Category: books

The Art of Fermentation by Sandor Katz

Seth Roberts6 Comments

The Art of Fermentation by Sandor Katz was published two weeks and I got a copy from the publisher. It has a few conceptual chapters (“fermentation as a coevolutionary force”, health benefits, small business) but most of it is DIY, how to ferment X, Y, and Z. Unlike a set of recipes, he includes background with each food so the result is a cross between an encyclopedia and a cookbook. There are also several pages of color photographs, cute marginal drawings, and excellent lists of references and sources. It covers lots of stuff I rarely see. For example, there is one page on fermenting eggs. When I’m in China, I eat lots of fermented eggs. The book doesn’t mention the controversy in China about heavy metals in the fermented eggs.

The author’s enthusiasm is contagious and I’m sure the book will encourage me to ferment more stuff. Nowadays I just make yogurt, kefir, and kombucha — not even sauerkraut. I once got a book called something like The Book of Yogurt that consisted of 30 different yogurt recipes — which differed from each other by only about 5%. Page after page the same with only minor differences. Talk about cut and paste! I got rid of it (“this is useless!”) but now I wish I had saved it because it was so funny.

Which is only to say that food writing is either incredibly difficult or incredibly awful. I used to subscribe to Saveur. Some of their recipes were very good. The writing was awful, however — like something from a tourist guide. Please, don’t tell me how beautiful the country, how friendly the cook, or how tasty the food! Katz does better than that, especially when he is describing what he has actually done. But about half of the book reminds me of my first piece of extended writing — a “state report” about Maine that I did when I was in fifth grade. I went to several encyclopedias and copied the interesting stuff. Katz has gone to quite a few books and copied the interesting stuff.

In at least one case, he has copied too much. I have made yogurt hundreds of times. Only in the beginning did I do something like what practically everyone in America, including Katz, advocates: heat the milk up, let it cool, put in the culture. Now I just take the milk from the refrigerator, put in a tiny amount of culture, surround the milk with hot water (using a Chinese yogurt-making machine that keeps the water warm), and wait. So much easier. The final product is better (smoother, thicker) than the old hard way, especially when I learned that tiny amounts of culture work better than large amounts. “In my experience, cultures from commercial yogurts never maintain their viability beyond a few generations,” Katz writes. My experience is different: I’ve never had a problem using them.

In contrast to Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking, The Art of Fermentation is more personal, more hands-on, and less scientific, all of which are improvements, in my opinion. It is also more opinionated, which since the opinions are commonplace, is bad. “I too love the beer they are usually thinking of . . . However I define beer more broadly than the famous 1516 Bavarian beer purity law . . . I define beer as a fermented alcoholic beverage in which . . . ” At another point, to my surprise, he mentions Jane Jacobs and her theory that agriculture began in cities. “If Jacobs’s theory is correct, then fermentation practices must also have had urban roots,” writes Katz. This is not interesting. The small business chapter is interesting whenever Katz is telling the story of a small business and uninteresting the rest of the time (“Consistency is not necessarily important to the home experimentalist”).

Oh well. I am glad to have a book that will encourage me to ferment more stuff and from which I can learn a lot about fermentation. The book is obviously a labor of love and there are not many of those.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Three Days in May: Sex, Surveillance, and DSK

Seth Roberts6 Comments

Nicholas Sarkozy must be kicking himself. Sometimes a bird in the bush is worth more than a bird in the hand. If only I’d waited… He struck too soon. If only he’d waited until Dominique Strauss-Kahn (DSK) became his main opponent and then created a DSK scandal. The opposition would not have had time to regroup. DSK was careless, creating opportunities for his opponents. Edward Jay Epstein’s new book, Three Days in May: Sex, Surveillance, and DSK , makes clear that DSK was being monitored, presumably via his cell phones. A first-rate intelligence organization, says Epstein, can turn on your cell phone and listen to you. At one point a French journalist is given a transcript of a call that DSK made. How was this possible? the journalist asked. The answer given is that by freakish coincidence “DSK’s speaker phone was accidentally left on while his line was somehow connected to a French phone that was legally under surveillance.” Why the speaker phone should matter is not explained.

Such means of surveillance — available to those in power, but not to the rest of us — make those in power more powerful, harder to unseat. However, Epstein’s book also shows the effect of lower-tech new recording devices, especially CCTV recordings, cell phone records, and key-entry logs. They make it harder to lie. DSK’s accuser, Nafissatou Diallo, was lying, no doubt. The district attorney’s office got to “Version 3″ of her story before giving up. The discrepancies between what she said happened and the key-entry records reveal her lies beyond doubt. The new recording devices also pull two people into the story who otherwise might have remained out of it: a security guard and the head engineer at the hotel, who went into a private loading-dock area and did a kind of victory dance shortly after 911 was called. The 911 call made the matter public, which effectively destroyed DSK’s chance of elective office. They claim to not remember what they were celebrating. If it had nothing to do with the 911 call, it is exceedingly strange — another freakish coincidence — that it happened at exactly the same time.

Three Days in May is a new kind of investigative journalism in the sense that it is based on detailed electronic records (such as CCTV tapes and key-entry records) that weren’t available until recent years. Stories and movies are often set in remote locations or times to give the story a kind of freshness. Here freshness derives from the information being used. Epstein assembles hundreds or thousands of facts from these records into his story. I was interested to see a kind of power-law distribution of information value, the same thing I see in my self-experimentation: almost all of the facts tell us just a little, a very tiny fraction of them tell us a lot. Although electronic surveillance is usually considered a government tool (“Big Brother is Watching”) Epstein’s book makes a more subtle point. These records make false accusations more difficult to sustain and conspiracies more difficult to carry out without detection — and who does that help? In any case, Three Days in May is a fascinating true crime story — and the criminal is not DSK.

The Hunger Games

Seth Roberts11 Comments

I recently read The Hunger Games and liked it a lot. I finished it in a few hours — couldn’t stop reading. In contrast, I read a few pages of the first Harry Potter and stopped. When I was ten years old, I read The Hobbit, The Fellowship of the Ring (the first book of The Lord of the Rings trilogy), and stopped halfway through the second book. I never went back and have not seen the movies. I have never read a book by Stephen King, John Grisham, Robert Patterson, Anne Rice, Stephanie Meyer, and so on. None of them appealed to me. The Hunger Games is different than other books that have sold huge numbers of copies. When it came out, Stephen King reviewed it in Entertainment Weekly and gave it it a B. The second book in the trilogy, reviewed by someone else, got a C.

Sentence by sentence, even scene by scene, The Hunger Games is mediocre. It is not quotable. There is no vivid writing. The characters are barely interesting. It is not Jonathan Franzen, much less Vladimir Nabokov. But it does a wonderful job of supplying the four basic elements of a good story: a hero, a villain, making you care about the hero, and putting the hero in jeopardy.

Beneath the surface, also, is something I rarely find in novels: the author feels strongly about her subject matter. Collins, the author of The Hunger Games, has said she is writing for teenagers about war. Her father, who was in the Army, cared deeply about this and taught his children about it. “A family trip to a castle, which [the 13-year-old Collins] imagined would be “fairy-tale magical,” turned into a lesson on fortresses [given by her father],” says an article about Collins. Did Vladimir Nabokov know this much about child molesters (Lolita)? No, it was a literary device. Did Tolstoy or Flaubert have the events of Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary drilled into them in childhood? Unlikely. Both novels are built on basic novelistic subjects (actually, the same subject — infidelity). Somehow Collins’s deep connection comes through. I have no idea if you can write a good book simply because you love something. But you can definitely write a good book if you hate something: The Devil Wears Prada.

 

Gary Shteyngart is a Very Funny Guy

Seth Roberts1 Comment

I heard Gary Shteyngart (latest book Super Sad True Love Story) at the Beijing Bookworm. No better job of authorial self-promotion have I seen. He was born in Leningrad in 1972, he grew up hearing jokes from his parents. For example: The 1980 Summer Olympics were in Moscow. At the time, Brezhnev was in charge. He was going senile. At an Olympic ceremony, he gave a speech. His hands shook holding the text of his talk.

“Ohhhhhh…..” he read.

He paused.

“Ohhhhh…….”

He paused.

“Ohhhhh……”

An apparatchik ran up to him. “Senior Comrade Brezhnev, those are the Olympic Rings!”

The moderator asked Shteyngart what he thought of Putin’s plan to require every Russian teenager to read a specified 100 great books by graduation. “These things never work,” said Shteyngart. “American cities have done this. Everyone’s supposed to read a certain book, usually To Kill a Mockingbird. Never tell someone what to read.” However, he said one of his favorite authors is Karen Russell. (For a New Yorker podcast, he read a story by Andrea Lee.)

I asked about his favorite TV shows. He mentioned The Sopranos, The Wire, and Breaking Bad. “Who would have guessed that TV would become a great art form?” He is writing a show for HBO about Brooklyn immigrants.

I learned that he was interviewed by a magazine called Modern Drunkard. The interviewer — not Shteyngart — mentions an Russian saying: “The church is near, but the road is icy. The bar is far away, but I will walk carefully.” How true.

 

 

 

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts4 Comments

Thanks to Peter Spero and Allan Jackson.

Father Versus Surgeons and New York Presbyterian Hospital

Seth Roberts3 Comments

I decided to read this book review because of a brief description (“A father describes, and rages at, the loss of his teenage son.) in an email. Then I found this:

Weber’s story becomes more spirited and urgent when Damon’s health begins to fail more seriously, and his father is forced to locate his true enemy: the received wisdom and arrogance of the American medical establishment.

Weber père . . . admits he doesn’t trust “any single voice on Damon’s illness.” And he’s wise not to, as he discovers in short order that health care for his son is first and foremost a business, and that surgeons frequently talk out of their hats.

Heart transplants represent big money for hospitals: at half a million dollars each, 20 pediatric transplant operations a year make a significant contribution to the finances of New York-Presbyterian ­Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center, where Damon’s surgery is eventually performed. Hospitals compete to attract patients (every transplant center Weber speaks with wants to perform his son’s operation) and stringently guard their surgical outcome data, as Weber discovers when he tries to find out if the blithe assurances of the Columbia transplant team are scientifically valid. He quickly realizes “each hospital is a fiefdom.”

Worse still, the medical barons who run the fiefs care as much [i.e., as little] for protocol as they do for patients. Over Christmas of 2004, Damon is casually “listed” as a potential heart recipient — meaning he has to be ready to receive a new heart at a moment’s notice — without his father’s knowledge. His doctors then disappear for a week and more.

Before Weber can truly blow his stack, he discovers Damon’s doctors have also misclassified his son’s transplant status as less urgent than it is. Dad bulls [sic] them into fixing the problem, and 11 days later, a heart is found for Damon. The transplant in turn initiates a tragic cascade of doctor errors so egregious that Weber eventually sues both the medical director of pediatric heart transplants at New York-Presbyterian Columbia hospital and the hospital itself for malpractice. (Three years into the lawsuit, the medical director claimed Damon’s post-op records couldn’t be located.) All this happens at one of the country’s best heart transplant centers.

“Passively relying on the medical establishment and trusting them to manage my son’s care in his best interest is not . . . a luxury I have allowed myself,” Weber writes, with good reason.

Maybe I should start a series called “The Culture of Surgeons”. Entry 1: Eileen Consorti, a Berkeley surgeon who told me I should have surgery for a hernia I could not detect. Entry 2: Martin Burton, an Oxford ear nose and throat surgeon whose Cochran Review about the pros and cons of tonsillectomy failed to consider that tonsils are part of the immune system.

The Legacy of Steve Jobs

Seth Roberts16 Comments

Sue Halpern has written the first interesting assessment of Steve Jobs I’ve seen, in the form of a book review of Isaacson’s biography. It happens to be very negative. She says little about his now-well-known bad treatment of coworkers, friends and family (“a bully, a dissembler, a cheapskate, a deadbeat dad, a manipulator”) and focusses on the effects of Apple Computer, which are obviously much greater.

She makes one very bad point. He should not call himself an artist, she argues:

There is no doubt that the products Steve Jobs brilliantly conceived of and oversaw at Apple were elegant and beautiful, but they were, in the end, products. Artists, typically, aim to put something of enduring beauty into the world; consumer electronics companies aim to sell a lot of gadgets, manufacturing desire for this year’s model in the hope that people will discard last year’s.

“In the end, products”? “Gadgets”? Are books gadgets? I cannot imagine a future without books. Nor one without cellphones and laptops. If they are lovely and work well, so much the better for all of us. Moreover, cellphones and laptops, much more than other necessities (food, clothes, housing, transportation, medicine) help us express ourselves — our hidden inner selves — in so many ways. (Like art and books, but better.) Mark Fraunfelder made a similar point (obliquely).

“Products” and “gadgets” is Halpern’s conventional anti-consumerism. She goes on to make two equally conventional but much better points:

According to a study reported by Bloomberg News last January, Apple ranked at the very bottom of twenty-nine global tech firms “in terms of responsiveness and transparency to health and environmental concerns in China.” Yet walking into the Foxconn factory, where people routinely work six days a week, from early in the morning till late at night standing in enforced silence, Steve Jobs might have entered his biggest reality distortion field of all. “You go into this place and it’s a factory but, my gosh, they’ve got restaurants and movie theaters and hospitals and swimming pools,” he said after being queried by reporters about working conditions there shortly after a spate of suicides. “For a factory, it’s pretty nice.”

Apple had (and has) the power to improve working conditions at Foxconn. I completely agree: this was (and is) an enormous missed opportunity, for which Steve Jobs is completely responsible. No doubt he said that Apple products empower individuals (and they do) — well, how about empowering Foxconn workers?

Halpern’s final point is about recycling:

Next year will bring the iPhone 5, and a new MacBook, and more iPods and iMacs. What this means is that somewhere in the third world, poor people are picking through heaps of electronic waste in an effort to recover bits of gold and other metals and maybe make a dollar or two. Piled high and toxic, it is leaking poisons and carcinogens like lead, cadmium, and mercury that leach into their skin, the ground, the air, the water. Such may be the longest-lasting legacy of Steve Jobs’s art.

Yeah. Apple could (and can) lead the world in making their products easy to recycle. They haven’t. Entirely Steve Jobs’ fault. As Halpern says, this really matters.

Steve Jobs spent his working life (a) exploiting the commercial potential of new products (home computer, etc.) in large part by (b) caring obsessively, much more than others in his rarefied position, such as Bill Gates, about how they made him feel. Apple made products that Steve Jobs enjoyed. Fine. The problem is what Steve Jobs enjoyed. My take on him is a lot can be explained by (a) he cared little what others thought of him and (b) he lived in a tiny, uncomplicated intellectual world — as illustrated by his remarks about Foxconn and his Stanford graduation speech. Nabokov might say he had the emotional development of a child and the curiosity of an adult.

He left behind a company that reflects the shallowness of what he cared about. Those who take over Apple Computer are likely to be less shallow than he was — most people are. I predict the company will begin to care more about working conditions, ease of recycling, and other things beyond immediate user experience.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts4 Comments
  • The Shangri-La Diet: still too good to be true. It was my dream — and maybe every scientist’s dream — to discover something (a) useful and (b) counter-intuitive, the more surprising the better. It did not occur to me that (a) and (b) conflict. I think that more surprising discoveries are eventually more useful (as logic suggests), but it takes much longer.
  • Marisa Tomei wants to play Jane Jacobs. “I love that she saved Greenwich Village.” When she does, perhaps Robert Caro will post the unpublished Jane Jacobs chapter of The Power Broker.
  • Symposium on The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs.
  • Did you know that Mindy Kaling’s amusing article in this week’s New Yorker is an excerpt from a forthcoming book? Neither did I. Likewise, the recent Murakami story Town of Cats was from a forthcoming book. The New Yorker, unlike other magazines, never identifies book excerpts. This is unfortunate because doing so would help both writers (sell books) and readers (find books to read). For more criticism of The New Yorker, see the great book Gone: The Last Days of The New Yorker by Renata Adler.

Thanks to Dave Lull.

Spycraft, Personal Science, and Overconfidence in What We Know

Seth Roberts14 Comments

Edward Jay Epstein‘s newest Kindle book is James Jesus Angleton: Was He Right?. Angleton worked at the CIA most of his career, which spanned the Cold War. He struck some of his colleagues as paranoid: He believed that the CIA could easily contain Russian spies. Colleagues said Oh, no, that couldn’t happen. After his death, it turned out he was right (e.g., Aldrich Ames). At one point he warned the CIA director, “an intelligence [agency] is most vulnerable to deception when it considers itself invulnerable to deception.”

What interests me is the asymmetry of the mistakes. When it really matters, we overestimate far more than underestimate our understanding. CIA employees’ overestimation of their ability to detect deception is a big example. There are innumerable small examples. When people are asked to guess everyday facts (e.g., height of the Empire State Building) and provide 95% confidence intervals for their guesses, their intervals are too short, usually much too short (e.g., the correct answer is outside the intervals 20% of the time). People arrive at destinations more often later than expected than earlier than expected. Projects large and small take longer than expected far more often than shorter than expected. For any one example, there are many possible explanations. But the diversity of examples suggests the common thread is true: We are too sure of what we know.

There are several plausible explanations. One is that it helps groups work together. If people work together toward a single goal, they are more likely to reach that goal and at least learn what happens than if they squabble. Another is the same idea at an individual level. Overconfidence in our beliefs helps us act on them. By acting on them, we learn. Doing nothing teaches less. A third is a mismatch idea: We are overconfident because modern life is more complicated than the Stone-Age world to which evolution adjusted our brains. No one asked Stone-Age people How tall is the Empire State Building? A fourth is that we assume what physicists assume: the distant world follows the same rules as the world close to us. This is a natural assumption, but it’s wrong.

Early in Angleton’s career, he had a very unpleasant shock: He realized he had been fooled by the Russians in a big way for a long time. This led him to try to understand why he’d been fooled. Early in my scientific career, I too was shocked: Rats in Skinner boxes did not act as expected far more often than I would have thought. I overestimated my understanding of them. In a heavily-controlled heavily-studied situation! I generalized from this. If I couldn’t predict the behavior of rats in a Skinner box, I couldn’t predict human behavior in ordinary life. My conclusion was data is more precious than we think. In other words, data is underpriced. If a stock is underpriced, you buy as much of it as possible. I tried to collect as much data as possible. Personal science — studying my sleep, my weight, and so on — was a way to gather data at essentially zero cost. And, indeed, the results surprised me far more than I expected. I could act based on the overconfidence effect but I could not remove it from my expectations.