FDR

Recently finished Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Political Life by Robert Dallek. I really didn't care for FDR as a person, but I do admire his will and ability to overcome his disability. I also admire many of his legislative accomplishments during the depression, and his ultimate ability to lead the U.S. into the war and mobilize.

Overall I'm caught up on his lack of moral courage to take unpopular political decisions. Perhaps the U.S. would have been better served by 2 term or single term presidents who cared less for maintaining their political base, and more for plight of Jews (FDR did essentially nothing for Jewish immigrants), his own Japanese citizens (interned), the Allied cause (didn't enter the war before he was attacked, and took fairly limited measures in advance of that to mobilize the country and support the Allies through Lend Lease).

Ego and insecurity

Ego is overdressed insecurity - Quincy Jones

Business related video

LinkedIn is very high on the list of highest number of video web queries

China and AI - it's about control

According to Signal, the newsletter of the Eurasia Group: "control is a central motivation of the [Chinese] government’s bid to become a 21st century AI superpower"

They go on:

The idea is to create a nation in which every person, company, road, bridge, river, air particle, hospital, school, and police station is monitored by sensors, cameras, or data hoovers. And then to feed that data into AI systems, developed by China's increasingly capable homegrown tech industry, that can help the government do to three things:

• Improve people’s quality of life by using massive data sets and artificial intelligence to make roads, rails, hospitals, schools, and other public services run better and more responsively – without ever having to open up to the mess of democratic accountability or oversight. This might look good to those people around the world who believe democratic governments can barely tie their own shoes.
• Keep order by controlling the movement of “threatening” people and ideas. This is much easier to do via technology and data analysis than by sending spooks out to spy on people. This idea will appeal to governments looking to create the kind of stability that doesn’t demand power-sharing.
• Create incentives for people to follow the rules by using technology to limit the access of lawbreaking citizens to important services. That might appeal to both law-abiding citizens and political officials.

US, China, AI and warfare

Some highlights from an FT article entitled "Washington unnerved by China’s ‘military-civil fusion"

... scientists and companies in both China and the west have become interwoven. Large numbers of young Chinese study and work in related disciplines in Europe and America. As many as 25 per cent of graduate students in science, technology, engineering and maths in the US are Chinese citizens, according to an estimate from the Pentagon. Western technology companies are heavily invested in China and Chinese firms have been a growing source of funding for AI start-ups in Silicon Valley.


... “The entanglement in AI creates a dual-use dilemma,” says Elsa Kania, a fellow at the Centre for a New American Security. “Our open and liberal societies facilitate the development of AI, but the Chinese state’s single-minded pursuit of these technologies puts this same openness and freedom at risk.”

... role of private companies means that industry “is moving centre stage in geopolitics”, says Su Tzu-yun, a senior official at the Institute for National Defence and Security Research, a think-tank backed by Taiwan’s defence ministry and National Security Council.

...“So far, their main interests appear to be in harnessing AI for command and control, and to use augmented and virtual reality to make exercises more real — an important feature for a military that has essentially not fought since the Vietnam war,” says Elsa Kania, a fellow at the Washington-based Centre for a New American Security.

NYTimes on musicals converted from other formats

In his review of King Kong (with Ben Brantley), Jesse Green stated:

When I see a musical drawn from a work in another genre — in this case the 1933 movie and its novelization — one thing I look for is the added value. What is gained in bringing “King Kong” to the stage? Certainly not provocative or insightful songwriting. The score is a hodgepodge of soundtrack-style murk by Marius de Vries and a clutch of no-profile songs by Eddie Perfect, whose score for “Beetlejuice” is heading toward Broadway even as we speak

Nitin Noria's comments on veterans and business

Nitin Noria wrote this article in the Washington Post in 2013 about his experience teaching veterans in business school and the importance of cultivating ties between business and the military.

Large corporations and fascism?

In the NYTimes opinion pages this week, Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia, argues that large corporations lay the groundwork for fascism.

I don't think it's a very strong argument, as he fails to tie corporations to the actual rise of leaders. However he highlights that having fewer, larger corporations in an industry obviously consolidates political power in that industry.

He closes by stating: "We have forgotten that antitrust law had more than an economic goal, that it was meant fundamentally as a kind of constitutional safeguard, a check against the political dangers of unaccountable private power."

Nassim Taleb talk

Nassim Taleb gave a talk today at Google. He opened by stating that he gave a talk six years ago at Google in Mountain View, and that it seemed that the average age in the room today was about six years older. I don't know if he meant it this way, but it made the point for me that people really never leave Google (and that says something about our culture).

He said later in his talk that all corporations decline, and that some of that is because we get farther away from the customer. He recommended that we all start our own companies.

He also discussed the Lindy Effect. Wikipedia defines it as: The Lindy effect is a concept that the future life expectancy of some non-perishable things like a technology or an idea is proportional to their current age, so that every additional period of survival implies a longer remaining life expectancy.[1] Where the Lindy effect applies, mortality rate decreases with time. In contrast, living creatures and mechanical things follow a bathtub curve where, after "childhood", the mortality rate increases with time. Because life expectancy is probabilistically derived, a thing may become extinct before its "expected" survival. In other words, one needs to gauge both the age and "health" of the thing to determine continued survival.

Refreshing article on conservative leadership at Pintrest

Pintrest is led by a conservative leadership team, that seems to emphasize profitable growth with a core set of customers. The NYTimes wrote an article profiling the CEO, Ben Silbermann, and the company more broadly.

Obama's summer reading list

"Tara Westover’s Educated is a remarkable memoir of a young woman raised in a survivalist family in Idaho who strives for education while still showing great understanding and love for the world she leaves behind.

"Set after WWII, Warlight by Michael Ondaatje is a meditation on the lingering effects of war on family.

"With the recent passing of V.S. Naipaul, I reread A House for Mr Biswas, the Nobel Prize winner's first great novel about growing up in Trinidad and the challenge of post-colonial identity.

"An American Marriage by Tayari Jones is a moving portrayal of the effects of a wrongful conviction on a young African-American couple.

"Factfulness by Hans Rosling, an outstanding international public health expert, is a hopeful book about the potential for human progress when we work off facts rather than our inherent biases."

No one else is thinking about you...

"You wouldn't worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do."

-attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt but probably not her...

Kissenger and Brzezinski on diplomacy

Henry Kissenger said in an interview with the Financial Times (article here):

“Zbig was almost unique in my generation. We both considered ideas about the world order to be the key problem of our time. How could we create it? We had somewhat different ideas. But for both of us, we were above all concerned to raise diplomacy to that level of influence.”

Andre Aciman's "Enigma Variations"

I really enjoyed Andre Aciman's Enigma Variations. He creates such a beautiful world that you really don't want to put the book down. I couldn't necessarily identify with all of his character's romantic situations, but they all took place in a lovely scene.

It also struck me as a very lovely story about bisexuality, which isn't frequently in the spotlight.

Some highlights:

(First, After the protagonist's mother finds her deceased father-in-law's cufflinks):

"This is the cruel thing about the dead. They come back in ways that always catch us off guard, don't they, Signor Giovanni?" Mother said.

"Yes," he agreed. "Sometimes, just wanting to tell them something that would have mattered to them, or to ask about people and places only they would have known about, reminds us that they'll never hear us, won't answer, don't care. But perhaps it's much worse for them: maybe they are the ones calling out to us and it is we who can't listen and don't seem to care."

(Later in the book, into another 'variation,' when he's at dinner and reminiscing about a seminar he took with an old friend.):

"Edith Wharton," I continued, "had lived in New England a great portion of her life and yet suddenly, because of an affair with someone who was not her husband, at the age of forty-six she penned these nine words in her diary: I have drunk the wine of life at last. Old Brit [the professor] loved that sentence. 'Think of the courage it takes to say such a thing to yourself at an age when most people have long drunk and sobered up from the wine of life. And think of the despair in her last two words - at last - as though she had all but given up and was ever grateful to this man who appeared in her life in the nick of time.'

"After mulling over his own words, Old Brit asked how many of us had actually drunk from the wine of life. 

"Most in the room raised their hands, thoroughly persuaded they'd experienced life-changing bliss. Only two failed to raise their hands."

"Me and you," she said, after a moment of silence, as thought that said it all, had always said it all. Silence hovered over our table.

"Actually, a third hand didn't go up that evening," I finally said.

"I don't remember a third hand."

"Ole Brit himself." 

[Much later in the book, he tells the story of how slept with Ole Brit, years later...]

I said, 'I think you should sleep with me.' 'That's an idea,' he said, startled yet placid as ever, 'and when should this be?' he asked in his typical way of giving a humorous spin to things. But I wasn't going to let him off the hook. 'Tonight.' I'd never in my life been so certain of myself or so peremptory. 'Are you so sure?' he asked. Once again he tried to put me off. I found the right words to reassure him: "Yes, tonight. I'll take care of everything, I promise.' And because a dead silence fell between us, I still remember repeating I promise.  He reached over to me and held my face with both his hands and brought it close to his. 'I've thought of this from the very first time I met you. Paul.' 'I didn't know,' I said. I was more baffled by this admission than by anything I had said to him. 'Changed your mine?' he asked, putting a smile on his face. 'Not at all,' I said, more scared than I thought I'd be, because I suddenly realized that, despite the hasty, untrammeled sex I'd knoow, I had never made love to a man before and that this was what he was offering. When I led him upstairs to my room, he didn't enter right away. I thought he was nervous, but now I think he was giving me a change to change my mind. I didn't turn on the light and began taking off my sweater. But he was naked before I was; he embraced me and started to remove everyting I was wearing. I lost tracke of waht we were doing. I was far more nervous than he. He ended up taking care of me.

It's a beautiful story. I love the way Aciman chose to wrote it all in one long paragraph of back and forth conversation, which somehow builds the sexual energy of the story.

Later, we meet a woman he is infatuated with, who writes emails in a very direct way, but her other prose is intricate:

I had read one of her articles and knew how complicated her mind was; I loved her complicated mind. Her prose reminded me of a warren of arcane, sporadic lanes in the West Village that take sudden turns and are perennially ahead of you. On e-mail, however, she spoke the polished language of the tree-lined grands boulevards of Paris, all clarity and transparency, no hidden corners, no false trails, no dead ends. You could always choose to overinterpret the meaning of so much clarity,  but then you'd be reading your own pulse, not hers.

Books on Napoleon

Matt recommended the following books or resources on Napoleon:

• Napoleon by Emil Ludwig (first recommendation)
• The Napoleon Bonaparte Podcast (looks like a great introduction to Napoleon)
• Napoleon Profiles in Power - Geoffrey James Ellis
• History of Warfar: The Napoleonic Wards - Gunther E. Rothenberg

Russia summits

Good article on U.S. / Russia summits. Diplomacy remains close to my heart:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/14/world/europe/summits-kremlin-us-presidents.html

"Men without Women" Murakami

I recently finished Men Without Women, a collection of short stories by Haruki Murakami. I'm such a fan of his, and (as a Times review said) this provides all the Murakami trademarks a reader wants - a mysterious cat, rock n roll vinyl, late nights in Tokyo bars.

My favorite short story was called "Kino." The protagonist was a man named Kino who sort of stumbles through life. He was injured as an athlete and began selling shoes because his coach recommended it. His wife left him, and with minimal objections he uprooted his life and opened a bar in a space that a family member encouraged him to take. He floated through life, but in the end he's forced to live the emotions he has been suppressing. It ends:

"Don't look away, look right at it," someone whispered in his ear. "This is what your heart looks like."

The willow branches swayed in the early summer breeze. In a small dark room, somewhere inside Kino, a warm hand was reaching out to him. Eyes shut, he felt that hand on his, soft and substantial. He'd forgotten this, had been apart from it for far too long. Yes, I am hurt. Very, very deeply. He said this to himself. And he wept. In that dark, still room.

All the while the rain did not let up, drenching the world in a cold chill.

I think too often I am like Kino, removed from my emotions because dealing with them would be too much work and too messy.

In another favorite short story called "An Independent Organ," a doctor who is floating quite successfully through life falls in love for the first time. It forces him to question the entire foundation of himself as a person.

"Who in the world am I? I've really been wondering about this..."

"Who am I?" he went on. "Up until now I've worked as a cosmetic plastic surgeon and never had any doubts about it. Graduated from the plastic surgery department of med school, worked first with my father as his assistant, then took over the clinic when his eyes started to go and he retired. Maybe I shouldn't say this, but I'm a pretty skilled surgeon. The world of plastic surgery can be pretty seedy, and there are some clinics that put out splashy advertising but do mediocre work. I've always been conscientious about my work, and I've never had any major problems with my clients. I'm proud of this as a professional. I'm happy with my private life, too. I have a lot of friends, and have stayed healthy up till now. I'm enjoying life. But still these days I've often wondered Who in the world am I? And very seriously at that. If you took away my career as a plastic surgeon, and the happy environment I'm living in, and throw me out into the world, with no explanation, and with everything stripped away--what in the world would I be?"

Tokai looked me right in the eye, as if seeking some sort of response.

"Why have you suddenly started to think that way?" I asked.

"I think it's because of a book I read a while ago about the Nazi concentration camps."  

He goes on to discuss how nothing in his life that he relies on - his experience, his career, his relationships - would prepare him to survive in Auschwitz.

I identify with Tokai, but I do think that I'm being hard on myself in this case. I've certainly survived in tough situations, and those experiences can help me understand "Who am I?"

In addition to these stand outs, there was an interesting story that drew on the story of Scheherazade (one of my favorite myths / tales). 

I love Murakami and should review his full bibliography to ensure I've read everything. 

A final note. One of the reasons I enjoy Murakami so much is that he changed his life quickly over night. After running a bar with his wife, he decided to become an author, and he must be one of the world's most renowned and successful authors today. His characters' ability to appreciate detail and become drawn into music, food, and other aspects of culture always inspire me as well.

Days, life, and New York

This quote was included in the article I discussed in my last post, by Kevin Baker. I think it took on a different meaning for me than perhaps the author, or La Guardia himself, intended, because of where I am in my life and what I contemplate on a day to day basis.

"Too often, life in New York is merely a squalid succession of days, whereas in fact it can be a great, living, thrilling adventure." Fiorello La Guardia, 1933

A city of workers and eccentrics...

Shortly after I wrote my last post, I found the cover article of July's Harpers Magazine, called "Death of a Great American City." Kevin Baker wrote this article, and while I think he very nicely articulates the concerns I have about the city losing its character by economically unsustainable for artists and creatives, I think he also gives way to the nostalgia and impracticality that tarnishes the arguments I would like to make.

Baker tries to strike a balance, but often ends up damning development on the whole, and draws on no data and loads of undocumented nostalgia.

In one quote, he does perfectly articulate my concerns and desire for the city.

But New York should be a city of workers and eccentrics as well as visionaries and billionaires; a place of school-teachers and garbage men and janitors, or people who wear buttons reading IS IT FASCISM YET? -- as one woman in my neighborhood has for decades, even as she grows steadily grayer and more stooped. A city of people who sell books on the street-- and in their own shops. A city of street photographers, and immigrant vendors, and bus drivers with attitudes, and even driven businessmen and hedge fund operators. All helped to get along a little better, out of gratitude for all that they do to keep everything running, and to keep New York remarkable.

And earlier in his story he articulated it slightly differently, focusing on the experience in the street.

It is through all these interactions, multiplied a million times, that a truly great city is made. The street life--the warrens of little shops and businesses that once sustained our neighborhood in the sort of 'exhuberant diversity' that Jane Jacobs considered a prerequisite for a successful city--is being eradicated as well: the botanica on 96th Stree that Susan, my sister-in-law, always visisted to buy her healing herbs when she was in town; the Indians spice shop next to it, with the protective elephant-headed idol of Ganesh mounted outside. ...

... These stores, like so many others in my neighborhood, ahve not been replaced. They are simply... gone.

He also provided an interesting history of the city in the 60's and 70's that I was previously unfamiliar with. Basically, the decline in the port system (as container shipping began), and a decline in manufacturing in the Northeast US, meant a decline in industrial jobs just as a large number of African Americans and Hispanics arrived in the city.

The great threat to the New York of the Sixties and Seventies--and many other cities in the Northeast and Miwest--was considered to be the flood of largely unskilled, uneducated African Americans from the South and Hispanics from the islands. (He goes on to address the racism in this.)... 

But the 'peasants' pour in just as the hopeful and the desperate had always come, though they encountered, for the first time in New York's history, a city that no longer had many entry-level industrial jobs to offer them. The result was perverse, a New York that was home to more than a million welfare recipients and featured almost full employment for everyone else; a city where 7 milion to 14 million square feet of office space--the size of the entire downtown of a metropolis such as Kansas City or Pittsburgh--was built in New York every year from 1967 to 1970, as Ric Burns and James Sandeers notes in their history of the city. 

Urban experience: Where can the arts thrive?

I spend a weird amount of time thinking about what cities still allow the arts to thrive. Is New York too expensive and fully gentrified for an artist to live? If so, where can an artist thrive today, as artists did in NYC in the 80s?

First off, I have to acknowledge that I have no statistics to support this narrative. I'm sure artists struggle in every region and throughout time. There are certainly conditions that allow artists to make a living and even thrive, and it is productive to explore those conditions, so that we could even mimic them in NYC today.

I first became truly interested after attending a fundraising and promotional event for a nonprofit that raises money to support theater spaces in NYC. Many many theater spaces in NYC closed over the past several years, as property owners and developers decided that a theater wasn't the best and highest use of a property. I was told at this event that young actors and writers regularly choose Detroit over New York (I do believe however that the draw of New York would continue for generations even if this worrying real estate trend continued unchecked).

I recently read a NY Times article on "Athens, Rising" after the economic crisis it has experienced for the last decade. According to the author, art spaces and a vibrant restaurant and nightlife scene have emerged in the wake of the crisis. Has the economic difficulty of the crisis facilitated the artistic and creative vibrancy we see today?

It's hard to say. The author and those he interviews do question this narrative, but it remains compelling for me.

'We all got fired or we quite because we weren't getting paid,' he [Theodosis Michos, founded of an online magazine called Popaganda] said, and yet in 2013, arguably the lowest point of the crisis, Theosis was part of a collective that covers culture and city lie through an Athenians lens. 'The first thing we did to resist the crisis psychologocially was to tell ourselves again and again: O.K., we are artists, we are writers, this is the best time for us, because when artists have nothing, the can do anything,' he said, adding that this isn't actually true. 'We told ourselves this so many times, that we started to believe it'

(This alludes to another theory, that art may thrive in resistance -- psychological resistance -- to economic, political, or cultural forces that appear to inhibit the artist.)

Continuing to question this theory of art thriving in economic crisis:

'It's not like, oh, the crisis, I'll start painting. That's not happening!' said Konstatntinos Dagritzikos, who opened [a nightlife spot] ... in 2009... And yet the place they launched at the start of the crisis did evolve into the amibitious cultureal venue they imagined, which now attracts droves to shows by Greenk artists like the fuzz-rock outfit the Noise Figures and the chill-wave duo Keep Shelly in Athens, as well as interantional acts.

...

Fotis is now often on the road, explorinig those destinationa dn the many inventive restaurants and visitor attractiions that have emerged in Greece since the crisis, from a wave of young chefs using Nordic, French and East Asian cooking techniques on local ingredients, to a multitude of 'second-act producers,' people left unemploye or underemployed who returned to the villages where they grew up and began to sell homemade, organic, artisanal Greek products -- to phenomenal results.

'I think everybody became more creative after the crisis, more cooperative,' he said.

""

Certainly the philanthropic and corporate world plays a role in Athens, as we see in NYC. The author closes with the story of an epic all night party  (or maybe normal by Greek standards) put on by the Onassis Foundation. He also talks about the rivalry with the Niarchose Foundation Cultural Center, and how the former business rivals now have dueling cultural legacies in Athens.

The author also highlights the ongoing problem of poverty, crime, and drugs in Athens, which is not to be forgotten in this discussion of whether certain economic circumstances facilitate art. In fact, these consequences of economic crisis perhaps highlight the importance of studying this issue, to identify how to mimic conditions that facilitate a thriving art scene within a thriving economy.

I think we are a long way from understanding this, and I'm not sure if anyone is studying the conditions that facilitate a thriving arts scene.

However, I still wonder where internationally, and in the U.S., the arts are thriving? It seems that Athens is one such place.