For someone who supposedly likes science fiction I’ve been late getting to Asimov’s best known works. That’s too bad, since 20 years ago I would have enjoyed the first book much more.

• The literal title of the series could be The Decline and Fall of the Galactic Empire, and How to Survive It.

• Amazon says “Foundation” is book three. It’s not: books 1 and 2 are prequels and if you read them as published, this is the rightful Book One (you’re not one of those people who shows their kids The Phantom Menace first, are you?)

• The future has no women, save for a shrill daughter of a viceroy wedded off to a barbarian ruler. This is literally the only female character in a book that spans 80+ years and five star systems. I would not have noticed this 20 years ago.

• The Empire’s degeneracy is most evident in its approach to culture and science: our ancestors knew more that we did so we’d better maintain the status quo and not let things get too much worse on our watch. Over a few centuries of such policies things inevitably get much worse. The premise is a good counterfactual to Tyler Cowen’s Stubborn Attachments.

• The peak of science is neither interstellar travel nor advanced atomic energy: both of these survive the decline and continue to be used even by “barbarians”. What waits to be re-discovered is psychohistory (PH), an invention of Asimov’s which is to psychology what Newtonian physics is to quantum mechanics: an averaging out of individual variability in order to predict “future history”.

• PH notably can’t predict actions of individuals, yet at critical moments it’s the individuals who make the critical decisions that make the PH predictions come true. Paradox? Irony? Both?

• Also, for someone who keeps saying that PH can’t predict the future of an individual human, the inventor of PH is really good at predicting the future of individual humans. That’s neither paradox nor irony but rather bad plotting on Asimov’s part, but I’ll hold final judgment until the end of the series.

Written by Isaac Asimov, 1951

This could have and should have been the wrap-up of Sapiens rather than a book of its own. The first two thirds are a rehash of the last few chapters of Sapiens, dealing with three different flavors of humanism (liberal, social, evolutionary) in more depth. Only the last third deals with predictions, the main one being that, the postulates of liberalism being incompatible with our current understanding of biology, two other candidate “religions” may replace it: techno-humanism (out of which springs Homo Deus) and dataism (wherein humans need not apply).

So far so good; unfortunately, his claims about the current state of affairs are supported by the thinnest of cobwebs, at least where medicine is concerned:

“It is highly likely that during your lifetime many of the most momentous decisions about your body and health will be taken by computer algorithms such as IBM’s Watson.”

It isn’t.

“Google, together with the drug giant Novartis, is developing a contact lens that checks glucose levels in the blood every few seconds by analysing the composition of tears.”

Not any more.

“Twentieth-century medicine aimed to heal the sick. Twenty-first-century medicine is increasingly aiming to upgrade the healthy.”

Is he referring to the “ADHD” epidemic? Anabolic steroid use? Medicine’s record of messing with the healthy has so far been abysmal, there are no indications that this will change, and there are plenty of sick that still need healing. It’s not medicine that wants the upgrading, it’s the Silicon Valley tech bros, for the most part.

Yes, it’s only medicine, but it’s the part I understand the most and his conjectures, deductions, and extrapolations fall flat on their face.

A darker prediction: the best minds of the West are too busy monetizing the unjustified optimism and hubris of the monied classes to work on the important problems. A breakthrough, when it comes, will be out of left field and from somewhere less regulated, less devoted to a good narrative, and more prone to experimentation for its own (rather than financial) sake. It is now indescribable but will in hindsight seem inevitable, which makes it a terrible subject for a book on future history but a terrific one for true science fiction.

Written by Yuval Noah Harari, 2018

Fifty years and what feels like ten times as many people crammed into a story of physics, engineering, politics, psychology, diplomacy, and war. An awesome book about an awesome topic, and yes that’s how awesome was meant to be used.

• I enjoyed the first half of the book, about the physics of it all, much more than the second. It has fewer characters, all of them characters, and has fewer parallel stories to tell. A whole chapter is devoted to a manuscript authorship dilemma: kudos to Rhodes for making it interesting.

• Niels Bohr and Ernest Rutherford were some of those characters. So was Marie Curie: “How does it feel to be married to a genius, Mdm. Curie?” “I don’t know, ask my husband”. Indeed.

• If there’s anything that I got from the second half, about engineering and deploying the thing, it’s that large projects are messy, costly, and never completely satisfying. But that’s kind of a given.

• With all the firebombing (Dresden et al), and two atomic bombs top it off, how much worse must have the Allies behaved for their atrocities to be equal to those of the Nazis? Note that Stalin was an Ally.

• I knew little of Oppenheimer before reading this except that he got into political trouble after Los Alamos. The book doesn’t go there, but every mention of him foreshadows his troubles to come. Which would be very confusing if I knew absolutely nothing about him, and was still kind of confusing with the little knowledge I had.

• Soldiers were much more interesting to read about than politicians, and came out on top in almost every confrontation.

• I know what I wrote about the second half of the book, but the last three chapters are easily the best, and the way Rhodes covered the actual bombing of Hiroshima was masterful.

This will probably be the best book I read this year.

Written by Richard Rhodes, 1986

A speedy overview of the past 70 some millennia of humanity. Self-aware without being modest about its proclamations. Very 2014 in its optimism to dread ratio, but with enough forewarning that things might slip at any moment that it doesn’t appear naïve when being read in 2019. A few observations:

• The book’s main thesis is that civilization as we know it lies on many, many figments of our collective imagination: states, laws, human rights, religions, corporations, etc. The last hundred years have sped this up, pulling people apart from families and other tangible local communities and into fictive constructs such as nations, sports teams, organized religion, and other forms of fandom. Are Twitter and Facebook communities more or less real than these, and if more, are they why people have been having a hard time suspending their disbelief?

• Many religions are poked, proded, and pulled apart by witty turns of phrase, but Harari turns dead serious whenever buddhism is discussed. Unlike christianity and islam, buddhism gets whole running paragraphs of in-depth explanation. Did the book need a religious disclaimer?

• His go-to example for discussing nationalist myths is Serbia. It figures. Kudos for doing it respectfully.

• Another thesis is that capitalism lives by using up future resources in form of credit, which in turn produces and enlarges those very same future (now present) resources. In addition to being a very Predestination way of seeing things, does that support or conflict with Tyler Cowen’s thesis in Stubborn Attachments that we tend to — but shouldn’t — discount the future? Maybe we (or capitalists, at least) are at the same time optimists by thinking the future will be better by default, but also saying to hell with it by using those perceived future benefits now, to the detriment of future people? To this non-economist modern capitalism looks like an underbaked ideology.

• This is the best-looking and best-made soft cover edition of a non-fiction book I’ve ever read.

Written by Yuval Noah Harari, 2014

A history of the Trieste kerfuffle between Tito and the Allies immediately following WW2, but also an overview of the many warring sides: Non-soviet Allies, the Soviets, Tito’s partisans (“Yugoslavs” but also sometimes “Slovenians” and “Croats”), Chetniks (“Serbs”), Ustashe (“Croats”), Italian communists, Italian fascists, Italian non-communist non-fascist partisans, and let’s not forget the Nazis. Whew… At least the French are out of the picture.

It’s biased towards the Americans and the British, but then that’s not surprising considering the author. All other sides being equally horrible — according to the book at least, and it’s a lazy though intellectually safe stance to make — it manages to be sort of objective but then in a lot of cases resorts to citing some not very objective secondary sources written in the background of a much bigger kerfuffle in the 1990s. Jennings is no Ron Chernow, and even less of a Robert Caro. The region needs someone of Cs’ tenacity and attention to detail to untangle even the footnotes of Balkan history like Trieste. I can’t imagine who would be able to tackle a Power Broker-like biography of Tito, but I’d be happy to read one.

Written by Christian Jennings, 2017

A biography of the Rockefeller patriarch. It’s a messy book, but then it was also a messy 97 year-long life. A few highlights:

• He benefited from starting his business, unencumbered by monetary or ideological debt, just when one of the greatest technological leaps of human history occurred. What got him all that money was luck and ruthlessness more than business acumen (what others thought) and religious zeal/hand of God (what he thought). His subsequent mostly failed business ventures confirm this.
• Even so, it is his religion that led him to become the world’s greatest philanthropist, and also set up a template for modern billionaires on how to donate most of their fortune formally and on a grand scale. Yay for religion, then?
• Rockefeller’s company Standard Oil and other trusts emerged at a time when legislature couldn’t keep up with rapidly evolving technologies; by the time laws caught up, it didn’t matter. Private data and human attention are 21st century oil.
• You also have corrupt politicians, populist presidents, and progressive and gender/racially sensitive (dare I say woke) but ineffective intelligentsia. It all seems very familiar.
• A search for “John D Rockefeller” on youtube brings mostly conspiracy videos and hilarious reenactments. I did find one video of the man himself in which he looks eerily like my grandmother.

Written by Ron Chernow, 2004

An introduction to the normal distribution and to our incompetence in dealing with probability. Since it covers a different type of probability than “Fooled by randomness”, and only skims the heuristics and biases discussed at length in “Thinking, fast and slow”, it works well as a prologue to both books. This trio should be mandatory reading for premeds, by the way, with the rest of Taleb’s Incerto rounding out an advanced curriculum. They would for sure have served me better than the anemic statistics textbooks I had to plough through in the early ‘00s.

Written by Leonard Mlodinow, 2009

I’m glad the author, Roger Lowenstein, didn’t even attempt to appear impartial in this, Amazon’s most highly rated of Warren Buffett biographies. It’s the reverse of a Power Broker hit job: in the reprint afterword, Lowenstein is wistful about not getting more praise from Buffet while the aforementioned is signing the author’s personal copy at a conference. How wonderful it would be if our heroes loved us as much as we love them.

Granted, Buffet is an easy person to love, what with being an aw-shucks Midwestern pro-government regulation democrat who is modest, smart, and also one of the richest people in world. That he first earned his money off of America’s addiction to sugar and shopping, followed by tobacco and war, followed by decidedly inegalitarian buddy deals, all while neglecting his wife to the point of her leaving, and his children to the point of their becoming New Age musicians, just supports his claim to being the most American of all American heroes. Kudos.

Written by Roger Lowenstein, 2008

So much wasted potential in this one. It could have been a great movie for both children and adults, a Labyrinth for the age of CGI and social justice. Instead, it’s a confused, hurried mess in which lots of Stuff happens for no good reason; a Michael Bay extravaganza for your middle-schooler. My daughter (6) liked it, but even she questioned a major plot point. “But, why did X become evil, daddy?” I’ve no idea, Honey, and I’m not sure the screenwriters gave it much thought either.

Such is the faith of many book adaptations; this one even more so, having had to pass through the Disney committee wringer. I haven’t read the book(s? That’s how much I know about the potential franchise) but I’ve read and watched enough fantasy to know that 1) your made-up world needs to have rules, and 2) if you break them, it better be for a good reason. The few week rules set in the Wrinkle’s first half are promptly broken at the half-time, with no explanation and nothing to replace them. Instead you get a holodeck of a planet, where anything can happen: hurricane in a haunted forest turns into a Stepford wives cul-de-sac turns into a crowded beach, and no there is nothing connecting those dots.

Which is too bad — each one of those scenes would’ve made a good episode for the second season of the unmade Wrinkle TV show, perfect for Disney’s new streaming service. Such a waste.

Directed by Ava DuVernay, 2018

The first thing I picked up after taking the hematology boards was this gem from Chicago’s medical royalty (Adam Cifu) and everyone’s favorite oncologist (this is of course a joke — you know that people hate your guts, Vinay).

I didn’t, and still don’t, care much for the title. It is ambiguous: if medical reversal means overturning an established practice that was based on weak to no evidence once stronger evidence comes along — usually in the form of a (multi-center, blinded) randomized controlled trial — why on earth would you want to end reversals? Well, the book is about how to stop those kinds of practices from becoming established in the first place, which would indeed end medical reversal, but an easier way to stop them and one that would be endorsed by most of industry and many researches would be to just not look. “Ending Medical Reversal the Hard Way” is therefore a more appropriate name.

Title aside, I agreed with pretty much everything they wrote, from reforming medical education, through stopping direct-to-consumer marketing and direct-to-academic (not their words) payments, to having more people participate in (simpler, cheaper, and fairer) randomized trials. I enjoyed their honesty and clear style, and wished my medical school had at least a passing resemblance to the one they proposed (if you thought US medical education leaned too much on basic science-oriented and was heavy in professorial mechanistic proclamations, try the average European med school). Granted, I work in a federal research hospital and focus on some of the rarest of the rare diseases; but that only makes me shake my head in disbelief more when my colleagues who specialize in breast or lung cancer, not to mention coronary artery disease and diabetes, randomize enormous numbers of patients to search for minute differences in surrogate outcomes.

Written by Vinayak Prasad and Adam Cifu, 2015