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Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer: Tracks cancer from its earliest recorded appearances to modern (2011) understanding and treatments. While there’s a fair amount of suffering, it’s really a researchers’-eye view, with special attention to the ways in which practicing doctors didn’t always follow what the best understanding of contemporary researchers were. As someone about to turn the corner on recommended mammographs (except that the research seems to be conflicting), I wondered about what things are taken as true now that will be discarded in ten years, the way so many previous recommendations and treatments have been, but I still learned a fair amount about how cancer treatment has changed over time.
Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism: Short, depressing book about American political dysfunction noted for two long-time conservative types (or what used to be conservative, before the right went off the deep end) pointing out, repeatedly and at length, that the dysfunction is not caused by “both sides” but rather by intransigient, heedless Republican obstructionism. Mann and Ornstein suggest that reforms in the filibuster might do much more to fix this than campaign finance reform (which would, not for nothing, require Supreme Court appointments to get through the dysfunctional Senate), and also that various forms of preference voting could improve outcomes much more than spoiler third parties. The proposed solutions are intriguing; the question is whether people can muster up the overwhelming political will necessary to adopt even very popular measures given the current power of obstructionism.
Steve Coll, Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power: This book isn’t about American power in the sense you might expect: ExxonMobil is a transnational company with an ideology that doesn’t give a good goddamn about America, or any other country; its obligations are solely to its shareholders, in its own estimation. (Not incidentally, its top executives own lots of shares.) Though EM claims that it just wants to be left alone, it is perfectly willing to lobby the US government, especially its good friend Dick Cheney, when other countries or nonstate actors threaten to interfere with its interests, whether through kidnapping workers in Nigeria or expropriating assets in Venezuela. It’s American power in the service of EM, rather than the reverse. Coll tells various stories about EM’s international adventures, from the Exxon Valdez (which led to a companywide focus on safety that was not, sadly, emulated by others in the industry) to propping up dictators in Africa to attempts to get in on the fracking boom. EM denied global warming past the point of reason (even while internally its scientists were basing oil exploration recommendations on expectations of changed climate that would make certain oil easier to reach), and now thinks a carbon tax would be the least disruptive to its business. Basically, the company is very efficient and very amoral; according to EM, nothing is its problem other than finding more oil. A running theme, also, is EM’s desire to appease the stock market by continually finding more and more reserves, even when that required defying the SEC’s rules for what counted as bookable reserves—many of EM’s dodgier deals with antidemocratic regimes were driven in substantial part by the desire to get a deal that would result in bookable reserves, not just contracts for EM to produce the oil that would then be owned by a sovereign state. So this is one way in which the financialization of the economy has contributed to various kinds of corruption in nonfinancial industries as well—both manipulation of the numbers and willingness to deal with corrupt foreign regimes.
Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism: Short, depressing book about American political dysfunction noted for two long-time conservative types (or what used to be conservative, before the right went off the deep end) pointing out, repeatedly and at length, that the dysfunction is not caused by “both sides” but rather by intransigient, heedless Republican obstructionism. Mann and Ornstein suggest that reforms in the filibuster might do much more to fix this than campaign finance reform (which would, not for nothing, require Supreme Court appointments to get through the dysfunctional Senate), and also that various forms of preference voting could improve outcomes much more than spoiler third parties. The proposed solutions are intriguing; the question is whether people can muster up the overwhelming political will necessary to adopt even very popular measures given the current power of obstructionism.
Steve Coll, Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power: This book isn’t about American power in the sense you might expect: ExxonMobil is a transnational company with an ideology that doesn’t give a good goddamn about America, or any other country; its obligations are solely to its shareholders, in its own estimation. (Not incidentally, its top executives own lots of shares.) Though EM claims that it just wants to be left alone, it is perfectly willing to lobby the US government, especially its good friend Dick Cheney, when other countries or nonstate actors threaten to interfere with its interests, whether through kidnapping workers in Nigeria or expropriating assets in Venezuela. It’s American power in the service of EM, rather than the reverse. Coll tells various stories about EM’s international adventures, from the Exxon Valdez (which led to a companywide focus on safety that was not, sadly, emulated by others in the industry) to propping up dictators in Africa to attempts to get in on the fracking boom. EM denied global warming past the point of reason (even while internally its scientists were basing oil exploration recommendations on expectations of changed climate that would make certain oil easier to reach), and now thinks a carbon tax would be the least disruptive to its business. Basically, the company is very efficient and very amoral; according to EM, nothing is its problem other than finding more oil. A running theme, also, is EM’s desire to appease the stock market by continually finding more and more reserves, even when that required defying the SEC’s rules for what counted as bookable reserves—many of EM’s dodgier deals with antidemocratic regimes were driven in substantial part by the desire to get a deal that would result in bookable reserves, not just contracts for EM to produce the oil that would then be owned by a sovereign state. So this is one way in which the financialization of the economy has contributed to various kinds of corruption in nonfinancial industries as well—both manipulation of the numbers and willingness to deal with corrupt foreign regimes.