16 Books I've Read Recently
Philosophy, geopolitics, Wall Street, PR, PayPal, Vegas, hookup culture, media
Here’s another periodic bookshelf update from the last few months. If you have comments or book recommendations, send me a note. -Eric
Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology
By Chris Miller, 2002
One popular Soviet joke from the 1980s recounted a Kremlin official who declared proudly, “Comrade, we have built the world’s biggest microprocessor!”
Sony’s research director, the famed physicist Makoto Kikuchi, told an American journalist that Japan had fewer geniuses than America, a country with “outstanding elites.” But America also had “a long tail” of people “with less than normal intelligence,” Kikuchi argued, explaining why Japan was better at mass manufacturing.
China spends more money buying chips each year than the entire global trade in aircraft.
Recommend: 7/10. View on Amazon
All the Worst Humans: How I Made News for Dictators, Tycoons, and Politicians
By Phil Elwood, 2024
Operators like me oil the machines that prop up authoritarian power all over the world. I help those machines function by laundering the sins of dictators through the press.
There are seven and a half PR pros for every journalist. Would you take those odds in a fight?
Recommend: 10/10. View on Amazon
The PayPal Wars: Battles with Ebay, the Media, the Mafia, and the Rest of Planet Earth
By Eric M. Jackson, 2023
Seventeen days after the devastating attacks in New York and Washington, PayPal announced plans that startled both Wall Street and Silicon Valley. On September 28, 2001, our company filed a registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission for an initial public offering.
Recommend: 7/10. Read on Amazon
The Times: How the Newspaper of Record Survived Scandal, Scorn, and the Transformation of Journalism
By Adam Nagourney, 2023
In extraordinary events, Siegal told him, we try to keep a certain continuity across the history of the paper: a headline that evokes the spirit of a previous page of comparable gravity. What he had in mind were historic one-line headlines, such as “Nixon Resigns” or “Men Walk on Moon.” The Shuttle Explodes, Rosenthal said. That’s not newsy enough, Siegal said, listing off suggestions: Seven Die As Shuttle Explodes, Seven Die in Blast of Shuttle. Each time Siegal came back with another idea, Rosenthal had the same response. The Shuttle Explodes, Rosenthal said. It’s stately. It’s dignified. It’s icy cold. It’s blood-curdling in its simplicity.
As reporters returned to Washington and New York from Chicago, Rosenthal sent Reston a memo warning that the newspaper faced a challenge in “maintaining its character” because of these new correspondents. It is “inevitable as time goes on that the radical or militant element in the Times staff will increase in size…. It also strikes me as quite likely that in addition to young people who are genuinely torn or confused we will have on our staff people who quite deliberately set out to radicalize the Times.
Even Rosenthal came to acknowledge that “people liked it more than they read it.”
Recommend: 7/10. View on Amazon
The Gray Lady Winked: How the New York Times's Misreporting, Distortions and Fabrications Radically Alter History
By Ashley Rindsberg, 2021
The New York Times was not scrutinized the way any institution that serves a critical public function ought to be. No one was watching the watchdog.
Recommend: 5/10. View on Amazon
Welcome to Hell
By “Bad” Billy Pratt, 2021
I didn’t choose a path, so one was chosen for me, like I let the menu screen run for too long and the game booted up on its own.
There’s a complexity to adolescence that becomes forgotten in adulthood. Like the ability to truly fall in love, once it’s lost, it’s gone forever. People who shit on adolescence—who mock those who miss high school, who swear they’d never go back while laughing at the cynicism they’ve developed over the years—are dead inside and should be avoided. If you’re so far gone that you can’t remember a time more lofty and wistful…you may as well give yourself over to the system entirely, work your bullshit job until you’re dead, and, if you’re a woman, get pounded out by every shithead with a decent opener on Plenty of Fish. Most men don’t have that luxury. If you do have fond memories of adolescence, you’ll end up doing all that just the same, but at least you’re not an asshole.
Recommend: 8/10. View on Amazon
From Third World to First: The Singapore Story: 1965-2000
By Lee Kuan Yew, 2000
We had one simple guiding principle for survival, that Singapore had to be more rugged, better organised and more efficient than others in the region. If we were only as good as our neighbours there was no reason for businesses to be based here.
Start with putting three of your friends to jail. You definitely know what for, and people will believe you.
If I have to choose one word to explain why Singapore succeeded, it is “confidence”
Recommend: 7/10. View on Amazon
McCain's Promise: Aboard the Straight Talk Express with John McCain and a Whole Bunch of Actual Reporters, Thinking About Hope
By David Foster Wallace, 2000
You can run the same kind of either/or analysis on almost everything about this candidate. Even the incredible daily stamina he shows on the Trail—this could be a function of McCain’s natural energy and enjoyment of people, or it could be gross ambition, a hunger for election so great that it drives him past sane human limits. The operative word here is “sane”: the Shrub stays at luxury hotels like the Charleston Inn and travels with his own personal pillow and likes to sleep till nine, whereas McCain crashes at hellish chain places and drinks pop out of cans and moves like only methedrine can make a normal person move.
Recommend: 10/10. View on Amazon
Note: listen to the audiobook — it’s just 4 hours, and narrated by DFW
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments
David Foster Wallace, 1998
I am now 33 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster and faster every day. Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options those choices foreclose. And I'm starting to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and their foreclosures multiply exponentially until I arrive at some point on some branch of all life's sumptuous branching complexity at which I am finally locked in and stuck on one path and time speeds me through stages of stasis and atrophy and decay until I go down for the third time, all struggle for naught, drowned by time.
Americans seemed no longer united so much by common beliefs as by common images: what binds us became what we stand witness to.
Recommend: 8/10. View on Amazon
The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success
By Ross Douthat, 2020
The left-wing dude who tries to assassinate Republicans isn’t just a little deeper into the Resistance mind-set than the average activist; he’s the guy who totally misunderstands the Resistance, who listens to all the online talk about treason and fascism and thinks that he’s really in 1940s France and his online allies are actually the Maquis instead of just the suburban-liberal cosplay version.
…it shouldn’t surprise anyone if decadence ends with people looking heavenward: toward God, toward the stars, or both.
Recommend: 7/10. View on Amazon
Unstoppable: Siggi B. Wilzig’s Astonishing Journey from Auschwitz Survivor and Penniless Immigrant to Wall Street Legend
Joshua M. Green, 2021
When Naomi found out her husband was purchasing shares of Wilshire on a regular basis, she chided him. “More stock? We can barely pay the bills and you’re buying more stock?” Siggi made excuses, but he didn’t stop buying.
Recommend: 8/10. View on Amazon
Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest and Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics
By Henry Hazlitt, 1946
But such facts and their modern counterparts have led some writers to the opposite extreme of looking only at the immediate effects on certain groups. Joe Smith is thrown out of a job by the introduction of some new machine. “Keep your eye on Joe Smith,” these writers insist. “Never lose track of Joe Smith.” But what they then proceed to do is to keep their eyes only on Joe Smith, and to forget Tom Jones, who has just got a new job in making the new machine, and Ted Brown, who has just got a job operating one, and Daisy Miller, who can now buy a coat for half what it used to cost her. And because they think only of Joe Smith, they end by advocating reactionary and nonsensical policies.
Recommend: 7/10. View on Amazon
Liar's Poker
By Michael Lewis, 1989
I thought instead of a good rule for survival on Wall Street: Never agree to anything proposed on someone else's boat or you'll regret in in the morning.
Buy potatoes,” he said. “Gotta hop.” Then he hung up. Of course. A cloud of fallout would threaten European food and water supplies, including the potato crop, placing a premium on uncontaminated American substitutes. Perhaps a few folks other than potato farmers think of the price of potatoes in America minutes after the explosion of a nuclear reactor in Russia, but I have never met them.
Recommend: 7/10. View on Amazon
The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder
By David Grann, 2023
In 1757, Admiral John Byng would be executed after being found guilty of failing to “do his utmost” during battle, prompting Voltaire to remark in Candide that the English believed it proper to “kill an admiral from time to time in order to encourage the others.
Yet they were compelled onward by that mysterious narcotic: hope.
Just as people tailor their stories to serve their interests - revising, erasing, embroidering - so do nations. After all the grim and troubling narratives about the Wager disaster, and after all the death and destruction, the empire had finally found its mythic tale of the sea.
Recommend: 8/10. View on Amazon
Self-Reliance and Other Essays
Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1841
An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man
The secret of fortune is joy in our hands. Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man. For him all doors are flung wide; him all tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire. Our love goes out to him and embraces him because he did not need it. We solicitously and apologetically caress and celebrate him because he held on his way and scorned our disapprobation. The gods love him because men hated him. “To the persevering mortal,” said Zoroaster, “the blessed Immortals are swift.”
The law of nature is, Do the thing, and you shall have the Power; but they who do not the thing have not the power.
Recommend: 10/10. View on Amazon