There’s no shortage of good ideas. The significance of a technology is not really in the idea; it’s in the execution. A mere idea will not change the world. Good leadership, good communication and faultless and execution will. I’m interested in big ideas: the bigger the better. The conquest of the South Pole, the circumnavigation of the North Pole, the genesis of neural networks, the Theranos and WeWork scams, the world domination of the ubiquitous toy LEGO. I’ve enjoyed biographies of Roald Amundsen, who won the race to the South Pole by stratagem, and of Ernest Shackleton, another polar explorer who didn’t achieve the big trophy firsts but paved the way for his successors by proving that they were possible. I loved the biography of Angela Merkel, whose worldview was shaped by her life behind the Iron Curtain in East Germany, and am still absorbing the painstaking work of Vaclav Smil, whose “How The World Really Works” is a fantastic precis of the technology that underpins modern existence like Atlas shouldering the globe. I’ve also included (a) scattered reviews of Persian films, which seldom follow a neat plot, and occasionally neglect plot altogether for mood, notions, or ideas and (b) some original essays. Enjoy!
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Shackleton, By Endurance We Conquer by Michael Smith
I recently read “The Last Viking”, a biography of Roald Amundsen, the first man to traverse the Northwest passage, the first to reach the North Pole by airship (and possibly at all) and the first to reach the South Pole. It opened my eyes to the heroic age of polar exploration, a time when people straddling the line between sane and insane attempted feats that defied death and often defied logic. Shackleton did not achieve any enduring heroic “firsts”, and for years his reputation played second fiddle to that of the famous Captain Scott. Shackleton is now regarded as one…
Cockroach by Ian McEwen
A quick twist on the Metamorphosis In a reverse twist on Kafka’s Metamorphosis, a fairly ordinary and even likeable cockroach, wakes up in the body of Jim Sams, the British Prime Minister. This is an occasionally funny book that describes an attempt by the Cockroach wing of the party to enact an economic concept called Reversalism. Under the Reversalist paradigm, employees pay to work, but are paid for consuming. The book digs its heels into the dirty politics of cross-border transactions, and patriotic chest-thumping ensues. It’s all a bit heavy-handed, but it has the merit of being short.
The Chancellor by Kati Marton
The biography is interesting both for what it says and for what it omits. It’s remarkably thin in terms of content or juicy gossip. Merkel developed deep habits of paranoia when she lived in East Germany, so much so that years later she refused to use text or email. Her inner circle was so intensely loyal that nobody spilled the beans for this book, and it’s not clear that there were any beans in the first place. A few facts do emerge: Merkel had immense stamina for diplomacy, for engaging in dialogue. Germany’s chancellor is the de facto leader of…