Category Archives: Books

Glenn Loury’s memoir is remarkable. One of the finest economists of his generation dishes on his own addiction to porn and drugs, rampant infidelity, endless lying, and all sorts of other misdeeds that most people would go out of their way to cover up — not publish. In the opening chapter, one of the most riveting I’ve ever read in a memoir, he writes:

I am going to tell you that I have lied, because I need you to believe me. I am going to tell you that I have deceived those closest to me, because I need you to trust me. I am going to tell you that I have abandoned people who needed me, because I need you to stick with me. I must tell it all in this memoir, because if I don’t tell it all, nothing I say will be heard. The skeptical reader will have observed that this game has already begun.

Glenn repeats a refrain throughout the memoir about the difference between the “cover story” and the “true story” — and his own life was full of cover spin, masking darker truths, and so it goes for many us in our presentation of self in everyday life.

Aside from all the jaw-dropping moral confessions, Glenn’s intellectual evolution is fascinating. He is an African American economist who grew up on the wrong side of town and who made his way into the most prestigious corridors of academia. Presumptions of allyship on the basis of race came from both the political left and the political right at different times in his career. But Glenn is fiercely independent, rejects labels, and at different turns and on different issues (be it affirmative action, race and crime, Obama, Trump), surprises people who thought they had him (and his worldview) figured out.

The real reason this memoir has generated so much attention, though, relates to his personal life misadventures — not his academic accomplishments. He speaks apologetically about his addictions and betrayals, although with not quite as much scathing self-judgment as one might expect. He takes a fairly balanced tone about it all, even though words of disapproval about himself appear frequently.

I don’t know Glenn personally or the players who appear in this book. But I read about his flawed mind and heart and I am not decisively repelled. I would be open to the possibility of friendship with someone like Glenn. Not that Glenn cares, but it made me think about singular moral purity tests for friendship. I don’t have them. This is borne from a recognition that things are more complex than they can seem from the outside, that almost nobody should be judged in full by their worst deeds, and that I, too, am morally flawed. To be sure, there are people who, in sum, morally repel me. But it’s often a function of their lack of self-awareness and lack of desire to improve more than it is a decisive black-and-white litmus test on particular beliefs or actions.

Some direct quotes / highlights from the memoir below.

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My bet is that this strategy of self-discrediting disclosure will accomplish two things: First, it will appease your impulse to find cracks in the edifice of my self-presentation, to search out my contradictions and too-convenient narrative contrivances.

Since I was a child, I had watched Adlert and Alfred seduce their way through the South Side. Adlert was very clear about it. Despite his professional accomplishments, he told me, point blank, that life’s goal was to “get as much pussy as you can.”

I found myself doubting that he fully grasped the pain, frustration, anger, and self-doubt many of us felt in moments such as these, when the seeming intractability of American racism made itself felt by such vicious means.

She was not the most stylish dresser, and she was not a conventional beauty in their eyes, although I found her very attractive.

She now knows for sure that there is someone in my life I’m not telling her about. I know that she knows. She knows that I know that she knows. But, amidst this intersubjective game of tacit consent and thinly veiled deceit, neither of us ever lets on that we know what we know, even though my infidelity has now become common knowledge between us.

I was overcome by a sense of panic. None of it seemed good enough to live up to what was expected of me or to what I expected of myself or to what I saw my peers doing. My research questions just weren’t big enough, I felt; my insights were insufficiently deep and original. Along with this terrifying suspicion that I could not measure up came an old, familiar feeling: I really was choking.

It’s the excitement that comes from the adventure of entering an unknown situation with an unknown person and betting that I can charm my way past whatever reservations she may have.

I had met Bennett previously, and he and I got along well. He had a sharp mind and a sharper tongue. I liked him. Although he made his name as a crusader for family values and public morality, behind the scenes he was a bit of a hedonist. The first time I saw him in a private setting, I was astonished by his appetite for alcohol. Who was I to judge? I had my own appetites.

A baby would mean I would have to curtail my affairs and flings. I knew what having an infant in the house was like, and it would be almost impossible to continue to exercise my right as a Master of the Universe to seduce any woman I could, whenever I wanted to.

…can be a little like talking about Israel with a Jewish American. Just as an otherwise liberal Jew can take a surprisingly hardline stance on the Israel-Palestine issue, even some conservative African Americans buckle down and shake their heads if you question affirmative action. In such matters, the call of the tribe can ring out louder even than political ideology or, indeed, than reason itself.

I still considered them friends. But America in Black and White represented a viewpoint that had, I felt, led conservatives down the path to apathy and, at times, to a kind of smug satisfaction at the failures of the policies they abhorred.

It seemed to me that I was being instructed by my conservative colleagues not to think, and to choose sides between my political affiliations and my race, my tribe. I felt compromised.

But it seemed to me that stigma could be more readily explained as both a rational response to a set of social circumstances and the cause of those circumstances. Imagine the case of the stereotypical New York City cab driver who does not want to stop for young black men because he fears being robbed. He believes picking up a young black man to be less wise than picking up, say, an old white lady, because he believes that young black men are, on the whole, more likely to rob him than old white ladies. Now let’s also say that, as a statistical matter, the cabbie is correct. No matter how unlikely he is to be robbed by a young black man, he is still more likely to be robbed by one than by an old white lady. Cabbies then rarely choose to pick up young black men. But when this happens, young black men who are simply looking to hail a taxi will notice that it’s almost impossible to get one to stop. They’ll then find some other means to get where they’re going and eventually stop bothering to even try to hail a cab. As a result, cabbies who engage in biased profiling will have incentivized law-abiding riders to take themselves out of the pool of potential fares and also increased the likelihood that any young black man looking for a ride will be a robber, as only robbers will be left. In that case, the cabbie will be acting rationally when he sees one of them trying to flag him down and keeps driving. Through this rational behavior, he will also have brought into being the very state of affairs to which he is reacting.

I showed that biased social cognition can go a long way to explaining any number of forms of racial inequality, and without relying on the idea that such inequality is necessarily the result of racial animus or malice. Ordinary people and institutions can respond to incentives in totally rational ways that actually create and perpetuate the very stigmas they are responding to.

suggested to me that in my lecture I had described something like a bank run on black people. That had never occurred to me, but Larry was right! A bank run happens when people come to believe that their bank is going to run out of money. Believing their savings to be at risk, they all, in a totally rational fashion, attempt to withdraw it at the same time. But when everyone tries to withdraw all their funds at the same time, the bank actually does run out of money, which does put the savings of anyone who didn’t make it to the bank in time at risk. A shared belief about some state of affairs, regardless of whether or not it is unavoidably true, brings that state of affairs into being.

“I never understood what you got out of those relationships.” I cannot deny that his bemusement spoke well of him. I didn’t really answer his question at the time, but there was an answer: Nothing could define me. I wasn’t reducible to “economist” or “Christian” or “black man” or even “husband” or “father.” I was those things, certainly. But I was much more than that. This was my life. I was only going to get one shot at it, and if I saw a way to broaden my experience, to enlarge my world,

Some years earlier, Richard John Neuhaus was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer that he thought would kill him. He survived, but in the intervening period, when he believed he was facing death, he wrote As I Lay Dying, a book about the experience of preparing yourself for the end of life. I read this book to Linda in bed, and we both took solace from its wisdom.

I also found a self-help book in her library. It was about learning to forgive those who have wronged you. As I leafed through the pages, I saw that Linda, ever the diligent scholar, had underlined passages and scribbled notes to herself in the margins. Many of those notes clearly referenced things I had done. She made a study of forgiving me. Perhaps that’s what it took to live with me. I had to be treated as a miniature research project.

An absent father was no doubt a difficult thing to deal with, but his life was one of prep schools and elite universities and the political fast track. I don’t think that one must undergo hardship in order to lay claim to their blackness, but the dissonance between Obama’s claim to represent “the black experience” and his actual life experience was just too grating for me to ignore. My childhood friend Woody was “blacker” than Obama, as far as I was concerned.

None of the disqualifications of Trump that his critics listed—ceaselessly, day after day, year after year—could negate the gut-level satisfaction I got from watching him. Sure, he lied constantly, but Americans had become so inured to the dishonesty of their politicians that it was actually a relief to hear someone lie with brazenness and glee, instead of prevaricating and equivocating while pretending they had a claim on moral authority.

enforced silence in a marriage is just as unsustainable as rancor.

In my seventies, I have nothing left to prove and nothing to hide. Whatever promise the young man showed sitting in Mr. Reffels’s solid geometry class at John Marshall Harlan High School has long since come to fruition. I now find myself receiving honors that point backward to what I have accomplished in the past rather than garnering grants that anticipate what I might yet accomplish in the future.

It sometimes seems acceptable to do that which I, inspired by Václav Havel, had fought so hard against: “to merge with the anonymous crowd and to flow comfortably along with it down the river of pseudo-life.”

Here are Kindle highlights from two books that cover themes of friendship, love, and grief. The first is Love Undetectable: Notes on Friendship, Sex, and Survival, a collection of essays and musings that Andrew Sullivan published in 1999 essays. Some great passages about friendship. Anything Andrew writes, I read.

The second is Stay True by Hua Hsu, a memoir about growing up a child of immigrants and, among other things, forging a deep friendship. Stay True recently won the Pulitzer Prize for memoir. Thanks to John Krakauer for the recommendation.

Love Undetectable by Andrew Sullivan

For, of all our relationships, friendship is the most common and the most natural. In its universality, it even trumps family. Many of us fail to marry, and many more have no children; others never know their mother or father, and plenty have no siblings. But any human being who has ever lived for any time has had a friend. It is a relationship available to and availed by all of us. It is at once the most particular and the most universal relationship there is.

It is as if only in the death of a friend that a true reckoning with mortality is ever fully made, before it is too late, which is why so many theologians for so long saw friendship as an integral and vital part of a truly spiritual life.

A really good friend, indeed, might be defined as someone whom you need not see for a year or so, or even longer, and yet, when you next get together, it is as if nothing has happened. The relationship snaps instantly back into place, as if the year were a matter of hours.

Equally, it could be said that one’s friends are simply those people with whom one spends one’s life. Period. Anything else is a form of rationalization.

And I don’t mean what Saint Paul meant by love, the Christian notion of indiscriminate and universal agape or caritas, which is based on the universal love of the Christian God. I mean love in the banal, ubiquitous, compelling, and resilient modern meaning of love: the romantic love that obliterates all other goods, the love to which every life must apparently lead, the love that is consummated in sex and celebrated in every particle of our popular culture, the love that is institutionalized in marriage and instilled as a primary and ultimate good in every Western child. I mean eros, which is more than sex but is bound up with sex. I mean the longing for union with another being, the sense that such a union resolves the essential quandary of human existence, the belief that only such a union can abate the loneliness that seems to come with being human, and deter the march of time that threatens to trivialize our very existence.

friendship delivers what love promises but fails to provide. The contrasts between the two are, in fact, many, and largely damning to love’s reputation. Where love is swift, for example, friendship is slow. Love comes quickly, as the song has it, but friendship ripens with time. If love is at its most perfect in its infancy, friendship is most treasured as the years go by.

In love, so many hazardous uncertainties in life are resolved: the constant negotiation with other souls, the fear and distrust that lie behind almost every interaction, the petty loneliness that we learned to live with as soon as we grew apart from our mother’s breast. We lose all this in the arms of another. We come home at last to a primal security, made manifest by each other’s nakedness.

But I am saying that this is the principle to which all love finally pays homage, the criterion by which such relationships are ultimately to be judged. It is, of course, a sublime experience, almost inhuman, because it is about the loss of the self-control which ultimately makes us who we are. And with that loss of control comes mutual power, the power to calm, the power to redeem, and the power to hurt. In some relationships, one partner holds that ultimate power, and the love is unequal. But in those relationships, the other partner must want to be powerless, yearn to be controlled or held, if the underlying principle of love is not to be undermined. And in other relationships, the power is distributed and redistributed from day to day and hour to hour and, sometimes, minute to minute. It will always differ, of course, in how it is given expression. But the principle is the same: it is a principle of control, of giving and retaining it, of wielding and begging for it. It is a strange mix of choice

How many of us can say that about love in its highest form, a love that elevates us like a narcotic and addicts us to its redemptive power? But friendship is for those who do not want to be saved, for those whose appreciation of life is here and now and whose comfort in themselves is sufficient for them to want merely to share rather than to lose their identity. And they enter into friendship as an act of radical choice. Friendship, in this sense, is the performance art of freedom.

If you enter a friendship to be less lonely, then it is not a friendship; if you enter it to find out something, then you are fooling yourself; if you enter it for profit or even the chance to meet others, then you have no understanding of it. Love solves a need, answers a calling, scratches an itch. Friendship does none of these things. It merely flourishes, a sign that human beings can choose one another for company, enjoy each other’s selves, and accompany each other on an enterprise, with no thought of gain or purpose. In a utilitarian world, it is useless in the best sense of the word. It resists the meaning of anything but itself.

The fear of male intimacy, which is intrinsically connected to a fear of homosexuality, has too often denied straight men the bonds they need to sustain themselves through life’s difficulties. When they socialize, they too often demand the chaperone of sports or work to avoid the appearance of being gay. Or they need to congregate in groups that tend to diminish the quiet intimacy that all of us need.

Stay True by Hua Hsu

[Youth] At that age, time moves slow. You’re eager for something to happen, passing time in parking lots, hands deep in your pockets, trying to figure out where to go next. Life happened elsewhere, it was simply a matter of finding a map that led there. Or maybe, at that age, time moves fast; you’re so desperate for action that you forget to remember things as they happen.

[On immigrants] The first generation thinks about survival; the ones that follow tell the stories. I often try to spin the details and small effects of my parents’ lives into a narrative. How did they acquire a sense of taste or decide which movies to see?

The things around them were like the raw materials for new American identities, and they foraged as far as their car or the subway line could take them.

we were both sifting, store to store, for some possible future—that we were both mystified by the same fashions, trends, and bits of language. That my late-night trips to the record store with my dad had been about discovery, not mastery. Later still, I came to recognize that assimilation as a whole was a race toward a horizon that wasn’t fixed. The ideal was ever shifting, and your accent would never be quite perfect. It was a set of compromises sold to you as a contract. Assimilation was not a problem to be solved but the problem itself.

But I saw coolness as a quality primarily expressed through erudite discernment, and I defined who I was by what I rejected, a kitchen-sink approach to negation that resulted in essays decrying Beverly Hills, 90210, hippies, private school, George Bush, braided leather belts, the police state, and, after they became trendy, Pearl Jam. I knew what I was against, but I couldn’t imagine what stood on the other side.

…I was a diligent scholar. I knew all the bands that sounded a bit like Nirvana that nobody had heard of yet. I prized research: the excavation of arcane tributaries, secret knowledge, and conspiratorial anecdotes, building new religions around has-beens or never-weres.

Ken lived too loud a life, at least by my standards. I had met hundreds of him, hundreds of times before. I was eighteen, in love with my moral compass, perpetually suspicious of anyone whose words came too easily. He was a genre of person I actively avoided—mainstream. Ken was flagrantly handsome; his voice betrayed no insecurity.

Now that I was a college student, I tried to rebrand myself as someone who was outspoken, hopefully in a charmingly digressive way. Someone who knew a little about everything and fancied weighing in on stuff; this was how I hoped I came across when writing my zine.

He was boisterously overfamiliar, and I could never tell if he was making fun of me.

There are many currencies to friendship. We may be drawn to someone who makes us feel bright and hopeful, someone who can always make us laugh. Perhaps there are friendships that are instrumental, where the lure is concrete and the appeal is what they can do for us. There are friends we talk to only about serious things, others who only make sense in the blitzed merriment of deep night. Some friends complete us, while others complicate us. Maybe you feel as if there were nothing better in the world than driving in a car, listening to music with friends, looking for an all-night donut shop. Nobody says a thing, and it is perfect…For others, it’s the sporadic intimacy of effortlessly resuming conversations or inside jokes left dormant for years.

What does it mean to truly be yourself? Around this time, in the mid-1990s, the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor began thinking about how people throughout history had dealt with this question of individual identity.

It turned out the Beach Boys were pretty good. Everything about the group was inauthentic: only one of them actually surfed, they were more indoor than outdoor kids, and whatever good vibes they conjured were incidental. Their breezy harmonies were less a reflection of collaboration and friendship than the bandleader Brian Wilson’s micromanagement. He became so obsessed with translating his psychedelic visions into sound that it pushed him to the edge of reason.

But this was exactly why Derrida resisted the eulogy form. It’s always about “me” rather than “we,” the speaker burnishing his emotional credentials rather than offering a true account of the deceased.

A celebration of how it began, rather than a chronicle of free fall, a tribute to that first sip, rather than all the spinning rooms that followed. It would be an account of love and duty, not just anger and hatred, and it would be filled with dreams, and the memory of having once looked to the future, and an eagerness to dream again. It would be boring, because you simply had to be there. It would be poetry and not history.

But she had helped me rearrange some of the furniture in my mind. I knew what I needed to do now, I told her. I needed to figure out how to describe the smell of secondhand smoke on flannel, the taste of pancakes with fresh strawberries and powdered sugar the morning after, sun hitting a specific shade of golden brown, the deep ambivalence you once felt toward a song that now devastated you, the threshold when a pair of old boots go from new to worn, the sound of our finals week mixtape wheezing to the end of its spool. Which metaphors were useful and which were not, what to explain and what to keep secret. The look when someone recognizes you.

I read and enjoyed both of Freddie DeBoer’s books. Freddie is a Marxist by self-identification — a rabid anti-capitalist who wants to redistribute all wealth. He’s simultaneously a trenchant critic of the left. This duality makes him interesting to read.

His newer book is How the Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement. He marshals ample evidence to show that the social justice movement of the past few years has been an abysmal failure on achieving actual outcomes. He convincingly argue that elites’ obsession with culture war issues and other symbolic victories distracted it from real, on the ground reforms related to crime and poverty. DeBoer centers class, not race, in his analysis. The book in one paragraph: “That basic drift from the material and the concrete to the immaterial and symbolic is no accident. This is the constant dynamic in left politics because of a kind of elite capture. If you’re a Black child living in poverty and neglect in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, you might very well wonder how the annual controversy over the number of Black artists winning Oscars impacts your life.”

In The Cult of Smart, his earlier book, Freddie effectively destroys the idea that every child has an equal opportunity to succeed if only put in the right educational environment. In fact, most life and academic outcomes, traditionally measured, are pre-determined prior to a kid enrolling in kindergarten. To be a star student, you want to have good genetics (IQ), be born healthy and at full weight from non-abusive parents who hail from a middle class or upper middle class background, and be free of any developmental or cognitive disabilities. A child is in control of precisely none of those attributes, and the school they attend has no bearing on those factors either. Freddie’s thesis calls into question the wisdom of virtually every educational philanthropic initiative and government ed reform effort — of which there are countless — to say nothing of the pressure parents put on themselves to get their kids into better schools. Freddie then questions the morality of a meritocracy — of a society that orders itself based on intellectual ability — given intellectual ability is not something you’re in control of.

Both books made me think. Here are my Kindle highlights from each.

Highlights from Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement

Some cities and states enacted modest criminal-justice reforms, but many of these were later quietly rolled back. In Minneapolis, where Floyd’s murder had taken place, the drift over time was telling: the city council first voted to abolish and replace its police department, then later changed the reforms to simple budget cuts, then later enacted an increase in funding to the very department it had recently set about to dissolve.

Worse, there are now many in progressive spaces who decry the white working class—an immense group that still exerts heavy influence on American politics—as an inherently and permanently racist and bigoted class. This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, as left-leaning disdain for uneducated white workers and voters results in leftist cultural and communicative practices that seem tailor-made to reject the support of that large bloc. Left activists refuse to engage with the complexity of, for example, the millions of voters who supported Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 but Donald Trump in 2016. This is, strategically, a kind of madness; any successful future for the left-of-center requires expanding our coalition and dreaming big when it comes to convincing disaffected lower-wage citizens to support us.

We have to get past thinking that our righteousness makes victory inevitable and start engaging in the real, tough, boring labor of convincing others. We have a lot of work to do, and there’s no time like the present.

at the height of the George Floyd protest moment, 55 percent of Black respondents wanted police spending in their area to stay the same or to grow; by September 2021, that number had grown to 76 percent.

Consider this statement: “My life is determined by my own actions.” While 52 percent of respondents identified as very conservative agreed with this statement, only 33 percent of very liberal respondents agreed.

But as I have argued in this book, zero-sum racial (or gender, et cetera) thinking is the enemy of progressive politics. White people make up 70 percent of the electorate; men half of it. Straight people, cisgender people, and the able-bodied make up dominant majorities. To convince those people that they must lose for those from marginalized communities to succeed is politically suicidal.

For example, there are people who earnestly believe that the phrase “I see what you mean” is ableist—that is, disrespectful and oppressive toward people with disabilities—because some people can’t see. This is—and I choose the word carefully—nuts.

Highlights from Cult of Smart

For decades, our educational politics have obsessed over between-group variation, that is, gaps between black students and white, between girls and boys, between rich and poor. But to me the more interesting, more essential, insights lie in the nature of within-group variation. Take any identifiable academic demographic group you’d like—poor black inner-city charter school students, first-generation Asian immigrants in Los Angeles public schools, poor rural white girls in the Ozark Mountains. There are indeed systematic differences in outcomes between these various groups. But what’s more telling and more interesting is the variation within these groups. In any such groups, you will find students who excel at the highest levels and students who fail again and again.

You can have two students who are the same age, the same race, the same gender, from the same socioeconomic status, with similar family compositions, who live on the same street, who even have the same teachers. I knew many such sets of kids growing up. And yet for all of their demographic and educational similarity, these kids will see profound inequality in their academic outcomes. Some will be academic stars while some will struggle until they eventually drop out. Why? What is the source of this variation? And why has our society seemingly decided never to ask that question?

But I would put it to you a different way: What could be crueler than an actual meritocracy, a meritocracy fulfilled? Because once we acknowledge that natural talent exists at all, even if it were a minor factor, the whole moral justification of the edifice of meritocracy falls away. No one chooses who their parents are, no one can determine their own natural academic abilities, and a system that doles out wealth and hardship based on academic ability is inherently and forever a rigged game.

The blogger Scott Alexander laid it out well in a piece titled “The Parable of the Talents.” As he points out, in most arenas, ascribing outcomes to biological factors is the more progressive position—when it comes to being overweight, for example, or in the case of mental illness, progressive people tend to believe that it’s biology, not willpower, that plays the largest role.

The obvious pattern is that attributing outcomes to things like genes, biology, and accidents of birth is kind and sympathetic. Attributing them to who works harder and who’s “really trying” can stigmatize people who end up with bad outcomes and is generally viewed as Not A Nice Thing To Do. And the weird thing, the thing I’ve never understood, is that intellectual achievement is the one domain that breaks this pattern. Here it’s would-be hard-headed conservatives arguing that intellectual greatness comes from genetics and the accidents of birth and demanding we “accept” this “unpleasant truth.” And it’s would-be compassionate progressives who are insisting that no, it depends on who works harder, claiming anybody can be brilliant if they really try.

This is, as I’ve said before, akin to having a height requirement for your school and then bragging about how tall your student body is. Schools that use a screening mechanism specifically designed to exclude the students who are less likely to succeed can’t then turn around and assume that the strong outcomes of their students say something positive about the efficacy of their teaching.

In fact, I will go a step further: school quality simply doesn’t matter very much when it comes to quantitative educational outcomes.

Random selection into a better school in Beijing has no effect, random selection into a better school in Chicago has close to no effect, random selection into a better Kenyan school has no effect, nor does it in Missouri, nor in New York City. Once you control for student characteristics, Australian private schools didn’t outperform state schools on the 2009 PISA. Conscription into extra education didn’t much affect life outcomes in late 1970s France. In 1950s England, going to an elite school made no difference to a youth’s job market outcomes. The literature is huge and there are many many more examples.

Once you correct for ability, attending schools like Hunter makes no difference. Several high-quality studies have been performed evaluating the real impact of selective public high schools and have found that attending those high schools simply doesn’t matter in terms of conventional educational and life outcomes.

A high-quality longitudinal study found that, in cohorts of college students from both the 1970s and the 1990s, the returns from attending an elite college were effectively nil, once you controlled for SAT scores. Once you compare like with like, and look at students of similar underlying ability, attending a prestigious school makes no difference.

To succeed academically, a child should be born to college-educated parents. Those parents should be from the middle class or, preferably, the upper class. The child should be brought to full term and be born at a healthy weight. The child should be free from developmental or cognitive disabilities. The child should be raised in a lead-free environment. The child should not be abused or neglected, particularly early in life.

No one would assume that one’s ability to run a race or to lift a heavy weight is synonymous with their greater human value. No one would presume that height is an accurate marker of human worth, or that we should accept a rigid caste system based on how tall we are. And few would doubt that there is a genetic element in each of those attributes. Yet when it comes to intelligence—a complex and multifaceted human attribute that includes both objective abilities of raw reasoning and a great deal of socially constructed and influenced factors—too many would-be egalitarians assume that there is a simple relationship between genetic predisposition and general human value. This is the Cult of Smart in its most distilled form.

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.