Reflection on Crash Course: If You Want to Gt Away with Murder Buy a Car

 This is an interesting book and a good topic to read about- the excess of car-related injuries and deaths. However, the author's polemic tone is a little frustrating and it feels like a very negative book that offers more criticism than problem-solving.

Reflection on The Hobbit, or There and Back Again by J.R.R. Tolkien

              This is a great book and I loved re-reading it. The Hobbit is just really special and has such a warm feeling to it. Tolkien’s writing is much more for children in this book than the more adult-level Lord of the Rings. There are talking animals and lots of assurances from Tolkien that things will turn out alright. It has the feel of a grandpa telling stories to his children. Anyway, this is a five star book that everyone should read at least once.

Reflection on How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi

              This was a great book that was extremely well written. Kendi takes the reader through his life’s story and in each chapter he also covers an important aspect of racism and how it intersects with other issues. The most important lesson of the book is that it is not enough to be non-racist; we should all be anti-racists. Non-racists are complicit in racism, but anti-racists make change. I didn’t really take a lot of notes on this book unfortunately but I would highly recommend.

Reflection on Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly by Anthony Bourdain

              I was watching one of Anthony’s Bourdain’s shows (I think the Travel Channel one) a few days back when I started looking him up and came across this book he wrote in 2000. It is an awesome memoir of his life working in kitchens across America and is a very interesting and entertaining book for any fan of Bourdain’s and anyone interested in professional cooking.

              Bourdain says that a good cook is marked by reliability, which means always showing up and having integrity. These lessons are very applicable to everyone’s life. However, in the culinary world it goes to extremes- kitchen staff are expected to show up sick and take tons of verbal, physical, and sexual harassment. It is sad to see that the people in this industry treat each other so badly. But that said, Bourdain’s book is full of life lessons and you’ll learn a lot about how things really work in the hearts of the nice restaurants you go to for birthdays and anniversaries.

Reflection on Curious Mind: The Secret to a Bigger Life by Brian Grazer

              I didn’t love this book, but it was a nice, easy read. While I didn’t learn much about curiosity besides the fact that it’s good to be curious, Grazer peppers the book full of interesting anecdotes about being a Hollywood producer.

Reflection on The Sabbath: Its Meaning for the Modern Man by Abraham Joshua Heschel

              I was looking for a book on spirituality in Judaism or theology and I really loved this short book that I found and finished today. The Sabbath is all about the seventh day of the week and what it means and how best to observe it. Heschel is an excellent writer and I plan to read more of his works. He can be confusing to read at times, but that’s really because his work can get really dense with meaning. I found the first third of the book especially interesting an the middle third not as interesting.

              In the prologue, Heschel is very concerned with the contrast between space and time. He claims that many people equate reality with “thinghood,” focusing on space and objects, but that Judaism is a religion of time. Consider native American religions that have sacred mountains and rivers and other sites against Judaism, which has sacred days like the Sabbath and the high holy days. Heschel sums it up by saying that “Judaism is a religion of time aiming at the sanctification of time.” In fact, the first holy object was not an object in space but a day—the Sabbath— “And God blessed the seventh day and made it holy.” This is why in Judaism there are fixed times but no fixed place of prayer that is holy by itself.

              Heschel moves on to discuss how to observe the Sabbath and one important thing is that it is not a means to an end. The Sabbath is a day of rest, but not in the sense of resting from exercise so that the body can heal and be stronger. Rather, it is a rest for rest’s sake. Heschel says that “Labor is a craft, but perfect rest is an art… The seventh day is a palace in time which we build.” The Sabbath is given by God to us and we are not given to the Sabbath, so Heschel implores us to take advantage of that day and enjoy it because it is an example of the reward given to the worshippers of God. You shouldn’t even get angry on the Sabbath. He goes on to say that the likeness of God is not found, therefore, in any image, and though we may think of God as all-present in space, that’s not really it either. Rather, God’s likeness is found in the Sabbath and “our keeping of the Sabbath day is a paraphrase of His sanctification of the seventh day.”

              Another really important concept in the book is the qualitative difference between different moments in time. It is unfortunate that for many people time is just a “measuring device rather than a realm in which we abide,” meaning that people just use time to say that something was before or after another thing. Yet, says Heschel, “everyone will admit that the Grand Canyon is more awe-inspiring than a trench. Everyone knows the difference between a worm and an eagle. But how many of us have a similar sense of discretion for the diversity of time?”

              This quick read is excellent reading for any Jewish person and really any student of philosophy. It was very thought-provoking for me and I would highly recommend to others.

Reflection on On Trails by Robert Moor

              This was a really cool book recommended to me by a friend. It is all about paths and offers interesting perspectives on ecology and geography. I didn’t take too many notes, but the most profound thing I got from this book is that trails are key to life. In a forest, the spiral instinct kicks in when people are lost, so that without landmarks, the average lost hiker will move no further than 100 yards from where they got lost. Instead of going far in one direction, people will move around spiraling in circles for hours. I think this applies well to knowledge versus information. Information is a forest, and knowledge is a trail. You move nowhere when lost in tons of information, but with knowledge you can go far.

Reflection on The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien (also Christopher Tolkien) and Illustrated by Ted Naismith

              The Silmarillion is a tough but worthwhile read for a fan of Tolkien’s other works, in my case The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. The book has five sections: the Ainuindale and the Valaquenta cover the beginning and creation of the world, the Quenta Silmarillion covers the Silmarils, the Akallabeth covers the rise and fall of Numenor, and the section “Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age” gives background story about The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. The problem is that the Quenta Silmarillion, by far the longest section of the book, is also the most difficult by far to get through. Tolkien uses endless names and places that are difficult to decipher and the text does not read like his other novels. That was definitely a negative in reading this. That said, it’s really a must-read book for any serious Tolkien fan.

Reflection on Joker One: A Marine Platoon’s Story of Courage, Leadership, and Brotherhood by Donovan Campbell

              This was a great book to read before going to OCS. It’s all about a Marine infantry platoon in Iraq in 2004 and the story is told by their Lieutenant who authored the book. It explains really well all the basics of military organization and life and for that it was very useful to me. A lot of life lessons are universally applicable, like this one: “Marines could accept even the harshest punishment with equanimity provided that 1) they understood the rules well in advance of the infringement, 2) they felt that the mandated sentence was appropriate for the misdeed, and 3) they were confident that you, as the punishment's administrator, would have doled out the same penalty to anyone else in their situation.” It seems like a fair and smart way to lead in any capacity. The book, like any book about the war in Iraq, reveals the futility of that war. It quickly became a matter of just getting all of his men out alive, which meant that the mission was no longer the primary focus. No one was prepared to fight as hard as the Iraqi insurgents and the presence of Americans only served to draw in more fighting and violence. It is incredibly sad that America sacrificed its best to a doomed war. Their bravery is inspiring and they were truly determined to serve their country even though we put them in a terrible situation.

Reflection on Boys and Sex: Young Men on Hookups, Love, Porn, Consent, and Navigating the New Masculinity by Peggy Orenstein

              I read Peggy Orenstein’s book Girls and Sex several years ago (2017 I think) and I was very impressed. She went around the United States interviewing girls about taboo sexual subject, how they felt about hookup culture, and all sorts of things that affect young women in that context. At the time I thought that I would really enjoy reading a version of that book for boys. Well that version finally came out and it is an excellent companion to the first. I would highly recommend reading both books to people interested in the effects of hookup culture, especially young people like myself from high school to a post-college age.

              One of the really good improvements Orenstein makes in this book is broadening her focus outside of cis-gendered, heterosexual relationships. I found it interesting that one of the reasons that there are often huge age gaps in relationships between gay teenagers and adult men is because gay teenagers can’t find each other as easily and resort to seeing older men. I also learned that there is more openness in gay culture because, as author Dan Savage writes (quoted in the book), gay men tend to use the “four magic words,” which are “what are you into?” Because not all gay men want to be penetrated or penetrate, they will generally communicate this to each other. This sort of thing would definitely be very good for heterosexual relationships and it gives people an opportunity to connect more deeply with someone and understand better each others’ likes and dislikes before sex. Orenstein also covers transgender boys and men, who have experience on both sides of gender, which gives them a unique perspective. On my kindle, this book was barely over 200 pages and is a quick and interesting read. Five stars.


Miscellaneous Facts:

• Orenstein writes that for men, the overlap between blood flow to the genitals and “turned-on” feelings is only 50 percent, yet for women it is only 10 percent.

Reflection on Can’t Hurt Me: Master Your Minds and Defy the Odds by David Goggins

The author of this book is a retired Navy SEAL named David Goggins who has also run ultramarathons, triathlons, and lots of other crazy shit, pushing his mind and body to the absolute limits that they can reach. To be honest, he’s insane, and that can be a little discouraging because I don’t think I really want to be where he is mentally. He really doesn’t talk much about his relationships with women and he is obsessed with masculinity in a way that swerves into unhealthy territory. On the other hand, Goggins also has excellent perspective. I think the best passage of the book comes when he talks about what to do when you become triumphant and a master of your own body and mind:

“You can push yourself to a place that is beyond the current capability of temporal mindset of the people you work with, and that’s okay. Just know that your supposed superiority is a figment of your own ego. So don’t lord it over them, because it won’t help you advance as a team or as an individual in your field. Instead of getting angry that your colleagues can’t keep up, help pick your colleagues up and bring them with you!”

What is most incredible about Goggins is that he fails constantly, over and over again in pursuit of his goals. His determination is extremely unusual and something any person should emulate.

Reflection on The Office: The Untold Story of the Greatest Sitcom of the 2000s by Andy Greene

              I loved this book! It is the coolest oral history of The Office I’ve ever read though it is also the only one I’ve ever read. I think that is because it is the only thing of its kind in existence. I would also recommend (the much much shorter) Conference Room, Five Minutes by Shea Serrano, but that’s just essays inspired by The Office. If you really want to know all the best trivia and info about how the show was made, Andy Greene is your guy. I think he interviewed 86 people among the cast, crew, and writers who made it all happen. The biggest strength of the book is in how Greene lets the people involved do the talking. The oral history format works really, really well.

              One of the most interesting things I learned (among many interesting things) was that Steve Carrell ended up leaving the show feeling disrespected by the producers and NBC. Apparently he let slip in an interview that he was thinking about leaving and then got no response from anyone. No one ever checked in with him about that and it rubbed him the wrong way. NBC apparently was very bad at talent management in those years and it’s still kind of unclear who’s responsibility it was. The only sure thing is that it really hurt the show. It’s worth noting though that showrunner Greg Daniels had already left after season five to focus on Parks and Recreation and didn’t return until season nine. The thought I had when I read this was that David Wallace should have become the replacement for Michael. They struggled a lot with who to bring in but also didn’t want to change the dynamic of the show by promoting someone from within. I think David Wallace would have been a good compromise.



Miscellaneous Facts:

• Rainn Wilson auditioned for both Michael Scott and Dwight Schrute
• They wanted to cast Peter Dinklage as “a dwarf or midget” named Anton, which I think would not have been tastefully done in 2003.
• Jenna Fischer was married to James Gunn, who went on to direct the Guardians of the Galaxy movies.
• Phyllis Smith (who played Phyllis) was a casting assistant to Allison Jones, the director of casting, who put her in the show.
• Originally, Chili’s was upset about the script for the Season 2 opener, in which Pam was gonna vomit all over the bar. Instead, they had her fall off her stool and get kicked out for sneaking drinks from other tables. That change was Steve Carrell’s idea and stopped Chili’s from pulling out of the episode.
• Jim was originally the only talking head with a window behind him while the others faced the bullpen. That symbolized that he had a future. Pam eventually joined him on that side.
• Michael Scott’s condo is at 7303 Bonnie Place in Reseda, California.
• Jen Celotta, a major showrunner thought about having an episode with Phyllis going through menopause. I think that would’ve been a good idea and it’s a shame they didn’t do it. The fact that they didn’t reminds me of the book Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez that I just read.
• The very famous scene when Dwight simulates a fire in the office was made for premiere after the Super Bowl, to draw in viewers. What a good idea.
• Jenna Fisher said that when she got to say goodbye as Pam to Michael and the mics cut out, she “told him all the ways I was going to miss him when he left our show. Those were real tears and a real goodbye.”
• An idea was pitched to replace Michael that Queen Latifah be brought in as the boss and that she would slowly fire and replace everyone with black comedians and it would become the black office. I think that idea is super funny but it was not favored in the writers’ room.
• Originally it was thought that they were going to use the new cast from later seasons to reboot the show but that idea was abandoned in season nine when Greg Daniels and NBC decided to end it. The end of the show was announced when Bryan Cranston was on set directing the “Work Bus” episode.

Reflection on Invisible Women, Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez

              In this excellent book, the author convincingly proves that the world is largely designed for men. So much of the way we think and live is with men as the default and it has negative effects on women in basically every single aspect of life, from labor laws to medical care and from bus routes to toilet stalls. For example, is it really fair to dedicate equal space to men’s and women’s bathrooms? We have all seen situations with women waiting in long lines for the bathroom while men go in and out with ease. Women have more to do if they are changing pads/tampons, taking care of children, or are elderly and disabled (the majority of elderly and disabled are women). As a result of these many factors, women take up to 2.3 times as long to use the bathroom. These are sorts of indirect discrimination or “gender neutral discrimination) that make life more difficult for women than men. Another example is seat belts, which are not designed for women! Federal regulations only require that car companies test their cars’ safety with the average male height and weight crash test dummies, and women are significantly more likely to be injured in car crashes. It’s even worse if they’re pregnant. That’s probably an example of a lack on women in leadership to step in and point out the problem to the males who are making and enforcing regulations like these. I would definitely recommend this book, it’s very complete and convincing.

Reflection on Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck

              Suburban Nation is a fantastic book and I am turning into a really big fan of Jeff Speck. IT is incredible to me how the smallest choices made in planning regulations can have such big impacts on the way we live. Speck, Plater-Zyberk, and Duany make excellent points in this book about how to stop suburban sprawl and recreate traditional neighborhoods. They are extremely credible and they put their money where there mouth is, designing many different towns and additions to towns up to 2003, when the book was published.

              Sprawl has caused a lot of problems for our country, significantly damaging our public spaces. Before 1950, new roads increased investment and property values nearby, but since 1950, the opposite occurs. The causes are many, but the biggest culprit seems to be the separation of land uses. Building a place with one area for residences, another for commerce, another for schools, and another for some other use is incredibly inefficient for living. It is, however, very efficient for a lazy designer. The result is all of the traffic taking place on a few collector roads and everyone being stranded without a car.

              One of the biggest obstacles in the way of better urban planning is that almost all planning occurs at the municipal level and therefore cannot take regional, state, or federal concerns into account. A loud group of privileged residents can often block development near them and push it into an area of less powerful people. Luckily for South Florida, we have a regional planning authority, the South Florida Water Management District. We should probably put it to work and give it the power to do more planning in Palm Beach, Broward, and Miami-Dade.

              Another major solution that the authors propose is the total overhaul of planning regulations. Regulations should have diagrams and pictures and an overall vision for what cities and neighborhoods should look like, whereas they currently just list pages and pages of rules prohibiting certain things that are perceived (often incorrectly) to be ugly or unsafe. An additional benefit is that this would do “pre-planning,” allowing developers to know exactly what they can build and where they can build it, which would save would-be investors tons of time. This sort of thing is already in place in Providence, Rhode Island and West Palm Beach, Florida.

              I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in public life at all. I feel like it would be incredibly interesting to any American because we are all affected by the suburban style of living, even if we live in urban or rural areas. The writing is great and every chapter has some new, revelatory passage. The authors end with a simple call for more neighborhoods, defined as cohesive, mixed-use, walkable areas, saying:

              No more housing subdivisions!
              No more shopping centers!
              No more office parks!
              No more highways!
              Neighborhoods or nothing!

• Miscellaneous Facts:
• Spending on transit creates twice as many jobs as highway spending.
• Houston provides 30 asphalt parking spaces per resident.
• New “anchor” businesses, like sports stadiums, should be build with parking at least a block away so that other businesses can locate themselves nearby and benefit from the anchor.
• A structured, multi-tier parking lot costs $12,000 per place versus $1,500 in a surface lot.

Reflection on The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein

Do white and black Americans live apart for reasons of personal preference or because of the actions of the government? This important question is the point in dispute between Chief Justice John Roberts, who argues the first and author Richard Rothstein, who argues the latter. Rothstein convincingly shows how the government has intervened time and time again in favor of segregation, which implies that to right this wrong, the government should intervene in favor of integration now, something the Chief Justice has argued is unnecessary because the government was not responsible for housing segregation in the first place.

A major source of federal support for segregation was the Federal Housing Administration (FHA). The FHA offered cheap loans to Americans that made it possible for all to own a home… except for black Americans, who were not served by the FHA. This locked black people in America out of one of the biggest wealth-building policies in American history, setting the entire race back by generations. Those homes gathered massive passive income and wealth for the families who had them and many are still in the same families as the original owners. The FHA even judges it too risky to insure racially mixed neighborhoods, forcing whites away from blacks. The US Commission on Civil Rights concluded in 1973 that the, “housing industry, aided and abetted by Government, must bear the primary responsibility for the legacy of segregated housing… Government and private industry came together to create a system of residential segregation.”

In the last 50 years, it has not been possible for most places to discriminate explicitly based on race, yet the standard necessary to prove that someone is doing so is extremely high and difficult to meet. Lawyers are usually unable to prove discrimination unless they can more or less record the defendant saying that they discriminated based on race. Rothstein illustrates this though a story of two communities, one black and one white, in the 1990s. When Warren County attempted to build a waste disposal facility in a white area, the residents protested and kept it out. But when they tried to build in a black area that already had three waste disposal facilities, they overruled protests by black residents. A federal judge ruled this legal because there was no explicit discrimination.

Chapter nine of this book is particularly atrocious in the behavior of whites described. It talks about the mobs that formed to eject black people from white neighborhoods they moved into, and those mobs were violent. They used dynamite, cross burnings, and drive-by shootings to terrorize their black neighbors. Worse, the police who arrived at these horrible scenes did not stop them or do anything to inhibit the violence present, instead organizing the mobs and otherwise protecting the violent whites, not the poor black families who just wanted to live.

I just want to quote a few pages from the epilogue of the book here, since they’re excellent in summarizing the point of the book:

“If government had declined to build racially separate public housing in cities where segregation hadn’t previously taken root, and instead had scattered integrated developments throughout the community, those cities might have developed in a less racially toxic fashion, with fewer desperate ghettos and more diverse suburbs.

If the federal government had not urged suburbs to adopt exclusionary zoning laws, white flight would have been minimized because there would have been fewer racially exclusive suburbs to which frightened homeowners could flee.

If the government had told developers that they could have FHA guarantees only if the homes they built were open to all, integrated working-class suburbs would likely have matured with both African Americans and whites sharing the benefits.

If state courts had not blessed private discrimination by ordering the eviction of African American homeowners in neighborhoods where association rules and restrictive covenants barred their residence, middle-class African Americans would have been able gradually to integrate previously white communities as they developed the financial means to do so.

If churches, universities, and hospitals had faced loss of tax-exempt status for their promotion of restrictive covenants, they most likely would have refrained from such activity.

If police had arrested, rather than encouraged, leaders of mob violence when African Americans moved into previously white neighborhoods, racial transitions would have been smoother.

If state real estate commissions had denied licenses to brokers who claimed an “ethical” obligation to impose segregation, those brokers might have guided the evolution of interracial neighborhoods.

If school boards had not placed schools and drawn attendance boundaries to ensure the separation of black and white pupils, families might not have had to relocate to have access to education for their children.

If federal and state highway planners had not used urban interstates to demolish African American neighborhoods and force their residents deeper into urban ghettos, black impoverishment would have lessened, and some displaced families might have accumulated the resources to improve their housing and its location.

If government had given African Americans the same labor-market rights that other citizens enjoyed, African American working-class families would not have been trapped in lower-income minority communities, from lack of funds to live elsewhere.

If the federal government had not exploited the racial boundaries it had created in metropolitan areas, by spending billions on tax breaks for single-family suburban homeowners, while failing to spend adequate funds on transportation networks that could bring African Americans to job opportunities, the inequality on which segregation feeds would have diminished.

If federal programs were not, even to this day, reinforcing racial isolation by disproportionately directing low-income African Americans who receive housing assistance into the segregated neighborhoods that government had previously established, we might see many more inclusive communities.”

• Miscellaneous Facts:
• Housing discrimination on the explicit basis of race was illegal starting in 1866 though it was without any method of enforcement and continued unabated until 1968.
• Until the New Deal, home ownership often required 50% down and full repayment after 5-7 years.
• In 1976, the IRS denied the tax exemption of Bob Jones University because the university prohibited interracial dating. The case went before the Supreme Court and Reagan’s administration REFUSED TO EVEN PRESENT THE CASE! The Supreme Court had to APPOINT AN OUSTIDE LAWYER to present the case, and that lawyer won. Incredibly fucked up.
• In 2015, NYC’s sheet metal workers union paid out 13 million dollars for racial discrimination in job assignments.

Reflection on Why Does He Do That? by Lundy Bancroft

              Lundy Bancroft is an author and a counselor specializing in relationships of abuse, generally when a male partner is abusive of a female partner. I didn’t realize until I finished a book and researched the author that Lundy is a man. Bancroft has decades of experience working with abusive men and their victims, writing books, and giving speeches across the country. He is definitely a major expert in his field, and he dispels tons of myths in this book. I love that he includes and references tons more resources in his book that are written by others. He is clearly out here to help survivors of abuse any way he can. One crucial point that Bancroft makes early on is that abuse is not always or even mostly physical. Abuse can take spoken form in emotional manipulation and the men that use their words to hurt their partners are still abusive even if they never lay a hand on them.

              Bancroft spends a lot of time analyzing the mind of the abuser. He tells us that abusers want to be a mystery. An abuser seeks to make others think that his behavior makes no sense and have them focus on his feelings rather than his thoughts. An abuser would prefer that his partner think of him as having “anger issues” or a mental illness rather than having his partner understand how he thinks about his actions. An abuser wants his partner to focus on his feelings when it is his thoughts (in which he justifies his manipulation) that are the problem. Bancroft states it very well when he says that, “Abuse grows from attitudes and values, not feelings. The roots are ownership, the trunk is entitlement, and the branches are control.”

              I think that you could criticize Bancroft a little bit for focusing so much on male-on-female abuse and not covering female-on-male abuse. He does address gay and lesbian relationships. However, I am pretty convinced by his points about female-on-male abuse being extremely uncommon. While it makes sense as a reader to hear so much about one and immediately think about abuse going the other way, the fact is that abuse is not divided evenly on gender and that men commit a disproportionate amount of abuse while women receive a disproportionate amount of abuse. For this reason, Bancroft says that “A genuine male victim tends to feel sympathy for abused women and support their cause. The Victim (referring to a male abuser who likes to play the victim), on the other hand, often says that women exaggerate or fabricate their claims of abuse or insists that men are abused just as much as women are.”

              In another interesting passage, the author points out that, “Many of my clients are skilled spin doctors…” and that they use their abilities to manipulate the entire family to get the children on their side. Bancroft puts forward a hypothetical argument in which the children are present but don’t understand the issue at stake. They just see their parents yelling at each other. Bancroft says that in his experience, “An abuser can naturally snap out of the bad effects of an abusive incident much more quickly than the abused woman can.” What tends to happen is that the mother spends the rest of the day distant and depressed while the father disappears for two hours and returns in a good mood, joking and laughing with the children. First of all, this reveals that the mother is probably the victim here since she was obviously impacted more by what happened. Second, who do you think the children want to be with afterwards? Probably not their mother, who’s in a bad mood. This is a classic manipulative tactic that abusive husbands use to bring children onto their side and further isolate their partners.

              Bancroft closes the book by reflecting on how to know if an abuser is really changing. This is incredibly difficult and he points out that his abused partner is the person in the best position to analyze his behavior, not a psychologist or anyone else. This is because abusers tend to be expert manipulators, especially in couples’ therapy, which tends to focus on how both partners can improve their behavior. As such, couples’ therapy does not work in a situation where one partner is causing the problems. In those cases, it can make things worse as it teaches the abuser new vocabulary to use for manipulation and can make him feel even more justified in his actions. Truly repentant abusers will not focus on their partner’s behavior and will express empathy towards their partner. A truly repentant abuser will not feel the need to control their partner’s emotions and will understand their partner’s justified anger towards them for what they had done. Non-repentant abusers will say things like “I can only change if you change too,” and “you need to help me,” or “you don’t realize how much I’ve changed.”

              Bancroft says that the answer is not therapy for the abuser, because therapy “focuses on the man’s feelings and gives him empathy and support.” The answer is an abuser program like Bancroft’s, which can impose rules and consequences on abusers and which is in contact with his victims to get a better understanding of how he acts outside of the program. Bancroft tells countless stories in the book of men who appeared excellent in the program but whose wives and girlfriends told a very different story over the phone. Ultimately, writes the author, “The first test of the quality of an abuser program is whether the main goal of the staff members appears to be helping you or helping him. In a responsible program the abused woman is considered the primary client. The only “assistance” they should be offering to the man is to educate and challenge him about his abusive attitudes and behaviors.”

              I would highly recommend this book because many of us experience abuse or manipulation in our lives even if we don’t want to categorize the person who does it as an “abuser.” Bancroft cautions the reader that the answer is not always cutting contact with that person. He writes that, “One of the biggest mistakes made by people who wish to help an abused woman is to measure success by whether or not she leaves her abusive partner. If the woman feels unable or unready to end her relationship, or if she goes back to him, people who have attempted to help tend to feel that their effort failed and often channel this frustration into blaming the abused woman. A better measure of success for the person helping is how well you have respected the woman’s right to run her own life—which an abusive man does not do—and how well you have helped her to think of strategies to increase her safety. If you stay focused on these goals you will feel less frustrated as a helper and will be a more valuable resource for the woman.” This is an important book and has had a huge impact on the way I view a lot of relationships. I can’t recommend it enough.

Reflection on Leadership: In Turbulent Times by Doris Kearns Goodwin

              This is a cool book that is comprised of four mini-biographies of the presidents Lincoln, both Roosevelts, and (Lyndon) Johnson. There are three parts, in which the author explores the rise of each figure, a setback in his life, and his leadership in the presidency. A final chapter addresses the last days of each president. I think this book is a great way to learn the lives of each president as well as their leadership styles, but it is more biography than self-help or advice. While Goodwin does mark important lessons to be learned, it would be nice to have more coherent lists of them, rather than being dispersed throughout each chapter. That said, this is an excellent book and I learned a lot about each man profiled. I gathered certain images of each president. Lincoln was completely self-made and self-taught, and cursed with a strong body that made his father take him out of school to work the fields. TR, on the other hand, was cultivated intellectually from a young age but cursed with a weak body that he had to overcome and strengthen. FDR was raised in a similar way and like LBJ was not an intellectual like Lincoln or Teddy. He instead had what Oliver Wendell Holmes called “A second-class intellect. But a firs class temperament.” FDR was smooth, confident, and likeable. He was able to make hard decisions based on good advice and didn’t need the wits of someone like Lincoln, who pored over books in every spare moment. Johnson, like Lincoln, grew up poor. He worked the hardest and most obsessively of all of them and was a true visionary. It’s interesting that each man looked to his predecessors for lessons and learned from those who came before.

Reflection on Dune by Frank Herbert

              Since this is just a novel I don’t plan to produce a seriously big reflection. I just wanna say that I read this book and it was great. I found it very engaging and honestly crazy. I am excited to see the movie later this year though I doubt they can recreate all of the third-person omniscient thoughts that Herbert gives the audience. I didn’t know that this book was so based on middle-eastern culture.

Reflection on Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination by Neal Gabler

               This book left me feeling sad in a way that not a lot of these books do. I remember reading the Jefferson biography a year or so ago and having a similar feeling, which I think means that the writer did a very good job with the death of their subject. In Disney’s case, it left me especially sad being that he died of lung cancer and very fearful of death. He was always seeking perfection and never really was satisfied with anything he did, which must have left him feeling incomplete. That sort of attitude drove him forward, but it also must have made him feel like his life was so unfinished at his death as he was obsessing over EPCOT.

               Walt had a really good and a really bad childhood. The really good part was in the small town of Marceline, Missouri, where his father Elias was a farmer. However, the really bad part was when the family moved to St. Louis after the farm didn’t work out. Walt hated the city and was forced to work constantly and missed out on a lot of childhood activities that he had in Marceline. Walt’s father Elias was stern and sometimes violent, leading to an incident when he went to beat Walt with a hammer and Walt stopped and disarmed him at 14 years old. After working with the Red Cross in World War One, Walt moved to LA to follow his artistic dreams. Though his first business, Laugh-O-Gram (which produced short cartoons before movies), went bankrupt, Walt wasn’t bitter and continued to work hard.

               With Laugh-O-Gram, Disney had a successful character in Oswald the Rabbit, but lost the rights to him in the bankruptcy. It was then that he created Mickey Mouse. Originally, he was to be called Mortimer Mouse, but Walt’s wife Lillian made him change the name. Mickey defeated his rival, Felix the Cat because Mickey’s shorts contained sound, a major innovation. Not only did they have sound, but they were created with sound in mind so that the action matched up. Felix the Cat’s creator, however, only added the sound in afterwards, a sort of halfhearted attempt to compete with Mickey.

               When the Depression came, Walt and his older brother Roy, who managed the finances, were in a very good position. They had not invested in the markets, rather putting all the money from their business back into their business. You could say that the Depression saved the Disney company since they ended up with a lot of money when nobody else had any. It led to the best talent moving into Disney Studios. In the thirties, Disney’s new innovation was color cartoons, and when Snow White premiered in color it was a sensation, earning $6.7 million, the most of any film to that point.

               One May 29, 1941, Disney’s workers went on strike, a very controversial event that split the studio. At a time of unionization all across the country, the AFL put Disney products on its “unfair” list and that meant that no Disney movies could be shown since the soundmen were unionized. The lab technicians at Technicolor wouldn’t even process Disney film. Walt meanwhile blamed the strike on Communist infiltrators. The strike ended on July 30 with ten percent wage increases for artists earning under $50 a week, backpay and reinstatement of strikers and fired workers, and for future layoffs to be decided by a joint committee of management and workers. The strike marked the end of the carefree days at Disney studios when Walt was just one of the guys. Walt started to get meaner and became a fearsome presence in Disney offices. At the same time, Disney started to face greater competition from Hannah-Barbera and Looney Tunes.

               I think the author protests too much when discussing Disney’s racism and anti-Semitism. While it seems like Walt was not a virulent, hateful racist, it is clear that he harbored prejudices, even if they were not much more than most other powerful white men at the time. I think that Gabler overdoes it when he tries to defend Disney’s statements. I also wish that Gabler had spent more time on the Disney World park, since that was a major reason that I picked up the book, but I guess that was a project that was not occupying most of Walt’s time at his death. I enjoyed this book and found the subject to be a very interesting guy.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• Walt Disney was not frozen, but cremated.
• By the end of the 30’s, Disney Studios had a row of filing cabinets with 1.5 million jokes grouped under 124 classifications.
• Walt bought a house for his parents in California and sent one of his men to fix the heating system there. Tragically, the handyman made some sort of mistake and created a carbon monoxide leak that rendered his father unconscious and killed his mother. The guilt must have been terrible.
• Disneyland was built with a railroad at 5/8 scale. The buildings are built with the first floor at 9/10 scale, the second floors 8/10, and the third floors 7/10. Other parts were also built at different scales to emphasize and deemphasize certain parts of the park.
• Disney World was built in Orlando so that it wouldn’t have to compete with the gulf or ocean coasts.

Reflection on How the Few Became the Proud: Crafting the Maine Corps Mystique, 1874-1918 by Heather Venable

               This is another book about the Marines that I’m reading for obvious reasons. This book, which was excellent, focused on an early time in the history of the Marines and their crucial public relations transition into “the first to fight.” The book convers the transition in which Marines stopped calling themselves soldiers and started to call themselves just Marines. In the 19^th century, Marines served onboard ships as sharpshooters and boarders of enemy ships as well as military police to prevent mutinies. But as the Navy developed further, there was less need for Marines except for as secondary gunners on large steel ships, which created conflict with sailors who felt that the big guns were their purview.

               The Marines created their myth before it became a reality. Marine recruiters made exaggerated claims in newspapers about being the oldest service and that the young American republic depended on (as quoted in newspapers) a “faithful cops [that] was its only defense.” Prior to this, Marines had a bad reputation on ships for refusing to do menial tasks that they considered to be part of the Navy’s job. Later on, at the beginning of the 20^th century, they adopted a can-do attitude, claiming that they could and would do any job. However, President Theodore Roosevelt removed Marines from ships in 1908. But by that time, the Marines had already found a new purpose as an expeditionary force in the Spanish-American War. Around the same time, the Marine Corps song, “The Halls of Montezuma,” became referred to as a hymn, suggesting a deeper meaning. All this pride became a part of the Marine Corps’ personality by World War One and future Marines would enter the Corps believing whole-heartedly in their masculinity, toughness, and superiority over other branches of the military.

               Venable tells a story of a World War One-era Marine, who was sleeping in a cot. Some visitor remarked to another, “I think this must be an American soldier.” Venable writes that, “From the depths of the pillow came a muffled voice— ‘Hell no; I’m a Marine!’”

Reflection on The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business by Erin Meyer

               This was a decent book for international businesspeople who seek to work better with people from other cultures. At its best, the book offers nuanced ways to understand why some people operate one way and other people another. At its worst, it has factual inaccuracies and oversimplifies huge areas. One issue in particular was the way that India was treated as one big culture yet Europe had different cultures for Dutch, German, French, and all other sorts of people. I guess the book is written from a western perspective but that seemed silly since more languages are spoken in India than Europe and I bet they have just as many cultures. The book was alright, but I’m not sure if it was that useful to try to create “culture maps.”

Reflection on How to Defend Australia by Hugh White

               This was a kind of weird book to pick up being that I am not Australian and know very little about Australia but as someone interested in how future conflict in the Western Pacific will look I found Hugh White’s case for Australia to remain a medium power to be fascinating. White points out that America has disengaged from the region due to the War on Terror. Even as the USA returns with the “pivot to Asia,” American power will not be undisputed in the region again in our lifetime. The rise of China, soon to be followed by a likely rise of India, traps Australia between a rock and a hard place (not to mention an ascendant Indonesia). White argues for a reorientation of Australian defense policy to its immediate region and to the important goal of the independent defense of Australia, assuming no outside help.

               White often returns to a critical event in recent Australian military history, the 2000 white paper released by the Howard government, which reoriented Australian military policy to focus less on defending the homeland and more on foreign intervention and assisting US forces in a hypothetical war against China. White argues that this is not in Australia’s interest. Now that both China and Indonesia are far stronger than they were 20 years ago, White points out that Australia cannot focus so much on projecting force far from its borders. With US capabilities in decline in the Western Pacific, Australia must focus on its own self-defense.

               One of White’s most interesting points is that, “History may well judge that the most important long-term consequence of 9/11 was the way the attacks that day distracted American from the biggest strategic shift of our time. They stopped America recognizing China’s rise, made it easier for China to challenge US leadership, and harder for America to remain a significant power in Asia.” He points out that both US and Australian forces began to tailor their capabilities to needs in Iraq and Afghanistan and failed to develop capabilities that are necessary in the Western Pacific. Now, White says, Australia lacks sufficient submarines yet has a huge and useless investment in amphibious land forces and a large surface fleet to protect them. Australian combat aircraft cannot sustain operations without massive US support. Now Australia will survive a major regional war only at the pleasure of the United States.

               The author points out four “permanent strategic interests” of Australia; they are based on Lord Palmerston’s model that required England to oppose the strongest power on continental Europe. Each interest represents an area of importance to Australia’s defense. In declining order of importance, they are:

• The military balance in the waters and airspace immediately surrounding Australia, and especially the area between continental Australia and the archipelago to the north
• The closest islands of the archipelago to the north that can be used to launch attacks against Australia
• The huge archipelago of maritime Southeast Asia including Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, and the Philippines
• The final ring includes Japan, India, and China and the balance of relations between those countries

This makes it seem kind of ridiculous that Australia participated in the War on Terror. While at the time it must have looked important to maintain good relations with the USA, today Australia’s situation is very different. To look that the geography of where Australia lies, it is clear that its interests lie far closer to home than Iraq or Afghanistan. As a goal, White says that Australia should strive to be able to defend itself from a major Asian power.

               One of the most important things for Australia to achieve is sea denial in its immediate area rather than sea control. While Australia has invested in major surface warships in the past that enable sea control, the ability to move one’s own ships across a stretch of ocean, it would be better for Australia to focus on sea denial, the ability to stop an enemy from moving across an important stretch of ocean. To attack, you need control and to defend you need denial. Since White wants to defend Australia, he focuses on denial. Thanks to technological changes in missiles and air power, most surface ships are just targets, incapable of defending themselves. For that reason, White suggest a dramatic increase in Australia’s submarine fleet paired with a reduction in its number of surface ships. White argues that, “warships will remain valuable for operations in waters that are not contested by other maritime powers, and likewise carriers and amphibious ships will remain useful in uncontested waters against less capable adversaries. But their roles in major maritime conflicts will disappear. Instead, war at sea will be dominated by submarines, aircraft, drones, missiles and satellites.” I found myself very convinced by his thinking. To bring this back to what Australia needs, White says that air and sea forces must be able to deny approaches to Australia and land forces must be able to challenge any landing on Australian shores. As for land forces, White recommends taking a page from the Russians and using the size of their continent-country to their advantage in maneuver warfare.

               In summation, Australia needs to change its military orientation now. Australia continues to develop naval forces for sea control and power projection that would support the US Navy; and while this is great for America, it does Australia no good in defending itself. Australia’s offensive-minded forces should become more defensive. For me, it will be interesting to see if this happens, though as an American I feel like I should hope for the opposite of what White wants. It seems like it would be better to have an Australian ally geared to help us out in the West Pacific rather than just defend itself.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• Thanks to technological advances, air-to-air combat will likely not involve much dogfighting in the future. In the modern day, aircraft can launch long-range missiles outside of sight range and accurately hit other planes, meaning that “who wins a clash between fighters will depend on which side launches its missile and gets it within the other’s no-escape zone first.”

Reflection on Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom by David W. Blight

              Blight’s biography of Frederick Douglass is a very thorough look at the life and times of the great American thinker, which is especially interesting in the times shortly before and after the Civil War, when Douglass’ influence was greatest and his ideas tested. Going in, I knew that Frederick Douglass was a great thinker, but I didn’t realize that he was really more of an orator than anything else. He gave legendary speeches across the nation rallying Americans to the abolitionist cause. He was a deeply religious man who took great inspiration from the Old Testament, so much that I frequently consulted my bible to find the passages he referenced. Douglass was pretty radical and came around to support a violent end to slavery a few years before the Civil War. I was impressed by the fact that as a young man he was sent to be “broken” by a slave master and instead of being broken, he beat and strangled the man, humiliating him. The man, embarrassed, sent him back to his master without revealing what happened.

              As a young man, Frederick Douglass (then Frederick Bailey) was taken away from his family and sold to a couple in Baltimore, where the wife made the mistake of teaching him how to read. Her husband ordered her to stop, but Douglass found ways to get more books and information and became a rebellious, unmanageable teenage slave. His master was cruel, but not cruel enough to send him to the deep south when he was caught leading a group of runaways at 18 years old. That gave him enough time to plan another attempt, and he finally made it north in 1838, at 20 years old. Douglass went with his new wife, Anna (who we never hear much about), to Massachusetts, where he was discovered by abolitionists in 1840. By 1841, Douglass’ occupation in the town directory was changed from “laborer” to “reverend,” and he gained fame as an orator. He ended up getting to know the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and working with him. Garrison seems kind of condescending and patronizing in this book though, and I didn’t love that about him.

              As a Garrisonian, Douglass denounced political participation from 1841-1851 and argued that all forms of participation in American government were corrupt. However, in the 1850s, Douglass decided to accept working within the system. He also gave up on non-violence, deciding that violence could be acceptable as a means to end slavery. In fact, Douglass met with John Brown before his famous raid in Harper’s Ferry bringing him money and a recruit. That said, Douglass was not a warrior. He did not participate in the struggle at Harper’s Ferry and was not ready to die at 41. With a young family, that was definitely the right choice.

              It must have been incredibly disappointing for Douglass to see so much progress erased for African Americans after the Civil War. In the 8-1 ruling in United States v. Stanley, the court held that the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment “applied only to states and not to individual acts of discrimination by a person or business establishment,” as Blight explains. This legalized discrimination against blacks and paved the way for Jim Crow. Through the end of the 19^th century, the Supreme Court consistently found in favor of states’ rights and helped solidify the racist and evil system of the South at that time.



Miscellaneous Facts:

• Frederick Douglass was a feminist and forcefully endorsed the right to vote for women at the Seneca Falls Conference
• Douglass had two white mistresses (Julia Griffiths and Otillie Assing) over the course of his life who regularly visited his and his wife’s house and sometimes stayed for extended periods of time. I can only imagine how terrible it was to be Anna Douglass, who it seems like Frederick did not really treat very well.
• Gerrity Smith, an associate of Douglass, wrote a book called “Heads of the Colored People,” which must have inspired “The Heads of Colored People” by Nafissa Thompson!
• Douglass despised colonization schemes designed to liberate the slaves and send them to Africa or anywhere far from the United States. 
• Despite being an anti-racist, Douglass had pretty bad things to say about Native Americans and often compared blacks to them to show how much better blacks were.
• Douglass wrote three autobiographies, later deemphasizing slavery and emphasizing his ascendance as a great man.
• After his wife Anna died, Douglass married a white woman, Helen Pitts, and that was very controversial among all races. 
• Douglass climbed the Great Pyramid of Cheops at Giza at 69 years old. 
• Douglass became the US Ambassador to Haiti towards the end of his life.
• In his autobiography, Douglass writes of his father, “I say nothing of father…. Slavery does away with fathers as it does away with families.” His father was truly his mother’s white overseer, but his quote gets at a really important truth of slavery that affects the USA to this day—slavery worked by destroying family bonds over decades and centuries. That sort of evil cannot be overcome for several generations.

Reflection on Exile: Portraits of the Jewish Diaspora by Annika Hernroth-Rothstein

               I enjoyed this book about different Jewish communities around the world from Venezuela to Finland and from Uzbekistan to Morocco. The author visited different synagogues around the world and met the Jewish people who worship in them, creating a really cool book with tons of different cultures and languages and food all part of one Jewish people. One thing that stood out is that most diaspora Jews are poor. The places the author describes are often more or less ghettos and you do not find many doctors, lawyers, or other professionals. Hernroth-Rothstein draws some lessons at the end, being that:

• Orthodox communities fare better than their conservative or progressive counterparts
• A larger community is not necessarily a more vibrant community
• Religion begets religion (AKA Jews keep more traditions in majority religious countries than in atheistic countries)
• A level of isolation often benefits Jewish communities
• Diaspora Jews are connected to Israel, but that relationship is complicated
• Holocaust remembrance has both a push and pull on Jewish identity

               While I think that Hernroth-Rothstein has good points, I disagree with a few, primarily that “a level of isolation benefits Jewish communities.” Under that point she writes that, “when the Jews attempt to actively intermingle and adapt, the cultural exchange seems to only go one way—Jews adapting to the majority religion and culture and not the other way around—inevitably blurring the line between integration and assimilation.” I think the author is completely wrong here. One Jewish community she doesn’t address is the American Jewish community, which I think has a huge impact on the country. I don’t know much about others, but I know that Yiddish words, Jewish holidays, and Jewish actors have had huge impacts on American culture from the Rugrats Hannukah special to the show Seinfeld. I think that Hernroth-Rothstein tends to favor a Talmudic, rabbinic, and orthodox Judaism, and that bias comes through in the book. That said, despite those disagreements I really liked the book and would recommend it to others.

Reflection on First to Fight: An Inside View of the U.S. Marine Corps by Victor Krulak

               This is a pretty cool book all about the Marine Corps, mainly focusing on the period from the 1920’s to the 1960’s in Vietnam. Krulak was a Lieutenant General and most of the book is told from the first-person perspective as he takes you through his long career in the USMC. He also covers earlier history, detailing how in the 19^th century, the Navy wanted to get the Marines off their ships and insisted that a sailor could do anything that a Marine could do. At the turn of the century, the Navy had a good idea, that Krulak says the Marines should have realized first—that the Marines become an expeditionary force in support of the US fleet, clarifying their role, which had been as a sort of raiding party or naval police. The Marines fought it at the time, but started to evolve into that role in Mexico and Cuba, where they earned a reputation for themselves as great fighters. Within the Department of Defense (or Dep. of War), there have been numerous attempts to eliminate or diminish the role of the Marines. Krulak counts 15 times when the Corps was saved by Congress or public opinion due to its exceptional reputation, the most intense occasion occurring shortly after World War Two. Part of the reason that the Marines developed a culture of elitism and high physical requirements was to justify their existence.

               A lot of the Marines’ influence lies in straight-up propaganda. Like how the Spartans used Thermopylae to boost their reputation, the Marines did the same with the “Halls of Montezuma,” Belleau Wood, Okinawa, and Guadalcanal, among others. Harry Truman once said, “They have a propaganda machine that is almost equal to Stalin’s…” But the propaganda contains a core of truth, Krulak writes of the 1980’s recruit that, “During his twelve weeks of sixteen-waking hour days a recruit will run ninety miles, run the obstacle course ten times, do at least seventy hours of calisthenics, at least sixteen hours of swimming, and spend ninety hours in field training. It is an intensely physical experience, fueled by a daily thirty-three hundred calorie diet. On an average he will lose eight pounds of fat and gain twelve pounds of muscle.” That is intense!

Reflection on Everything is Fucked: A Book About Hope by Mark Manson

               I thought this book would be more of social analysis, but I think it falls more into the self-help category. Manson talks about various dilemmas we find ourselves in but it’s hard to find a unifying theme in the book. Some things I did like, though, were his points about how happiness should not be our goal in life. Happiness is a temporary state and you can’t go through life trying to maximize your joy at all times. What is more important is fulfilling your duties to others. He also points out the difference between variety and freedom. If one person has 2 cereal options and another has 100. The person with 100 does not have more freedom, she has more variety. Freedom isn’t how many choices you have, but rather your ability to make a choice without being forced to do anything by anyone or anything else. Manson has good lessons in the book, but I would have been more interested in what he has to say about broader unhappiness in developed countries. He touches on this on a “micro” level. He discusses how variety doesn’t improve our lives and how we’ll always just look for more problems once our problems are solved, but I didn’t feel like I got any real solutions out of the book.

Reflection on The Law of the Land: A Grand Tour of Our Constitutional Republic by Akhil Reed Amar

               This book is the third in a long series that Amar is writing about the constitution using different perspectives. I didn’t realize that until he mentioned it at the end of this book, when I found out that the one other book I had read by him was the first in the series. This book starts each chapter by discussing one state’s connection with a constitutional concept and explores a lot of different ideas that have been debated in our country’s nearly 250-year history. It was pretty cool, though not as engaging as the first book in the series. I found myself a little bored with it by the end. My problem is that the book lacked any central, unifying theme. It covered lots of different aspects of constitutional law, but quickly changed subject every 20-odd pages, making it hard to follow and really get into. I think I’ll give it four out of five stars, but I didn’t enjoy it as much as I thought I would. I will still be interested in reading more of Amar’s work though. He writes with a lot of clarity.

Reflection on Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou

               This book is a thrilling account of the lies of Elizabeth Holmes. Holmes dropped out of Stanford at 19 years old to create a company (Theranos) that would invent blood testing devices the size of a phone that would only require a fingerprick of blood rather than an intravenous needle. If it sounds too good to be true, that’s because it is. The technology wasn’t there. Despite that, Elizabeth Holmes allowed whatever sort of complex she has to pus her into bigger and bigger lies about her company until it all came crashing down in 2016. This book is a really exciting and detailed account of her attempts to cover up her lies, silence her critics, and swindle multi-millionaires and multinational companies out of hundreds of millions of dollars.

               Holmes was able to fool a lot of people through various techniques. She imposed intense security regulations on the company, hiring bodyguards and forcing employees to sign Non-Disclosure Agreements. While this was seemingly to hide the incredible technology that she had as a trade secret, it was actually to hide the lack of technology and that her multi-billion-dollar company was based on nothing at all. During demonstrations, Theranos would place the finger-stick sample of the visiting VIP in their “miniLab,” wait until they left the room, and then take the sample out to run on a modified commercial analyzer. While Tharons claimed they could use blood from finger-pricks, they needed blood drawn intravenously. While they said that they could do dozens of tests at once, they could only do a few and needed to do them separately. Their lies cost their partners, Safeway and Walgreens, millions of dollars.

               The book is really thrilling, especially the last few chapters when the author starts to tell the story of how he met all the people involved in the scandal. The book tells the tale of Theranos through the perspective of employees who quit or were fired and it’s interesting how they all had pieces of information but needed somebody like Carreyrou to put it all together. Seen individually, it was unclear, but when Carreyrou viewed the whole picture from afar, it came into focus.

Miscellaneous:

• Something I’ve been trying to think of lately is how to describe the importance of patience. I know that patience is a virtue and my gut always told me it was good, but I couldn’t describe it until I read this passage in the book: “Arnav Khannah, a young mechanical engineer who worked on the miniLab, figured out a surefire way to get Sunny off his back: answer his emails with a reply longer than five hundred words. That usually bought him several weeks of peace because Sunny simply didn’t have the patience to read long emails.” There’s a great example of how an impatient manager can be bad for business.
• One astounding thing is that Rupert Murdoch, who invested in Theranos, was able to take the $150 million he invested as a tax write-off. How the fuck is it possible that you can invest all that money, lose it, and still end up fine? Doesn’t that just encourage people to make bad investments?

Reflection on The World of Ice and Fire: The Untold History of Westeros and The Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin, Elio M. García Jr., Linda Antonsson

               Now here’s a really cool book that tells the history of Planetos as it is known to the maesters of Oldtown. I loved the illustrations and the descriptions of the faraway lands in Essos. I only wish there was more. The book does a whole history of the world and a history of the Targaryens. It also details the histories of the major regions that make up the Seven Kingdoms. The book fills in a lot of gaps and I really enjoyed it. I would recommend to any fan of the A Song of Ice and Fire series.

Reflection on American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur 1880-1964 by William Manchester

               I wanted to read this book because I really enjoyed Manchester’s biography of Churchill. While American Caesar is not as well written, it shares some very interesting thematic similarities. Both books are about men of the West born at the end of the Victorian Age and dying in the Atomic Age. Both men were meant to fight the Manichean struggle of World War Two and both saw themselves as extremely important in the history of the world from a young age. They both became disillusioned with war in their elder years and both dreamed of ending it. They both hated Communism. Both men were patricians, raised to see themselves as above all others, a trait that would have important effects on their leadership abilities.

               One interesting facet of MacArthur’s reputation is that he was hated by his own troops but loved by American civilians and foreigners. His own soldiers called him “Dugout Doug,” but the author argues that MacArthur was anything but the type of general who liked to stay away from the fighting. While he kept himself comfortable behind the lines, MacArthur frequently sought out danger and exposed himself to enemy fire countless times—this book references at least a dozen. Only once though did MacArthur truly think he would die, and it was when the Japanese seized Bataan with him and his family close by on Corregidor Island. He was sure that they were all dead until FDR ordered him back to Australia.

               MacArthur was a great general due to his “leapfrogging” technique. Rather than hitting every Japanese bastion so as not to leave enemy fortresses in his rear. MacArthur skipped all that he could, frustrating well-trained Japanese troops who wanted to see combat and cutting off their supply lines. By doing this, he achieved the lowest rates of casualties of any general in the war. In the Southwest Pacific, MacArthur advanced nearly two thousand miles in two years and did eleven hundred of them in two months.

               Something interesting about MacArthur was that he was very liberal. Like Churchill, this did not come out of any identification with common people, but due to his patrician upbringing that commanded a sense of noblesse oblige. Entering Manila, MacArthur could have shut off the roads to civilian traffic to speed up military vehicles but chose not to, saying that, “Before I interfere with the civilian population, so hard hit by the horrors of war, things will have to be a lot worse for us.” MacArthur also expressed sympathy for the Hukbalahaps, who dispossessed landlords and created agrarian soviets in central Luzon. He said that, “I haven’t got the heart to dispossess them. If I worked in those sugar fields I’d probably be a Huk myself.” He opposed discrimination by whites against the local Filipinos and was remarkably anti-racist for a white man of his time. As the dictator of Japan after the war, MacArthur gave women the vote, legalized divorce, dismantled the war industry, held free elections, formed labor unions, and opened all schools without any restrictions on instruction except that they must eliminate military indoctrination and add civics classes. The General also banned American troops from eating Japanese food and canceled martial law. He exhibited tremendous generosity and clemency. The Filipinos and Japanese loved MacArthur immensely and probably even more than the American people.

               MacArthur was dismissed for being openly insubordinate to Truman in the Korean War, attempting to escalate the war when Truman wanted to deescalate to a stalemate. MacArthur’s firm belief was that wars are made to be won and that the USA should have launched an invasion of China. He was recalled but remembered by Americans as one of the greatest public figures of all time.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• MacArthur’s father, who had a Medal of Honor. Desired above all else to have died at the head of his regiment. He got his wish when he was giving a speech to them 50 years after the Civil War when he collapsed and died at their reunion.
• MacArthur was hazed hard at West Point. Southern cadets had him freeze still and recite his father’s Civil War record and then beat him so hard that he had a seizure. “During a lull in his spasms he asked his tentmate… to put a blanket under his feet” to keep his movements quiet and another in his mouth for his outcries.
• MacArthur was a model West Point cadet, finishing first in his class with the third highest points ever achieved at West Point.
• MacArthur did not have a lot of toxic masculinity in him—he let his son dress as a ballerina and a princess as a child.
• Manila was the second hardest hit allied city in the war after Warsaw. Manchester writes that, “seventy percent of the utilities, 75 percent of the factories, 80 percent of the southern residential district, and 100 percent of the business district were razed. Nearly 100,000 Filipinos were murdered by the Japanese.
• MacArthur’s land campaign in the Philippines was a work of genius, taking 17 American divisions against 23 Japanese and coming out losing only 820 men to Japan’s 21,000 losses.
• These are the author’s word’s, not MacArthur’s, but I like how he tries to describe MacArthur’s attitude: “…a gentleman did not look upon women as inferiors. To do so was, by definition, ungentlemanly. It was more; it was, he told those who disagreed with him, sacrilegious. Women, like men, had souls. Therefore they should be treated equally.”
• MacArthur also had a genius-level campaign in Korea, where he defeated 30-40,000 North Koreans in a daring surprise landing at Inchon at a cost of only 536 dead and 2,550 wounded to American forces.

Reflection on Keynes Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics by Nicholas Wapschott

               I feel like this was a weird book for me to read. At times I liked it, was bored by it, hated it, and loved it. It was really a roller coaster ride because it does a lot. This book tells the life stories of Keynes and Hayek. It explains their work and economic theories. It analyzes their legacies. Lastly, it covers modern economics and politics through the lens of their conflict. I come away with the perspective that these were two great men, both very smart. I would only call Keynes a genius, but both were extremely wise. The fundamental concerns they dealt with were political as well as economic, since they argued over the role of the government in the economy.

               Before I get into the substance of the ideas that each man had, it is interesting to note that Keynes and Hayek had an interesting relationship. Hayek was younger and looked up to Keynes before developing different economic ideas, as Keynes was one of a few who argued that the indemnities placed by the victors of WWI on the losers were too high, an appealing message to Austrians like Hayek. After a long period of disrespect and argument in the 1930’s, the two eventually had a truce on a personal level, though their followers would still duke it out. The two men still argued with one another but forged a deeper respect and even guarded university buildings from firebombs together during the Blitz.

               The motivations of each of the great economists were different and led to different thinking. While Keynes was an economist to apply solutions to peoples’ lives, Hayek was much more interested in economic theory for its own sake. This reasonably led to the development of macroeconomics from Keynesian theory and microeconomics from Hayekian theory. It’s also probably the reason that libertarians in the vein of Hayek (and Milton Friedman) tend to be more idealistic and utopian in their ideas. Some argue that they’re even religious. It’s because Hayekian thinkers/libertarians are really not thinking about the world as it is, but rather as it could be. Keynes used an analogy that’s informative. The following idea is ugly and a sort of “so-stupid-it-just-might-work” strategy that is useful in the real world, but could never conform to Hayek’s ideals about how an economy should run. The author of the book writes, quoting Keynes:

“If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coalmines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again,” he wrote, “there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of the repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth also, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is. It would, indeed, be more sensible to build houses and the like; but if there are political and practical difficulties in the way of this, the above would be better than nothing.” To emphasize how a commonsense grasp of economics differed from how economics worked in real life, he repeated his ominous conclusion that “just as wars have been the only form of large-scale loan expenditure which statesmen have thought justifiable, so gold-mining is the only pretext for digging holes in the ground which has recommended itself to bankers as sound finance.”

               One reflection I’ve had while reading this book (which is not an original thought) is that economics is politics. When you think about other sciences, biologists, geologists, and mathematicians get into their fields to discover truths. Economists generally don’t. They usually have some sort of preconceived political idea or allegiance that they seek to prove. I am not saying this is everybody, but the field is so tied into politics that I really can’t see it any other way. Hayek’s political observations, which Keynes generally agreed with, are in my opinion his wisest ideas. Hayek’s primary concern with government spending is not to dispute that it will have positive effects on the lives of ordinary people. Rather, as an Austrian in self-imposed exile, he identified a serious negative impact of the increased power of the state that is caused by its increased spending: totalitarianism. Being from Austria, a country trapped between Hitler and Stalin, it was clear for him to see how a strong and powerful state could be used for evil. To me, the most critical facet of that state is then its connection to democracy. The Road to Serfdom is a product of its times in alleging that high government spending leads to tyranny. That correlation has been mixed up in modern Europe, where non-tyrannical, democratic states spend more than ever before. So long as the state adheres to the rule of law and the will of the people, tyranny is avoidable.

A strong state is just a tool that can be used for good or for evil, and if it is tied to a free and fair democracy where one person equals one vote, it should act in the interest or at least the desires of a majority of its people. The popular approach posed by followers of Hayek and “the enemies of big government” is to reduce the size of the state so that none can wield that tremendous power. If this could be done in the utopian way that libertarians dream of, such that democracy and representative government could be preserved, I would support it. However, I think this is an idea that’s better on paper than in reality. Because a weaker state cannot regulate the economy, I think that markets move towards monopoly. With no power to break up these monopolies, the power of the state is no longer the relative power that can produce oppression. After all, what libertarians often fail to acknowledge is that the state is not the only source of oppression. Instead, the natural tendency is for corporations or wealthy elites to take power, hijack the state, and diminish the power of the majority of non-rich people. This leads to the opposite of the other utopian dream-world: communism. While the communist utopia ends in a massive and oppressive state, the libertarian utopia ends in massive and oppressive corporations. Tyranny can further be imposed from outside in the failed libertarian utopia since other states that are stronger could enter such a fractured country and conquer it.

               The author is kind of unclear on who’s side he is on throughout most of the book, but in the final chapters, he shows that he is clearly a Keynesian in most respects. At the very least, he has strong condemnation for the neoliberal consensus that is represented by the economic policies of Reagan, Thatcher, Bush Senior, and Clinton. Woohoo, I’m just reading more books by authors who agree with me. But that said, these facts are damning. Wapschott writes that “public debt grew from a third of GDP in 1980 to more than half of GDP by the end of 1988, from $900 billion to $2.8 trillion.” He writes that Reagan entered office when America was the world’s largest creditor and left us the world’s largest debtor. The irony is that that was just Keynesianism for the rich. For all the talk of reducing the size of government, Reagan just cut taxes on the rich and moved money from social welfare programs to military spending. That has been the modus operandi of the Republican Party ever since. Nobel Prize-winner Robert Lucas was once quoted as saying that, “Everyone’s a Keynesian in a foxhole.” It has special application to Republicans, especially Reagan and Bush Junior, who despite entering office with Hayekian ideals, almost immediately abandoned them when the going got tough. It is easy to be a utopian until you actually have responsibility for the economy.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• Both Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig Von Mises were inhibited by their poor English, though Hayek was at least understandable and much better than his mentor Von Mises, who failed to impact the English-speaking world as much as his student.
• John Kenneth Galbraith summed up his interpretation of supply-siders’ arguments: “The poor do not work because they have too much income; the rich do not work because they do not have enough income. You expand and revitalize the economy by giving the poor less, the rich more.”

Reflection on The Last Lion Volume 3 by William Manchester and Paul Reid

               I’m not really going to do a reflection on this one because I’ve been busy/procrastinating for a while and I just wanna read new things. Overall it was good, though probably the worst of the three volumes. I have one real reflection in that it’s interesting how aristocratic types like Churchill tend to believe more in the social safety net than pure middle-class or upper middle-class capitalists. I think people of aristocratic lineage see themselves as having a lofty responsibility over “the realm,” and I think that leads to interesting political decisions.