Book Notes

The second volume of the Scholomance trilogy follows Galadriel "El" Higgins through the senior year of Magic Boarding School. The school is a terrible place, filled with magic monsters hoping to snack off adolescent wizards and completely devoid of any adult presence. About 1⁄4 of the students survive to graduate, and in some years no one makes it out. The rich kids have many advantages, of course, but El’s mother lives in a Welsh commune. Her father died during graduation, and El has always expected she’ll go the same way. Wonderfully plotted, this is a fine tale.

October 30, 2025 (permalink)

In 2014, a famous English poet celebrated his wife’s birthday with a dinner, which later became a famous literary event. In 2119, a literary historian in the post-apocalyptic British Archipelago sets out to recover every discoverable detail of that party, and to locate the birthday present: a lost cycle of 15 sonnets thought to have been a masterpiece. I personally found this fascinating exploration of the meaning and mechanism of History nearly impossible to read because one plot thread involves a vivid rendition of a character’s decline into dementia. I learned too much about that from my mother’s last 18 years and I avoid Alzheimer books. Oh well.

October 21, 2025 (permalink)

I’m reading Unthought, in which Kate Hayles wrestles with nonconscious cognition. She seems to be at pains to argue that nonconscious cognition is at least plausible, so some of her audience must be skeptical. I can’t imagine who. I’ve always thought this was self-evident. OK: raised by a psychoanalyst. But still: has anyone who has tried to learn to throw a baseball and to swing a bat ever questioned that there are decisions made about when and how to use various muscles that are made without conscious consideration?

Hayles also thinks that the Freudian unconscious is exclusively a response to trauma. That’s not the church in which I was raised, and daddy always said he was fairly orthodox. I mean, what is the id if you don’t admit unconscious cognition?

Nonconsciousness came up in a very practical way last month, as I was debugging the link between Claude Desktop and Tinderbox that is a highlight of the new Tinderbox 11. When it wants Tinderbox to do something, Claude sends it a little JSON bundle that explains what it wants. Tinderbox replies with its own JSON bundle, telling Claude what Tinderbox did. When it works, it's simple and straightforward.

It was not working. Because Claude’s designers made a very inconvenient architectural choice, moreover, it was not working at a glacial pace, with each change and test requiring a complete Tinderbox recompilation. It was an unwelcome return to the era of Tinderbox 2.

At each step, I would ask Claude to do something with Tinderbox. Interestingly, if the communication isn't working at all, Claude has no idea what you're asking and clearly thinks you’re nuts. But if some of the communication works, Claude can sense that there’s this Tinderbox thing, and it offers tools that do stuff. Great!

Unfortunately, those tools didn’t work.

I suspected that the problem was simply that the JSON package Tinderbox was sending did not quite correspond to what Claude was expecting. At this level, a small typo or a missing version number can make the response unreadable. So I got clever, and asked Claude "What JSON response did Tinderbox send you?"

This seemed a simple request, but Claude has no access to introspection of this mechanism. Much as you really cannot reflect on what your pancreas is doing this morning, Claude had no idea (until it looks at its own documentation) that it exchanges JSON messages. After reading the documentation, it suggested I check the logs. (I’d been checking logs for hours at this point.) Eventually, I started copying the logs into Claude. Ultimately, I found some problems, and then Claude identified another, and ultimately things began to work.

Handling these JSON exchanges certainly requires processing and decision-making, so it's a kind of low-level cognition. When they work, Claude can talk and plan quite well about its Tinderbox tools. But if Tinderbox is not available at the start of a session, Claude has no idea that anything is missing or wrong. If Tinderbox can list its tools but cannot process a request to use a specific tool, Claude knows something is wrong but has no idea what. It’s like a second baseman with the yips: "this should be easy, but the ball just doesn’t go where I throw it."

There used to be lots of studies of hypertext reading that tried to figure out how people read hypertexts by watching them and asking them why they were doing what they were doing. No serious reader has any idea of what they are doing; they’re reading! (Except now you interrupted them, so they’re chatting with you and pretending to know what they intended before you stopped them.)

If you want a mechanical model of nonconscious decision making, Claude is always there for you.

October 16, 2025 (permalink)

The capstone book in a series that began with Godfrey-Smith’s landmark speculation on the octopus, Other Minds.Godfrey-Smith does a fine job at explaining what we know, and don’t know, about how plants and animals came to be. What is their felt experience? What is consciousness, anyway? Only in this last question does Godfrey-Smith falter, finding himself willing to countenance mollusk consciousness but unwilling to situate consciousness in a brain made from neurons. We have always known that this is in fact the case—we are dust—yet learned people still avert their eyes.

October 10, 2025 (permalink)

This 2024 Hugo Award novel is less ambitious than The Incandescent, but it works. Val Kyr opens the book on the verge of graduating from an asteroid-base military training academy, the last refuge of humanity after the destruction of earth. She is the ultimate soldier, an expert platoon leader honed by years of combat simulations. This sets up a critique of and response to Ender’s Game, which is worth doing. But there was one thing they had forgotten, and we end up exploring alternate time lines.

What works here is that this is a novel about abused children. Everyone is abused; Tesh’s world building ensures that everyone lives either with the guilt of genocide or the threat of conquest. Even within that small space, Tesh finds plenty of room for nuance.

September 30, 2025 (permalink)

An interestingly fantastic school story that uses a realistic Hogwarts to explore class and scholarship at elite British schools. The POV character is usually the school’s Dean of Magic, but there's a bravura view from the demonic plane in second person present.

September 26, 2025 (permalink)

A collection of nifty, and surprisingly lively, papers on travelers’ impressions of Constantinople over many centuries. Fascinating looks at how Crusaders saw Byzantium (they weren’t all that interested), how Arabs saw it, even how Byzantine artists worked out the spatial structure of empire in mosaic pavements.

August 30, 2025 (permalink)

A group biography of five 20th century physicists who were born in Budapest, moved to Germany, and then fled to the US.

• Theodore von Karman
• Leo Szilard
• Eugene Wigner
• John von Neumann
• Edward Teller

They all wound up at Los Alamos, where they were central to the atomic bomb project. There, people sometimes called them "the Martians," as a joke; they were small (except for von Neumann), balding (except for Teller), and spoke a weird language among themselves. Interestingly, all except Szilard wound up on the American right; that would be unthinkable now. I was looking primarily for more depth on von Neumann, but Hargittai leans pretty heavily on Macrae’s biography for von Neumann. There is a fascinating point that von Neumann was prone to interrupt speakers at seminars and this caused problems. That sounds a lot like Neurath; some people who knew him well thought it reflected a deep insecurity.

August 15, 2025 (permalink)

This Edgar-winning police procedural drops a black British Detective Inspector into two cold cases. One is the accidental drowning of an elderly and impoverished alcoholic who seems to have fallen in the Thames. The second is an old disappearance of a student from a Cornwall girls’ school which drops onto his desk when, at the theater, a man seated in the detective’s row died of a sudden stroke. That man, it turns out, was building a dossier on the disappearance. The plot is elaborate but repays attention.

August 7, 2025 (permalink)

Jane Harrison (1850-1928) was "the first woman in England to be come an academic in the fully professional sense—an ambitious, full-time, salaried university researcher and lecturer. She made important contributions to Classics. Her ghost has a cameo in "A Room of One’s Own." Mary Beard uses her biography as an opportunity to explore archives, their uses, and their limits. Every archive has a story, and that story has always been manipulated by those who chose what to keep. A fascinating book.

July 8, 2025 (permalink)

Channon, a Chicagoan, went to France during the First World War to drive ambulances. He didn’t much like ambulances, but he enjoyed helping out at the embassy and loved meeting lots of important people. They told him to go to Oxford to meet important people after the War. He did. His roommate was Paul of Yugoslavia.

Channon begins this second volume of his diaries at the Foreign Office, where he works tirelessly for appeasement. Once Churchill settles in, Chips is out; all he has left to do is hang out with all London society. He has elaborate lunch and dinner parties, nearly every day. He was immensely rich.

He was gay, and that shapes his view of people, but isn’t very reflective. He was a ghastly anti-semite, but as the years pass it begins to dawn on him that anti-semitism is not quite the thing. He reads, but he doesn't talk about it. It’s a fascinating document, even if Chips sometimes stays too long.

July 8, 2025 (permalink)

A magnificent overview of the remarkable surviving evidence of the medieval Jewish book world. Though almost everything has been lost, what remains is extraordinary.

Of particular interest are the strategies the illuminators adopted to distinguish Jewish figures from non-Jewish figures. On surviving Haggadah, for example, appears to depict Jews as griffins. Another fascinating strategy was to appropriate a conventional Christian scene and to use its conventions to critique Christianity. For example, one illustration of Moses and family returning to Egypt (Exodus 4:20) looks almost exactly like the usual "Flight Into Egypt". But there are details: two kids, not one! Zipporah is no virgin! And where we expect aged, infirm, broken-speared Joseph, we have young, virile, powerful Moses ready to confront Pharaoh. Clever. Maybe doubly clever; in some cases, we know that these paintings were done by Christian artists working from instructions in Latin that can still be discerned in the margins.

What I did not find enough of is details on production, especially details on how scribal errors were avoided. That’s why I spent the day in the Fine Arts Library! It was fascinating nonetheless .

June 19, 2025 (permalink)

Prof. Karen King, from Harvard, presented a paper in the Vatican about a new papyrus fragment recently surfaced by an American collector. The small scrap included a fascinating reference by Jesus to his wife, and appeared to say that she was worthy to be a disciple. King, an authority on gnosticism, was inclined to believe it an authentic early account of the life of Jesus, a gospel.

It turned out to be a fraud. Sabar eventually tracks down the con man who created the forgery, and this makes a terrific and surprising detective story. The final chapters try to indict King and Harvard for gullibility, and these are far less convincing. Forgeries happen all the time, and people—even experts—are taken in by them all the time. If they weren’t convincing, they wouldn’t be interesting. Sabar is particularly blind in thinking that a divinity school professor would understand that the sort of sleuthing he undertook is possible: three separate trips to Germany on the trail of the con man’s East German background, extensive public records searches in numerous states, treks through school archives from Berlin to Florida, handwriting experts, archival searches for traces of the porn sites that the con man set up and to which the forgery was a side hustle.

Sabar also persists in misunderstanding King’s argument that the fragment, even though forged, can focus our attention on an underlying truth. We have very little evidence of Jesus’ views on sexuality or on the status of women. What evidence we do possess is chiefly in the letters of a man who disliked sex and who thought that family life was perfectly pointless because the world was going to end in the next year or two. Several of the letters in which Paul discusses this were forgeries.

June 16, 2025 (permalink)

A pleasant and lively overview of what we know about medieval book production. It appears there weren’t many scriptoria; a lot of book production seems to have been done in cloisters or just wherever the copying could put a stool and a desk. I particularly enjoyed its treatments of different styles of writing, from Insular through Gothic. A good deal of this book focuses on evoking what book creators saw and felt. This is necessarily speculative, and I suspect it works better in lectures than on the page.

June 16, 2025 (permalink)

After Saving The City, I thought it would be interesting to read about the collapse of 2008 and the failure of Shearson. Instead, I accidentally grabbed this well-written book about the Lehman Brothers’s decision to sell itself to American Express in 1983. This is a nicely-written take of feudal revolt in a staid Wall Street institution, with lots of infighting between bankers and traders. A good read, but irrelevant to the questions I wanted to pursue.

April 22, 2025 (permalink)

Revisited this fine book on a day when, once again, the world’s financial machinery appeared to be breaking down. A significant difference now is that the people in charge are fools and poltroons, some of them actively seeking to end civilization.

Here’s what I wrote before:

A fascinating and detailed study of the financial crisis that struck London in 1914 and engulfed the world. World Trade in 1914 was highly globalized – far more so than at any time before, and world trade only surpassed this mark recently. Back then, the Pound Sterling was the international reference currency, all major currencies were pegged explicitly to gold and implicitly to sterling, and trade was based on bills that could be settled for sterling in London and subsequently converted at the Bank of England to gold. (In practice, settled bills went into accounts and gold was only shipped for arbitrage.)

The problem was that, as war approached, everyone wanted safety, and so everyone bought up London bills. There were soon no bills available, and that meant if you wanted to make a routine transaction, like paying for a shipload of shirts you’d ordered, you couldn’t: you could have plenty of money but you couldn’t get any of the de facto international currency because there wasn’t any to get.

It’s a complex and technical story with some interesting characters, and Roberts tells it skillfully.

April 22, 2025 (permalink)

This memoir by David Chang. the chef behind Momofuku, is dominated by Chang’s chronic and nearly unmanageable depression. A problem is that Chang is a very thoughtful fellow with some very intriguing ideas about food, and these keep being pushed to the side as he writes about the experience of being depressed. It’s hard to find a narrative shape to depression, and Chang’s insights on the topic are limited.

April 18, 2025 (permalink)

A portrait of U.S. Figure Skating at the end of the 20th century, the years after Harding/Kerrigan and just before the Salt Lake City Olympics made the old, corrupt 6-point scoring system insupportable. The early chapters have a certain air of John McPhee with quick cuts and interesting pacing. Later, as the World Championships approach, the book veers more closely to a sports exposé, and ultimately the author herself is declared persona non grata by the figure skating officials. Her employer, The Washington Post, fought hard for her, and her numerous colleagues rallied behind her; the past is a foreign country.

April 5, 2025 (permalink)

We know that some things are connected. For example, Mark Bernstein is the author of the weblog that you are reading. (And that sentence connects in a different way to the opening of Italo Calvino’s if on a winter night a traveller.) That some things are connected to other things cannot be denied, but are these connections exceptional and instrumental, or are they ubiquitous? As a rule, I find that people who believe in ubiquitous connection embrace tools like Tinderbox, while those who disagree do not.

Leibniz (1646-1716) remains a central figure in the philosophical question of connectionism. Postulating that God is perfect and perfectly kind, Leibniz tried to deduce the natural laws that would follow. Famously, he reasoned that a perfect God would not create an inferior universe, nor one that inflicted unnecessary suffering on its inhabitants: ours must be the best of all possible worlds. Because stupidity and suffering are not hard to find, Leibniz concludes that they must be necessary, and intuits that they are necessary because paradise would not be paradise unless it were achieved by universal effort. So, for Leibniz, everything must be connected because it is God’s plan not to build a garden for his creation, but to allow his creation to build a better one.

In his work on automatic calculators and on languages, Leibniz discovered the trick of representing any text as a very large number. This is one of the crucial connections that Gödel and then Turing made in demonstrating the incompleteness of formal systems. Leibniz didn’t quite get there — he did not quite figure out that there is more than one infinity, and that focus on the one perfect God was a distratction. Still, Leibniz did understand that, if the events in life could be represented as texts (like the Sybil’s book), then eventually everything (and everyone) happening right now would happen again. (Leibniz eventually embraced the alternative view that events must be continuous in the way time seems to be, more like the Fate’s weaving than the Sybil’s writing.)

March 20, 2025 (permalink)

I’ve been reading and watching a lot of material on figure skating to prepare for seeing the Worlds next week, and this was a pleasant part of that immersion. Alina Adams, a sports television researcher, was approached to do a mystery about the figure skating world. Naturally, the investigator in this PI procedural is Rebecca "Bex" Levy, a TV researcher covering the Nationals. After a controversial ruling, an Italian judge is found dead under suspicious circumstances, and Bex’s loathsome producer is eager to have her deliver the answer in time for the closing gala.

One oddity here is that Murder On Ice doesn’t quite meet the technical requirements of the genre: there is no second body. Nor is it a thriller, because Bex never really leaves her element; she’s an intelligent and (mildly) analytical observer of a sport and a medium for which she feels little affinity, and even when she’s most worried, her concerns are chiefly about losing a job that she doesn’t much like. We have good — even great — books that flutz the formal requirements of the mystery, but I found it odd here because figure skating is so concerned with formal requirements.

March 17, 2025 (permalink)