What am I up to now?
September 30, 2024
August, 2024
Contents
Updates
I spent most of July visiting my family in DC with my wonderful girlfriend. Being home was nice, although MWG now gets along with my parents dog better than I do.
While in the US , I also attended a conference on the economics of animal welfare at Brown. This was a compact, diverse event; several friends presented. Loren FryxellOn the market this winter from Oxford! presented an older theory paper well-adapted to crowd, with an interesting methodology for valuing animal wellbeing. Jojo talked about wild animal welfare, and Luis Mota presented joint work with Kevin Kuruc. Tyler Cowen made the case for GLP-1 inhibitors being the most important trend in animal welfare,The case goes: people on Ozempic persistently consume about 20% fewer calories; some of these calories are meat; therefore fewer animals are being tortured and slaughtered. although he later recanted on his blog.
Over those three days, I repeatedly heard that this field is only one AER, one JEP, one top-tier applied micro JMP away from the big-time. No one knows what this paper will be about or who will write it, but it’s on the way. Then we would sit down and listen to a presentation of a new normative principle which implies a specific utility representation, followed by a discussion of how to best label eggs. Every talk at the conference was valuable and interesting — but the gestalt didn’t feel like a field coming together. It felt like a group of clever and empathetic academics gathering to talk about their own interests, with a very narrow intersection.
Of course, fields have been born from less. If order must be imposed on the economic field of animal welfare, then I look forward to the next conference. But impact is the goal: materially improving animal welfare. That means getting useful research into the hands of the FAW team at Open Phil, or influencing policymakers. That may require narrowing the field, before we broaden it.
Now I’m back in Oxford, indulging in lots of Olympics through the full coverage bundle from Discovery+. I’m writing this during the cross country mountain biking final. Discovery+ finds expert commentators for each sport: the usual pattern is a broadly experienced sports commentator paired with a recently retired athlete in each sport for color. The two mountain biking commentators narrarated an engrossing race: about 25 minutes into a 90 minute race, the reigning champ, Team GB Tom Pidcock, had to change his front tire, losing his lead and putting him 40 seconds back. Over the next hour, he clawed his way into a tie for first going into the final lap, and battled it out with a Frenchman. He won gold to loud boos from the home crowd.
That’s the story from just one event — the men’s triathlon was just as nail-biting; all the individual fencing events and canoe slalom and archery were just as deeply covered. The enthusiasm of the commentators occasionally exceeds that of the athletes.
Which is not to underestimate the difficulty of the job: the commentary has to explain what’s going on to total novices while not boring the fanatics. As embedded as they are in their sport, they occasionally miss the balance: the cross country cycling commentators continually teased us with mention of the Swiss rider Flueckiger “recent well-known controversy”; the fencing commentators teach us that “epee is the only weapon without right-of-way” — for those of us who know the details of right-of-way, but are unaware of the relevant weapons.
I’m looking forward to a few particular events over the next few weeks. I’ll keep an open mind going into breakdancing, making its debut. I loved the Step Up movies; hopefully it’ll be just like that. My sister will be sending me daily (hourly?) updates on all the athletics events. The single-stage bike road race is always a highlight for me, too.
Reading
“Genre fiction” is a slur, meaning “bad fiction”. It’s the embarassing stuff, the books which, if you’re a person-who-reads, you never admit to reading. I am one of the most person-who-reads who ever read, and I’m here to say: I read 10,000 pages of sci-fi, fantasy, and alternate history this month.
There’s the spectrum of intellecutally respectable entertainment which is particularly acute in Oxford. Re-reading The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by a fire in the Senior Common Room is at one end;The old joke: A student at Oxford attends a cocktail party with members of the faculty. Hoping to impress these august dons, the student casually mentions, "I was reading Gibbon the other night…" Later, the student’s faculty mentor pulls him aside to chide him for the comment. "One must never say one is reading Gibbon," he says. "One must always say one is re-reading Gibbon." the Booker nominees are already edging the bounds of respectability; Blackwell’s on Broad Street must deny selling any sci-fi published after 1973.
Further, as someone whose identity is tied up in reading, I’m quite unclear on what I mean when I say “I like to read.” Of course, I like to read for work — I consume endless books on topics I’m writing or researching on. I also read plenty of books which are not work and not purely fun: last month I wrote about a history of the kings of the Henriad and a biography of an early American midwife. This isn’t entertainment; it doesn’t replace other people’s Netflix or TikTok, but it is the central example of my reading practice. But I don’t have Netflix or TikTok so when I seek the same pure-entertainment rush, I end up in genre fiction.Everyone is different. A new friend, who works as a copy editor in London, reads extensively on his own time, literally for practice. I’ve never seen MWG read a book I would call fun, and certainly not genre fiction, without the severest of encouragements. Her taste runs towards titles like Regulating Bodies and Rights for Robots.
On my trip back to DC, I started Mother of Learning a 3,000 page serialized novel. It’s a time-loop, hard fantasy series; the nature of the setting moves everything very quickly and it was easy to chew away a few hundred pages per day. MoL was the first web serial I’ve read.In that intended form, at least. Weir’s The Martian was originally published as a web serial. Some of my favorite “classics” were serialized,E.g., The Count of Monte Cristo, War and Peace; one my dad’s favorite books, The Bonfire of the Vanities was originally serialized in Rolling Stone. but the medium changed fundamentally on the internet. Serialization lent itself well to the explosion of fan fiction in the 2000s: intermittent posting enables community engagement and incorporating reader feedback, as well as fitting into the amateur author lifestyle.My only previous experience with long web fiction was a Harry Potter fan fiction recommended by my sisters.
The most popularBy a few probably made-up rankings I found online. non-fan fiction web serial is Worm by John McCrae, which I read while in DC this summer. Worm is 7,000 pages, and while McCrae has written a few novels of similar length, Worm is the one which most broke out of the web serial world. It is a superhero science fiction story of high ambition, and almost engaging enough to justify the time investment; Worm is fast-paced enough to feel like scrolling an app.
Finally, since returning to Oxford, I’ve charged through the first five books in the massive 1632 series. This is alternate history; a small 21st century mining town in West Virginia is transplanted to 17th century Germany. The 30+ books detail every possible effect such an event has on the world. Recent titles include 1635: The Battle for Nefoundland and 1635: The Papal Stakes. The first book, published in 2000, is unapologetically patriotic"I say we start the American Revolution — a hundred and fifty years ahead of schedule!" and that spirit infuses all of the books published over the last 25 years by dozens of authors. They’re also surprisingly willing to address difficult questions: abolitionism is an obvious early policy priority of the German United States, but there are also debates about the definition of genocide, the diffusion of dangerous technologies, and the morality of resource extraction.The authors sidestep another quite interesting question: would it have been possible, with modern medical knowledge, to avoid the Native American demographic disaster. Best estimates are that 90% of the indigenous population of the Americas died of Old World diseases, and this process was only partly underway in the early 1600s. Is this preventable with germ theory? Everything winds up surprisingly solar-punk.
The stories are fun. Each modern American has some scheme to get rich or shape the course of history, from selling their Barbies to hanging out with a young Cardinal Mazarin. And it’s not just statemen (Richelieu, Cromwell, Gustavus Adolphus) that show up; we spend time with Rembrandt, Rubens, and baby Spinoza.
None of these books are good literature; all of them are genre fiction.Having written all of that, my ego wants to compensate by discussing all of the high status things I’ve read recently. Three books by G.K. Chesterton, a collection of Chekhov’s stories, two Shakespeare plays, and a few chapters of Milton. Ah, that feels better. The intersection is not empty, however. Occasionally, something breaks out of genre fiction and into just normal fiction, or even literary fiction. Ursula Le Guin and Margaret Atwood are praised, despite their genre-y settings; literary writers occasionally dip their toes into the world of genre without being tarred. Of course, what the pretentious among us mean when we call such books “genre” is that they are fun. Reading is a serious endeavour. If a book is fun, it is not worth reading. Screw that.In that spirit, I’ll link some of posts by a courageous and enthusiastic commentator on genre fiction: Did Tintin Prevent World War II?, Star Trek in-universe history, Life, Death, & Time in the Vorkosigan Saga.
One final thought: the best response I got to my question from last month (“are there old-but-popular things which don’t get labeled “classics”?’’) was detective fiction. Specifically convincing was Sherlock Holmes — certainly old, certainly popular, questionably a classic. So I read A Study in Scarlet, the first Holmes book, and unfortunately it feels very classic-y. Perhaps not in the way Emma or Heart of Darkness, but perhaps like The Count of Monte Cristo or Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Maybe we’ve stretched the definition too far to be useful. Or maybe there remains an old, popular, but un-classical book out there. Help me find it!
Previously
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