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Tuesday, May 20, 2025 Book Roundup [T1]This is a temporary blog file container. It can be used for assembling a file well ahead of publication, allowing me to keep multiple files open without committing to a specific order. The file will be given a sequence number when ready for publication. As of 2025-05-20, I'm opening two Book Roundup files. This first one will be for featured new books since the previous file back on May 23, 2025. The second one will be for lower-priority books, especially ones written up long ago but not yet published. I'd like to clean up as many of those as possible.
Maggie Haberman/Jonathan Swan: Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump (2026, Simon & Schuster): New York Times reporters, Haberman previously wrote Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America (2022), write a first-draft history of Trump's first year back in office.
Robert A Schneider: The Return of Resentment: The Rise and Decline and Rise Again of a Political Emotion (2023; paperback, 2025, University of Chicago Press): Tim Wu identified resentment as a stage on his "real road to serfdom" extending from monopoly capitalism to dictatorship. For Wu, resentment is the feeling that those in power are taking advantage of you. But there is a tendency to dismiss resentment as unfounded, especially (for those in power) when it drives one to leftist political views, opposing the power that caused such a reaction. Sure, resentment can also feed rightist political views, but this is rarely a problem for those in power, as it spares them in favor of convenient scapegoats. Indeed, the main purpose of right-wing media seems to be in cultivating and directing resentment against people other than those actually responsible for injustice. Paul Starr: American Contradiction: Revolution and Revenge From the 1950s to Now (2025, Yale University Press): A broad politial history of my lifetime: it does seem like you have to go back to the 1950s to find solid ground, and portraying everything since as a dance between revolution and revenge helps explain a lot. I would add that ever since the late 1950s there has been a desire for revolution, but that it has been stymied, not so much by the repressive right as by the responsible center. The problem, of course, is that the center hasn't satisfied the desire for revolution, which keeps growing, and has eventually been exploited by the Trumpy right, not that they're actually offering anything that will work either. Robert Wright: The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning (2026, Simon & Schuster): Author of Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny (1999), where he quite sensibly tried to show how society progresses and benefits from looking beyond zero-sum games to cooperative enterprises that benefit all (or most), an effort only slightly marred by his attempts to wrap the whole enterprise up in some kind of teleology ("destiny"). That probably goes back to his roots in theology, which seem to recur here, but even as I distrust that approach, I do appreciate his big question: "how do we create a happy ending?" I suspect his answer will be the same as he offered in Nonzero. And that, I think, is fundamentally correct. I'm not sure whether the common alarmism about AI is warranted, but I do believe we need to think of it as something more than just another way to make or save money. And we need to consider the likelihood that unless we're careful, it will accelerate and exacerbate already extant problems, perhaps to a catastrophic degree. So it's good to think about it in these big picture terms. It turns out I only had three references to AI in my archive. Here are some more that caught my eye:
Let's add a second section for the business end of AI:
Not sure whether these belong among the general books or with the business ones:
Robert Wachter: A Giant Leap: How AI Is Transforming Healthcare and What That Means for Our Future (2026, Portfolio). Dan Wang: Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future (2025, WW Norton): Born in China, emigrated to Canada as a child, later to Pennsylvania, graduated from Yale Law, went back to China as a business journalist. Key concept is to contrast the relative dominance of engineers in China vs. lawyers in the US, the result being that China is heavily biased toward building things, while the US is swamped in red tape. Most books on China seem to spend more time carrying political water than actually explaining things, so I've been looking for one that at least makes sense. This mostly does. Current count: 1 links, 1694 words (2098 total) |
Cory Doctorow: Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got
Worse and What to Do About It (2025, Verso Books): Sci-fi
novelist, has written several books about the internet, increasingly
on how tech businesses make everything they touch worse in their
relentless effort to exploit users, extract and mine data, and lock
in monopoly profits — although the dynamic seems to apply to
all current forms of capitalism. What makes tech especially sinister
right now is the tremendous overvaluation of their stocks, based on
the hunch that their control of information will eventually give
them infinite powers of extraction.
Dahlia Scheindlin: The Crooked Timber of Democracy in Israel:
Promise Unfulfilled (paperback, 2023, De Gruyter): A thorough
history of what passes for democracy in Israel, dating back to and
beyond 1948, including the pivotal initial decisions to exclude and/or
control the Palestinians, and to grant the religious parties extensive
control over Jewish civil life, up through the 2022 election which
gave us Netanyahu's coalition with the extremist settler parties,
the revolt in Gaza, and the subsequent genocide. The fateful early
decisions were made by David Ben-Gurion, who comes off poorly here:
his grasp for power so determined his claims for democracy and/or
socialism come off as flimsy rhetoric. Compared to him, Menachem
Begin appears to be a principled liberal, until he came to power
and reverted to form. While Scheindlin is sensitive to the legal
skirmishes around democracy, especially the formulation of "basic
laws" in lieu of a constitution, and the balancing act performed
by the Supreme Court, she pays little attention to the underlying
ideological straitjacket of zionist supremacism, which these days
seems so wedged into the Israeli psyche that it's impossible for
them to imagine any alternative.