Randall Munroe (2022)

A tour de force of creative scientific answers. It’s perhaps less enjoyable than the original What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions – but only because it is a sequel, and so lacks the novelty of the first. It’s still a rush, ranging from cosmology down to particle physics, with enough black holes to satisfy anyone. And I also learned about the Glass beach of Vladivostok, which is a place I’d never imagined existed and made the book worthwhile all on its own, just as Randall said it would.

5/5. Finished Monday 14 November, 2022.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Monty Lyman (2021)

A book about pain, and why it isn’t what we think.

The conventional wisdom is that pain is caused by damage, but it’s more subtle than that. Pain is a signal that can be triggered by damage, but can also be caused in response to less physical causes such as fear and a memory of past damage – and can be suppressed by activity or positive thinking, at least to a degree. This is awkward ground, as Lyman recognises: it’s close to saying that “it’s all in the mind”, which is both literally true and deeply offensive to those suffering persistent pain. But it also offers hope that enormously dangerous pharmaceuticals can – sometimes – be replaced or complemented with cognitive therapies that might be effective.

Everyone has had the experience of being deeply engaged in some activity, incurring damage, and not noticing until afterwards. Soldiers frequently report it: they also sometimes feel significantly less pain from their injuries than civilians, because an injury that takes you off the battlefield makes you safer than you were. The signals get mixed, and the pain felt changes accordingly.

There’s much to like in this book, not least a very thorough treatment of placebos. It does sometimes get lost in reporting yet another clinical trial, or yet another insight into neurochemistry. It sometimes feels a little too long and too well-referenced for a popular science take on the issues.

3/5. Finished Thursday 3 November, 2022.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Anne-Marie Slaughter

A book on grand strategy and its application to less-grand challenges in a world dominated by networks.

The central thesis of this book is that the world of hierarchies and direct state-to-state diplomacy – the chessboard – is giving way to a much more nuanced world in which state and non-state actors interact and co-operate in far ore complex ways – the web. The network effects change everything, from the nature of power and how it’s used to the nature of leadership and how one can actually get things done.

It’s interesting to see the concepts of network science being applied to social and political science in a way that doesn’t trivialise them. The applications range from analysis of interaction patterns to trying to engineer particular interactions such as improving information sharing.

There’s an obvious comparison to The Seventh Sense: Power, Fortune, and Survival in the Age of Networks, with which Slaughter contrasts her work, she being a “Wilsonian” humanist versus Joshua Ramo’s “Kissingerian” realist. Slaughter’s view is that there is a need for more understanding of how small-scale interactions can happen – contrasting with Ramo’s desire for aggressive “gatekeeping” of a US-led networked order. I can’t help thinking that her view is more realistic and democratic.

4/5. Finished Thursday 27 October, 2022.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)