2025 picks for written media
This is the second installment in my top five lists of 2025 series. Similarly, none of the top fives here are ranked (although Hemenway’s book would be ranked the best if it were). Similarly, these “reviews” are closer to a compilation of the thoughts and responses I had to the work than proper reviews… Hopefully the thoughts are interesting enough to be worth reading.
Articles
The Autism Spectrum Is Too Broad by Emily May.
“Pain destroys language” is a phrase I often quote from John Green paraphrasing Elain Scarry’s The Body in Pain. Language is such a universal tool for understanding that we don’t trust understanding not expressed in language. In The Autism Spectrum Is Too Broad, the mother of a daughter with profound autism copes with how the term “autism” has changed over the past few decades. Autism has evolved in the public consciousness from a severe intellectual disability to a spectrum of neurodivergence that usually requires extra care but may also endow those with autism with special abilities. While this evolution is important and continues to include those who were previously left out, it has come at a cost to the families of those with profound autism.
In knowing a family-friend whose daughter has profound autism, I saw this. She shared how people would ask her if her daughter had any special talents or quirks after learning her daughter has autism. They pictured rain-man when she had lived a lifetime providing round-the-clock care for her non-verbal daughter.
Most of all, I feel like this article left me with a stark reminder: language is reduction. We take our infinitely-varied, fractal, world and compress it into a few marks on a page. Although language is our best tool for understanding the world and communicating those understandings, we must always be mindful of what is missing.
Why I am Not a Liberal by David Brooks
Great non-fiction writing pulls into focus something you’ve already seen many times before but never with great clarity. It brightens the dim and sharpens the blurred. This essay met this criterion with the following observation: Conservative-leaning people believe it is culture and values which determine individuals’ future whereas liberal-leaning people believe it is their material circumstance which determines their future.
The second thought it educed from me was that there is a fundamental limitation the scientific method has when it comes to culture. How can we test the effects of different cultures applied to a group of people? Can we randomly change the norms, expectations, and values of large groups of people? Seems tough to me. Perhaps this is why we are often philosophical when it comes to politics. I think of a lot of the questions of philosophy as “N<=1 problems”—those where data is extremely scarce. Shaping national culture certainly seems like an N<=1 case. With this problem, the scientific method may not be of much help.
All that said, David Brooks’ essay does argue strongly against material-determinism. This begs the obvious question: am I convinced by his arguments? No, not really. I find it hard to believe that things like snap-benefits don’t have large positive effects. Though I’m not convinced of its negation either. The studies exhibiting little differences from cash-transfers should be reckoned with. With my level of knowledge, I’m not confident in any conclusions here. In all, the essay did do the best thing an essay can do. It left me with a lot to think about.
Layla at Auction by Alex Marshall
The subject of Eric Clapton’s iconic love song “Layla” was Pattie Boyd, the subject of the even more iconic love song “Something” by George Harrison. She was also George’s wife. This article was my invitation to learn about the frenetic love-triangle between Clapton, Harrison, and Boyd and many of the great rock music that came with it. That alone made it worth reading. However, in a passing comment by Boyd, I was left more troubled than I expected.
She’s quoted “There was more romance years ago… I’m sure people do romantic things now, but I can’t imagine what they are. If you know, please tell me.” To be sure, in today’s romantic culture if one received a letter resembling any that Clapton sent to Boyd they would conclude the writer is a lunatic—perhaps dangerous too. Maybe that is the right conclusion. Though, while the romantic culture of 60s rock stars is not one I envy at all, the sterility of the current romance culture leaves much to be desired as well. Maybe we can try for something in between.
Books
While we were sleeping: Success Stories in Injury and Violence Prevention by David Hemenway
Between the covers of this book is a practical guide for how to change the world. While we were sleeping was both the most inspiring and most useful book I read in the last year. Spanning from nineteenth century England to the modern day, this book comprises short stories on real public health successes that have improved the health of all of us. Reading through it, a clear lesson emerges on how individuals can change the world. Find a real issue plaguing society, research what is causing it, and then spend continual effort over the course of a couple of decades working on it by campaigning, developing technology, and/or changing policy. Progress is slow, but with concentrated effort it is amazing what one can do.
Portuguese Irregular Verbs by Alexander McCall Smith.
If you know an academic, are an academic, or have any interaction with academia this book is required reading. Portuguese Irregular Verbs follows the fictional German philologist Dr. Von Igelfeld as he tries, mostly in vain, to get the respect he believes he deserves. I don’t want to give away too much, but I thought it was a charming and funny book. It does a great job of satirizing the self-important, often needlessly petty, and unendingly insecure character of many academics. If this last comment sparks animus in you, read it at your own peril.
The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains By Nicholas Carr
This is the only book that I’m reviewing in which I am not a fan of the entire thing. The first two-thirds are what got it on this list. It could also be called the book that convinced me of the value of reading. The Shallows details an argument that the internet is not the best for our brains and attention spans. While today this is an important and buzzy topic, I must admit that The Shallows suffers from being out of date. It came out in 2010. That being said, I found the early chapters’ history of intellectual technologies and its description of reading to be invaluable. You won’t find chatbots, but I found it enlightening.