The Best American 2013

Elizabeth Gilbert (editor), The Best American Travel Writing 2013 and
Siddhartha Mukherjee (editor), The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2013

The most interesting essays in each year’s Best American Travel Writing usually address some place no sane person would go. This year includes visiting a faith healer in Tanzania’s deep interior; sharing tea with Bedouins known to kidnap Western tourists; meeting an aspiring teenage poet in an illegal wildcat gold mine high in the Peruvian Andes. The authors make their settings, distant as another planet, seem humane and nearby.

Elizabeth Gilbert, of Eat Pray Love fame, in her introduction says: “I read great travel writing to feel, at the conclusion, I have now been there.” But she doesn’t hold herself or her authors legalistically to this standard. Daniel Tyx and Ian Frazier, for instance, don’t travel anywhere during their essays. Tyx discusses the momentous decision to stay put, while Frazier reminisces how travel psychology has changed in his lifetime.

Most essays, though, consider some place, particularly the people who make this place so fascinating. David Farley, in “Vietnam’s Bowl of Secrets,” describes the family who makes a unique rice noodle considered a delicacy, but so rare that you can only purchase it in one Vietnamese village. Christopher de Ballaigue’s “Caliph of the Tricksters” describes Kabul plutocrats who endure Afghanistan’s generational violence by betting on gory, interminable cockfights.

This year’s selections run short and concise. Many essays run under four pages; only two exceed twenty pages. Yet these authors pack their narratives with such incisive, engaging detail that one feels refreshed after reading, like returning from a much-needed vacation. Celebrity authors like Frazier or David Sedaris rub shoulders with wise but unfamous professionals who tell tales well. These compact, elegant essays transport eager readers outside their humdrum existence.

Gilbert succeeds in her stated mission. I really feel I’ve visited Sinai, or coastal Maine, or Britain’s ill-starred Dickens World park. Having never seen these places myself, I feel I could knowledgeably discuss them with natives, or anyway ask smart questions of seasoned travelers. These essays make engaging, uplifting lunchtime holidays, restful breaks from the non-literary world. I feel rested, restored, and more cosmopolitan for having read this collection.

Elsewhere, oncologist and author Siddhartha Mukherjee aggregates twenty-seven essays from across scientific and naturalistic disciplines. Some are written by scientists and researchers, including one Nobel laureate. Others come from journalists, novelists, and other writers with strong interest in developing science. Some discuss single, specific discoveries; others have more eclectic scope, describing entire ranges of new thought or developing disciplines of science.

A rare Mediterranean jellyfish doesn’t die of old age; it just reverts to childhood and relives its life. I learned that in one essay. But in another essay, at almost the far end of this collection, an oceanic researcher, one of the first women in a formerly all-male field, laments that the beautiful ecosystems that first made her love the ocean sixty years ago, are now severely depleted, in danger of imminent extinction.

Our real joy comes in the unspoken relationships between essays. David Deutsch and Arthur Eckert, for instance, describe implications of quantum physics for molecular-level computers, potentially defining processing capabilities grander than anything we’ve previously considered. But Michael Moyer describes how, approaching the Planck Length, the smallest possible length in existence, reality itself appears granular, binary, almost computerized. The potential interplay between these two realizations is chillingly beautiful.

Likewise, both Jerome Groopman and Katherine Harmon describe how recent developments in immunology offer new hope in fighting invasive cancers. But while Groopman examines the science, hopscotching among personalities, Harmon intensively focuses on one man whose discoveries let him treat his own cancer, with remarkable consequences. The shifting focus between ideas and personalities reveals unspoken truths about how science makes its advances.

Unlike other Best American selections, this one resists celebrity authors. Sure, Oliver Sacks and Kevin Dutton include excerpts from their latest books, and authors famous from other fields, like Mark Bowden, contribute to the collection’s overarching movement. But this specific collection rewards profound ideas, explained well, rather than authorial virtuosity. I contend this makes it easier reading, since the product, not the personality, defines quality.

I abandoned my childhood ambition to become a scientist when I discovered it’s hard to make test tubes explode. But I never quit my love of science and discovery, and continue enjoying new insights into how our universe works. This collection, laced with eye-opening expositions in the latest science, reminds me why I love science, and why our society, plagued by anti-intellectual thinking, needs science so badly. Read this book, and relearn the joy of discovery.



For reviews of other collections in this series, see:
The Year's Best Alice Munro and
Proving Personal Writing Still Matters

Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Personal Shameday

By historic standards, Black Friday 2013 was fairly mild. Though reports of shoplifting, incivility, and even a knife fight have trickled through with tedious predictability, we haven’t sat transfixed by news reports of employees trampled to death by rampaging shoppers. (I’d have expected we’d hear the end of “doorbusters” by now.) We’ve heard nothing as dramatic as soccer moms pepper-spraying each other over PlayStations. This year was remarkably tame.

In news-cycle terms, violence is passé. Paid opinionators have moved onto telegenic umbrage over retailers commencing sales on Thanksgiving Day itself. While retailers open earlier every year (K-Mart opened at 6 AM this year), and shoppers reward this move by buying, professional worriers get exercised over what this means for our economy, society, and values. Such naked mercantilism must, must, betoken a failure of common American ethics, they say.

A friend demonstrated such arguments’ vacuity by noting that bar and restaurant workers, who generally get paid much worse than retail clerks, already work on Thanksgiving, and often Christmas too. Families which consider themselves too time-strapped to cook at home, or sufficiently flush to outsource food preparation, take holiday meals out regularly. If you want to reverse the peonage of underpaid workers, start by cooking your own goddamn dinner.

Yet the complaints about merchant encroachment on holidays don’t mainly come from workers. Many people doing restaurant or retail work, especially adults, need the time-and-a-half that holiday hours provide. The anti-holiday-shopping complaints substantially come from people sufficiently well-heeled that they use accumulation of stuff as emblems of personal or social status. That is, people with holidays free to shop, complain about their peers shopping on holidays.



This socially expedient self-flagellation serves to deflect from what Black Friday, and its kissing cousin Cyber Monday, say about shoppers. Wal-Mart and Bloomingdale’s welcome Black Friday, and advertise substantial discounts in hopes of moving sufficient volume, but they didn’t invent the event. The massive shopping day directly after Thanksgiving has existed since at least 1939, when Franklin Roosevelt moved Thanksgiving itself to expand the lucrative Christmas shopping season.

Common American shoppers remain blasé about Black Friday excesses because we’ve internalized the belief that our ability to acquire stuff signifies our social worth. We come to blows over plastic trinkets and publicized gewgaws that, sometime after Christmas, we’ll recognize as instrumentally worthless. Consider all the Cabbage Patch Kids and Tickle-Me Elmos collecting spiderwebs in attics nationwide. This year, it’s the X-Box One and PlayStation 4.

Importantly, we can’t lump this behavior under the conventional vice of “selfishness”—at least not directly. Even the poorest laborer wants to give their loved ones gifts commensurate with their love: I care about you enough to risk bodily injury to retrieve this thingamabob. But nearly every adult I’ve spoken to, when asked what they want for Christmas, suddenly reverts to stammering infancy: they don’t know their own desires.

Our ability to purchase do-funnies thus becomes a direct manifestation of inner virtues. Where once we demonstrated love by providing a decent standard of living, undertaking onerous enterprises, or fighting off Vikings, we now substitute ability to buy stuff. When Jacob loved Rachel in the Bible, he served her father for fourteen years to demonstrate his worth. Purchasing the iPad Air or suitable Batman memorabilia now serves that role.



Old-line liberals and anti-capitalist activists might complain that aggressive retail advertising created this unsatisfying substitution. As a Wendell Berry devotee, I can’t disagree that advertisers structurally create a sensation of want, which they subsequently offer to assuage. Yet that explanation rings hollow: we wouldn’t look to retailers to plug the holes in our spirits if we didn’t first acknowledge that such holes exist. Some deeper problem holds sway here.

James Twitchell asserts, in Lead Us Into Temptation, that modernity successfully produces copious quantities of stuff, but strips that stuff of interior meaning. We accumulate and discard at rates our ancestors would consider appalling, not because we’re wasteful, but because we have no relationship with our work or its product. Hoarding on others’ behalf supplants action as the way we maintain relationships, which we hoard as surely as we hoard things.

We rush retailers on Black Friday, and vilify others doing likewise, for the same reason: because both buying and umbrage create the temporary illusion of meaning. We disregard the contradiction of complaining about others’ holiday shopping while dining out on holidays because our complaints are mere stories we tell ourselves. Until we find meaning internally, such unintentionally hilarious discrepancies will remain our society’s tragicomic emblem.

Scott Lynch's Exposition Epic

Scott Lynch, The Republic of Thieves

Career swindlers Locke Lamora and Jean Tannen have made many enemies in the city-state of Camorr. But a junta of wizards offers them sanctuary if they help throw an election. Ancient Kashain’s rulers maintain power by keeping secrets and buying massive conspiracies, so Locke and Jean shouldn’t act surprised when the city proves to be a dagger pointed at their hearts. What kind of dagger, though, is an ever-shifting mystery.

If I had to describe Scott Lynch’s third Gentlemen Bastards novel in one word, I’d pick “long.” It’s physically imposing, at over 650 pages, but that’s fine. As James A. Michener observed beaucoups years ago, books’ ability to tell epic stories with generational scope remains their chief advantage over cinema. But while it starts strong, it eventually resembles an uphill slog through a molasses swamp, in Wellingtons full of superglue.

Locke and Jean are resilient losers, the Captain Mal and Zoe of heroic fantasy. Their sheer refusal to surrender to normality makes them staunchly heroic, especially when the law proves arbitrary and oppressive. Locke, always shrewd and quick with a sarcastic rejoinder, thinks he’s grown scars over his heart, but remains capable of humane insight. Jean restrains Locke’s often fatalistic tendencies; between them, he’s the one who wants to live.

Lynch’s writing has drawn comparisons to, and praises from, George RR Martin, in both its sweeping scope and foreboding tone. But Lynch’s actual prose more closely resembles British author M. John Harrison’s Viriconium novels, and he also includes occasional nods to other renowned fantasists, both point-blank and obliquely. I counted Fritz Leiber, CS Lewis, and Joss Whedon, among others. He’s a portmanteau of historic and contemporary sword-n-sorcery fantasy.

Unfortunately, Lynch’s storytelling style visibly mimics daytime television and X-Men comics, stumbling forward episodically, propelled by successions of cliffhangers and shocks. He intersperses the characters’ present, which unfolds with remarkable lack of haste, with scenes from his heroes’ history, contextualizing the suffering they now endure. Which would be fine, but he lampshades his big reveals so blatantly that, by the time they arrive, we’ve grown bored waiting.

When Lynch appropriates narrative cues from existing stories, he takes necessary gambles. Seasoned genre readers may recognize hints of Leiber’s Grey Mouser or Harrison’s Lord tegeus-Cromis, and cheer the knowledge that we can join a story contiguous with existing fantasy. But we pay for that familiarity when his narrative divulgences don’t differ sufficiently from his archetypes. This book openly courts readers who don’t like surprises.

Which is a shame, because for all his predictable plotting, Lynch’s prose is remarkably good. Locke Lamora uses impudent charm and gallows wit to extract other characters’ deeper secrets, while Jean translates suppressed rage into compelling action. Lynch’s incisive, dynamic writing propels action with such understated drive, and surprising humor, that even this jaded reader didn’t notice how many pages had passed without anything actually happening. At first.

Until I did. Somewhere around this massive, brick-like book’s one-third mark, I noticed Lynch was still setting the scene. Really. Well past page 200, Lynch kept spooning out exposition so slow and erratic, we practically hear the soap opera organ music. Yet his actual story remained in future tense, while the flashback scenes portended revelations in Locke and Jean’s present. Free semi-spoiler: love which goes unrequited long enough becomes hate.

Remember, in episodic drama, if characters mention some dead companion often enough, events will prove that character still alive. Or, since this is fantasy, undead. If characters hate some villain with sufficient passion, the person our heroes absolutely need to turn the tide will have some unacknowledged connection to that villain. And every question the MacGuffin character answers will omit some information our protagonists desperately need.

Lynch, sadly, exploits all these tropes. Amid his funny, grim, energetic flourishes, Lynch and his characters do little we haven’t seen before. Which perhaps isn’t bad; some people like the package tour, where everything’s pre-screened to guarantee customers find nothing shocking or unnerving on their trip. If that’s you, Lynch wraps a relatively familiar fantasy in eloquent prose and delivers it, like the stork, ready-made to your doorstep.

But that’s not me, and maybe not you. To paraphrase Doctor Who, I want to get lost on foreign streets, use wrong verbs, kiss the wrong people. Lynch keeps promising such jarring exhilaration imminently, but always shifts it into the future. His actual product cloyingly resembles every paperback fantasy from the last half-century, never really shedding its prototypes. And we never end up feeling we’ve really gone anywhere.

A Prayer For Jerry Falwell

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 25
Michael Sean Winters, God's Right Hand: How Jerry Falwell Made God a Republican and Baptized the American Right

Perhaps nobody in 20th Century politics polarizes responses more completely than Jerry Falwell. Five years after his death, nobody who came of age during the 1980s or 1990s can hear Falwell’s name without strong reactions, pro or con. Yet because he cultivated such strong reactions, he remains essentially enigmatic, more a pioneer or scoundrel than a human with comprehensible motivations. Perhaps it’s time to evaluate Jerry Falwell’s complicated legacy.

Michael Sean Winters combines biography with political history to contextualize Falwell firmly within his time. An adult Christian convert, Falwell initially avoided fame, and apparently never wanted any life other than a moderately ambitious country preacher. But while he quietly constructed a remarkably forward-thinking, innovative ministry, outside forces increasingly encroached on evangelical Christian turf. In forming the Moral Majority in 1979, Falwell merely recognized the signs of the times.

Following the PR nightmare of the Scopes “monkey trial,” evangelicals thought they’d struck a new bargain. They’d abstain from politics, and society would leave them alone. But postwar America didn’t honor its bargain. By 1979, cultural trends that remain conservative rhetorical staples—liberal media bias, secular vulgarity, government intrusion into church ethics—occurred, in ways they hadn’t before or since. Evangelicals felt compelled to act, and Falwell took point.

Before Falwell, public Christianity honored progressives like Reinhold Niebuhr and Dr. King. Falwell’s Moral Majority movement changed that dynamic. By spotlighting sexual ethics, especially abortion and homosexuality, Falwell broadened the scope of possibility in political ethics, a broadening made especially complex by his open alliance with one political party. He recast ethical issues as moral crises, urging his delicate alliance of evangelicals, Catholics, and Jews to the battlements often.

Falwell read American culture with remarkably savvy aplomb. He used changing media to motivate supporters, register voters, and attract money. Though his business management skills often fumbled, Falwell’s ideological leadership kept his constituents’ issues in the public debate. Before him, American Christians voted with both parties impartially. But Falwell so skillfully packaged private ethical issues alongside economic and policy concerns that he essentially realigned political parties along religious lines.

But, contra his critics, Falwell didn’t try to silence critics or enforce state-based religion on America. As Winters deftly demonstrates, Falwell relished electoral challenges, and wanted to win debates, not squelch them. Media moguls loved his affable folksy charm. And he remained visible in part behind his pathological inability to hold a grudge; some of his strongest ideological opponents, including Ted Kennedy and Larry Flynt, became close personal friends.

By his own admission, Falwell faced even sterner charges from the extreme right than the left. He disavowed extremists who wanted theocracy, opposed demagogues who advocated death for homosexuals and abortionists, and condemned Reverend Fred Phelps. Falwell’s liberal opponents may be surprised to learn how much criticism Falwell endured for not being conservative enough. But Falwell had real human goals, and couldn’t stomach unthinking doctrine, even from nominal allies.

Winters’ biography, though, is hardly a hagiography; a Christian himself, he spotlights many costs Falwell inflicted on American Christianity. In fighting secularism in political debates, Falwell needed allies, which required him to soften doctrine. Essentially, he reduced Christian beliefs to mere public ethics, diluting Christianity’s claims to uniqueness. This became especially pointed during the Reagan Administration, when Falwell enjoyed intimate access, and molded spiritual concerns to match party orthodoxy.

Essentially, Falwell wanted to pastor a church, and his political involvement stemmed from his ministerial goals. But he also wanted human recognition, and other people often look more concrete than God. In his desire to be liked, Falwell compromised important religious positions, often scoring short-term gains, but by by weakening his Scriptural foundation. He eventually found himself less defensible, less popular, less equipped for vital public debates.

Worse, by making Christianity look rich, white, and polarizing, he made his faith unappealing to anybody who didn’t share his Eisenhower-era heritage. By 2000, atheists and religiously unaffiliated persons became a significant bloc for the first time in American history, and they mostly voted against Falwell’s positions. Though he admits such developments generally arise from multiple causes, Winters lays part of the blame squarely on Jerry Falwell.

Two generations after hitting the national stage, and five years after his death, Jerry Falwell’s legacy remains distinctly mixed, a jumble of sweeping accomplishments and missed opportunities, electoral triumph and theological debacle. Winters provides the clear-eyed, dispassionate analysis Falwell’s legacy deserves. If religious and non-religious Americans want rapprochement, it’ll come only through Falwell’s shadow. And that means we must understand this complex, powerful man.

Dear Sebastian Thrun

An open letter to Sebastian Thrun, former Stanford professor, CEO of Udacity, and pioneer in Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs). Thrun announced last week that his company would de-emphasize providing online course content for universities, which has worked poorly to date, and turn its focus to specialized corporate training. Thrun's announcement has met cheers and mockery from predictable circles.

I blush to admit, I was one among the cackling chorus of educators dancing circles around the mouldering carcass of your high-minded promises. Your utopian vision of digital education is expensive, resists meaningful measurement, and suffers ebola-like attrition rates. It encourages an essentially private, passive relationship to education, with bleak implications for life and career. We who teach for love of students dreaded the failure of empathy your model betokens.

But once the giddy exhilaration of vindication wore off, I paused to ask myself why I felt so strongly. As a fan of Neil Postman, I initially attributed my doubts to the medium. Like TV, the online environment rewards entertainment, short attention spans, and spectacle. It doesn’t reward independent thought or context. But that doesn’t hold water, or I couldn’t write this blog. Online education’s well-documented limitations must run deeper.

Professor Thrun, you come from an industrial research background. Your contributions to exciting new programs like Google Glass and Google’s newly announced self-driving car approach legendary. I applaud your accomplishments, because they transform our relationship to information and knowledge. But your public statements reflect your industrial background, openly treating school like a machine shop, and students like interchangeable parts.

Not that you’re alone in such opinions. Many writers utilize industrial metaphors to describe schooling in the coming era. I’ve reviewed some of these books here. But consider what this metaphor implies. You’ve redefined humans to have worth only instrumentally; that is, we derive meaning from our ability to work and make money. This contravenes the reasons we tell students to study liberal arts, because education makes our souls free.

Online education advocates have been appallingly unalert to the limitations inherent in their model. From government studies to academic guidelines to the popular exposés linked in the prior paragraph, authors excitedly espouse classroom-free learning as education’s liberation. Even before these mass-market analyses, I remember an awestruck series of MacArthur Foundation white papers breathlessly expounding how digital technology would imminently render classrooms, institutional schools, and professional educators obsolete.

These books and studies all share one limitation, however: they evaluate digital learning venues according to responses from people who finished the courses. Even the US Department of Education, a fierce cheerleader for new technology in education, concedes when cornered that these courses feature an attrition rate approaching ninety percent. These courses particularly disadvantage poor students, minorities, and men—the populations already disadvantaged by the current system.

In an interview last week, Professor Thrun, you openly disparaged poor students for entering your company’s courses unprepared. But nobody is born knowing how to “do school.” Children model what they see growing up. I was fortunate enough, as you presumably were, to grow up in a household brimming with books, where my parents modeled self-improvement as a cardinal virtue. Therefore I started school already attuned to the learning process.

Your model places 160,000 students under one or two teachers’ guidance, as occurred with your celebrated Stanford Artificial Intelligence class. But teachers cannot guide 160,000 students. You cannot possibly read 160,000 papers, conduct 160,000 personal counseling sessions, or know 160,000 names. You can only offer standardized tests, which evaluate students’ rote memorization ability, and never determine whether they’ve thought about what you taught them.

Education is not about conveying information from one mind to another—or, it shouldn’t be. We don’t invite students to sit down and passively receive data into their otherwise blank minds. Such behavior invites helplessness and confusion—and, oh look, that’s how most students greeted your classes. Students may parrot your lessons without ever gaining significant understanding. Inexperienced students, especially from underprivileged backgrounds, need personal guidance to make the intuitive leap from fact to insight.

Let me state that another way: ours is not an information economy, because economies rely on scarce and desirable commodities. Information, today, is common as dirt. Rather, ours is a processing economy, where our ability to synthesize separate knowledge increments into greater wholes creates value, as you, Professor, did with Google Glass. Such processing requires guidance, mentorship, and nurturance, not an undifferentiated fact dump.

If I’ve learned anything at the factory, it’s that technology makes human discretion more valuable, not less. Machines are ultimately helpless without humans to guide them. But students entrained to passively receive information cannot guide anything, because they need guidance themselves. You yourself, Professor, have created a world where free-thinking minds making profound logical leaps are more valuable than ever. And you cannot create such minds by making students stare indifferently at a screen.