Nathan Bick

Tim Hwang in Subprime Attention Crisis exposes the markets that underlie the internet. These attention markets, where our attention is traded at hyperfast speed, highly parallel financial markets. This is no accident, as the tech and finance industries have been tightly connected since the beginning of the commercialization of the internet. And indeed, many executives in tech came from the finance world. The market for attention highly resembles more traditional commodity markets such as for oil, timber, or water. Hwang gives a very useful historical overview of the development of the market for wheat, where once farmers travelled to sell their individual yields at marketplaces in the city. Later, wheat was standardized by lot, quality, season, and other characteristics, and then turned into indistinguishable abstracted commodities. Eventually, futures and other financial derivatives developed on top of the underlying asset and became enormous markets.  Subprime Attention Crisis la...

I started reading The Prize by Daniel Yergin, which is a canonical account of the history of oil in global geopolitics and economics. To explain why it might be worth better understanding oil, pause and consider what oil really is. In a very real way, future anthropologists will view this era as the Oil Age in exactly the way we look back on the Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages. The realities of our personal lives, down to the contours of our simplest daily decisions, and our collective national prosperity, are almost wholly determined by the availability of oil and its products. Our gas powered car or plastic sneakers define us and our lives as much as or more than a stone-tipped spear defined our Stone Age ancestors. Cracking open this book in 2021 presents a fascinating dynamic since The Prize was released in the early 1990s. A transformative thirty years have elapsed, and while the earlier history up to 1990 recounted in the book is still the same history today, the author’s then-curre...

I started Mao in 2020 and finished on New Year's Day 2021. There is some symbolism in this because as I begin a new year I also will begin a new book on a new era after Mao, since I plan to read a book on Deng Xiaoping next. It is not a deep or unique observation that China is rapidly increasing in heft and influence in the world, and I personally am trying to react to this by studying China. I expect that for the rest of my life, China and its economy, policy, culture, and history will grow in its direct relevance in my daily life. An interest in geopolitics can sometimes appear like sports fandom - a great game played by its famous participants whose only direct impact on the viewer is that viewer's perceptual emotional response to a sense of "their team winning or losing." On the contrary, just as America and its economy, policy, culture, and history is directly relevant for many people in the world (think the daily life of Iraqis in the extreme), I see China doing...

Deng Xiaoping is a much more nuanced figure than Mao, and I believed at the outset of reading this book that he was also more important than Mao. In high school I read a large biography of Deng by Ezra Vogel which Pantsov and Levine address directly in this new biography. They suggest Vogel focuses sympathetically on Deng's time as Paramount Leader and his economic policies of modernization and opening up. Pantsov and Levine instead tackle Deng's entire biography and perhaps overcompensate in doing so. Similarly to their work on Mao, a relatively small portion of this work is spent on the man's time at the helm and a larger portion is spent on intraparty conflicts throughout his career. However, Pantsov and Levine here claim that this is done in order to present a holistic presentation of Deng, and there are episodes from Deng's earlier life that can be seen as early signs of features of his time as Paramount Leader. First, to address the comparative importance and rele...

  Life and Fate is the second half of the two part novel, the first part being Stalingrad which I reviewed above. Life and Fate, as previously mentioned, is the more famous portion of the overall work. It was completely censored in the Soviet Union by the editors rather than allowed to publish with state editing. In 1980, this book was smuggled out of the Soviet Union to the West where it was first published. The book became famous for this story, and further for its literary and political content. As a poignant critique of the Soviet Union, it was politically warmly received, and it may have represented an unleashing of previous Russian literature in the vein of Tolstoy or Dostoevsky rather than a work dominated by Soviet influence. Life and Fate is often likened to War and Peace , and I think this comparison is politically pointed as just mentioned as well as legitimate and obvious. This comparison is due to the wartime subject matter, the large cast of characters, and within the...

  The first in a two-part novel with Life and Fate , Stalingrad is often overshadowed by its more famous sequel. The publication of Life and Fate is itself an exciting spy story, and its critique of the Soviet Union primed itself for reception by Western audiences. Stalingrad only recently received a Western publication. I myself read Stalingrad this year after unexpectedly discovering it on the bookshelf at Politics and Prose in Washington, DC.I had previously read Life and Fate in my high school years, and picking up this new prequel gave me the opportunity to reread that book as part of my 2020 reading theme mentioned above.  This novel was published in the Soviet Union with Soviet editing, and this is usually "blamed" for the nationalistic and optimistic tone of the novel. Stalingrad features a wide cast of characters and mingling subplots, but it all girds a vast and simple impending confrontation between two titan states at Stalingrad. Grossman writes about the grand na...

The first part of Barack Obama's presidential memoir stands out as proof of Obama's writing prowess. To me the book came across more as a work by a historian rather than a personal memoir. His first-hand accounts of interacting with leaders at international conferences and dealing in the Congress are compelling stories exposing his novelist streak, but his explanation of major historical issues such as the lead-up to the Financial Crisis or the Arab Spring and the treatment of his term in office, the majority of the work, reveal his academic chops. Personally I would love to see Obama write more full-fledged histories on topics he either experienced or researches - I believe he could have an effective and important career as a popular historian. I have seen a variety of evaluations of the Obama presidency from the left and from the right. Some leftists paint Obama as a neoliberal center-right military interventionist, and some rightists race-baited and painted Obama as a social...