Seth’s blog

At dinner I asked my friend who he’d like to meet. “Good question,” he said. Let me try to answer it:

1. John Horton Conway. A Princeton math professor who’s combined math and human interest better than anyone since John Von Neumann. I especially like his work on numbers and games and The Book of Numbers, which he wrote with Richard Guy.

2. Lauren Collins. She and Mark Singer are the best writers at The New Yorker. As I recently blogged, I loved her profile of Pascal Dangin.

3. Chimamanda Adichie. I blogged about a recent short story of hers. Reading her reminds me how I used to read lots of fiction and how much I liked it.

The person I don’t know who I most wish would write another book is Renata Adler. If a book can be stillborn, Private Capacity, supposed to be published in 2002, was that. From Wikipedia: “Renata Adler’s investigation of the Bilderberg group reveals the true history of the organization, its membership and its nebulous function. With an astonishing cache of Bilderberg archives and secret files, Adler charts the history of the organization and the extent of its power.” Sounds like it exists, doesn’t it? It ranks 5 million on Amazon, maybe because I ordered a copy. Second most: Ben Cheever. I loved Selling Ben Cheever.

In response to the trouble at Fannie Mae — its stock plunged — we have this:

“There is a sort of a panic going on and that’s not what ought to be,” said Senator Christopher J. Dodd, the Connecticut Democrat who heads the Senate banking committee. “The facts don’t warrant that reaction, in my view.”

Mr. Dodd said that he was persuaded by conversations with Mr. Paulson and Mr. Bernanke that the two companies “are fundamentally sound and strong.”

Nassim Taleb begs to differ — a year ago:

The government-sponsored institution Fanny Mae, when I look at their risks, seems to be sitting on a barrel of dynamite, vulnerable to the slightest hiccup. But not to worry: their large staff of scientists deemed these events “unlikely.”

A footnote on p. 226 of The Black Swan, published April 2007. Asked to comment on the Fannie Mae situation, Taleb replied, “I discuss events before, not after. I despise postdicters.”

“The Headstrong Historian” by Chimamanda Adiche is the best short story I have read in The New Yorker in years, and in the book I am writing now — on self-experimentation — I will quote from it:

How she had puzzled over words like “wallpaper” and “dandelions” in her textbooks, unable to picture them.

No wonder the author won the Orange Prize last year for her novel Half of a Yellow Sun.

An essay by Adichie about being called “sister” contains the following:

The word “racist” should be banned. It is like a sweater wrung completely out of shape; it has lost its usefulness. It makes honest debate impossible, whether about small realities such as little boys who won’t say hello to black babysitters or large realities such as who is more likely to get the death penalty.

In college I wrote an essay saying essentially the same thing about the word scientific — that it was too vague and pompous to be helpful.

A Chimamanda Adiche website.

1. At Writers With Drinks I met a woman who is writing a memoir. Since I had actually published a book, she wondered if I had any advice about finding a publisher. I said don’t get your hopes up. Practically no one makes anything resembling a living from writing books. (I meant books like memoirs — what a friend calls real books.) It’s a hobby. I asked her if she’d heard this before. No, she said. She said she’s around people who are “positive” whereas I was “realistic.”

2. My friend Phil Price is a researcher at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. A few years ago he wrote a chapter (”"Assessing uncertainties in the relationship between inhaled particle concentrations, internal deposition, and health effects”) for a handbook-like compendium. It was a big mistake, he said. There were three problems: 1. It was much harder to write than he expected. 2. The quality of the final product was lower than he expected. 3. The audience was tiny. Maybe 11 people would end up reading what he’d written.

1. One of Entertainment Weekly’s most Spy-like articles: So You Want To Write A Memoir
2. Genesis in lolspeak, part of the Lolcat Bible Translation Project.
3. A riveting EconTalk interview about buying a new car.
4. Speaking of cars, the hidden meaning of bumper stickers.

Thanks to Joyce Cohen and Robin Hanson.