Cahokia, Illinois is a key example to how robust life was in the Americas long before Christopher Columbus

The Americas prior to Christopher Columbus were far from the untouched wilderness we have long been taught in school. They were instead a complex environment that worked because of the interplay between humans and natural forces, as I noted in my recent article about historian Charles C. Mann’s book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus.

I was particularly interested to get back to the section about Cahokia, which is now present day in Illinois just down the highway from where I grew up in Edwardsville and practically in the shadow of the St. Louis Arch (see these photos from my most recent visit to Cahokia).

I would have liked Mann to include more about Cahokia. But he colors in a bit of the amazing story of the Cahokia tribe of the Illiniwek people. Here are some of his highlights:

• Anyone traveling up the Mississippi River in 1180 would’ve seen the 120 "Cahokia mounds" looming in the distance. 
• Monks Mound was (and still is) the largest of the mounds and is the largest man-made mound ever built in the United States. Its base is larger than both the Pyramid of the Sun in Mexico and the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt.
• With about 15,000 people, Cahokia was the largest concentration of people north of the Rio Grande. It was also really the only city - period - north of the Rio Grande. The population at the time was comparable in size to London, which, if you think about it, is kind of astounding.
• It had few specialized craft workers and no middle-class merchants. The inhabitants really knew nothing about how cities worked so they had to invent everything for themselves as they progressed.
• Much at the heart of Mann's thesis is that Cahokia's mounds weren’t always thought to be Native American. In the 19th century, various scholars believed them to be Chinese, Welsh, Phoenician, or others. In fact, there was very little serious study at all about Cahokia until the 1960s. 
• Since then, there has been a flood and we have learned a lot, including the 270 bodies that have been found, with all of the burials occurring between 1000 and 1200, including overwhelming evidence of sacrifical burials. Mann notes that about 50 women appear to have been buried alive.
• What eventually killed Cahokia's earliest society was the agricultural runoff created by their maize production, which got into Cahokia Creek and other waterways nearby. Cahokia's leaders were so focused on keeping a strong hold over their people that they didn’t pay enough attention to external environmental factors. 
• By 1350, there was almost no one left. Never again would be that large of a Native American community be established north of Mexico.

Thurston Moore's autobiography surprisingly leaves too much off the table

I'm a big reader of rock-music books, and it's not that often that I find a rock bio about (and especially by) one of my favorite artists that I don't end up finding all that compelling. That has happened with Sonic Life: A Memoir, by Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth.

It's not that Moore didn't put his heart and soul into the book, which is a big one, but he really devotes it to the sounds and bands that influenced him throughout his life. I, on the other hand, was excited about reading it because I actually wanted to learn about his life and his awesome band (which I only got to see once, when they blew my brains out - in a great way, on the Rather Ripped tour - in Dallas).

The interesting stuff I gleaned from his book before abandoning it about a quarter of the way through:

• Moore was not named after anyone from Gilligan’s Island. It was a family name and the future rock star was born in south Florida, where he lived his first decade before later becoming an icon of New York City along the likes of Lou Reed and The Ramones. 
• Five-year-old Thurston heard his older brother’s single for “Louie, Louie” and loved it. Up until that point, nothing was played on the stereo in his family's house other than classical music. After that, his brother had a guitar that no amount of padlocks or other blockades could keep Thurston away from.
• At 16, he heard Iggy Pop and the Stooges and wanted to get Iggy’s haircut. He started taking the 90-minute train ride from his hometown of Bethel, Connecticut to see bands in New York City. 
• Thurston loved David Bowie, Roxy Music, and Sweet, unlike most kids around him who loved bands like Yes, Boston, and the Allman Brothers. His dad even worried about his sexuality because of all his glam-rock posters. 
• After high school, his dad unexpectedly slipped into a coma and died.
• Thurston went off to college, but once he realized that he wasn’t very good at writing gonzo articles about music in the school paper - and the only thing he enjoyed about the whole university experience was smoking cigarettes in the classrooms - he quit. At this point, Thurston needed to stop reading and writing about rock and go down much more frequently to New York to experience it.
• His true arrival on the NYC scene was in 1976, meaning bands like Lou Reed solo, Talking Heads, Blondie, and Television were around. He loved seeing shows at CBGB, but when Thurston and his friend Harold walked into Max’s and stumbled into a Cramps and Suicide show, he became a rock n’roll goner at that point. 
• At a Wayne County show in 1976, Thurston met Joey Ramone. They chatted and he felt pretty comfortable around the star, helped by the fact that they were both 6’6”. On his first journey to CBGB, he and Harold were able to say hi again to Joey in the entryway and, not having enough cash to get into the $2.50 Mumps and Blondie show, were lucky enough to sneak in under the auspices of being friends of Joey. 
• At all the gigs he was seeing, he would agree to smoke weed, do acid or mescaline, and drink alcohol, but it was never really his thing. “I preferred focus. I wanted to study every move, each gesture [of the bands].” Through music, he was looking for “transcendence, devotion, sonic love.” 
• At 19, he was becoming pretty restless to move to the city - even though Bethel was perfectly comfortable - and devote his life to rock n’roll.

I would have liked to learn more about that life, rather than the many lives that inspired him.

3 out of 5 stars

Unfrosted tells a lovable origin story of the Pop Tart wars

The unhealthy diets and tummy aches of the Civil War-era led a drive to culinary innovation, and by baking water and graham flour, Dr. James Caleb Jackson of New York was able to create the first breakfast cereal, Granula. 

From there, a Seventh Day Adventist in Battle Creek, Michigan named John Harvey Kellogg set about making “ready-to-eat cereals widely available at grocery stores.” Kellogg called his formula Granola. Creative, eh? By 1902 there were 40 cereal manufacturers in Battle Creek, including Grape-Nuts, Grape-Nut Flakes, Shredded Wheat, and Toasted Corn Flakes.

For more on cereal history, I highly recommend The Great American Cereal Book and also T.C. Boyle’s The Road to Wellville from 1993, which I somehow haven’t read yet.

The evolution of breakfast was on my mind when I watched Jerry Seinfeld’s new movie Untoasted - an Austin Powers-like, star-studded, rapid-fire, candy-colored comedy on Netflix. Jerry plays a Mad Man-like exec at Kellogg's in 1963 in, yes, Battle Creek who is doing battle indeed with Amy Schumer's Post to be the first to land on a pastry that will take kids' minds off always eating nothing but cereal for breakfast. Which company will get what we've come to know as Pop Tarts into the hands of the most kids?

The cast of characters is not only an endless stream of stars, but Jerry equips them with really funny material. Melissa McCarthy and Jim Gaffigan shine on the Kellogg's team, as does Hugh Grant as an extremely strange Shakespearean Tony the Tiger, Christian Slater as the head of the evil milkmen syndicate, Bill Burr as a sexually debauched President Kennedy, Mikey Day as the leader of the Snap Crackle and Pops, Kyle Dunnigan as Walter Cronkite and Johnny Carson, and John Slattery and Jon Hamm as ad men.

The movie doesn't get great reviews and, while it is a lot of eye candy to handle, I really like it and think it's the kind of thing - because its bowl is so overflowing with jokes - that might actually be good to watch a few times.

4.5 out of 5 stars

BONUS: When I recorded Avalanche on Fubo, I didn't really know what I was going to get. I thought it might be a high-school movie along the lines of Porky's or Hot Dog: The Movie. But instead it's a melodramatic disaster flick from 1978. Bad as it is, I couldn't take my eyes off it because it's a Roger Corman production, which means just off-kilter and weird enough - and bad enough - to be good. Mia Farrow attends her ex-husband Rock Hudson's ski-resort opening. Robert Forster tries to warn them that the resort is in an environmentally unstable location. They get into a three-way relationship and the whole thing is a big mess. The movie, filmed in Colorado, cost a ton to create and bombed at the box office. 2.5 out of 5 stars.

We are part of Sapiens, which is just one of the multiple human species that have existed

I've started reading Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, by Yuval Noah Harari, and - if you're interested in people at all - it's a gripping read with each and every paragraph. It's broken into four parts, or revolutions: cognitive, agricultural, the unification of mankind, and scientific. My multi-part overview begins with Part 1 on the start of The Cognitive Revolution.

Harari's timeline at the beginning includes the most crucial of stats and puts everything nicely in context. That was what was missing in another history of humankind I recently read, A Little History of the World, by E.H. Gombrich. (Side conversation: If you’re looking for a chronological human history, Gombrich's book is a little all over the place and probably not for you. That said, his humor - and the narrator in the audiobook is very good too - is really well worth the read all by itself.) 

Back to Harari:

• Matter and energy appeared 13.5 billion years ago - the world of physics beginning about 300,000 years later with the Big Bang. The world of chemistry began with atoms and molecules interacting.
• Earth was formed 4.5 billion years ago. Then, about 3.8 billion years ago, the world of biology started when molecules formed organisms.
• Fast forward to 6 million years ago, when humans and chimpanzees shared the last of their immediate relatives.
• The genus Homo - species that evolve from a common ancestor and which are very closely related to modern humans (Homo Sapien self gratuitously means wise man) - evolved in Africa and invented the first stone tools 2.5 million years ago.
• Humans spread from Africa to Eurasia 2 million years ago.
• Neanderthals evolved in Europe and the Middle East 500,000 years ago.
• After an astoudingly long time continuing to exist and evolve in the cold, fire was invented and being used daily 200,000 years ago.

Harari's narrative begins 70,000 years ago with "The Cognitive Revolution," with this being essentially the start of our history, language emerging, and Sapiens finally spreading beyond Africa (long after other types of human species did). They settled in Australia 45,000 years ago, alongside the extinction of that continent's megafauna. Neanderthals became extinct 30,000 years ago. Sapiens setted America 16,000 years ago as American megafauna went extinct. 

From about 2 million years ago to 10,000 years ago, there were several different human species roaming the world. It wasn’t exactly like the posters we see of apes slowly progressing into modern humans. It was just like how today there are many species of dogs, foxes, bears, and pigs. Someday there very likely could be multiple human species on Earth as well.

If you traveled back 150,000 years ago, most scientists agree there were humans walking around East Africa that looked pretty much like us today. 70,000 years ago they started spreading through Eurasia. There are differing theories, but it seems most likely that Sapiens somehow killed off Neanderthals and everyone alive today harkens back to that original Sapien species from East Africa. This species made its way from Africa to Europe and Asia then to Australia and North America and finally to South America. There is some evidence and ongoing research to determine if Neanderthals weren’t completely killed off but actually merged with Sapiens and still exist in some small percentages to this day.

Homo Sapiens have long viewed ourselves "as set apart from animals. But that's just not the case. Like it or not, we are members of a large and particularly noisy family called the great apes. Our closest living relatives include chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans. The chimpanzees are the closest. Just 6 million years ago, a single female ape had two daughters. One became the ancestor of all chimpanzees, the other is our own grandmother."

Humans have paid dearly for our many advantages. While being upright is nice because we can scan the landscape for threats and use our hands for things like throwing rocks at those threats, it is not easy to carry upright our heavy brains. These big-head-causing brains also have made it so we need to be born premature for mothers to survive childbirth, which is why it takes us a much longer time than animal babies, which typically start walking, eating on their own, and doing other mature things much faster than humans. 

The human place in the food chain, until recently, was right in the middle. We only jumped to the top about 100,000 years ago. While species like sharks and lions evolved over a much longer period of time to rule the food chain, humans ascended quickly, which made us “full of fears and anxieties over our position, which makes us doubly cruel and dangerous.”

Fire was huge for us to because we could chew and digest our cooked food in an hour or so while chimps would take about five hours to do the same thing with raw foods. Cooking is believed to have “opened the way to the jumbo brains of Neanderthals and Sapiens.”

The Count of Monte Cristo is a tour de force of reading adventure

1844's The Count of Monte Cristo by France's Alexandre Dumas (how cool-looking is that author? what a rock star) has stood as my favorite adventure classic novel since my days as an undergrad English lit major. It tells the history of Napoleonic times in 1800s France but wrapped in the added excitement of an action/adventure modern-era-type flick.

I highly recommend the full-length, epic novel for anyone who doesn't know the story. I also just listened to the abridged audiobook from Naxos Audiobooks, which is available to anyone with a library card in the Hoopla app. It's only two hours and suffers by losing all the excellent suspense and character development of the full experience. I listened to parts of the unabridged, 52-hour audiobook and, sure enough, it's a lot better. But it's also 52 hours!

In the story, it's 1815 and Napoleon has just escaped from his exile in Elba, off the western coast of Italy. Edmond Dantès has just been named captain of a ship that makes runs between France and Elba and agrees to deliver some packages back and forth for some Bonapartists. A crewmate is jealous that Dantès gets named captain and, just as Dantès is about to marry his fiancée Mercédès, the crewmate conspires to spread word that Dantès is a Napoleon sympathizer.

Dantès is arrested and sentenced without a trial to life imprisonment at the Château d'If in Marseille. After six years in the dank place, Dantès is preparing to commit suicide when the Abbé Faria, an Italian priest, pops into his cell after digging a wayward escape tunnel. The Abbé helps Dantès figure out the many people who were involved in the constructed conspiracy to lock him up. Additionally, he turns Dantès into a complete intellectual over the next eight years and also informs him of a treasure on the island of Monte Cristo south of Elba.

That's all I really want to tell you. The tale takes off on an extended jam in revenge adventure. His kindness to those who have helped him through life stand in stark contrast to the subtle manipulations which he uses to slowly torture those who have betrayed him - and each are traits that are a joy to see as they unfold. Which way will he go with Fernand Mondego (his old best friend), Danglars (his former ship crewmate), Villefort (the crafty magistrate), Mercédès (his former fiancee), and others?

If I were recommending one ancient classic piece of literature, it might very well be The Count of Monte Cristo.

• Reading the full book: 5 out of 5 stars
• Listening to the full audiobook: 4 out of 5 stars
• Listening to the abridged audiobook: 3 out of 5 stars

"Winning ugly" in tennis is all about finding your opponent's weaknesses

Since I've whole-heartedly gotten back into competitive tennis, former pro Brad Gilbert's classic Winning Ugly: Mental Warfare in Tennis and Lessons from a Master has been a book at the top of my list to read. I'm going to sum up the most interesting bits in this three-part series. Here's part 1. 

First published in 1992, when Jim Courier and Monica Seles were each number one in the world, I'm finding the advice to be timeless, even through the Nadal/Federer/Djokovic era and into the modern Alcaraz/Sinner/Zverev one.

Gilbert was a winner when he played on the pro tour not because he was a better athlete than his competitors but because he thought a lot between points and matches. Timothy Gallwey’s philosophies, which I recently wrote about, are on the intuitive processes while Gilbert’s is on the analytical processes. Gallwey focuses on the inner game while Gilbert focuses on seeing what’s in front of you and doing something about it.

He says that by using the advice given in Winning Ugly, tennis players’ chances of winning each match will go up by 20 percent. 

Gilbert prepares for 10 minutes on his way to matches by trying to answer what weaknesses of his opponent to exploit. This will determine how he will serve, what parts of his own game he should rely upon, and where he wants to place himself most often on the court.

Exploiting opportunities is key, and Gilbert says it's even easier at the recreational level than the pro level. Only once or twice out of every 10 matches will you encounter another player who isn’t lazy and is actually thinking about a game plan before the match. Players usually just show up to play, but you can get a step up on them if you review your notes on that player (if you have played them before), arrive at the courts early and stretch to loosen up, hit around with anyone else who might be there for some light warm-up, and work on your serve before the match. That should almost be an assurance to win the match over your opponent, Gilbert writes. "Recreational players are usually long on running and short on thinking." 

I sometimes play guys who, two hours into the match, ask if I have any extra water. That should be a sign that they aren’t too serious, Gilbert claims. Therefore, the tennis bag checklist is crucial:

• Why do some people have seemingly way too many rackets? There’s good reason. If control is proving to be a problem on any given day (or even just over the course of the past three or four games), go to a more tightly strung racket (which will be a higher number). If I’m getting overpowered and need more power myself, I can go with a racket strung looser (which will be a lower number). I've always found stringing confusing. Go here for how it's done.
• Take tape and band aids. I could have used some in my last match when a toenail got crunched halfway through. 
• Along these lines, take two Advil or Tylenol or whatever pain medicine before and after a match and bring some in your bag. And bring pain rubs. 
• Even just a few minutes of stretching before a match will pay off. Opponents often just warm up their arms and hands. Focus on your legs. Running in tennis movements back and forth and up and back in the court, and kicking your butt as you run, will get the legs ready. "Gradual, gentle, smooth stretching, never strain," and especially stretch the groin. Finally, don't forget to stretch after matches before cooling down. 

In the warmup with the other player: 

• Continue stretching. 
• Get your eyes and body working together. 
• Begin to assess your opponent. 
• For defrosting your strokes in the short warmup, volley for a few minutes and stay on the balls of your feet, work on hitting deep with your baseline strokes and try to work on your weaker stroke (typically the backhand), hit a few overheads to help practice your serve, and practice tossing the ball 4 or 5 times before actually warming up your serve.

What to watch for when warming up with your opponent, especially if you’ve never played them before:

• When he's at the net warming up his volley, hit a surprise lob to see whether his footwork is quick or clumsy.
• When he's at the net, hit a ball near his feet to see if he bends his knees or drops his racket with the lazy man’s volley.
• When warming up at the baseline, hit the ball down the middle to see whether he favors the forehand or backhand. And does he hit slices or other unusual shots, does he have big looping strokes or compact ones? The strokes that are the prettiest in warmup are ugly in a match, so never be impressed in the warmup.

To deal with pre-match nerves: 

• Practice taking deep breaths, like you have asthma.
• To avoid heavy feet, stay on the balls of your feet, not only in warmups but in the important parts of a match. Tell yourself “toes not heels.” This works on your opponent's mind too. 
• Try to read the label on the ball as it comes to you. This will take your mind off your nerves and onto a pleasant distraction, even if you can't truly tell whether the ball says Penn or Wilson.
• Sing a song.

That should be enough for a while. I'll report back with more of Gilbert's advice after I've read another third of his classic.

Sherman Alexie's Part-Time Indian can help pre-teens understand and empathize with a world that is cruel to many people

Since my daughter is now 10, it occurs to me that there won't necessarily be a whole slew of nights left when I get the chance to read to and with her before bedtime. Back in March, I wrote about one of my favorite authors, Sherman Alexie, and how he has a modern classic book that is nearly perfect for pre-teens:

Next on my list from Alexie is his young-adult novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, from 2007. It’s listed in 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die, which notes its revered status as a favorite on banned-book lists by school boards. It’s “controversial in the way life itself is controversial: unsettled, uneasy … devastating one day and comic the next.” Alexie also won the 2009 Odyssey Award for his reading of it as the year’s best audiobook.

We finished it tonight and the novel gets two major thumbs-ups from me and my daughter. Although most people will be attracted by the banned-book designation, there will be a handful of racists and prudes who will consider it a badge of honor towards their U.S. patriotism to not approve of this book. (There are a couple of sections about masturbation and other teen tomfoolery that I kind of mumbled through, but certainly nothing that is bannable and the tale itself is never less than page-turning.)

We read the 10th-anniversary edition and Alexie added details in a postscript about how the narrator, Arnold Spirit Jr., also known as "Junior," was more-than-a-little based off his own early-teen years. Junior is an aspiring cartoonist and good basketball player who decides to leave his Spokane reservation to attend a white high school. This irritates many on the rez, especially his best friend Rowdy, who is based off Alexie's best friend growing up named Randy, who would later die as an adult when he wasn't wearing his seat belt in a car crash.

Because of Junior's balancing act between the worlds of Native Americans and whites, I've never read a better description of the many ways it must feel alienating to live in the U.S. as members of reservation communities. The descriptions of alcohol abuse, violence and bullying, and abject poverty are harrowing.

Alexie began writing it as a memoir but then was convinced by an editor to turn it into a young-adult novel. Still, he noted that it's "about 78 percent" a true story. From the first sentence, when Junior informs us he was "born with water on the brain," Alexie opens up an entire world of a poor person with a disability and all kinds of other issues to deal with that, in my mind, can help prepare a pre-teen for the world and all the empathy that is needed to survive healthily within it.

5 out of 5 stars

Chuck Paluhniak's Survivor takes a disturbed journey through the mind of the last member of a suicide cult

For obsessives about cults and Chuck Paluhniak's Fight Club, his 1999 novel Survivor is just what the doctor ordered. 

The story starts with a bang, as Tender Branson, the last surviving member of the suicide Creedish Church cult, has forced an entire plane of people out on an island and made the pilot take him back up before forcing him out the hatch because Tender has to pee so badly and can't see any other way to make it happen. With everyone gone, he figures he has two hours or so to tell his story on the black box before the autopilot and gas run out.

The start is classic. And even if the rest of the book isn't quite as good, it is an entertaining take on how mass murderers and other unusual characters take on the roles of celebrity in our culture. Survivor is also memorable for how the story is told, with the last chapter occuring first and then working all the way down to chapter one as the conclusion.

Tender's life story is kind of a mishmash, but in a mentally disturbed, disturbing, and again entertaining way. He has a job as a house cleaner and often rattles off lists of basic chores he performs like a how-to YouTube video playlist. Making lobsters for the home owners one night, he steals one for himself then realizes he's eating it while it's still alive. He also has a job answering calls on a crisis hotline and always instructs people simply to kill themselves. 

Growing up in his cult community, Tender had 13 siblings. All his family is dead, reportedly in a mass suicide - at least for the children who hadn't already been eaten by the adults. Several had not died; however, by the time Tender is telling his story, he is the last one, as a murderer may have been stalking his other remaining siblings.

Being the sole survivor, he had become famous, gone on a book tour, and appeared on the cover of People. Part of his fame came from his girlfriend-groupie-prostitute Fertility helping him predict the disasters of the future. And even though they attempt to get married in a huge ceremony during halftime at the Super Bowl (it doesn't happen because he screams out that the Colts will beat the Cardinals 27-24 and pandemonium breaks out across the stadium), his talent waned pretty quickly and a planned TV spinoff fell through. He considered how committing suicide would keep him in the spotlight for a bit. 

Like Fight Club, the whole thing is pretty discombobulating because of the scattered timeline but also because the narrator has a multitude of personalities he himself can't quite figure out. Partly for those reasons (and also because of 9/11), a planned film adaptation was postponed and still has yet to happen. But for telling narratives about what a celebrity-obsessed and depraved society we live in, Paluhniak is about as great as it gets.

3.5 out of 5 stars

AI will inevitably help us become more human than we used to be

Writer Kevin Kelly concludes that “the computer age didn’t really start until computers merged with the telephone” in the early 1980s. The Internet has of course grown since then to be central to the way our society operates and it will continue to grow. That is the baseline that begins his 2016 book The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future. A pretty intriguing title, and I wanted in on the secrets.

Things we can’t stop include massive copying, massive tracking and total surveillance, decentralized ownership, virtual reality that is actually real, and improved artificial intelligence and robots that will both take our jobs and create new businesses. Kelly writes that we need to embrace these changes. We don’t want to fight any one invention because the scientific process has made it so that we’ll take “solid things - an automobile, a shoe - and turn them into intangible verbs. Products will become services and processes. Embedded with high doses of technology, an automobile becomes a transportation service … rapidly adapting to customer usage, feedback, competition, innovation, and wear.”

Kelly has organized his book into 12 categories that are verbs like "accessing, tracking, and sharing" and posits that we look at technology this way instead of "iPhone, Uber, or shoe." Which products or companies will succeed or fail is unpredictable because those are determined by fads, fashion, and commerce. 

“Becoming” is the first area of focus. In the 1980s and 90s, young boys in chatrooms and Wall Street traders used the internet but leaders at ABC TV, WIRED, and many others scoffed at the thought of the internet going big. Many thought there would be 500 or so channels on TV that would be where the content would be created. “Instead, billions of users created the content for all the other users. There were 500 million channels.” The internet stuff the execs couldn’t imagine was that passive consumers would become active creators. We still fail to truly grasp how awesome the web has become, with its 60 trillion web pages (about 10,000 for every person alive). 

The corporations eventually realized the online world could be their distribution network, but they did not foresee that they wouldn’t be the ones making the content. YouTube, blogs, and social media were not created by big-media’s staff but by their users. We no longer even typically get customer service anymore from corporations because we can ask the global community congregating at places like Reddit subgroups. 

By now, the internet feels completely bloated, with “more than enough content to demand our attention for the next million years.” But Kelly claims, in reality, “nothing has happened yet! The internet is still at the beginning of its beginning.” For instance, by 2050, just about everything with have a little AI added to it. “The last 30 years has created a marvelous starting point, a solid platform to build truly great things.” We are just now “becoming” and the coolest inventions are yet to happen. 

“Cognifying” is the second inevitable and it’s all about AI. Granted, this book was released seven years ago so quite a bit has already happened, but perhaps not as much has happened as one would think. “At the rate AI is improving, a kid born today will rarely need to see a doctor to get a diagnosis by the time they are an adult.” AI will not look like HAL 9000 - “a discreet machine animated by a humanlike consciousness” - but rather like Amazon Web Services, “a cheap, reliable industrial-grade digital smartness running behind everything and almost invisible except when it blinks off.” 

One example of being cognitive is photography. Years ago, it would have taken $100,000 and hefty bags of equipment to do everything cameras and iPhones do today to make photos treated, modified, and beautiful. Other examples could include music created in real-time as needed for soundtracks or video games, smart clothes that tell laundry machines how to wash them, advertising optimized for how many people follow and watch and what their level of influence is, matching buyers and sellers of real estate, real-time adjustments of medical care and treatments, dolls that will probably be the first really popular robots, and stats on every breath and movement of athletes to create highly advanced fantasy sports.

Google has been working on AI for decades and has always seen its search engine as a way to refine its AI rather than AI as a way to improve its search engine. Google has indeed been buying up lots of AI companies and, by its own predictions, AI should be its main product by 2026. This would be pure hyperbole, except three recent breakthroughs have made the ancient promise of AI possible: “parallel computation” has become so cheap that companies are able to use it in ways that Facebook can identify friends easily in photos and Netflix can make reliable recommendations, it’s taken a long time to get enough big data fed into the system for computers to get this smart, and the growing amount of users is helping to make it all even smarter. 

By 2100, Kelly predicts that 70 percent of the jobs people do will be replaced by automation. Assembly-line and factory workers will be the first to go. Pharmacists will be replaced by pill-dispensing machines. Office and school cleaners, truckers, and information-intensive white-collar jobs are in the AI path. But these aren’t things to worry about. No Victorian boy ever dreamed of one day becoming a professional video-game developer. Those who once farmed began working in factories and then later moved to other jobs. 

“Today, the vast majority of us are doing jobs that no farmer from the 1800s could have imagined.” AI’s greatest benefit is that it “will help us define humanity. We need AIs to tell us who we are.” It’s not a race against the machines. It’s a race with the machines. “Let the robots take our jobs, and let them help us dream up new work that matters” and helps us become “more human than we were.”

European colonization of the Americas greatly set back human progress

I’m often not great at staying focused while listening to audiobooks and was bored silly with the first hour of 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, by Charles C. Mann. But I really wanted to know more about his challenge to the long-held notion that the Americas were a sparsely populated wilderness before Christopher Columbus landed ashore. 

Luckily the Hoopla library app has a 20-page Cliff notes-type summary. Here are my Cliff notes to the Cliff notes. Caution: it's interesting stuff:

• As the last Ice Age receded, the New England region turned into an ecologically diverse landscape. Many people were hunter-nomads, but there were also settled villages with established agricultural practices.
• As early as 1616, hepatitis began attacking the indigenous population in the region. It had been brought by European settlers and killed off most of the region’s native Americans. The same thing was happening in Peru. The sophisticated engineering and military capabilities of the Inca society were no match for the smallpox brought by Europeans. Hernando de Soto’s exploration left almost no population in its wake in the Mississippi Valley, thanks mainly to the diseases his pigs carried.
• Europeans understood how diseases operated and spread, but there were not any attempts to halt or slow colonization. Transmission was often viewed simply as God’s will. Scholars have put the death totals in the millions, suggesting there had been a significant population in the Americas. 
• The human die off truly set humanity back, as there was a ton of knowledge and advancement lost in the entire colonization process.
• Peru’s mountainous landscape was shaped by continental drift that became an attractive locale for diverse groups of Indians around 10,000 B.C., with complex societies, governments, and urban centers common by 3200 B.C.
• The cultivation of maze throughout Mesoamerica was truly one of humanity's greatest feats of genetic engineering. Native American ecological influence could have helped greatly advance society's progress, but Europeans wiped out the native people and, with them, almost all their knowledge of landscape architecture and the urban settlement of places like Cahokia, Illinois, near modern-day St. Louis. 
• I grew up very close to Cahokia, where several mounds/hills still exist. It’s amazing to think back to how advanced this society was in 1250 B.C. before it collapsed around 1350 due to environmental mismanagement, social unrest, and a devastating earthquake. Likewise, the Mayan population collapsed between 800 and 830 B.C. because of overpopulation, resource overuse, and severe drought. 

Mann’s conclusion is that the Americas were not an untouched wilderness but rather a complex environment that worked because of the interplay between humans and natural forces. This suggests that people now and in the future should focus on building sustainable habitats rather than trying to simply reproduce what has been done in the past in terms of restoring ecosystems. 

It's no wonder "white trash" is so prominent in America. That's who founded it

Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election because, like so many politicians before him, such as Bill Clinton, he refused to be the usual scripted politician and embraced “the common man, the working stiff, the forgotten rural American,” according to Nancy Isenberg in White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America.

Turns out, sound deliberation and calm problem solving have never been the reality of the U.S. political landscape, which jibes with my master’s thesis, which concluded that personal foibles tend to help presidential candidates win office. 

The scumbag family that accuses a Black man of rape in To Kill a Mockingbird, disgraced chef Paula Deen, and the Duke boys of Dukes of Hazzard are all popular examples of white trash - “marginalized Americans stigmatized for their inability to be productive, to own property, or to produce healthy and upwardly mobile children.” These examples of “human waste” were known as “waste people” as early as colonial times in the 1500s.

British colonizers saw the New World as the perfect place to ship its most unproductive and idle people. One reason we don’t see it this way any long, Isenberg writes, is that our elementary-school history lessons tend to become pretty much the extent of what we still know years later as adults, which, essentially equates to a series of vague myths about American exceptionalism, our uniqueness, and that there is an absence of class in our country. “Americans do not like to talk about class. It is not supposed to be important in our history. It is not who we are.”

We celebrate the Pilgrims only because Thanksgiving was invented to boost the struggling poultry (turkey) industry during the Civil War. And earlier, just because the country had won its independence from England, it doesn’t mean the British class system suddenly went away. “Long-entrenched beliefs about poverty and the willful exploitation of human labor … [meant that some humans have] remained disposable well into modern times.” 

In the time of Shakespeare, French and English intellectuals became fascinated with the idea of sending Sir Walter Raleigh and other like-minded “men of action endowed with larger-than-life egos, heroism, and ill-tempered public behavior” overseas to the “almost inconceivable” wilderness of America, which they imagined to be filled with cannibals that could be tamed and subordinated and helpful in gathering natural resources for "the greater good."

But it wasn’t just the wealthy and educated who thought the artisans, the poor, and the homeless should be the ones put to better use in America. "This view of poverty was widely shared." Most of the settlers of the early 1600s to Jamestown died off quickly and a good portion of the rest “dreamt of finding gold, which did little to inspire hard work.” Gold didn’t pan out but some success started to happen with the “filthy weed” tobacco. The land was still barren by the late 1600s but the process for distributing land ownership and the creation of a white slave class ensured an already deeply entrenched division of classes. 

The 700 or so who landed on the Mayflower and other ships in Massachusetts were considered slightly less scum-of-the-Earth. They were, like the Jamestown arrivals, big on land ownership, but unlike those in Jamestown they were religion crazy. When two Quaker women tried to escape the church community, they were charged with contempt and hung. Pretty standard stuff. Class rank was becoming even more embedded in Puritan America, with “age, reputation, marriage, estate, number of sons all properly calculated before a church seat was assigned.”

Bacon’s Rebellion is an example of a defining event of the era. Sir Francis Bacon originated from wealth but decided to fight for the lower class. Part of what he was rebelling against was the “the most promising land was never equally available for all.” The game was rigged against many people, something that should sound similar to all of us today - no matter whether we’re on the rich or poor side of the divide.

RIP Alice Munro, whose stories perhaps got better as she got older

Western Ontario may not have been the best place to grow up for a kid, but for Alice Munro, it provided a fertile ground of small-town characters to spread throughout her lifetime of writing. She is renowned as a master of the short story, compared often to William Faulkner and Anton Chekhov, and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013. Somehow I had never read any of her work, but when she passed away on May 13, it spurred me to delve into some of the stories regarded as her finest.

“Walker Brothers Cowboy,” from the collection Dance of the Happy Shades (1968): The young girl narrator describes a walk with her father through her small town anmed Tuppertown on Lake Huron. Then later, the mother isn’t feeling so well so the dad, daughter narrator, and younger brother go for a car ride and, oddly, stop at a woman’s house where there is whiskey and dancing - two things that definitely don’t happen at their own family’s home.

There really is not much that happens in this story, although Munro artfully describes what typical life must have been like for people in Depression Era-ravaged households where better times were still a memory and current times were very rough going. 3 out of 5 stars

“Age of Faith,” from the collection Lives of Girls and Women (1971): A 12-year-old girl with the family name of Jordan attends various churches in her rural community in order to get an understanding of whether God is real. She gets no help trying to understand from her younger brother, who has absolutely no need for religion. She gets no help from her mother, who yells at her that man created God, not the other way around. By the end, after their dad is looking for their dog because it has killed a sheep and the dad is now going to kill the dog, the previously ambivalent younger brother is attempting to pray to keep him from doing it. Meanwhile the protagonist girl still has lots of questions about God’s existence and how difficult it is to watch her brother show this display of faith.

Munro’s writing is all over the place, and despite an excellent concept or idea for a short story, I think she only half pulls it off. The story is profound, but it’s also not that interesting. 2.5 out of 5 stars

“How I Met My Husband,” from the collection Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You (1974): A plane lands in the field across from the wealthy Peebles property, where the not-wealthy 15-year-old protagonist named Edie works, having dropped out of school because of bad grades and disinterest. She imagines that it must be harder for the rich people to picture what the poor people’s houses and lives were like than the other way around. The pilot has been camping out in the field and comes over for water then catches her wearing one of Ms. Peebles’ dresses, but the two spark a bit of a friendship or at least curiosity of each other. Then Alice, the fiancée of the pilot Chris arrives. But she leaves with Ms. Pebbles for a picnic and Edie takes a cake to Chris. They get intimate in his tent and he says he’s leaving and will write her a letter. Alice finds out and is furious but Edie is allowed to stay on working for Ms. Peebles. She waits for the letter for a long time, but it never comes. In the meantime, she builds up a relationship with the postman and they eventually get married. 

Now this is more like it. A great and entertaining story and a deep dive into the loneliness and sexual awakening many - all? - women face. 5 out of 5 stars

“Dimensions,” from the collection Too Much Happiness (2009): Doree is 23 and riding a bus to visit her husband in a home for the criminally insane. Then shifting back to when she was 16, her mother dies in the hospital from a botched operation and Doree moves in with a hospital orderly she has started a relationship with named Lloyd. They move across the country, get married, and have three kids named Sasha, Barbara Ann, and Dimitri. Doree and Lloyd homeschool the kids but increasingly he gets mad at her. One night she buys a dented can of pasta and he accuses her of wanting to poison him and the kids. She leaves and spends the night at the house of an another homeschooling mom. She comes back the next morning and he has murdered all three children because “how could they suffer the shame of knowing their mom had walked out on them?” She works at a job cleaning a motel and sometimes goes to visit Lloyd, who assures her the kids are happy and doing well. She continues to not find meaning in her life.

I found this one to be the most page-turning of these four Munro stories, but the ending is strange and a little unfulfilling. Doree was on her way to see Lloyd again when she witnesses a young man fly out of his pickup truck. Doree breathes life back into the man but it’s unclear if this is a sign to give up on Lloyd or continue to include him in her life. Perhaps Lloyd provides the only happy memory she can imagine about her kids. 4.5 out of 5 stars

Fondly recalling “the trade” from my early-career journalism days, with Calvin Trillin

Even though I was a daily newspaper journalist for several years way back at the start of my career, I still love it when journalists open up about their day-to-day life and what the trade means to them. Therefore, esteemed writer Calvin Trillin's new compiliation, The Lede: Dispatches from a Life in the Press, is set up to be a page-turner for me. 

The book includes “disparate pieces from various places in various styles” and amounts “to a picture from multiple angles of what the press has been like over the years.” It’s true: Trillin has written stories for many outlets, including The New Yorker, The Nation, and one of my old favorites Brill’s Content. Broken into sections on the trade, reporters and reporting, big shots, R.I.P., controversies, niches, and closings. 

His first topic in the book is “the lede,” a term I still use often in my strategic-communications work and often feel apologetic for using, having to explain that "no, I haven’t misspelled something." Trillin calls himself a “collector of ledes.” Like many old-time journalists, he appreciates a story told grippingly from the start. It can be a one-word crime article that begins (and ends) with the word “Dead” or it can an obituary in The New York Times that packs an entire life into a first sentence.

When I started my first newspaper writing job out of college, I was paid $17,000 a year and worked incredibly hard and very long hours. I was a known entity in the community yet the people I was covering - coaches, judges, lawyers, politicians - were all making way more money. I never really thought much about this. I loved to write. I loved to report. If that's what it paid, I would have to be happy with that, even if Trillin points out that news people are odd members of society. Is it a job befitting a college graduate? About all you might be truly guaranteed is a “decent obituary.” 

I also always wanted to work at a magazine and never truly did (I freelanced for National Geographic and other magazine-like publications), but Trillin’s essay on the downfall of magazines is interesting. Time Magazine invented the genre in 1923, with Newsweek coming along 10 years later. It was originally designed like The Week (which is my favorite magazine these days, essentially an upgrade from Time and Newsweek), presenting “the week’s news succinctly to ‘busy men’ who were too involved in their important endeavors to spend time wading through a lot of newspapers.” Time started as “a rewrite operation” before moving into enterprising original reporting. The magazine’s founders invented a fact-checking system that pitted the all-male reporting staff against the all-female research staff with the thought that it “would create a sexual dynamic that could lend energy to the process.” This was in the era of “group journalism,” before bylines were introduced at Newsweek then Time. Columnists followed. 

Trillin himself left Time so he could work for The New Yorker and then, realizing that “the civil-rights struggle had been covered mostly in terms of organizations and court cases and disruptions,” he wanted to write a book all by himself telling the stories of people who had been involved. He has continued to write for The New Yorker and the rest of this book promises interesting stories about it, even if, as Trillin jokes, there hasn't been a person who has worked at The New Yorker who hasn't written a book about working at The New Yorker.

The pieces come into place for the Velvet Underground and Lou Reed to become massively influential

I'm finally committing to a full-length Lou Reed biography. Alongside The Beatles, Reed is second on my list of musical performers I wish I could have seen perform live. So he's a big deal to me. I started PCLB's coverage of Lou Reed: The King of New York, by Will Hermes, with an article about what Lou Reed was like before he was The King of New York. 

Here's part 2.

A history of mental-health issues and hepatitis likely saved Lou Reed from getting drafted into the Vietnam War. It probably helped that he allegedly told the draft board to give him a gun and he “would shoot anyone or anything in front of me.” This fortunate turn allowed him to focus on music and he got a job as a songwriter for Pickwick Records.

John Cale, the Velvet Underground's other guitarist, was born in Wales one week after Reed and had his own early mental-health issues. Reed and John Cale’s first iteration of a music group was to busk on the streets of Manhattan, but soon they put together a band that included Sterling Morrison. They called themselves The Falling Spikes until they changed their name to the Warlocks, which was at the same time the name of a band that would soon change its own moniker to the Grateful Dead. Moe Tucker joined as the band’s drummer right after they were wisely renamed the Velvet Underground. Their first gig was at a Jersey high school with about 1,000 people in attendance. While some were mesmerized, many others ran out screaming from the drone noise.

Next, enter Andy Warhol, who grew up as Andy Warhola in Pittsburgh. Like Reed, he had also suffered mental breakdowns as a child. But that was also a time when he developed his strategy to mostly stay quiet rather than telling people what to do. It became his style and power. He offered to be VU’s manager as long as he got a 25 percent cut. 

Nico allegedly first witnessed the Velvets in action on the same night Warhol first saw them. She had been kicking around as a singer and had even previously hung out with Bob Dylan for a week or so. She called that night seeing VU “the most beautiful moment in my life.” Reed came around pretty quick to her joining the band, although he was still pretty insecure as the lead, saying “I was just this poor little rock and roller and here was this goddess.” 

As they worked on the many brilliant songs from the debut album, Reed and Nico entered a relationship. Years later, she called him “very soft and lovely. He always stayed that way. I used to make pancakes for him.” She also always kind of thought Lou held a grudge against her for what her German people did to his Jewish people. During the same short period that Reed and Nico dated, Cale and It Girl Edie Sedgwick also had a brief fling.

Things didn’t stay great with Nico and the band all that long. She wanted to play Dylan covers and the band mostly refused, knowing he was one of their top rock’n’roll poet competitors. She also asked to sing “Heroin” and “I’m Waiting for the Man,” to which Reed refused. 

But much more influential on Reed than Nico was Warhol. They were best friends and a lot alike. “But Reed’s biggest takeaway was Warhol’s work ethic, which would stick with him for life.” Reed also watched closely as Warhol transformed himself from an “uptown commercial artist” into a flamboyant and open gay man - “in the tentative pre-Stonewall era” - knowing that it was possible to remake himself anyway he liked. 

Billy Name was a kid from the New York suburbs and he became a right-hand man at Warhol’s Factory art spaces. While Warhol and Reed were “strictly comrades,” Name and Reed clicked and not only hung out but would sometimes hook up together afterwards. 

The band finally hit the road - with Nico driving scarily in the English style of occasionally drifting into the wrong lane while Warhol “couldn’t care less” - going to Rutgers and the University of Michigan. It’s safe to say people in the hinterlands didn’t really get it, but the Velvets were about to begin a residency throughout April 1966 in the East Village at a run-down, smelly place called the Dom that was going to truly start to put them on the map, much like The Beatles at the Cavern Club a few years earlier.

Bad Summer People is the trash you’ve been searching for

Bad Summer People is a total trash beach read, and I loved every minute of it. 

Author Emma Rosenblum is the chief content officer for a women’s magazine named Bustle and this 2023 novel is her first, with her second, curiously titled Very Bad Business, apparently due for release this month.

She grew up in New York and lives in Manhattan, with a bio that sounds suspiciously similar to the characters in this book, which takes place on Fire Island and was inspired by the excellent TV shows The White Lotus and Succession.

The action begins when, near summer’s end, a boy finds a dead body along the boardwalk of a summer-vacation beach town. Then the action shifts back to the start of summer as we get to know some of the town’s seasonal visitors. Jason and Lauren are married and hang out with Sam and Jen. There’s also childhood friend Rachel, young bartender Micah, and tennis-pro Robert. These and others carry on with their unlikeable behavior through the season, with the tennis tournament at the club being the center of the action. Then one night a big storm hits and the murder occurs, which lead us down an Agatha Christy-like path towards figuring out how this happened and if anyone is responsible.

I can’t recommend this book enough. Read it now.

5 out of 5 stars

Yeah, Salt Lake City has lots of Mormons, but there are lots of other fun things to do there

I’m headed to Salt Lake City, Utah, so I wanted a good book to get me in the mood. Luckily, professor of American history Benjamin E. Park has just released American Zion: A New History of Zion.

Park is a life-long Mormon who says the stories he was raised on are quite different from what he’s discovered in the historical record, even that of the Mormon library at Brigham Young University. “At the founding meeting for what was then the Church of Christ on April 6, 1830, Joseph Smith, the faith’s ‘first elder,’ dictated the revelation that commanded the faith to keep ‘a record.’ [However,] the new faith’s historical record was primarily envisioned to reaffirm Smith’s role as a prophetic leader and encourage followers to obey his dictates.”

Smith’s first church was actually started way back near Fayette, New York. Even before that, when he was 15, he claimed God descended upon him in a pillar of light and assured him that even though the world was sinful, his own sins would be forgiven.

The controversies started from the beginning. Brigham Young claimed to be Smith’s successor and burned all the existing history at the time so nobody would question his authority. By now, some 400 sects have sprouted that verge from Smith’s original visions for what this American-grown religion would be about. The thesis of the book is to narrate “the long history of cultural wars waged over Mormonism’s purpose and mission.”

Park continues on with the religious or spiritual or whatever visions young Smith encountered along his way. At that point I lost interest in the fairly academically-written tome and decided to instead look at what things I might like to do in Salt Lake City, although with two days at the Kilby Block Party planned, there won’t be time for much else. 

According to “36 Hours in Salt Lake City” in The New York Times, some possible interests include:

• “Celebrate the repeal of liquor laws that required bars to operate as private clubs and collect membership fees. The Red Door has dim lighting, a great martini list and kitschy revolution décor — yes, that’s a Che Guevara mural on the wall. Squatters Pub Brewery serves high-gravity beers from the award-winning brewmaster Jenny Talley.”
• If we need to walk off the rock’n’roll, there’s The Red Butte Garden, “nestled in the foothills above the University of Utah campus. The Living Room is a lookout point named for the flat orange rocks that resemble couches. Sit back and absorb the expansive views of the valley, mountains and the Great Salt Lake.”
• “Chart your own architecture tour. The city’s Main Library, a curving glass structure built in 2003 by the architect Moshe Safdie, has fireplaces on every floor and a rooftop garden with views of the city and the Wasatch Mountains. For older buildings, wander the Marmalade Historic District, home to many original pioneer homes from the 19th century.”
• A growing non-white share of the population means there are great restaurants to be found, including Tibet, Bosnia, and Somalia ones. This includes Himalayan Kitchen, “a down-home dining room with turmeric-yellow walls and red tablecloth tables, where dishes include Nepali goat curry, Himalayan momos, and steamed chicken dumplings served with sesame seed sauce.”
• “As the only sizable city between Denver and Northern California, Salt Lake City gets many touring bands passing through. Hear established and up-and-coming acts at places like the Urban Lounge and Kilby Court.” Ok, I will.
• I kind of can’t believe, with the area STILL getting snow, that I’m not skiing “28 miles east at Park City’s Utah Olympic Park,” but alas it seems my ski season is over.

Woody Allen still has the brilliant absurdist-essayist touch

When I was younger, I frequently turned to Woody Allen’s comedy collections Getting Even, Without Feathers, and Side Effects (I haven’t read 2007’s Mere Anarchy) for comedic and writing inspiration. These are admittedly more complicated to turn to since the film legend’s personal controversies, but I was interested to at least see if he still has the same sociologically insightful magic, so I dug into his latest collection - from 2022 - called Zero Gravity.

Daphne Merkin, a writer for The New Yorker, offers an introduction that takes us down the memory lane of some of the “cerebral jokester’s” best lines. She notes that the collection includes 19 pieces, one of which is a 50-page short story called “Growing Up in New York” that is appearing for the first time. To see if I want to read the entire collection, let’s start with a report on the first four stories.

“You Can’t Go Home Again - And Here’s Why:” The narrator, a big-time mineral trader, gets a letter that a movie company would like to film at his house. The housekeeper and wife are excited by this prospect but the trader doesn’t want to endanger any of his beloved things - first-edition books and Chinese vases and whatnot. He gives in when the director promises him a major part. Away the production goes and, although they have promised not to disturb his shrine, they indeed massively transform it into a Muslim brothel, with the couple's furniture “stacked haphazardly outside on the curb despite some rather heavy rain.” Sure enough, playing a character named Grimalkin, the trader appears in the movie, but as a dead body, then the crew quickly wraps up and assures the trader that he and the housekeeper can put the house back in order nicely. There are lots of improbable laughs in this one, but be sure to have a dictionary handy. Not far from classic Allen. 4 out of 5 stars

“Udder Madness:” This story leads off with an excerpt from the newspaper about how 20 people are killed each year by cows, with most of them happening when the cow purposely kills the person. The story is then told from a cow’s perspective. The lyricist of a Broadway musical comes to his New Jersey farm to relax. The narrator cow comes to despise the man and decides he will kill him. He’s just about to do so when his tail is caught in a closet door. The man looks up at the sound of "moo" and tries to spray the cow with his mace, but the mace sprays into his own face. The man does not die but he is taken away to be institutionalized, as he endlessly babbles “something about attempted homicide by a Hereford.” This one is not Earth-shaking, but it is creative and so darn ridiculous that it at least gets 4 out of 5 stars

“Park Avenue, High Floor, Must Sell - Or Jump:” This one I just don’t get. It seems to be an inside joke for rich people and their real-estate agents trying to sell properties. Not good at all. 1 out of 5 stars

“Buffalo Wings, Woncha Come Out Tonight:” This story brings Allen back to the animals. Actor Harvey Grossweiner gets a call from his agent about a job entertaining chickens at “a poultry farm a good three hours from Rodeo Drive. The owner, Al Capon, a small-time egg baron whose fortunes rose and fell with every new study on cholesterol” hires Harvey to entertain his chickens, who don’t produce enough eggs if they’re bored. Lots of fowl jokes ensue as Harvey just can’t get the chickens to care, but finally he has the idea to teach them to type. At first everything is gibberish, but soon they are writing award-winning scripts and Harvey quits acting to be the leader of the Broadway Hen House. I still haven’t found anything in new Woody Allen to match some of his master classes in essay writing deom the 1960s and 1970s, but this is an absurd blast. 4 out of 5 stars

Despite "Park Avenue," the verdict is in that this is a collection - when you're in need of total intellectual wackiness - worth reading in full.

Dashiell Hammett gets extra pulpy in his short stories

Ernest Hemingway is largely credited with moving popular U.S. fiction out of the flourishing Henry James/Victorian style of writing into a leaner, more conversational one. And that is certainly true, but Dashiell Hammett doesn't get enough credit in this department.

His pulpy detective stories began their string of popular publication in 1923, while Hemingway's first book In Our Time was published in Europe in 1924 and not in the U.S. until late 1925. Hemingway may not have ever admited it, but he was under the influence of Hammett. 

While The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man are well-known Hammett novels, I wanted to explore his lesser-known short stories a bit.

"The Creeping Siamese" (1926): In the Continental Detective Agency's San Francisco branch, a tall, leathery man named Rounds, in town from New York, walks in and collapses dead from a fresh knife wound. The employees can't find anything amiss in their hallway or the rest of their building. The wound has a sarong stuffed into it, which leads the detective on a hunt for the killer. He ends up at the apartment of a local movie-theater owner and a woman he claims to be his wife. Through a very sharp eye for detail, the detective determines the woman had actually been married to the dead man and had accidentally stabbed him after he had located her lover. The story gets its name because the guilty and racist couple had tried to blame everything on a mysterious "siamese" who had supposedly broken into their apartment and shot her beau's leg. A minor story but a good glimpse into Hammett's world of crime, and a nice semi-subtle dig against racism. 3.5 out of 5 stars

"Faith" (appeared for the first time in 2007's compilation The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps): This is the tale of a homeless encampment of people in Maryland, A nomad named Feach tells everyone there that everywhere he's gone, something has gone tremendously wrong. He is a religious fellow and thinks it's God's will for him. But when a block of houses burns nearby, it's discovered that Feach was the one who set the fire, leading the reader to believe it's not God but Feach that is the evil one. Interesting conceptually, and thankfully short, but far from essential.  And being overly wordy, it's not very Hemingway-like. 2 out of 5 stars

“The Girl with the Silver Eyes” (1924): This is a bit of a the sequel to another popular Hammett short story published earlier in that year called “The House in Turk Street,” which I would like to read as well. The author practically invented the feline-like, cold-bloody temptress that would be a feature of just about every pulp story by every pulp author to follow. A “fat little” P.I. from the Continental Detective Agency in San Francisco - a running enterprise of much Hammett fiction - is called upon to check on a poet who has given his girlfriend $20,000 right before she had left temporarily and suddenly for Baltimore, writes letters back and forth to him for several days, and then seems to vanish completely. Turns out the money had been stolen from the poet’s wealthy brother-in-law, who tells the detective to find the poet and the money discreetly, without his wife finding out. The poet soon also disappears and the detective tracks him and the girl to a bootlegging operation in Half Moon Bay. Bloodshed follows and, although the woman seems to nearly be working her attraction magic on him, in the end, he deposits her to the Redwood City jail. Before she is locked up for likely a very long time (she had a streak of other killings and also had been disguised as a dangerous redhead in the previous story), she whispers “the vilest epithet of which the English language is capable” into the detective’s ear. It's a very fun, and very pulpy, read. 4.5 out of 5 stars

Misinformation is a running theme when some non-Jews attempt to tell the Jewish story

While Austria and Serbia began fighting in World War I, and while many other countries began to join into the fighting, a series of frenzied negotiations and conflicting agreements took place. One was the Balfour Declaration in 1917 that “promised to reestablish an independent national home for the Jewish people in the backwater former Ottoman province of Palestine.” 

By the end of the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, the Allies had divided the former Ottoman Empire, a broad, wide-open, and not divided landscape, “into new and invented states based on colonial interests rather than natural borders, tribal affiliation, family connections, or a desire for self-determination” and “to secure the establishment of the national Jewish home.”

A few years' later, in 1924, Noa Tishby’s grandmother was living in Russia and realized - or thought she realized - she was part of and in a good free society. But while seemingly good, a dark underbelly of that society was simultaneously “trying to break down the Jews. It occured to her grandmother that she wanted “a new movement to rebuild the old homeland based on communal ideas, shared living, shared ownership of all personal possessions, and self-sufficiency.” Luckily she escaped before being sent to Siberian work camps, but unluckily her family “left Russia penniless and embarked on a boat, infested with rodents and thieves, from Odessa to the promised land” - also known as the harsh and barren landscape of Jaffa (what is now part of Tel Aviv). Tishby’s grandmother was living at the very tipping point of “Zionism.”

As Tishby continues with fascinating story after fascinating story in 2021's Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth (and she has a new one as well called Uncomfortable Conversations with a Jew, which she wrote with ex-NFL player Emmanuel Acho and discussed with him recently on the CBS Morning Show - pictured), she notes, “After thousands of conversations with highly educated people, I have come to realize that most don’t know” what Zionism means.

Jews, a minuscule portion (less than 1 percent) of the global population, have long been discriminated against, with the Russian tsars being particularly heinous and continuous offenders. In 1903, the tsar’s secret police force created “one of the first pieces of viral fake news” called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which “claimed Jews were part of a global conspiracy to take over the world.” Henry Ford went on and on about it in his babblings for the paper he owned called the Dearborn Independent. Partly because of that, the book was a huge bestseller, contributing to the slaughter and banishment of millions of Jews the world over. “Cue the Zionist movement,” which was basically all about finding a safe harbor and being able to practice self determination like everyone else.

Theodore Herzl really coined the term Zionism in the 1890s when he realized Jews could never really “shake off the Jewishness” around other people and that a homeland to return to as needed was a pretty good idea. Jewish people were spread out all over the world, mostly persecuted in ghetto-ish areas, and the idea of going off to this far-off place was foreign and not seriously considered by the vast majority, but Herzl’s rallying began to slowly take affect. His writing, beginning with The Jewish State, was laughed at, not covered by the media, and called silly and desperate. The Russian Jewry were the ones who accepted it the most and that’s how it got to Tishby’a grandmother and her family. 

Herzl got Jews to meet in 1897 in Switzerland for the First Zionist Congress, and while the attendees had trouble agreeing on much of anything, they did end up agreeing that Israel should be the home base, "aliyah" or migration to Israel could connect the diaspora, the Hebrew language would be restored, and all Jews should join in solidarity against antisemitism. It would take about 50 years, and a little after Herzl’s death, but the newly formed United Nations established a Jewish state in Israel.

Herzl's subsequent writings about the topic as the 1900s began sounded like John Lennon and ahead of his time, with a slogan of “man, you are my brother!” Right on, Theo! He tried to get the support of leaders from around the world but it would take the Holocaust for there to be enough support for the Jews to finally have a little home, to have Israel. Those who stayed behind in Europe perished in World War II, but those who had made it to Israel survived. 

Tishby, the author, grew up in Israel and, well into her teens, didn’t realize there was such a thing as anti-Zionism until she was having a romantic moment with a hot guy from Germany who told her there possibly wasn’t really such a thing as the Holocaust. For someone whose grandmother had written so much of the her history down, it was clear that not only would this boy get no more of her time that night, but Tishby’s goal in life would be to start to undue the misinformation that dangerously exists around the Jewish story.

I'm really enjoying this book and it's as important as ever, as antisemitism puzzlingly marches on and seemingly progressive students at colleges all over the U.S. appear to be propagating the misinformation of those long-ago terror-mongering and evil Russian tsars.