James Somers

Time 2020-10-21 20:05:04

Web Name: James Somers

WebSite: http://jsomers.net

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Keepers of the Secrets* This article appeared in the last print edition of the Voice. It started with a tip from a fellow journalist: I was told that the most interesting man in the world works in the archives division of the New York Public Library, and so I went there, one morning this summer, to meet him. My guide, who said it took her a year to learn how to get around the Schwarzman Building on 42nd Street, led us to an elevator off Astor Hall, up past the McGraw Rotunda, through a little door at the back of the Rose Main Reading Room. Our destination was Room 328. Should Surgeons Keep Score?* It turns out that there is huge variation in skill among surgeons, and that this is the biggest factor determining the outcome of many surgical procedures. So which surgeon you get matters—a lot. But how do we know who the good ones are? In this article, I profile a biostatistician at Memorial Sloan Kettering who is developing a program to give surgeons feedback about their performance. Included are two videos—one of a good surgeon, one of a surgeon who's not so good—that everyone should see. Something about this essay struck a nerve—it has been read by more than 130,000 people. It's a lament about the state of today's dictionaries, and an argument in favor of using Noah Webster's 1913 edition (with instructions for how to install it).I don’t want you to conclude that it’s just a matter of aesthetics. Yes, Webster’s definitions are prettier. But they are also better. In fact they’re so much better that to use another dictionary is to keep yourself forever at arm’s length from the actual language.Recall that the New Oxford, for the word “fustian,” gives “pompous or pretentious speech or writing.” I said earlier that that wasn’t even really correct. Here, then, is Webster’s definition: “An inflated style of writing; a kind of writing in which high-sounding words are used, above the dignity of the thoughts or subject; bombast.” Do you see the difference? What makes fustian fustian is not just that the language is pompous—it’s that this pomposity is above the dignity of the thoughts or subject. It’s using fancy language where fancy language isn’t called for. It’s a subtle difference, but that’s the whole point: English is an awfully subtle instrument. A dictionary that ignores these little shades is dangerous; in fact in those cases it’s worse than useless. It’s misleading, deflating. It divests those words of their worth and purpose. Books This is a list of the books I've read since my first day at college, arranged basically in the order I read them. I have the list both to jog my memory and because I've read a lot of stuff I've loved, and want other people to find it. Neuromancer, William Gibson. Raise High the Roofbeams, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction, J.D. Salinger. Narcissus and Goldmund, Hermann Hesse. What is Thought?, Eric Baum. Here is a large collection of excerpts from this book, which asks, "How can there be semantics?" and answers, "compression." Lots of good thought about computation, biological development, and machine learning. Baum's style is highly allusive and the book is full of excellent references. I learned more from this book than just about any other on the list with the exception, I think, of Godel, Escher, Bach. My Belief: Essays on Life and Art, Hermann Hesse. Hesse is a beautiful nonfiction writer and it's a shame that his essays are not more widely read. One called "Concerning the Soul" struck me in particular. Here is a note about it. Naomi, Junichiro Tanizaki. I read this for a class and wrote a brief response. The U.S. Constitution. Demian, Hermann Hesse. The Mind's I, Douglas Hofstadter and Dan Dennett. A compendium on the philosophy of mind; Hofstadter and Dennett take turns providing commentary for each of the selected essays/stories. Highlights: "Computing Machinery and Intelligence", in which Turing proposes his eponymous test. "The Turing Test: A Coffeehouse Conversation." "Minds, Brains, and Programs" (especially Hofstadter's response). Thomas Nagel's classic, "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" I picked this up because Eliezer Yudkowsky once claimed it was his favorite science fiction book. The theory at its core holds together and has a lot of appeal, although the writing is a little cheesy at times. Greg Egan's home page is a bit nuts but has links to many of his shorts and essays. He is a published author in physics and co-wrote a paper with John Baez. Swingers (screenplay), Jon Favreau. The Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa, Yukichi Fukuzawa. The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion, Ford Madox Ford. Here is a paper I wrote about the book, which I hated until the second half and then loved it. The Iliad, Homer. The link above points to the full text online, but translators matter here. I'm not sure he's the best (or anywhere close), but for what it's worth we used the Lombardo translation at the U of M. Freedom and Neurobiology: Reflections on Free Language Will, and Political Power, John Searle. This is really just two lectures written up and bound together. The first of these, on free will, is much better it clears ground in the debate by using the language of "causally sufficient conditions" (do a, b, c, and d taken together make X inevitable?) to lay out two hypotheses: (1) that there are causally sufficient conditions for our conscious choices and free will is an illusion per William James's hard determinism, or (2) there are not, and the "gaps" we feel between a proposal and our decision, in which we deliberate, are real things are actually "up in the air." As to where that indeterminacy comes from, he offers, somewhat lamely, "quantum mechanics." I appreciated the above ground-clearing because that is how I had mentally conceived of the debate. A more sophisticated reader disagreed, though, and planed Searle in this brief review . I Am a Strange Loop, Douglas Hofstadter. A "softer" and less satisfying version of much of Hofstadter's earlier writing. It may be a good introduction to his ideas for people who don't have time for GEB or find it too technical. The best pages of this book (from the first chapter) are available in Amazon's "Look Inside" reader. The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot The link above points to the raw text online but this print edition has tons of excellent annotations, commentary, and criticism, which are pretty much necessary for a poem this difficult. Read it many times. I wrote a paper about Part V ("What the Thunder Said"). Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track, Richard P. Feynman I have written about Feynman here and here and admire him to the point of reverence. See this wonderful series of videos, "Fun to Imagine," in which he explains (a) why mirrors seem to reverse left-and-right but not up-and-down, (b) how trains stay on the tracks, and (c) how rubber bands work. Fantastic stuff. Other Feynman videos worth watching: The Last Journey of a Genius, about his adventure to Tannu Tuva. Warning: a real tear-jerker. Also, of course, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out. Here's a great short piece on Feynman's involvement with a massively-parallel supercomputer known as "The Connection Machine." The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins. Zhuangzi, Zhuangzi. Awesome book with many cryptic, wise-sounding koans. Very quotable and contains the classic "was I a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming I was a man?" (Answer: the first one.) His philosophy, for all its fancy simple phrasing, seems to boil down to the idea that we delineate and distinguish to our detriment that we're all up in our heads imposing artificial structure on the world, and that this is bad. The Elements of Style, William Strunk Jr. and White, E.B. This is a classic and is full of excellent advice about style. But it is dangerous, overly prescriptive, and in many places wrong; do a site search on one of my favorite blogs, The Language Log, to see all of their carefully argued (and vehement) criticism. Also read George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language." The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins. Lost in the Funhouse, John Barth. Three Lives, Gertrude Stein. Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse. Wow. Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll. excerpts The Analects, Confucius. "To learn, and at due times to repeat what one has learnt is that not after all a pleasure?" To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf I loved this book and wrote a paper about it. The Animal Mind, James L. Gould. This was heavily cited in Eric Baum's What is Thought?, and with good reason: it's full of impressive displays of animal intelligence. Darwin Among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence, George Dyson. A strange and problematic thesis, but fascinating nonetheless. There is a wonderful line in here where at "odd, unpredictable" moments Dyson found himself "wondering whether trees could think. Not thinking the way we think, but thinking the way trees think; say, two or three hundred years to form the slow trace of an idea." Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity, Stephen Toulmin. Narrative Thought and Narrative Language, Bruce K. Britton and Anthony D. Pelligrini (eds.). Life: What a Concept!, Freeman Dyson, J. Craig Venter, George Church, Robert Shapiro, Dimitar Sasselov, and Seth Lloyd. Evariste Galois, Laura Rigatelli Toti. Read his Wikipedia page what an exciting and romantic life. I'd like to write a screenplay about it someday. The Art of War, Sun Tzu. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce. I think I understand Stephen Daedalus more than any other fictional character, besides maybe Zero Cool in Hackers. I wrote a paper about a scene in Portrait. Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity, David Foster Wallace. Read his essay, E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction, right now. Aaron Swartz keeps a nice list of all of his nonfiction Thus Spake Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche. Comeuppance: Costly Altruistic Signaling Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction, William Flesch. excerpts Franny and Zooey, Salinger, J.D. excerpts This was a hugely important book for me. Human Inference: Strategies and Shortcomings of Social Judgment, Richard E. Nisbett and Lee Ross. Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut. Welcome to the Monkey House, Kurt Vonnegut. My favorite collection of Vonnegut stories. What a crisp, straightforward writer, and a brilliant storyteller. He never wastes your time. Metamagical Themas, Douglas Hofstadter. Another compendium from Hofstadter a collection of all of his Scientific American columns. "Metamagical Themas" is remarkably an anagram of "Mathematical Games," the title of his predecessor Martin Gardner's column (on recreational mathematics). Crazy! I once posted some "innumeracy exercises" based on a chapter of this book. Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Douglas Hofstadter. The most intellectually exciting book I've read. Here is its excellent annotated bibliography. Industrial Society and Its Future, Theodore Kaczynski. Mathematics: A Very Short Introduction, Timothy Gowers. Hidden Order: How Adaptation Builds Complexity, John H. Holland I had Holland as a professor at the U of M. He's brilliant, and an excellent teacher. I also recommend his Emergence: From Chaos To Order. A Mathematician's Apology, G. H. Hardy. This is as good as everyone says it is. Hardy was mostly famous for two things: this book, and discovering the true genius Ramanujan. Read a biography of him. A People's History of the United States, Howard Zinn. Like Will Hunting says, this one will blow your hair back. The Big Lebowski: The Making of a Coen Brothers Film, Tricia Cooke and William Preston Robertson. Shows the Coen brothers' obsessive attention to detail. Every shot is storyboarded, and every piece of the production wardrobes, lighting, casting, etc. is meticulously planned. They're the Joyce of filmmaking. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas S. Kuhn Ceci N'est Pas Une Pipe, Michel Foucault. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, David Foster Wallace. Some of my favorite short fiction is in here. See, e.g., this and this. Breaking The Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, Daniel Dennett. I wrote a philosophy term paper that played with ideas from this book. Dialogues with Children, Gareth Mathews. Proof that children can do philosophy, and a study of an excellent teacher in action. Remarks on Color, Ludwig Wittgenstein. Tao Te Ching, Laozi. Drastically overrated. The Diamond Age, Neal Stephenson. Hamlet, William Shakespeare. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Edward Tufte. Worthwhile even if all you learn is to maximize his "data-ink" ratio. Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science, Atul Gawande. Gawande is a phenomenal writer. His work is self-recommending. Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind, V. S. Ramachandran. Some of the coolest i.e., the most fascinating stuff I've ever read. This book may tempt you to drop everything for a career in neurology or cognitive neuroscience. Dubliners, James Joyce. A paper I wrote on the story "A Little Cloud." My professor called "The Dead" the best short story of all time. "Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age." Autobiography of Malcolm X, Malcolm X with Alex Haley. Nine Stories, Salinger, J.D. Some of these stories took Salinger more than a year to write, each. It paid off they're incredible. Gems. The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, Richard P. Feynman. Prima facie a great read. 1000 Most Important Words, Norman W. Schur. Here is the list of words. A while ago I marked the ones I was uncomfortable with or clueless about. The Hedgehog and the Fox, Isaiah Berlin. Ulysses, James Joyce. I wrote a paper on Ithaca, the epic penultimate episode. Writing in Unreaderly Times, Kevin Smokler. Zingerman's Guide to Giving Great Service, Ari Weinzweig. Zingerman's, in Ann Arbor, MI, is arguably the best (and best-run) deli outside of New York. And part of what makes it so special is their highly regarded company culture and especially the way they treat customers. This book is a great guide for doing that yourself, as most of the ideas and advice are less about the restaurant industry than the giving-people-what-they-want industry. On Bullshit, Harry G. Frankfurt. I Want to Be a Mathematician, Paul R. Halmos What an incredible book I will have it by my bedside wherever I live. Halmos was a beautiful writer and a hard worker. Here's what he had to say on the subject: Archimedes taught us that a small quantity added to itself often enough becomes a large quantity (or, in proverbial terms, every little bit helps). When it comes to accomplishing the bulk of the world's work, and, in particular, when it comes to writing a book, I believe that the converse of Archimedes' teaching is also true: the only way to write a large book is to keep writing a small bit of it, steadily every day, with no exception, with no holiday. It's hard to overstate the importance of what Godel achieved. Nagel and Newman do a superb job of explaining his remarkably clever and loopy proof, a proof which inspired Hofstadter to write the incomparable Godel, Escher, Bach. In fact, this is one of Hofstadter's favorite books. Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson. A study of "grotesques." As some writer says in the afterword, it has a lot to teach us about humility, ambivalence, and self-doubt. The Equation that Couldn't Be Solved, Mario Livio. The Vagina Monologues, Eve Ensler. It's probably better to see a live performance, but this book was a fine substitute. Anathem, Neal Stephenson. This might have been my favorite book if I had read it as a youngster. I see it as a headier, meatier, more intellectual version of Harry Potter. A Man Without a Country, Kurt Vonnegut. Systemantics, John Gall. The Dip, Seth Godin. Quite a useful concept. Fear and Trembling, Soren Kierkegaard. excerpts Mythologies, Roland Barthes. Brilliant, and hugely influential. The Stranger, Albert Camus. Getting to Maybe: How to Excel on Law School Exams, Richard Michael Fischl and Jeremy Paul. I wrote about this a bit in my piece, "Why the Law" Proof, David Auburn. Coders at Work, Peter Seibel. A book of fifteen interviews with famous hackers and computer scientists. There is lots of wisdom in here: see, for example, my large file of excerpts. Unaccustomed Earth, Jhumpa Lahiri. Six Easy Pieces, Richard Feynman. Harvey Penick's Little Red Book: Lessons and Teachings from a Lifetime in Golf, Harvey Penick. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov. How Fiction Works, James Wood. I recommend this to any amateur reader (or writer) of fiction. It gives you a great toolbox for thinking about the craft and it'll make you a better reader. This Craft of Verse, Jorge Luis Borges. Envisioning Information, Edward Tufte. The Nine, Jeffrey Toobin. Girl With Curious Hair, David Foster Wallace. The Best of Isaac Asimov, Isaac Asimov. My favorite stories, in order, were "The Last Question," "Nightfall," and "Billiard Ball." The Art and Craft of Judging: the Decisions of Judge Learned Hand, Hershel Shanks. Fantastic. Learned Hand was a beautiful expositor, and a crystal-clear thinker. One of the great minds of his century. Junk Mail, Will Self. Tinkers, Paul Harding. Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, Richard Feynman. Self-recommending. Read it with an eye toward Feynman's disposition, his particular way of thinking concretely, simply, with a hard reflex against the illusion of understanding. The Human Stain, Philip Roth. The polemic in those first few pages scared me, but this develops into a fascinating character study, and a suspenseful story. Gang Leader for a Day, Sudhir Venkatesh. Story of My Life, Jay McInerney. The Road, Cormac McCarthy. Wise Choices, Apt Feelings: A Theory of Normative Judgement, Allan Gibbard. Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, Paul Reps and Nyogen Senzaki, eds. Disappointing except for "Centering", which was excellent. Inside "Jeopardy!": What Really Goes on at TV's Top Quiz Show, Harry Eisenberg. There is lots of interesting info about how the show works: how clues are written, researched, vetted, etc., and how individual episodes are produced. The Chomsky-Foucault Debate on Human Nature, Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault, ed. John Rajchman. A Mathematician's Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form, Paul Lockhart. The expanded book version of this wonderful essay on mathematics education. Look at the Birdie, Kurt Vonnegut. The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger. Reading this in high school probably ruins it. It's not Salinger's best that's Franny and Zooey, I think but it's still excellent. Worry less about the symbolic significance of that red hunting cap or those ducks in Central Park, and more about Holden's psychology, the what-it-is-like to think like him, the complexities and consequences of his attitude. Dune, Frank Herbert. Occasionally it's fun and probably healthy to read about essentially perfect people, like the Duke Paul Maud'Dib. Otherwise this is as realistic and careful a work of world-building science fiction I've encountered. Wampeters, Foma Granfalloons (Opinions), Kurt Vonnegut. I particularly liked "Science Fiction", "Excelsior! We're Going to the Moon! Excelsior!", "Why They Read Hesse", "Biafra: A People Betrayed", "Address to Graduating Class at Bennington College, 1970", "Address to the National Institute of Arts And Letters, 1971", "Reflections on My Own Death", "Address at Rededication of Wheaton College Library, 1973", and "Playboy Interview". Not as good but certainly worth reading were "Torture and Blubber" and "A Political Disease". I bet all of these essays and talks could be found online. The Little Schemer, Daniel P. Friedman and Matthias Felleisen. A wonderful book. From essentially nothing, it builds you up to the point where you can write (or at least understand) (a) the applicative-order fixed point combinator for functionals, and (b) an interpreter for the very language you're writing in. Here's a readable derivation of the Y combinator based on the one given in the book. Here's a more compact attempt, by Paul Graham, to build a Lisp interpreter from the ground up. Explaining Consciousness: The Hard Problem, ed. Jonathan Shear. A collection of papers responding to David Chalmers's "Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness," in which he famously introduces the term "the hard problem." The hard problem is the problem of explaining how first-person phenomenal experiences colors, tastes, itches, pains, thoughts, moods, mental images, feels, etc. arise in the brain, which looks to be nothing more than a really complicated collection of jiggling atoms, just like everything else in our physical world. A good portion of the book is available online at Google Books. Since it's just a collection of papers, it should be easy enough to find whatever you need. Chalmers's response to the responses might be a good way of getting a lay of the land without having to trudge through 400 pages of detailed arguments. If anything the book chipped away at my staunch materialism. I feel a lot more open to Chalmers's view, which initially struck me as almost laughably absurd. The hard problem is so hard, I now think, that it warrants quite drastic moves, like introducing something fundamental to the ontology of the world. Armageddon in Retrospect, Kurt Vonnegut. A collection of his writings on war, both fiction and nonfiction. Quite good. Communication With Extraterrestrial Intelligence (CETI), Proceedings of a conference held at the Byurakan Astrophysical Observatory, Yerevan, USSR, 5-11 September 1971, edited by Carl Sagan. One of maybe two or three of the most interesting books I've read. The chief aims of the conference were, first, to estimate values for terms of the Drake equation, and second, to devise strategies for contact. Necessarily, then, they had to discuss a remarkable range of topics everything from the chemical origins of life, to the anthropology of early civilizations, to the problem of encoding messages in a form comprehensible to intelligences vastly unlike ourselves. The conferencegoers were some of the top scientists from around the world, chiefly the US and USSR. And if anything the pleasure here is in watching them think and debate in a relatively informal setting. It's a wonderful mix of prepared talks and extemporaneous discussion. The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdős and the Search for Mathematical Truth, Paul Hoffman. A wonderful book about a wonderful man. Captivating, fast, and fun. Erdős was the most prolific mathematician who ever lived, publishing 1,475 papers, many of them hugely important. Honeybee Democracy, Thomas D. Seeley. First, Seeley explains in wonderfully lucid detail just how bees go about finding their new homes (nest sites). I came away feeling like an expert on the subject no doubt a testament to Seeley's expository skill. Second, the illustrations are fantastic: Edward Tufte would be proud. Finally, this serves nicely as a case study in basic science: how to explore, how to ask useful questions, how to design experiments, how to patiently collect data, how to make sense of your results, and how to tell a coherent story about them. The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms, Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Provocative, in both good and bad ways. Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson. Easily one of my favorite books. This is actually the second time I've read it the first was in high school, and unfortunately I think much of it went over my head (though it probably influenced me in all kinds of subtle ways). It's a book that repays many returns. For a Breath I Tarry, Roger Zelazny. How Animals Work, Knut Schmidt-Nielsen. There is a surprising and fascinating detail every five pages or so. It gets a bit technical, but the writing is remarkably understated and lucid. How the Mind Works, Steven Pinker. When I call this a "must-read," I mean it less in the sense of "so good you should drop everything and read it now" than "foundational." What Pinker talks about here is the sort of cognitive psychology that every educated person should understand well. See in particular chapters 4 (on the mechanics of vision and stereograms) and 7 (on the evolutionary psychology undergirding human relationships). And Then We Came to the End, Joshua Ferris. Funny, touching, and seemingly very accurate. Weakened only by a somewhat gimmicky finish but otherwise both a fun and edifying read. Unusual in its use of the first-person plural ("we"). Certainly pulls it off, though. Palindromes and Anagrams, Howard W. Bergerson. Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Langauge, Douglas Hofstadter Quintessential Hofstadter. The index for this book apparently took Hofstadter one full month of fifteen-hour days to pull off, which, when you see it, seems like not nearly enough time! Yours Ever: People and Their Letters, Thomas Mallon. Mallon is an excellent editor, writer, and reader, and a wonderful tour guide through centuries of private lives. Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre, Keith Johnstone. A remarkable, one-of-a-kind book. Drastically changed my view of acting and improv. Its section on status relations, and "playing high/low status," was the stickiest in my mind. Protagoras, Plato. One Two Three... Infinity: Facts and Speculations of Science, George Gamow. This is a book that should be printed in massive quantities and sprinkled everyplace youngsters hang out, in the hope that just a few of them pick it up and delightedly fall headfirst into a life of science. Deserving of all its praise (see for example the distribution of reviews on Amazon). The Screwtape Letters, C. S. Lewis. Incisive chronicle of the many ways humans stray from the good life. Lewis is a master observer of subtly pernicious psychology. Amusing, witty, and wise, just like most of Lewis's stuff. The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury. Star Maker, Olaf Stapledon. Wildly imaginative but maybe too abstract, lacking the standard hooks of successful speculative fiction (like characters, or detailed close-ups of the worlds). Stellar prose. It's florid but not purple and laced with an almost biblical majesty. Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor, Paul Farmer. Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis. C. S. Lewis's Lost Aeneid, C. S. Lewis, ed. A. T. Reynes. Lewis is a wonderful translator. Only books one, two, and six are translated at any length, enough to show that the Aeneid is a hell of a story. The John McPhee Reader, John McPhee, ed. William L. Howarth. When I grow up, what would I like to be? A modified John McPhee! It's hard to overstate how much I admire McPhee's work and writing. He's a master craftsman. Howarth's introduction tells and the rest of the book shows. Let the Great World Spin, Colum McCann. Maximum City, Suketu Mehta. This is a good, long, perspectifying read about Bombay. What strikes me most about that city, or Suketu's picture of it, is how anal and serious it makes New York look. Murders don't just go uninvestigated here; prostitution hides; restaurants are inspected; crooked plumbers aren't tolerated. I'm struck by how public our complaints are here, how easy it is to get into trouble with some authority. Things seem looser in India. Sometimes that's bad -- as when potable water must be bought with bribes -- and sometimes it's good, as in the way kids are raised (e.g., the idea of a "play date" would get you laughed out of the room). Field Notes on Science and Nature, ed. Michael R. Canfield. A beautiful, readable, very useful book. One is quickly sold on the power of narratives and sketches, and notes in general, for recording information, remembering stuff, and most important, propelling the mind into a reflective observant mode. Zodiac, Neal Stephenson. The Best American Essays (2010), ed. Christopher Hitchens. My favorites were "Gyromancy," "The Elegant Eyeball," "On John Updike," "Irreconcilable Dissonance," "The Dead Book," and "My Genome, My Self," in that order. The Quest for Artificial Intelligence: A History of Ideas and Achievements, Nils J. Nilsson. Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: The Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought, Douglas Hofstadter. Beatrice and Virgil, Yann Martel. A very quick read, and very suspenseful. You're drawn through the book on your tiptoes. But I kept waiting for the story to gear up in earnest, and kept waiting, until I had only a slim fingerful of pages left and nothing meaty yet had happened. I was left unsatisfied. "Unsatisfied," I say, except that the last few pages, particularly the short "games"... they're incredible. Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life, Adam Gopnik. Way, way better than you probably think it's going to be. Gopnik is a brilliant essayist. REAMDE, Neal Stephenson. Stephenson is a very indulgent writer. A friend at work said he was like an investigative journalist of his own imagination. When a character plugs in a router, it's 500 words about router configuration; when someone has to pick a lock, it's an essay on lock-picking and hacker culture; anytime a gun goes off it's a very careful description of bolts and safeties and the heft of the thing and firing mechanisms; when the plot calls for a flight across the Pacific it's a whole chapter's worth of great circle routes and the "what it's like" of bizjet travel. All very accurate. This is why I mostly like reading his stuff, because you learn so much in a tasty plot package. If I like REAMDE less than some of his other books, though, it's because the stuff he ends up teaching here is not as super interesting as the stuff, say, in Cryptonomicon or The Diamond Age. (I feel like I'd be much better at paintball after reading this book; in fact I was watching Die Hard 2 not too long after and the whole time I was thinking of how pathetically thoughtless all the maneuvers and tactics were in that movie, as compared to what I'd "seen" in Stephenson's book.) Sparse Distributed Memory, Pentti Kanerva. A coherent high-level account of how memory might work. Neurons are attractors in a space of bitstrings, which code for on/off features in the world. Bitstrings address neurons, which store addresses to other neurons; the chain either diverges (no recall) or converges to the best match. The mathematics of the space {0, 1}N ensure, first, that any two points chosen at random are far apart, but always closely connectable by a third; and second for that reason that a sparse and manageably-sized collection of address decoders (neurons) is sufficient to solve the best-match problem when N is massive (~10,000). Q.E.D: Beauty in Mathematical Proof, Burkard Polster. A very short book with beautiful illustrations of elegant proofs. The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation, Jon Gertner. Worth reading just for its account of the invention of the transistor. Great material, too, on Claude Shannon. Includes a very interesting concluding chapter that tries to explain what made Bell Labs so successful, and where we might find something similar today. Is it Silicon Valley? (No.) Gertner wrote a summary of that argument for the New York Times here. The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry, Jon Ronson. Less of a book about psychopathy than a book about writing a book about psychopathy. It's an interesting style, very fluid and easy to read. Puts you in the author's shoes. It allows Ronson to write things like "Immediately after he said this I wrote in my notebook, ...." The Rules: Time-tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right, Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider. Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche, Haruki Murakami. What I learned from the first part of this book, the interviews with victims / witnesses of the attack, was mostly that Japanese people have an incredible sense of duty and work ethic. I was terribly impressed by the conduct and bearing of subway attendants it's clear to me now why things in Japan are so clean and the fact that the first thought of so many victims, in the wake of their exposure to sarin gas, was to wonder, "Will I be late for work?" Murakami's essay between the book's two parts has this wonderful stance toward the Aum cult they are not "them," but rather, a twisted mirror image of "us" but I came away from it wishing I learned more about what exactly that image, and its mirror, looked like. What state was Japan in, culturally, in 1995, and how did that give rise to the Aum cult? I found the interviews with Aum cult members the most interesting, mostly for how un-crazy the lot of them sounded. My First Summer in the Sierra, John Muir. What I would give to have one day of Muir's summer, or better yet, one small ounce of his happy attitude. The Lady in the Looking-Glass, Virginia Woolf. The Way of Man: According to the Teaching of Hasidism, Martin Buber. The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, Douglas Adams. Final Approach: The Crash of Eastern 212, William Stockton. The Eastern 212 crash (which incidentally killed Stephen Colbert's father and two brothers) was said to be entirely due to pilot error. No equipment malfunctioned. What happened, essentially, is that the two pilots got wrapped up in chitchat, neglected their altitude on approach, and touched down violently well short of the airport. And what Stockton who had access to the flight voice recorder does really well in this book is give us a complete account of what they said. It's terrible, to see a conversation slowly kill 71 people. The Launch Pad: Inside Y Combinator, Silicon Valley's Most Exclusive School for Startups, Randall Stross. The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia, Bernard Suits. The editorial review summarizes well: "In the mid twentieth century the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously asserted that games are indefinable; there are no common threads that link them all. 'Nonsense,' says the sensible Bernard Suits: 'playing a game is a voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.' The short book Suits wrote demonstrating precisely that is as playful as it is insightful, as stimulating as it is delightful." This book is a shining example of philosophical thinking, of intellectual integrity: it articulates in the best possible light the best objections to its thesis, "come what may." That it manages convincingly to knock them all down is just icing. And in style: it's been a long while since I've read writing this clear, and yet it's not overbearing it manages to be both precise and light. Another one of those special books that I read on a whim and that will, I fear, never be read by anyone I recommend it to. Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell. As good as everyone says. Mitchell is an unbelievable prose stylist. My favorite was the long chapter that spanned the middle of the book. I preferred the second halves of the stories more often than the first halves; I particularly enjoyed the second half of the Frobisher letters. Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, Robin Sloan. Quick, unserious, but very engrossing. A joy to read. The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen. Probably the best novel I've read. Not necessarily the novel I most enjoyed, but goddamn is it (a) evocative and true to life, (b) astonishingly well-written, and (c) full of adult wisdom. I ought to read more fiction of this type (realist family drama). Franzen is a master analogist and creates extremely vivid images because of it. He seems to understand the mind well, and it improves his descriptions considerably. Rightfully a classic; not so self-helpy as you'd think. Quoted on p. 75: "Whenever you go out of doors, draw the chin in, carry the crown of the head high, and fill the lungs to the utmost; drink in the sunshine; greet your friends with a smile, and put soul into every handclasp." Fundamentally people want a sense of importance. "William James said: 'The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.'" The Imperfectionists, Tom Rachman. A great read, and devastating. Both Flesh and Not: Essays, David Foster Wallace. Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe, George Dyson. Covers just about the richest intellectual turf there is. You can hardly believe what giants these people were, the scientists who built the computer (and, simultaneously, the hydrogen bomb). von Neumann stands out the sense you get is that he had as big a mind as Newton's. He revolutionized everything he touched. I've never seen a book at once so grounded, with so much detail (to the point where at times it's tedious), that's also so wild with its essaying. Dyson is a historian of the first order but he has a way of coming unhinged. I happen to enjoy his grand imaginings (for instance that there even is such a thing as "the digital universe" and that it's been co-evolving with ours), just as I enjoyed his father's grand imaginings about e.g. trees that grow on comets. But I read those parts as science fiction they're like suggestive prose poems, they help kick my thinking to a higher weirder place. The Giver, Lois Lowry. I remember liking The Giver when I, along with millions of other American kids, read it in middle school. And I remember liking it because it was cryptic it gestured at something secretly significant. And that in itself is interesting, because re-reading it now I can see that it isn't, as it turns out, a cryptic book. It's actually pretty straightforward still great, but no longer glowing with some ineffable magic. What does that mean? Does it mean my mind's gotten stronger, or weaker? Tenth of December, George Saunders. The NYT Magazine called this "the Best Book You'll Read This Year," and they were wrong. But it's still a pretty good book particularly the title story. The Novel, James Michener. The style here is staid, and slow. Even the novel within the novel (the one that's fictively a bestseller) sounded awfully boring. But once through the first quarter I became more interested in the characters, and by the last third I was eager to read what would happen next. How to Be Alone, Jonathan Franzen. I am coming to very much admire Franzen's style and voice, even if he can be a little stodgy and self-satisfied at times. My favorite essays from this collection were, in the order of how much I liked them, "My Father's Brain" (about his father's Alzheimer's), "Sifting the Ashes" (about cigarettes), "Lost in the Mail" (about the Chicago post office) and "Books in Bed" (about books about sex). I imagine these can all be found in full online. Child of God, Cormac McCarthy. Hiroshima, John Hersey. Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, Daniel C. Dennett. Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do, Studs Terkel. Mortality, Christopher Hitchens. Charming, honest essays about dying from a person who lived well The afterword by his wife is beautiful Ingenious: A True Story of Invention, Automotive Daring, and the Race to Revive America, Jason Fagone. The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini. The first nine chapters, which together comprise a sort of self-contained novella, were terrific. The rest felt plotty and often contrived. Still, though, lots of great moments throughout. An emotional read. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Raymond Carver. Besides the title story, my favorites were "Tell the Women We're Going," "After the Denim," "The Bath," and "Everything Stuck to Him." On Intelligence: How a New Understanding of the Brain will Lead to the Creation of Truly Intelligent Machines, Jeff Hawkins. Aloft: Thoughts on the Experience of Flight, William Langewiesche. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams. In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives, Steven Levy. The Mezzanine, Nicholson Baker. The Logia of Yeshua, translated by Guy Davenport and Benjamin Urrutia. Conversations with David Foster Wallace, ed. Stephen J. Burn. No One Else Can Have You, Kathleen Hale. The Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Juster. "all the puzzle and excitement of everything he didn't know" Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, David Simon. The Journalist and the Murderer, Janet Malcolm. Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace. I read this in a reading pool, in 50- or 60-page increments over the course of about four months. We'd meet weekly to discuss the reading. I'm certain I would have abandoned the book without the group. It is brilliant and well worth the effort required to read it. It seems impossible to me that you could read the whole book without falling somewhat in love with it. I have the feeling IJ requires many passes to understand, a huge amount of cross-referencing, and research, and note-taking, and theorizing, before you get anywhere close to conquering it. I'm reminded of those old platformers or whatever where "beating the game" really meant you'd achieved like a 35% completion rate, and had to go back to find all the special missions and modes and worlds. That's roughly where I think I'm at with this book. I was disappointed when it finished because there seemed to be so many unanswered questions; I suspect, though, that these questions were answered, but in a way that'd be just about impossible to pick up the first time through. Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood. Democracy and Distrust: A Theory of Judicial Review, John Hart Ely. Ely writes and thinks like Bernard Suits in The Grasshopper: with cases, clarity, and good humor. My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind, Scott Stossel. Funny, fascinating, earnest, informative, and consistently fun to read. I can't believe how much of a page-turner this was, given its subject. The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood, James Gleick. The Design of Everyday Things, Donald A. Norman. Vox, Nicholson Baker. Coming into the Country, John McPhee. Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race in the Urban Present, Mark Costello and David Foster Wallace. The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia, Andrew Lih. Much more interesting, informative, and inspiring than I was expecting. The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers, Ben Horowitz. Libra, Don DeLillo. The Lifespan of a Fact, John D'Agata and Jim Fingal. My dismay at finding out that this very book was, in part, a fiction—the supposed correspondence between the author and fact-checker didn't actually happen as rendered—vindicates something Fingal (checker) says to D'Agata (author): "It seems to me like it's important for a person to know whether what they're reading is the product of someone trying to 'keep up the struggle to nail down the facts of the world,' as you put it, or if they're reading something that disregards, discards, or manipulates those facts for artistic purposes. People feel like they've been trifled with if they discover they've been misled on that front.'" Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, David Shafer. Total Recall, Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell. Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance, Atul Gawande. The Sense of Style, Steven Pinker. Basically the only theory-driven guide to writing I've seen theory-driven in the sense that it offers a reason for all its prescriptions, drawn usually from cognitive science or the psychology of reading. I therefore hope it is circulated widely, and that it becomes a regular part of the American curriculum. Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty, Vikram Chandra. Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe. Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. The Fermata, Nicholson Baker. The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher, Lewis Thomas. The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway. The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin. The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway. It's astonishing to me that this is considered as important a book as it is. There's nothing to it. And I don't buy that that's because Hemingway buried the substance of the book in the subtext. I think it's just because he didn't take much time writing it. It's an enjoyable enough read, but it's more like an artful travel journal than a novel. It feels like a giant missed opportunity. King Lear, William Shakespeare. Another Country, James Baldwin. Seveneves, Neal Stephenson. Stephenson might have the best job in the world. You can see how he uses his novels to dive into subjects that interest him. In that sense he's a lot like a journalist. These projects are an excuse for him to study and talk to smart people and even to do original research over the course of many years. In this book those topics include: orbital mechanics, mining culture, the physics of chains, big space engineering, epigenetics, and glider flight. The premise and storyline of this book might be the best Stephenson has ever come up with. The moon blows up in the first sentence; this causes a chain reaction that will, it is calculated, wipe out the planet in two years. The action takes place in three parts; the first and last of these are gripping and fascinating. The last part in particular is fun to read and imaginative. The middle part is a slog, and takes up about ten times too many pages. One consequence of Stephenson being (it seems) a scholar first and a storyteller second is that he indulges in technical detail. When he's describing new worlds, and the story is moving fast (as in the third section), that's welcome—but when the going is slow, all the minutiae is painful. Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer The Martian, Andy Weir Moby-Dick, Herman Melville Everything it's cracked up to be. What a read, and surely one of the best, most ambitious, most complete novels there's ever been. The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed, John McPhee The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal, M. Mitchell Waldrop The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., Adelle Waldman Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel The Big Short, Michael Lewis The Ghost Writer, Philip Roth An Anthropologist on Mars, Oliver Sacks Changing Places, David Lodge The Andromeda Strain, Michael Crichton The Beautiful and Damned, F. Scott Fitzgerald The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, Alain de Botton An unusual little book that ought to be read widely. It's a generous, funny, thoughtful look at the work that we do now—in logistics, in back offices, in science and infrastructure engineering—and what that means. The chapter on painting was my favorite. de Botton has a roving, essaying style sort of like DFW's in his nonfiction—he goes places and meets strangers, like a reporter, but instead of merely reporting he shows you what's going on inside his head. It makes for a more entertaining read, and it feels more honest. Ubik, Philip K. Dick Contact, Carl Sagan A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Robert F. Kennedy The Stand, Stephen King Maybe the most gripping novel I've read. The characters and scenes are incredibly vivid—King writes in a way where you see everything that's happening. And it's hard to imagine a more compelling premise and plot. The characters felt alive. This will be my go-to recommendation to anyone looking for a fun, engaging read. The perfect beach or subway book. I read the "complete and uncut" edition. Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov I believe Kinbote is the author of Canto IV. The poem itself is, I think, a great work of literature, and it's a stroke of genius to have embedded it in this strange novel, first because it must have greatly multiplied the poem's audience, and second because it has a way of weakening your critical stance toward it—you don't go into it thinking, "Here's a poem I must criticize," but thinking rather, "Oh, how neat—a little poem." Oranges, John McPhee The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood The Guns of August, Barbara W. Tuchman All the President's Men, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward The New Bloomsday Book: A Guide Through Ulysses, Harry Blamires My book group has been reading Ulysses, and this guide has been indispensable—reading it before each chapter of U made what was literally going on in each scene vastly more accessible. Sourdough, Robin Sloan Such a joyful book and a joy to read. I may have even liked it more than Penumbra. This one has that same infectious love for the world. Once a Runner, John L. Parker Jr. More people should write books like this: fictional odes to the thing they love. On Beauty, Zadie Smith The Control of Nature, John McPhee Childhood's End, Arthur C. Clarke The Machinery of Life, David S. Goodsell What a book! Required reading, and especially so for high schoolers and college students. I wasn't much interested in bio as a student but now am hungry to learn more about it, and sort of wish I'd fallen down the rabbit-hole when I was in school. This book would have been a great way in. I first heard about it via this blog post about how cells are "very fast and crowded places." Indeed, in the first few chapters of the book, this model of the inside of a cell is articulated very clearly. I'd always wondered what it meant for genes to be "expressed" and when exactly this would happen, how long it would go on, how often it would be repeated. This book gave me a mental model of the cell that explains gene expression in a simple way: our transcription machinery, like all proteins in the cell, are bouncing around at random, very quickly, encountering other molecules to bind with (or not); when they encounter DNA, they transcribe ("express") it. Gene expression is modulated—genes are "turned off" or on—when the DNA encoding that gene is literally hidden from the transcription machinery, by being packed into the crevasses of tight chromatin bundles. There are lots of drawings by Goodsell, along with videos, explanations, and other stuff, at the protein data bank. There are some excerpts on this page. The Beautiful Brain: The Drawings of Santiago Ramón y Cajal, Larry W. Swanson, Eric Newman, Alfonso Araque, Janet M. Dubinsky There are some open questions I had after reading the book on this page. The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA, James D. Watson Uncommon Carriers, John McPhee I, Claudius, Robert Graves Sex and the City, Candace Bushnell Defining the Wind: The Beaufort Scale, and How a 19th-century Admiral Turned Science into Poetry, Scott Huler A surprisingly wonderful book whose basic point is to pay closer attention to the world around you a bit like Field Notes on Science and Nature. I was inspired to write my own Beaufortian scale for airplane turbulence. My Brilliant Friend, Elena Ferrante. 11/22/63, Stephen King. Sing, Unburied, Sing, Jesmyn Ward. Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton. Wow! An incredibly captivating read. And complements the movie: both were ideal versions of the story for their form. Here in the book you get lots more motivation and justification it's very technical to the point of seeming real. Makes me want Crichton's job: study a world of science or engineering in great depth, and as payment, produce page-turning fiction about it. Did you know that at one point, Chrichton had the nation's #1 bestselling book, the top movie at the box office, and the most-watched television series, all at the same time and that this happened TWICE (!)? The White Darkness, David Grann. The Soul of a New Machine, Tracy Kidder. Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes (translated by Edith Grossman). Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process, John McPhee. The Waves, Virginia Woolf. The Course of Love, Alain de Botton. The Avalanche Hunters, Montgomery Atwater. Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style, Benjamin Dreyer. Shogun, James Clavell. The Three-Body Problem, Cixin Liu. The Man Who Knew Infinity, Robert Kanigel. The Dark Forest, Cixin Liu. Death's End, Cixin Liu. Medicine Walk, Richard Wagamese. The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes. Night Boat to Tangier, Kevin Barry. A Computer Scientist's Guide to Cell Biology, William W. Cohen. The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro. A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan. Stoner, John Williams. The Eighth Day of Creation, Horace Freeland Judson. The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead. My friend Ben and I wrote a New York Times crossword puzzle, which appeared in print on Saturday, October 20th 2018. You can download it here. I reverse-engineered Google Docs to create Draftback, a tool which allows you to play back any Google Doc's history as though it were a movie. (See an example here, from a FiveThirtyEight article about the tool.) It has more than 300,000 users, most of them teachers and students. Here's a note about how it's being used in the classroom, from the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy. Jimbo Jeopardy! is a playable version of the j-archive. It lets you play more than twenty years worth of real Jeopardy games. Here is a link to the github project page. You can read a blog post about it here. Or click here to play now! My friend Ben and I made a typewriter that sends its keystrokes in real time to a Google Doc. We call it the DocWriter. I made a tool to visualize trends in Jeopardy! clues over the past 30 years, available at jgrams.com, and written up on TIME. I created a tool for reporters that syncs notes to a recording, and generates a timecoded transcript. I've made a very simple typewriter simulator (a text editor where you can't hit Delete) at jsomers.net/typerwriter. With two other students, Michael Bommarito and Jon Zelner, I built a small system to help researchers at the University of Michigan's Center for the Study of Complex Systems manage and analyze data from big runs of agent-based model simulations. We were funded by Google as part of their Summer of Code (2008). Here you can download some of our code. As discussed in this blog post, I tapped into the Google Directions API to answer a few neat questions about driving directions, including "What's the most complicated route in the United States?" The relevant code is here. I wrote up my solution to Project Euler problem #106 in this blog post. Here is a more recent solution, this time in Ruby, to problem #215. And here's a write-up for problem #191. On this page I wrote some Javascript to quickly generate rows of the Rule 110 cellular automaton. I spent a few frantic weeks on a project (also) called "draftback," which was designed to give writers fine-grained feedback on their writing, fast. It worked in fact I think it worked well, in spite of some minor bugs but my attention and interest slowly waned. The code is here. I eventually expect to revive this in some form or another. For a while I went on a kick playing the Facebook game called Scramble, and eventually I wrote a solver for it. Along those same lines, I wrote a program to generate word puzzles like the ones found in this Sporcle game, where you're given a six-letter template, say, _ L _ _ _ X, and asked to find the word that fits. I had an idea for an application that would collect analog feedback on web videos. So as someone's watching a Steven Colbert clip, for instance, she might wiggle her mouse whenever she found Steven particularly funny. The funnier she found him, the harder she'd wiggle. That data about her interest and engagement (mapped to particular moments in the video) would be collated with data from other viewers. Here's a simple demo, and here's the Github repository for the demo. I've always wanted a simple utility for copyediting that would let me make insertions, deletions, and comments with the lowest possible overhead. The idea is in the same neighborhood as (but importantly different from) that "draftback" tool described in #7 above. Anyway, check out what I ended up calling "diffly." Here's the source code. Some friends in college taught me an Indian trick-taking game called Mindy Coat that feels very much like Spades or Euchre. Since we graduated everyone has spread around the globe and so in order to play I had to make a real-time multiplayer online version of the Mindy Coat game. You can browse its source at its Github project page.

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James Somers is a writer and programmer based in New York.

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