Category: Books

“Wishing Only for More Time”

(p. A20) Walter Mischel, whose studies of delayed gratification in young children clarified the importance of self-control in human development, and whose work led to a broad reconsideration of how personality is understood, died on Wednesday [September 12, 2018] at his home in Manhattan.
. . .
In a series of experiments at Stanford University beginning in the 1960s, he led a research team that presented preschool-age children with treats — pretzels, cookies, a marshmallow — and instructed them to wait before indulging themselves. Some of the children received strategies from the researchers, like covering their eyes or reimagining the treat as something else; others were left to their own devices.
The studies found that in all conditions, some youngsters were far better than others at deploying the strategies — or devising their own — and that this ability seemed to persist at later ages. And context mattered: Children given reason to distrust the researchers tended to grab the treats earlier.
. . .
For the wider public, it would be the marshmallow test. In the late 1980s, decades after the first experiments were done, Dr. Mischel and two co-authors followed up with about 100 parents whose children had participated in the original studies. They found a striking, if preliminary, correlation: The preschoolers who could put off eating the treat tended to have higher SAT scores, and were better adjusted emotionally on some measures, than those who had given in quickly to temptation.
The paper was cautious in its conclusions, and acknowledged numerous flaws, including a small sample size. No matter. It was widely reported, and a staple of popular psychology writing was born: If Junior can hold off eating a marshmallow for 15 minutes in preschool, then he or she is headed for the dean’s list.
. . .
In 2014, Dr. Mischel published his own account of the experiment and its reception, “The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control.”
In at least one serious replication attempt, scientists failed to find the same results. Still, there is general agreement that self-discipline, persistence, grit — call it what you like — is a good predictor of success in many areas of life.
. . .
“I am glad that at the choice point at 18 I resisted going into my uncle’s umbrella business,” he wrote in the autobiographical essay. “The route I did choose, or stumbled into, still leaves me eager early each morning to get to work in directions I could not have imagined at the start, wishing only for more time, and not wanting to spend too much of it looking back.”

For the full obituary, see:

Benedict Carey. “Walter Mischel, 88, Marshmallow Test Creator, Dies.” The New York Times (Saturday, Sept. 15, 2018): A20.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date Sept. 14, 2018, and has the title “Walter Mischel, 88, Psychologist Famed for Marshmallow Test, Dies’.”)

Mischel’s book on delayed gratification, is:
Mischel, Walter. The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2014.

Hershey Gave the World Chocolate Candy and a Single, Very Rich, Residential School

(p. A19) In the early 20th century, Milton Hershey transformed chocolate from a luxury good to a working-class staple. It made him a fortune, which he used to establish Hershey, Pa.–a model company town 100 miles west of Philadelphia and the self-proclaimed “sweetest place on earth.” He also established an orphanage, the Milton Hershey School, to provide housing and education primarily for children from the area.
. . .
Other early-20th-century philanthropists, such as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, left behind massive general-purpose foundations that underwrote experiments in medicine, science and higher education, Mr. Kurie observes, while Hershey “gave us chocolate candy and a single residential school in south-central Pennsylvania that remains little known outside the region.”
. . .
. . . , [Mr. Kurie] suggests that the trust can be viewed as a model of philanthropic responsibility, even by institutions without a devoutly local focus. Mr. Kurie’s most significant contribution here is to draw attention to philanthropy’s “external stakeholders,” those people and organizations “who are neither agents nor subjects of philanthropy but who are, for better or worse, caught up in its activities.” He demonstrates how a philanthropic institution can continue to reflect a founder’s vision while shaping and being shaped by the community that grows up around it, one whose bonds can often be bittersweet.

For the full review, see:
Benjamin Soskis. BOOKSHELF; A Man, a Brand, a School, a Town.” The Wall Street Journal (Monday, March 26, 2018): A19.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed name, added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date March 25, 2018, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; ‘In Chocolate We Trust’ Review: A Man, a Brand, a School, a Town.”)

The book under review, is:
Kurie, Peter. In Chocolate We Trust: The Hershey Company Town Unwrapped. Philadelphai, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018.

If She Could Choose Her Father, Lisa Brennan-Jobs Would Choose Steve Jobs

(p. A13) The house that Steve Jobs built had many mansions. One of them was a vast Spanish-style confection with soaring white arches. Majestic and crumbling, it sat on seven acres in the town of Woodside near Palo Alto, Calif. Inside there was an elevator, a ballroom and a church organ. Otherwise it was mostly empty. Jobs’s daughter Lisa was 9 when she began to spend overnights with him there on Wednesdays in the mid-1980s while her mother went to art school in Oakland.
Both the mansion and her father, whom the little girl barely knew, were scary and awe-inspiring, filling her with “a kind of ecstatic expectation,” as Lisa Brennan-Jobs writes in her memoir “Small Fry.”
. . .
For all the emotional injury Ms. Brennan-Jobs describes in her book, there are no villains. She portrays her father as a damaged person who in turn inflicted suffering on others. “There was a thin line between civility and cruelty in him, between what did and what did not set him off,” she writes. When he was not belittling her as if she were a delinquent employee, he could be spontaneously tender. “Hey, Small Fry, let’s blast,” Jobs would say as he arrived to take her roller skating on random weekends. “We’re livin’ on borrowed time.” She learned to navigate around his poisonous moods and not to trust too much in his moments of grace.
Nor are there any heroes here, though there are acts of heroism. Chrisann Brennan’s dedication to Lisa’s care was ironclad over the years as she struggled to support them both. Mona Simpson made helpful interventions on Lisa’s behalf, and Laurene Powell, who married Jobs in 1991, did what she could to include the child in her household. Lisa’s longtime psychiatrist became a trustworthy father figure, as did a sympathetic neighbor. Painful though this childhood was, it was not without a stumbling kind of love. Ms. Brennan-Jobs knows this, and works to forgive. About her parents she admits that, given the opportunity, “I would choose them again.”

For the full review, see:
Donna Rifkind. “BOOKSHELF; Coming of Age in Silicon Valley.” The Wall Street Journal (Friday, Sept. 7, 2018): A13.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Sept. 6, 2018, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; ‘Small Fry’ Review: Coming of Age in Silicon Valley.”)

The book under review, is:
Brennan-Jobs, Lisa. Small Fry: A Memoir. New York: Grove Press, 2018.

Dr. Charles Wilson Had Surgical Intuition, “Sort of an Invisible Hand”

(p. A19) Dr. Wilson sometimes worked in three operating rooms simultaneously: Residents would surgically open and prepare patients for his arrival, and he would then enter to seal an aneurysm or remove a tumor before moving on to the next case.
“He never spent much more than 30 or 60 minutes on each case, and we were left to close the case and make sure everything was O.K.,” Dr. Mitchel Berger, a former resident who is chairman of U.C.S.F.’s neurosurgical department, said in an interview. “It was unorthodox, but it worked. He demanded excellence and we gave him excellence.”
They also gave him silence. He allowed no music, no ringing phones and no idle chatter. Scrub nurses were expected to anticipate his requests.
“He would manage any break of silence with a stern look,” said Dr. Brian Andrews, a neurosurgeon who was one of Dr. Wilson’s residents and also his biographer, with the book “Cherokee Surgeon” (2011). (Dr. Wilson was one-eighth Cherokee.)
Dr. Wilson became world renowned for excising pituitary tumors through the sinus in a surgery called transsphenoidal resection.
. . .
The writer Malcolm Gladwell, in a profile of Dr. Wilson in The New Yorker in 1999, described one of those pituitary cancer surgeries. Looking at a tumor through a surgical microscope, Dr. Wilson used an instrument called a ring curette to peel the tumor from the gland.
“It was, he would say later, like running a squeegee across a windshield,” Mr. Gladwell wrote, “except that in this case, the windshield was a surgical field one centimeter in diameter, flanked on either side by the carotid arteries, the principal sources of blood to the brain.”
A wrong move could nick an artery or damage a nerve, endangering the patient’s vision or his life.
When Dr. Wilson saw bleeding from one side of the gland, he realized that he had not gotten all of the tumor. He found it and removed it. The surgery took only 25 minutes.
Dr. Wilson performed the surgery more than 3,300 times.
He told Mr. Gladwell that he had a special feel for surgery that he could not entirely explain.
“It’s sort of an invisible hand,” he said. “It begins almost to seem mystical. Sometimes a resident asks, ‘Why did you do that?’ ” His response, he told Mr. Gladwell, was to shrug and say, “Well, it just seemed like the right thing.”

For the full obituary, see:
Richard Sandomir. “‘Charles Wilson, 88, Lauded For Excising Brain Tumors, Sometimes Several in a Day.” The New York Times (Monday, March 5, 2018): A19.
(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed year, added.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date March 2, 2018, and has the title “‘Charles Wilson, Top Brain Surgeon and Researcher, Dies at 88.”)

The biography of Wilson, mentioned above, is:
Andrews, Brian T. Cherokee Neurosurgeon: A Biography of Charles Byron Wilson, M.D. Scotts Valley, CA: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2011.

German Bookstore Thrives Selling Bread and Sausage

(p. A7) BAD SOODEN-ALLENDORF, Germany — At five minutes after seven on a Saturday morning, the bookstore in this idyllic town was not yet officially open — that happens at 7:30 a.m. — but Susanne Frühauf had already rung up the first three customers of the day. At a shelf in the corner, behind a rack of discount paperbacks, her husband Wolfgang was working as quickly as he could.
“They’re like moths,” said Mr. Frühauf, genially, of his customers. “As soon as the lights go on, they come.”
With that, he got back to work, stacking not books, but rows of freshly baked bread rolls sprinkled with poppy, pumpkin, flax, sesame or sunflower seeds that have brought townspeople flocking. Next to him stood a small refrigerator hung with “ahle wurst” — a delicious air-dried, salami-like pork sausage that is one of the region’s culinary specialties — while in the center aisle, organic tomatoes and cucumbers vied with crime novels for table space.
. . .
Mr. Frühauf’s grandfather founded a bookbindery nearly a century ago, right here on the ground floor of the family house on the market square; Mr. Frühauf grew up above the bookstore, which his parents and uncle ran together. Five years ago, when he saw the numbers, Mr. Frühauf — who still lives upstairs, with his mother and his wife — said the situation was clear: “We had to do something.”
At the same time, news came that the town’s last two bakeries were closing. For residents like Mr. Frühauf, who remember when half a dozen local bakers strove to make the town’s best cream-covered plum cake, cumin roll or pumpernickel loaf, this blow was followed by hopeful news: Norbert Schill, who had lost his storefront lease, wanted to keep baking.
“I said, ‘before there’s no fresh bakery, I’ll clear a shelf, and we can sell the bread here,'” Mr. Frühauf said. Mr. Schill agreed to give it a try.
The experiment was a success. Mr. Frühauf began keeping baker’s hours, and Mr. Schill’s former customers started coming to the bookstore to buy their daily bread. Some, like Norbert Bergmann, a retired Catholic priest, got into the habit of picking up a book or TV guide, too.
Some of Mr. Frühauf’s regular customers found the idea strange at first, but they came around quickly. “It’s fun to eat breakfast again,” said Regina Kistner, who raised her family here, and had been making do with the processed rolls sold at the supermarket. “These taste good,” she added, leaving the store with two rolls (one rye and one sesame), a tabloid paper (for her neighbor) and the British romance novel “A Summer at Sea.”
Mr. Schill, the baker, said he for one was very happy to have found such an open-minded partner in the bookseller. “There’s a saying, I remember learning as a child, from the old people. ‘Go with the times, or with time, you’ll go.'”
. . .
Locking up after a long, warm morning, Mr. Frühauf paused. He took a look around at the 17th century building that houses his eclectic store, and said he enjoys being at the center of a new network of butchers, bakers and beekeepers. “In Germany, I think there’s a tendency now, to be very backward-looking, to say, ‘everything used to be better,'” said Mr. Frühauf. “But all you really need are some new ideas.”

For the full story, see:
Sally McGrane. “‘To Stay Afloat After 100 Years, a German Bookstore Sells Sausage.” The New York Times (Saturday, Sept. 22, 2018): A7.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the title “‘Would You Like Some Sausage With Your Novel?”)

“Machines Are Not Capable of Creativity”

(p. A11) New York
“I rarely have an urge to whisper,” says George Gilder–loudly–as he settles onto a divan by the window of his Times Square hotel room. I’d asked him to speak as audibly as possible into my recording device, and his response, while literal, could also serve as a metaphor: Nothing Mr. Gilder says or writes is ever delivered at anything less than the fullest philosophical decibel.
. . .
Citing Claude Shannon, the American mathematician acknowledged as the father of information theory, Mr. Gilder says that “information is surprise. Creativity always comes as a surprise to us. If it wasn’t surprising, we wouldn’t need it.” However useful they may be, “machines are not capable of creativity.” Human minds can generate counterfactuals, imaginative flights, dreams. By contrast, “a surprise in a machine is a breakdown. You don’t want your machines to have surprising outcomes!”
The narrative of human obsolescence, Mr. Gilder says, is giving rise to a belief that the only way forward is to provide redundant citizens with some sort of “guaranteed annual income,” which would mean the end of the market economy: . . .
. . .
For all the gloom about Silicon Valley that appears to suffuse his new book, Mr. Gilder insists that he’s not a tech-pessimist. “I think technology has fabulous promise,” he says, as he describes blockchain and cryptocurrency as “a new technological revolution that is rising up as we speak.” He says it has generated “a huge efflorescence of peer-to-peer technology and creativity, and new companies.” The decline of initial public offerings in the U.S., he adds, has been “redressed already by the rise of the ICO, the ‘initial coin offering,’ which has raised some $12 billion for several thousand companies in the last year.”
It is clear that Mr. Gilder is smitten with what he calls “this cryptographic revolution,” and believes that it will heal some of the damage to humanity that has been inflicted by the “machine obsessed” denizens of Silicon Valley. Blockchain “endows individuals with control of their data, their identity, the truths that they want to assert, their transactions, their visions, their content and their security.” Here Mr. Gilder sounds less like a tech guru than a poet, and his words tumble out in a romantic cascade.

For the full interview, see:
Tunku Varadarajan, interviewer. “Sage Against the Machine; A leading Google critic on why he thinks the era of ‘big data’ is done, why he opposes Trump’s talk of regulation, and the promise of blockchain.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Sept. 1, 2018): A11.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the interview has the date Aug. 31, 2018.)

The “new book” by Gilder, mentioned above, is:
Gilder, George. Life after Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy. Washington, D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 2018.

Alibaba’s Jack Ma Retires Early as Chinese Communists Intervene in Ventures

(p. B1) HONG KONG — Alibaba’s co-founder and executive chairman, Jack Ma, said he planned to step down from the Chinese e-commerce giant on Monday to pursue philanthropy in education, a changing of the guard for the $420 billion internet company.
A former English teacher, Mr. Ma started Alibaba in 1999 and built it into one of the world’s most consequential e-commerce and digital payments companies, transforming how Chinese people shop and pay for things. That fueled his net worth to more than $40 billion, making him China’s richest man. He is revered by many Chinese, some of whom have put his portrait in their homes to worship in the same way that they worship the God of Wealth.
Mr. Ma is retiring as China’s business environment has soured, with Beijing and state-owned enterprises increasingly playing more interventionist roles with companies. Under President Xi Jinping, China’s internet industry has grown and become more important, prompting the government to tighten its leash. The Chinese economy is also facing slowing growth and increasing debt, and the country is embroiled in an escalating trade war with the United States.
“He’s a symbol of the health of China’s private sector and how high they can fly whether he likes it or not,” Duncan Clark, author of the book “Alibaba: The House Jack Ma Built,” said of Mr. Ma. “His retirement will be interpreted as frustration or concern whether he likes it or not.”
In an interview, Mr. Ma said his retirement is not the end of an era but “the beginning of an era.” He said he would be spending more of his time and fortune focused on education. “I love education,” he said.
Mr. Ma will remain on Alibaba’s board of directors and continue to mentor the company’s management. Mr. Ma turns 54 on Monday, which is also a holiday in China known as Teacher’s Day.
The retirement makes Mr. Ma one of the first founders among a generation of prominent Chinese internet entrepreneurs to step down from their companies. Firms including Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu and JD.com have flourished in recent years, growing to nearly rival American internet behemoths like Amazon and Google in their size, scope and ambition. For Chinese tycoons to step aside in their 50s is rare; they usually remain at the top of their organizations for many years.

For the full story, see:

Li Yuan. “Founder Sees A ‘Beginning’ As He Retires From Alibaba.” The New York Times (Saturday, Sept. 8, 2018): B1 & B3.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Sept. 7, 2018, and has the title “Alibaba’s Jack Ma, China’s Richest Man, to Retire From Company He Co-Founded.”)

The book by Duncan Clark, that is mentioned above, is:
Clark, Duncan. Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built. New York: Harper-Collins Publishers, 2016.

Uncredentialed Entrepreneur Innovated to Save Babies

(p. 1A) He showed up in Omaha 120 summers ago, another unknown showman hoping to make a name for himself at this city’s biggest-ever event, its world’s fair.

He gave his name as Martin Couney, or sometimes Martin Coney. It wasn’t, at least not yet.
He said he was a doctor, a European doctor, a protégé of the world’s finest doctors. He was none of these things.
And yet in Omaha, Dr. Couney set up shop in a little white building on the east midway, not far from the Wild West Show, the Middle Eastern dancers, the roaming fortune tellers and the Indian Congress starring a Native American chief named Geronimo.
The fair, officially known as the Trans-Mississippi and International (p. 2A) Exposition, showcased all manner of things seen as strange, exotic and otherworldly to the 2 million Nebraskans and visitors paying the 50-cent admission to have their minds blown in the summer of 1898.
Couney thought he had just the thing to blow their minds.

“Infant Incubators with Living Infants” read the sign above the entrance.

“A Wonderful Invention … Live Babies” said another.
. . .
Usually the experts are right. That’s why they are experts,” says Dawn Raffel, author of the “The Strange Case of Dr. Couney,” a new biography seeking to save this once-famed faux doctor from history’s trash bin. “But occasionally you get an outlier like this. Someone who is extraordinarily inventive. Who brings us something incredible.”
What Dr. Couney gave us, through decades of work and tireless promotion, was an understanding that we could save babies that since the beginning of time had died before they crawled. We could save them using a piece of equipment designed by a French engineer who realized that if an egg could be nurtured in an incubator, then so could a newborn.
. . .
Newspapers, including The World-Herald, largely ignored the exhibit, Raffel says. The public didn’t seem particularly bothered that a “doctor” had decided to house anonymous newborns on the fairgrounds and put them on public display.
They also didn’t seem particularly interested, either.
. . .
Raffel estimates that Couney and his doctors and nurses saved between 6,500 and 7,000 premature babies all on their own during decades of midway work. But they saved countless thousands more by raising the profile of premature babies. By raising the hope that they could grow into healthy, happy adults.
. . .
“I find him fascinating because he was such a complicated man,” Raffel says. “He deserves more credit.”

For the full story, see:
Hansen, Matthew. “Tech Costs Force Honda To Let Go of Engineering Legacy.” Omaha World-Herald (Friday, Aug. 3, 2018): 1A-2A.
(Note: ellipses between paragraphs, added; ellipsis internal to sentence, in original.)

The Raffel book on which the passages quoted are partially based, is:
Raffel, Dawn. The Strange Case of Dr. Couney: How a Mysterious European Showman Saved Thousands of American Babies. New York: Blue Rider Press, 2018.

Americans Today “Are Far Less Likely” to Trust the Government than 40 Years Ago

(p. A16) . . . Suzanne Mettler, a political scientist at Cornell University [was] perplexed by the trends that Americans have come to dislike government more and more, even as they have increasingly relied on its assistance through programs other than welfare. Americans are far less likely today than 40 years ago to say in surveys that they trust the government to do what is right or to look out for people like them.
. . .
People who strongly dislike welfare were significantly less likely to feel government had provided them with opportunities, or to feel government officials cared what they thought, . . .
“Their attitudes about welfare end up being a microcosm for them of government,” Ms. Mettler said. “They look at how they think welfare operates, and if they see that as unfair, they think: ‘This is basically what government is. Government does favors for undeserving people, and it doesn’t help people like me who are working hard and playing by the rules.’ “

For the full commentary, see:
Emily Badger. “The Outsize Hold Of the Word ‘Welfare’ On the Public’s Mind.” The New York Times (Tuesday, Aug. 7, 2018): A16.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed word, added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Aug. 6, 2018, and has the title “The Outsize Hold of the Word ‘Welfare’ on the Public Imagination.” The page of my National Edition was A16; the online edition says the page of the New York Edition was A14.)

Mettler’s research is more fully described in:
Mettler, Suzanne. The Government-Citizen Disconnect. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2018.

A Dinner to Remember

(p. 6) The economist Dambisa Moyo, author most recently of “Edge of Chaos,” loves Agatha Christie’s “detestable, bombastic, tiresome, egocentric little creep” Hercule Poirot.
. . .
You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?
1) Vikram Seth, the economist turned novelist. His “A Suitable Boy” remains one of my all-time favorite books. 2) Ayn Rand, the philosopher and novelist. I am drawn to her irreverence — a woman ahead of her time. 3) Maya Angelou, the poet who penned “Still I Rise” and “Phenomenal Woman” … enough said.

For the full interview, see:

Dambisa Moyo. “‘BY THE BOOK; Dambisa Moyo.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, April 29, 2018): 6.
(Note: ellipsis between sentences added; ellipsis internal to sentence, and bold question, in original.)
(Note: the online version of the interview has the date April 26, 2018. The first sentence and the bold question are by the unnamed writer-interviewer. The answer after the bold question is by Moyo.)

Moyo’s book, mentioned above, is:
Moyo, Dambisa. Edge of Chaos: Why Democracy Is Failing to Deliver Economic Growth, and How to Fix It. New York: Basic Books, 2018.