My Year in Books

Notes from NY Times (December 2019)

The New York Times - Daily Edition for Kindle (The New York Times Company)

- Your Highlight on Location 7983-7985 | Added on Sunday, December 15, 2019 10:17:55 AM

But frailty also brings greater urgency to the discussions surgeons have with patients and families, who need to understand not only surgical risks, but what their lives may be like after surgery.

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The New York Times - Daily Edition for Kindle (The New York Times Company)

- Your Highlight on Location 2332-2333 | Added on Sunday, December 15, 2019 11:22:16 AM

Retirement wealth has accumulated almost exclusively among higher-income households, while middle- and lower-income households have only held steady or lost ground, Federal Reserve data shows.

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The New York Times - Daily Edition for Kindle (The New York Times Company)

- Your Highlight on Location 2397-2399 | Added on Sunday, December 15, 2019 11:25:22 AM

Despite this improvement, median weekly earnings of full-time workers age 55 to 64 have not risen appreciably during the recovery, standing at $872 during the third quarter of 2019, compared with $861 in the third quarter of 2008, adjusted for inflation, according to Census Bureau data.

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The New York Times - Daily Edition for Kindle (The New York Times Company)

- Your Highlight on Location 4139-4142 | Added on Sunday, December 15, 2019 2:12:19 PM

As Gregory Zuckerman notes in “The Man Who Solved the Market,” even Warren Buffett’s track record — 20.5 percent annualized returns since 1965 — doesn’t approach Simons’s average of 39 percent gains over a three-decade span. And that’s after his company has taken a 5 percent management fee and 44 percent of the profits.

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The New York Times - Daily Edition for Kindle (The New York Times Company)

- Your Highlight on Location 6967-6970 | Added on Sunday, December 15, 2019 2:39:17 PM

Though the president will almost certainly be impeached for extorting Ukraine to aid his re-election, he is equally certain to be acquitted in the Senate, a tacit confirmation that he is, indeed, above the law. His attorney general is a shameless partisan enforcer. Professional civil servants are purged, replaced by apparatchiks. The courts are filling up with young, hard-right ideologues. One recently confirmed judge, 40-year-old Steven Menashi, has written approvingly of ethnonationalism.

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The New York Times - Daily Edition for Kindle (The New York Times Company)

- Your Highlight on Location 9658-9662 | Added on Sunday, December 22, 2019 10:11:31 AM

Not surprisingly, this decade has been marked by the intense hostility of the young toward truisms that once governed our thinking. As they saw it, the liberal international order didn’t uphold the peace — it bled us dry. Capitalism didn’t make the country rich — it made the rich richer. Silicon Valley didn’t innovate technology — it mined our data. The Church didn’t save souls — it raped children. The cops didn’t serve and protect — they profiled and killed. The media didn’t tell the news — they spun it.

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The New York Times - Daily Edition for Kindle (The New York Times Company)

- Your Highlight on Location 9664-9667 | Added on Sunday, December 22, 2019 10:12:43 AM

This was the decade when algorithms meant to cater to our tastes succeeded mainly in narrowing those tastes; when the creation of online communities led to our Balkanization into online tribes and the dissemination of disinformation and hate; when digital connection deepened our personal isolation, vulnerability and suggestibility; and when the ubiquity of portable screens with infinite data meant there was always something more interesting to do than interact with the person before us.

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The New York Times - Daily Edition for Kindle (The New York Times Company)

- Your Highlight on Location 7728-7728 | Added on Sunday, December 22, 2019 10:48:07 AM

Will voters affirm shameless corruption and lawlessness, or will they reject Trump’s open attempt to subvert the Constitution?

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The New York Times - Daily Edition for Kindle (The New York Times Company)

- Your Highlight on Location 8171-8172 | Added on Sunday, December 22, 2019 11:05:21 AM

In 1950, a typical share of stock in United States public markets was held for eight years. Since 2006, the average share of stock has been held for less than a year.

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The New York Times - Daily Edition for Kindle (The New York Times Company)

- Your Highlight on Location 8174-8175 | Added on Sunday, December 22, 2019 11:05:41 AM

A 2006 study conducted by economists at Duke University found that 78 percent of executives at public companies said that they would sacrifice long-term economic value for a short-term lift in share price.

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The New York Times - Daily Edition for Kindle (The New York Times Company)

- Your Highlight on Location 3033-3034 | Added on Sunday, December 22, 2019 11:17:03 AM

Over the past 15 years, more than one in five papers in the United States has shuttered, and the number of journalists working for newspapers has been cut in half,

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The New York Times - Daily Edition for Kindle (The New York Times Company)

- Your Highlight on Location 4672-4674 | Added on Sunday, December 29, 2019 10:40:43 AM

Or again, the election of Trump probably wasn’t the moment of authoritarianism descending — but it was an important moment of exposure, which revealed things about race relations and class resentments and the rot in the Republican Party and the incompetence of our political class that inclined everybody to a darker view of the American situation than before.

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The New York Times - Daily Edition for Kindle (The New York Times Company)

- Your Highlight on Location 4705-4706 | Added on Sunday, December 29, 2019 11:11:56 AM

Historically, almost half of all humans died in childhood. As recently as 1950, 27 percent of all children still died by age 15. Now that figure has dropped to about 4 percent.

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The New York Times - Daily Edition for Kindle (The New York Times Company)

- Your Highlight on Location 4714-4715 | Added on Sunday, December 29, 2019 11:12:31 AM

As recently as 1981, 42 percent of the planet’s population endured “extreme poverty,” defined by the United Nations as living on less than about $2 a day. That portion has plunged to less than 10 percent of the world’s population now.

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The New York Times - Daily Edition for Kindle (The New York Times Company)

- Your Highlight on Location 4745-4746 | Added on Sunday, December 29, 2019 11:14:28 AM

When I was born in 1959, a majority of the world’s population had always been illiterate and lived in extreme poverty. By the time I die, illiteracy and extreme poverty may be almost eliminated — and it’s difficult to imagine a greater triumph for humanity on our watch.

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The New York Times - Daily Edition for Kindle (The New York Times Company)

- Your Highlight on Location 5378-5379 | Added on Sunday, December 29, 2019 11:21:41 AM

Geographic and psycho-sociological patterns now overshadow events in driving political loyalties and national electoral outcomes. Demography is destiny.

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The New York Times - Daily Edition for Kindle (The New York Times Company)

- Your Highlight on Location 1925-1926 | Added on Sunday, December 29, 2019 1:29:21 PM

They show that stocks outperform bonds over extended periods, but that stocks are far more volatile than bonds. Holding both stocks and bonds makes sense because they tend to buffer one another.

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The New York Times - Daily Edition for Kindle (The New York Times Company)

- Your Highlight on Location 1936-1936 | Added on Sunday, December 29, 2019 1:29:57 PM

“When you have some money to invest, put it into low-cost, diversified index funds,”

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The New York Times - Daily Edition for Kindle (The New York Times Company)

- Your Highlight on Location 1940-1941 | Added on Sunday, December 29, 2019 1:30:13 PM

If you are a conservative, older investor, as he is, he said, you might consider a portfolio with 25 percent stocks and 75 percent bonds.

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The New York Times - Daily Edition for Kindle (The New York Times Company)

- Your Highlight on Location 8-12 | Added on Sunday, December 29, 2019 2:09:11 PM

Political appointees have shut down government studies, reduced the influence of scientists over regulatory decisions and in some cases pressured researchers not to speak publicly. The administration has particularly challenged scientific findings related to the environment and public health opposed by industries such as oil drilling and coal mining. It has also impeded research around human-caused climate change, which President Trump has dismissed despite a global scientific consensus.

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The New York Times - Daily Edition for Kindle (The New York Times Company)

- Your Highlight on Location 46-47 | Added on Sunday, December 29, 2019 2:11:10 PM

At the E.P.A., for instance, staffing has fallen to its lowest levels in at least a decade.

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The New York Times - Daily Edition for Kindle (The New York Times Company)

- Your Highlight on Location 66-67 | Added on Sunday, December 29, 2019 2:11:46 PM

This year, for instance, the National Park Service’s principal climate change scientist, Patrick Gonzalez, received a “cease and desist” letter from supervisors after testifying to Congress about the risks that global

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The New York Times - Daily Edition for Kindle (The New York Times Company)

- Your Highlight on Location 66-67 | Added on Sunday, December 29, 2019 2:11:56 PM

This year, for instance, the National Park Service’s principal climate change scientist, Patrick Gonzalez, received a “cease and desist” letter from supervisors after testifying to Congress about the risks that global warming posed to national parks.

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The New York Times - Daily Edition for Kindle (The New York Times Company)

- Your Highlight on Location 156-158 | Added on Sunday, December 29, 2019 2:13:11 PM

The loss of experienced scientists can erase years or decades of “institutional memory,” said Robert J. Kavlock, a toxicologist who retired in October 2017 after working at the E.P.A. for 40 years,

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NY Times Notes and Highlights

Counting interim leaders, there have been seven communications chiefs; four heads each of the Departments of Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs and Health and Human Services; four national security advisers; three secretaries of defense; and three press secretaries.

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The Brookings Institution puts the turnover in Mr. Trump’s “A Team” — defined as top decision makers within the executive office of the president (which does not include cabinet secretaries) — at 74 percent as of Monday. No other modern administration came even close to that.

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Trump seems to understand, at least on a limbic level, that the effect of this cavalcade of scandal isn’t cumulative. Instead, each one eclipses the last, creating a sense of weary cynicism that makes shock impossible to sustain.

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The unemployment rate was only 3.7 percent in June, near its lowest level since 1969, as tens of thousands of people gave up actively looking for another job. But in doing so, the dropouts meant the labor force participation rate was stuck at 62.9 percent, near its lowest level since 1977.

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Online dating has numerous benefits, but it also leads to option paralysis, decreased fluency in social cues and the tendency to consider people avatars instead of human beings.

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Today that Grand Old Party has devolved into a personality cult surrounding a racist demagogue who incites a mob to chant about a Somali-American member of Congress: “Send her back!”

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Dear Democrats: This is not complicated! Just nominate a decent, sane person, one committed to reunifying the country and creating more good jobs, a person who can gain the support of the independents, moderate Republicans and suburban women who abandoned Donald Trump in the midterms and thus swung the House of Representatives to the Democrats and could do the same for the presidency.

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The gravest thing Trump has done is to empty this idea of meaning. His has been an assault on honesty, decency, dignity, tolerance and civility. On this president’s wish list, every right is alienable. He leads a movement more than he does a nation, and so depends on fear to mobilize people.

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He reflects many of the values that America once proudly stood for: toughness without belligerence, charm without smarminess, loyalty without question.

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He is a faux tough guy who lets other people do the fighting for him, a needy brat who never accepts responsibility for his actions, an oaf with no trace of courage, class or chivalry.

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The United States is the only advanced industrial nation that doesn’t have national laws guaranteeing paid maternity leave. It is also the only advanced economy that doesn’t guarantee workers any vacation, paid or unpaid, and the only highly developed country (other than South Korea) that doesn’t guarantee paid sick days. In contrast, the European Union’s 28 nations guarantee workers at least four weeks’ paid vacation.

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“A politician has no actual principles. He is in favor of whatever seems to him to be popular at the moment.”

Consider, for example, the matter of religion. It is debated freely and furiously in almost every country in the world save the United States,” but here the critic is silenced. “The result is that all religions are equally safeguarded against criticism, and that all of them lose vitality. We protect the status quo, and so make steady war upon revision and improvement.”

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United States: Essays 1952-1992 (Vidal, Gore)

- Your Highlight on page 794 | Location 14575-14577 | Added on Friday, August 23, 2019 11:58:55 PM

This dazzling inequity is reflected in our tax system where the man on salary pays more tax than the man who lives on dividends, who in turn pays more tax than the wheeler-dealer who makes a capital-gains deal.

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The New York Times - Daily Edition for Kindle (The New York Times Company)

- Your Highlight on Location 7272-7273 | Added on Sunday, August 25, 2019 8:27:02 AM

In the four decades between 1969 and 2008, economists played a leading role in slashing taxation of the wealthy and in curbing public investment.

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The New York Times - Daily Edition for Kindle (The New York Times Company)

- Your Highlight on Location 7277-7278 | Added on Sunday, August 25, 2019 8:27:34 AM

Perhaps the starkest measure of the failure of our economic policies is that the average American’s life expectancy is in decline, as inequalities of wealth have become inequalities of health.

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The New York Times - Daily Edition for Kindle (The New York Times Company)

- Your Highlight on Location 8134-8137 | Added on Sunday, August 25, 2019 2:11:28 PM

Let’s say I want to read about the Iran nuclear deal, but I prefer coverage from The New York Times. Instead of just Googling US iran deal for the latest news, I can search site:nytimes.com iran deal to see coverage only from The Times. This also allows me to see everything The Times has done on the topic going back weeks or months, rather than my results getting cluttered with versions of today’s news from other publications.

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The New York Times - Daily Edition for Kindle (The New York Times Company)

- Your Highlight on Location 8156-8157 | Added on Sunday, August 25, 2019 2:12:57 PM

Drag an image into Image Search and Google will find other versions of that photo for you.

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The 2,548 Wittiest Things Anybody Ever Said (Byrne, Robert)

- Your Highlight on Location 307-309 | Added on Friday, September 20, 2019 8:30:55 PM

As I grow older and older and totter toward the tomb I find that I care less and less who goes to bed with whom. —Dorothy Sayers (1893–1957)

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The New York Times - Daily Edition for Kindle (The New York Times Company)

- Your Highlight on Location 2262-2264 | Added on Sunday, September 22, 2019 8:29:07 AM

When we’re young, we want to stand out, to leave our mark on the world, to be exceptional. As the seasons pass, we come to find that it’s everything that’s not extraordinary in us — our ability to tend to a family, to keep ill health at bay, to hit a Ping-Pong ball — and even in the world around us, that may be most memorable.

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The president has previously handed over highly classified intelligence to Russia; sided with Russian President Vladimir Putin against U.S. intelligence; devised 

military strategy in public at Mar-a-Lago; insulted leaders of Britain, Germany and France; shoved the prime minister of Montenegro; fallen "in love" with North Korea's dictator; invited the Taliban to Camp David; asked if he could nuke hurricanes; taken children from their parents and put them in warehouses; altered a weather forecast with a Sharpie; said windmills cause cancer; and hired Rudy Giuliani.

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Perhaps for the first time since the United States was established, a majority of young adults here do not identify as Christian.

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The New York Times - Daily Edition for Kindle (The New York Times Company)

- Your Highlight on Location 7894-7896 | Added on Sunday, October 27, 2019 5:06:56 PM

Only 49 percent of millennials consider themselves Christian, compared with 84 percent of Americans in their mid-70s or older, according to a new report from the Pew Research Center.

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The New York Times - Daily Edition for Kindle (The New York Times Company)

- Your Highlight on Location 7910-7912 | Added on Sunday, October 27, 2019 5:08:02 PM

It would be difficult to imagine a president more at odds with Jesus’ message than Trump, a serial philanderer and liar who has persecuted refugees, divided families, exploited the poor and allegedly committed sexual assaults.

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The New York Times - Daily Edition for Kindle (The New York Times Company)

- Your Highlight on Location 7564-7565 | Added on Sunday, October 27, 2019 5:12:00 PM

Trump is as inept at English as he is at governing. He’s oxymoronic: a nativist who can’t really speak his native tongue.

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The New York Times - Daily Edition for Kindle (The New York Times Company)

- Your Highlight on Location 8998-8999 | Added on Sunday, November 3, 2019 9:15:21 AM

That Mr. Trump seems to have made up the scene of a whimpering terrorist may be shocking on one level yet not all that surprising from a president who over the years has made a habit of inventing people who do not exist and events that did not happen.

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The New York Times - Daily Edition for Kindle (The New York Times Company)

- Your Highlight on Location 9031-9035 | Added on Sunday, November 3, 2019 9:17:29 AM

Mr. Trump has always had an active imagination, on matters large and small. While in business, he called reporters pretending to be a Trump spokesman named John Barron boasting about Mr. Trump in the third person. For years, he peddled the lie that Mr. Obama was born in Kenya instead of Hawaii and he claimed to see “thousands and thousands” of Muslims in New Jersey cheering the fall of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, a claim that was thoroughly debunked.

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The New York Times - Daily Edition for Kindle (The New York Times Company)

- Your Highlight on Location 9080-9082 | Added on Sunday, November 3, 2019 9:20:28 AM

In essence, the more steps people accumulated over the course of the month, the higher their self-rated sleep quality was during that time. Ditto when the researchers looked at the number of minutes they had spent moving; the more time someone was in motion during the month, the better they rated their sleep over all.

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The New York Times - Daily Edition for Kindle (The New York Times Company)

- Your Highlight on Location 9098-9099 | Added on Sunday, November 3, 2019 9:22:23 AM

If Robert Ballard, who discovered the wreck of the Titanic, were given the job of finding Trump’s moral bottom, he’d fail.

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The New York Times - Daily Edition for Kindle (The New York Times Company)

- Your Highlight on Location 9408-9408 | Added on Sunday, November 3, 2019 9:34:59 AM

Diners who walk in the door eager to hand over literal piles of money aren’t greeted; they’re processed.

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The New York Times - Daily Edition for Kindle (The New York Times Company)

- Your Highlight on Location 9411-9411 | Added on Sunday, November 3, 2019 9:35:16 AM

The Department of Motor Vehicles is a block party compared with the line at Peter Luger.

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The New York Times - Daily Edition for Kindle (The New York Times Company)

- Your Highlight on Location 9437-9438 | Added on Sunday, November 3, 2019 9:39:02 AM

Other restaurants, and not just steakhouses, buy beef that is tender, richly marbled and deeply flavorful; at Luger, you get the first two but not the third.

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The New York Times - Daily Edition for Kindle (The New York Times Company)

- Your Highlight on Location 9448-9450 | Added on Sunday, November 3, 2019 9:39:55 AM

They will say that nobody goes to Luger for the sole, nobody goes to Luger for the wine, nobody goes to Luger for the salad, nobody goes to Luger for the service. The list goes on, and gets harder to swallow, until you start to wonder who really needs to go to Peter Luger, and start to think the answer is nobody.

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The New York Times - Daily Edition for Kindle (The New York Times Company)

- Your Highlight on Location 7917-7919 | Added on Sunday, November 3, 2019 3:31:44 PM

One of the first I learned was “nunchi”— literally translated, “eye-measure.” Nunchi is the art of sensing what people are thinking and feeling, and responding appropriately. It’s speed-reading a room with the emphasis on the collective,

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The New York Times - Daily Edition for Kindle (The New York Times Company)

- Your Highlight on Location 7931-7933 | Added on Sunday, November 3, 2019 3:32:15 PM

Maybe you have nunchi already: Do you sense when a host secretly wants you to leave? Do you accurately sense when dangers are real before your friends do? Then you probably have quick nunchi.

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The New York Times - Daily Edition for Kindle (The New York Times Company)

- Your Highlight on Location 8333-8335 | Added on Sunday, November 3, 2019 4:49:46 PM

Highly ideological parties and candidates can win elections in the right circumstances, and a race against an unpopular, unfit and impeachable incumbent might be one of them. But it would still be a folly, a case study in ideology’s exacting costs, for the Democrats to take the chance.

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The New York Times - Daily Edition for Kindle (The New York Times Company)

- Your Highlight on Location 9118-9120 | Added on Sunday, November 3, 2019 4:51:08 PM

No wonder the president chose to lambaste Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman as a “Never Trumper.” The combat veteran had the simple decency of being scandalized by what he heard from the president on the Ukraine phone call, and by what he knew of the discrepancies between what he heard on the call and the account of

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Best Damn Sports Books Part 2

Over 10 years ago, I posted a list of my favorite sports books. Here is an updated list of new sports books that I have enjoyed by sports category:

Basketball

A Sense of Where You Are: Bill Bradley at Princeton by John McPhee

The Book of Basketball: The NBA According to The Sports Guy by Bill Simmons

Dream Team: How Michael, Magic, Larry, Charles, and the Greatest Team of All Time Conquered the World and Changed the Game of Basketball Forever by Jack McCallum

On the Court and Inside the Heads of Basketball's Best Players by Idan Ravin

Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success by Phil Jackson

Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley, and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty of the 1980s by Jeff Pearlman

Tennis

Open by Andre Agassi

But Seriously by John McEnroe

Hardcourt Confidential: Tales from Twenty Years in the Pro Tennis Trenches by Patrick McEnroe

Trophy Son by Douglas Brunt (fictional story about tennis prodigy. Excellent!)

Golf

Tiger Woods by Jeff Benedict

Football

Football for a Buck: The Crazy Rise and Crazier Demise of the USFL by Jeff Pearlman

Three and Out: Rich Rodriguez and the Michigan Wolverines in the Crucible of College Football by John U. Bacon

Boxing

Unbeaten: Rocky Marciano's Fight for Perfection in a Crooked World World by Mike Stanton

Drama in the Bahamas: Muhammad Ali's Last Fight by Dave Hannigan

John Feinstein

One on One: Behind the Scenes with the Greats in the Game by John Feinstein

Interesting Notes and Analysis from Reading The New York Times

"The study, published in Current Psychology, found a substantial link between procrastination and clutter problems in all the age groups. Frustration with clutter tended to increase with age. Among older adults, clutter problems were also associated with life dissatisfaction."
“Cable networks have figured out that the most interesting television of the week is the National Football League pregame show, and that if you put enough experts on arguing about something that hasn’t happened yet, people will watch."

"The real story of Trump isn’t his amorality and outrageousness. It’s Americans’ receptiveness to that. It’s the fact that, according to polls, most voters in November 2016 deemed him dishonest and indecent, yet plenty of them cast their ballots for him anyway."

"There is an amazing calculus in old age. As much is taken away, we find more to love and appreciate. We experience bliss on a regular basis. As one friend said: “When I was young I needed sexual ecstasy or a hike to the top of a mountain to experience bliss. Now I can feel it when I look at a caterpillar on my garden path.”

“Cash was the only major asset class that posted positive returns in ’18,” according to a Bank of America report. Even the reed-thin 1.9 percent return on cash in money market funds was less than the 2.2 percent consumer inflation rate, the report said, but at least it was a positive number.

"For patients who have one terminal illness that is either resistant to treatment or can’t be safely treated, combined with a second very serious illness or complication, along with a high degree of physiological frailty, physicians should consider comfort measures instead of cure."

Why Walking is the Key to Being More Productive

by Clay Skipper

"Ultimately, his point is not that walking is a nice, mind-clearing activity (though it certainly can be). It’s that removing all friction from your life, and replacing it with the seductive speed of convenience, has pernicious effects.

For one thing, when we rush or move quickly, we stop being present and forget what we experience. (“High speed is a menace to memory, because memory depends on time and spatial awareness,” he writes.) Secondly, there’s a political aspect to walking: When we don’t walk among our fellow citizens—when we have the privilege of only traveling privately—we can become coldly detached from the fabric of the community. (“What would happen if world leaders were forced to take daily walks among the people?” Erling Kagge asks.) And, finally, taking a shortcut to what you want often leaves you disappointed because objects of our desire are less meaningful without the struggle to capture them. (How much less interesting might summiting Everest be if you could just take an elevator to the top?)"

Will Trump Be the Sage One? by Maureen Dowd

"But Trump, unlike W., is driven by the drama of it. “It’s a game of revving up the excitement and making people afraid and then backing off on the fear in order to declare that he’s resolved the situation,” D’Antonio said. “Trump prefers threats and ultimatums to action because that allows him to look big and tough and get attention without doing something for which he will be held responsible. This is who he is at his core: an attention-seeking, action-averse propagandist who is terrified of accountability in the form of coffins arriving at Dover Air Force Base.”

Latest Books I Have Read