Team of Rivals

In the end I made it all the way through Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals, the story of Lincoln and his cabinet, many of whom had vied with him for the Presidency. The first couple hundred pages were a bit of a grind, but once Lincoln was elected and everybody went to Washington I caught the groove.

I learned a lot. I had never really realized the extent to which Virginia -- and to a considerable extent what is now the I-95 corridor between Washington and Richmond, was the center of so much of the war. For some reason I also hadn't known that Richmond was the capital. I had figured it was someplace down in Mississippi, which would have seemed logical. Now I know. Honestly I think as a southern white male I have always to some extent shied away from the the Civil War as a subject matter. The south was in the wrong and we lost. Move on, I figured. 

But it's not a book about the war. It's a book about Lincoln and his team, about his team realizing what a remarkable captain they had lucked into. What a guy. It makes me want to read more of the capacious Lincoln hagiography out there.

I am not sad, I will freely admit, to be done with the book. It was a heavy one. Now I can read a mystery or some McPhee or something. I am due another bagatelle.

My Hoarding Tendencies

Ever since the pandemic we have kept the cubbard well-stocked, and the approach of Winter Storm Fern had me go out and top it up a little. It gives me comfort to gaze on the plenty.

Honestly, I began writing this post and had a nice riff I was going to go off on, then I looked at the news and saw that another American had been shot and killed on the streets of Minneapolis. He had a gun, OK. But he had a permit and the videos certainly make it look like he was not pointing it at anybody when the fracas began. That didn't stop Trump, Vance, Noem, Miller and Fox News from saying he instigated it immediately. At this point in time I don't know what to say or do. Probably I should have just not posted.

Writing wisdom for the AIs

Last week I listened in the car to Ian Bremmer's podcast interview of Geoffrey Hinton, who did pioneering work on the neural networks that made possible progress in AI, at least I think I have that right. Anyhoo, a smart fellow. Hinton by now holds serious reservations about AI, and specifically AI's catastrophic potential to destroy humanity.

One hope he holds out (roughly) is that if AIs can be imbued with positive learnings as opposed to negative ones, it might be less inclined to destroy us. This is far from as stupid as it sounds. For a long time we've known that if it bleeds, it leads, and that murder and destruction sell much better than glowing parables about the beneficence of mankind and the righteousness of love for one's fellow man. 

The fact that the sacred texts of the world religions are the biggest selling books in history and the most studied does not mean that AIs are going to pour over the Bible, Talmud, Koran etc. over and over for their whole lives seeking the deepest meaning, as humans do. In fact, it seems to me that specific communities of faith immerse themselves in their scriptures perhaps less to gain wisdom than to deepen their own common language with one another. Hence the benefits of reading others sacred texts. Then there's also the problem, for example, of all the very bloody war in the Old Testament/Torah, for example, wherein the Israelites smite their neighbors with great force for continually erecting shrines in the hills to the old Gods. It's confusing.

As I have mentioned before, Tyler Cowen has enjoined us to "write for the AIs" in the sense that we can't sit around as crafters of freely available expository prose and expect that somehow we can maintain control of our words. Though paywalls help. Instead, we just need to get ideas out there and keep moving so as to generate more and better ones.

It is Martin Luther King Jr Day. Rather than launch into some deep disquisition on what I think to be right, let me say instead that we should all endeavor to be humble. For now I need to read some things written by others and then complete some tasks and write some checks for people I believe in. The arc of history is long but it bends towards justice, but only with a little help from our friends.

Not just another MLKJ Day

I have blogged in the past about Martin Luther King Jr Day and its place in our personal life rhythms, first and foremost as the holiday that lets us recover from the other holidays. 2026 obviously differs from others in that it takes place against the background of the ever accelerating craziness of the Trump administration: the threatened invocation of the Insurrection Act in Minnesota, his batshit crazy idea of taking Greenland, etc. I think this weekend really opens the 2026 electoral season, which Democrats must dominate despite some of the stupidity upon which some of us perseverate.

In other ways this holiday weekend resembles others. It's just freaking welcome. After the holidays, then the quick opening of the year in which lots of client questions seem to pop up, three days of nothing just hit the spot.

Today a wintry mix comes down outside our windows. I'm making a hard push towards the conclusion of Goodwin's Team of Rivals, which has gotten less bad as I've pushed forward but has cemented me in thinking that she can never hold a candle to Robert Caro. But then who can?

Through all of this I am deriving ever more satisfaction from sitting at my end of the couch while Mary sits in her chair at the other end of the coffee table. I spend a lot of time looking at her, a fact that seems lost on her much of the time as she assiduously pours through whatever article she is reading, item she is shopping for, or perhaps animal video she is consuming. What a lovely woman. How fortunate I am to have her down there doing her thing. In our little domain at least, life remains good. 

Let us hope we can share this wealth as 2026 crawls forward. 

Listening to stuff in the car

A college classmate posted on Facebook yesterday about a number of podcasts she had listened to that were good, including ones from the Economist about Xi Jinping and Narendra Modi. I know I listened to the one about Xi. But the one about Modi? Maybe, maybe not. I'm just not sure. It's all kind of a blur.

Which raises the question: how good of a content delivery mechanism is listening to stuff in the car? Books, podcasts, news, what have you. On the one hand, it expands the range of ways one can ingest text. For that reason I love it. I listen to a lot of books and podcasts in the car. The practice also allows one to control what comes into ones ear and head to a greater degree, as opposed to being subjected to the editorial preferences of some radio programmer.

But I forget so much. In this regard, I suppose it's not all that much different from other media, from print media to "TV", movies, and streaming video. That also often passes in one ear and out the other. Which is why it's possible for me to rewatch TV serieses like 30 Rock and Arrested Development and get a lot of yucks out of them: because I forget them pretty quickly, but I know I like them. So they self-renew.

But with non-fiction content where the purpose is learning and informing oneself it's a little problematic. Therefore when I listen to a book that makes a strong impression I tend to buy a hard copy and put it on my shelf so I have the mnemonic boost of the book spine, but also the ability to refer back to the book to refresh my memory. For example, as I turn my head to the left I can see my copy of Stephen Pinker's 2018 Enlightenment Now, which I listened to while driving.

Which reminds me, I really need to refer back to Edward Chancellor's The Price of Time, a history of interest rates/extended screed on the unintended consequences of the long period of cheap money following the financial crisis, which Trump now wants to extend so that everyone will think of him as their sugar daddy. Chancellor has a super interesting section in which he talks about the extreme rate of innovation, technology adoption and productivity growth that happened during the Great Depression, a time of extreme capital scarcity. At least I'm 95% sure it was in his book... A very interesting argument with applications to the present moment.

All in the song

For some time now Mary had been talking about how we should get the kids to watch All In the Family just to give them a taste of prime Norman Lear. I had resisted, fearing they wouldn't love it and just knowing how dated it was. But then a couple of weeks back a columnist in the Times listed it as one of the 10 shows from back in the day that young people really should see, and Mary pitched it and was able to sell it to Graham. Natalie had already headed back to NYC after the holidays.

So there we were on the couch, watching the very first episode. And the theme song comes on. Carol O'Connor starts singing, alternates with Jean Stapleton, it all came rushing back. This theme song is indeed something of a tour de force, light years away from anything that could ever kick off a show nowadays, peaking when Stapleton's voice rises to "And you knew what you were then" and cracks apart. So intensely human and imperfect and yet...

The show itself was worth watching and yet conformed my fears in its intense formulaicness of showing Archie to be a racist boor. But still, there was some genuinely funny stuff, especially when Lionel Jefferson comes in and shows that he understands well what a pig Archie is and plays him like a fiddle.

I could watch another episode or two from time to time. But I could listen to the song all day, indeed have had a hard time getting it out of my head.  

The Reality of Force and Power

In a recent conversation Stephen Miller, Trump's Homeland Security Advisor and a Duke graduate, said the following to CNN's Jake Tapper.

We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time. 

Which is to say that if the kid in Pennsylvania had been successful in taking out Trump, that would just be that. It was fine to kill Charlie Kirk. If some clever person could assassinate Miller or Russ Vought, it would just be a normal business day.

Or if the United States had a hankering for, say, Vancouver, we should just take it.

Or that it's just fine for some gun-loving ICE thug to take out a woman on the streets of Minneapolis because she is making ICE's job difficult.

Miller presumably had to pledge an oath of allegiance to the Constitution upon taking office. It is not apparent.

We are taking down our Christmas tree today. After a 2025 focused mostly on charitable giving it is time to fire back up for the 2026 elections.

Bad Kids -- spoiler alert -- the conclusion is discussed

At Flyleaf Books sometime in the last six months or so, I happened across a copy of Bad Kids, a 2014 murder-suspense novel by Zijin Chen. Certainly one couldn't call it a mystery novel because all the murders happen in the presence of the reader (OK, all but one, but the killer admits to it to another character without a ton of pressure). The suspense in the novel derives entirely from the question of what will happen to the characters, will they be made to pay for their actions? In the end, the answer is... we/re not told.

Crime and Punishment this is not. There are two interlocking murder plots that are brought together, with a slight borrowing from Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train. Three kids (a boy and a girl who escaped from an orphanage, the third an academic superstar) capture video of a guy killing his in-laws. They blackmail him. A little bit later, they quasi-accidentally kill the half-sister of the genius kid, pushing her out a window to her death when they had really only intended to ram her head into a shit-filled toilet because she was such a brat.

Two things about the novel strike the reader. First, there's pretty much zero fluff or connective tissue. The novel consists of short, architectonic chapters that build the plot and do very little else. Atmospheric description of surroundings, food, people etc. is conspicuously absent. This is striking because, so often in the West where the mystery novel is a long-established genre, the mystery plot really serves first and foremost to let a narrator range across a society and render judgments, show scenery, describe characters. This is nowhere more in evidence than in things like Masterpiece Mystery or Britbox where the mystery lets a camera roam across a lush verdant landscape.

All of that shit is out the window in Bad Kids. This is a novel about morals. Kind of. Because what we would think of as morals also aren't very much in evidence. As the titular bad kids discuss the consequences of their actions, what they're concerned with is will they get in trouble. And they agree that, because they're not yet 14, even if they get in trouble it won't be too bad because they can't be sent to real prison, just kids' prison. Makes sense to me. So yeah, they go ahead and kill some more people, specifically the genius kid's dad and his second wife, referred to consistently as Big Bitch because she was indeed really mean to him.

There's also a tender subplot about a budding romance between the genious kid and the girl escapee. So cute. Until she dies at the end in circumstances that seem to have been anticipated and manipulated by the genius kid.

And so, the big question remains: will the genius kid, who could probably ace the all-important gaokao exam and go on to a really good job in the government or a big firm, be forced to give up his promising career because he commits and orchestrates some murders? The answer is not given.

Bad Kids became huge hit when adapted for TV in 2020, with more than a billion messages on Weibo discussing it. 

The fraternity of sales

I was looking for decent conferences to go to in the first quarter and remembered I had been to one in Charlotte a year or two ago via NAPFA (Google it if you care). I looked it up and, lo and behold, there's one coming up in about six weeks. Perfect. I wrote to the person in charge of the conference to make sure I could get continuing ed credit I needed, and she assured me that I would indeed. Her response was punctuated/infused with the universal positivity of salespeople. "Thanks so much for checking in!" or perhaps "Have a great day!"

I used to bridle slightly at this sort of thing, saccharine as it seems. But now I get it, I'm fully bought in. Sales is hard. There's a lot of rejection to fight through. It's part of the game. All the little verbal-micro energy boosts, smiles, firm handshakes, sitting up straight in your chair, discussions of various hydration strategies, people with things to sell need that stuff to get the day with good energy, so as to do more and better. There's a positive feedback loop to it all.

And make no mistake, in the end everybody is selling something to somebody for some portion of their day/week/month. Or, if they aren't, they are at risk of sliding off into the abyss or are deeply dependent on someone who is, and one hopes that the person they lean on has some life insurance.

Reading QuePasa

I went to Li Ming's last week to pick up the fixings for the New Year's nian gao, fast becoming a tradition in our household though my understanding is that actual Chinese people eat a sweet version of the rice cakes. I cooked a bunch of those for Chinese New Year's at Jonathan and Sharon's a couple of years back and was less excited about them. One thing I will say is that if the management of Li Ming's keep the place cool in summer -- and they most assuredly do -- they don't do the opposite in winter. Dress warmly when visiting, even if you plan to eat lunch there from the steam table, as Bobby and I do as often as we think of it.

On the way out I picked up an issue of Que Pasa, a Spanish-language newspaper out of the Triad (the NC triumvirate of cities, to be clear. Not the Chinese crime syndicate). To the best of my knowledge. I need newspaper both to start fires in the fireplace -- now that we don't get a print newspaper -- y tambien a practicar leer en espanol, something I don't do enough of.

I learned a fair amount from the paper. For instance, I had not been aware that the OBBBA places a 1% tax on remittances sent through cash or money transfer services like Western Union. This seems harsh given most wages remitted have already been subject to income tax. It could easily have the effect of driving immigrants into the banking system -- where they may have to commit fraud to establish accounts -- which could be used against them by ICE and make them more easily deportable. Alternately, this could fuel the adoption of cryptocurrency and stable coins as a payment mechanism -- currently helpful to Trump and his cryptobro allies. For the record, US remittances to Mexico were probably about $60 billion in 2025, something like 3% of Mexican GDP.

Also, I learned that the Mexican Government has a consulate in Raleigh, one of about fifty spread around the US to provide services to Mexicans. Makes sense.

Substack aggregation/bundling

Somebody on Substack made the point that 2025 was the year that the whole world showed up on Substack, which probably diverges from truth only incrementally. There are so many good writers on Substack, but there's no way anyone can read all of them let alone pay for all of the ones one likes. One wishes they could be aggregated and curated into something like.... a magazine.

Given the times we live in, it's not too far-fetched to think that Substack might create an AI that customizes each of our feeds into things we might like, based on... an algorithm derived from our reading habits. Gollie, if only that were technologically possible. But of course it would need a pricing mechanism to figure out how to optimize and balance engagement vs. revenue production which might look something like... Google Adwords or the dynamic pricing models that change the prices of airline seats based on demand at a given moment. Really all Substack needs to do is throw all this together and let writers opt into it as opposed to demanding $75 from each reader annually.

I already subscribe to NYT, WaPo, WSJ, The Economist, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, the News & Observer, and Triangle Business Daily. Our household print media spend already is probably in the $2,000-$3,000 range and I can hardly scratch the surface of what I already subscribe to. How am I gonna pay $75 to one writer, however clever?