So, to recap, choose common language when possible: “One out of three” instead of “1/3.” Choose percentages over decimals: “33%” instead of “.33.” And also choose percentages over complex fractions: “41%” instead of “7/17.”

Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness

by Patrick House

Interesting nuggets. I learned about Patrick from his fascinating appearance on EconTalk.

My Kindle highlights are pasted below; all House’s words:

The basic story is that a neurosurgeon, using small, carefully placed blasts of electricity to the brain, was able to cause the patient, Anna, to laugh. Alone, this is not surprising. We have long known that electricity powers our muscles to act, and laughter is just a series of rapid, coordinated muscle movements. What was so surprising was that Anna said afterward that she also felt the subjective sensations of joy and mirth alongside the laughter and that she, when asked why she laughed, gave different and implausible answers each time.

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The brain is messy and venous and dense and soaking wet, all the time, and is about as heavy as a hardback copy of Infinite Jest.

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Instead, she confabulated the reasons behind the laughter and mirth because the brain abhors a story vacuum and because the mammalian brain is a pattern-recognizing monster, a briny sac full of trillions of coincidence detectors that are only useful if there are connections between things. Even a wrong pattern, a guess, is at least a pattern to learn against.

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Those in the water who don’t fear being eaten, like humpback whales, often sleep vertically, often in groups, like the large towers of an aquatic city, for less than ten percent of their day. Sleep concerns are highly specific: birds dream of bird problems, whales of whale problems, dogs of dog problems.

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Interestingly, this means one can make a code, like those in a video game or medieval monastery, that lets one break the subjective fourth wall and communicate with the great sleep researchers in the sky. For example, a person can learn to, if lucid, move their eyes in a certain pattern and then count to ten, after which they move their eyes in that same pattern again, to mark the end of their test. Remarkably, some people take around ten “objective” seconds to do so, which implies that their subjective, incepted time—the waking dream within the dream—not only has a time keeping device but that it may be the same one we always use.

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A friend of mine, a bird-watcher, once told me that the best time to search for birds is right after a storm because the grounded ones are very anxious to get going again. He called it Zugunruhe, a German term, and translated it roughly, perhaps poetically, as “the anxiety felt by migratory birds prevented from migrating.” A body, too, is restless to get moving; in fact, the entire purpose of the brain is to make efficient movement from experience, and everything else, including consciousness, is downstream of these efforts.

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What we see is not the object itself, but an evolved decoding of the parts of that object relevant to survival, not to the truth.4 A red pill is not red. A blue pill is not blue. They are the same color, which is to say that they are no color at all, to all but our eyes.

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[Soldier in Afghanistan who had an intuition to turn around and not drive his daily patrol route.]  “What do you think it was?” He says, “There were no kids. We drive that same route every day at the same time and there are kids kicking around an old soccer ball, in that field, and today there were none. And that felt really dangerous to me. And thinking about it, it’s because the moms know when the bad guys have planted a roadside bomb, and they keep their kids away.”

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Can you travel in time back and forth?3 Can you imagine? Tell me something about the day you’re going to get married. Tell me something about what you will do when you have a daughter. Those are questions in principle you should be able to answer, “Well, if I have a daughter I would do this and that with her. I would take her here and here and the other.” Some people can’t do that, particularly if they have hippocampal lesions. Turns out these people not only have retrograde amnesia but also have difficulties traveling forward in time, imaging a future for themselves.

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As well, some people claim to have no internal visual imagery; some see images in their head as a flickering slide reel; others as if the memory is happening to them from the vantage exactly as it once did; others watch their memories unfold from a few dozen meters away, through a single aperture, as if filming them; others as if they are watching a television one hundred feet away. Some have photograph-like memories and can redraw cityscapes from scratch. Some people claim to have no inner, vocal monologue.