Feldman's Faves: June 14, 2021

Good morning BL5 – Thanks again to Alex for Friday’s Zoom session. It was great and my neck feels better already. I am also really looking forward to watching Emily’s exciting new reality TV show about her last year….

This week’s theme features the work of everyone’s favourite “pop culture philosophers”.

The Premonition – By: Michael Lewis – Ever since he wrote Liar’s Poker detailing his experience at Salomon Brothers in the 1980’s, Michael Lewis, like nobody else has become THE MASTER STORY TELLER of our time. His great books include, Moneyball, The Big Short, The Undoing Project and many, many more. A few years ago he wrote The Fifth Risk, which described how the machinery of government works in the US and the importance of how administrations work together in handing off knowledge to each other. Rather than warning about the “deep state” he described a number of ‘unsung heroes’ that help make the machinery of government work regardless of who is in the Oval Office and warned that if they are not allowed to do their jobs, there could be problems. The Premonition, basically picks up where he left off. In The Fifth Risk Lewis warned about the Trump team’s lack of interest in the “hand off” and the risk this would create, which he argues was manifested in the government’s failure to identify and manage the Covid-19 crisis. As one reviewer summarizes, “The Premonition, is the story of a group of medics and scientists who attempt to get the US government to take pandemic response seriously. In an interview, Lewis described the book, as ‘a superhero story where the superheroes seem to lose the war’. Lewis’s main subjects are a group of extraordinarily dedicated, resourceful and conscientious people who understand how drastically underprepared America is for a viral pandemic. They know what needs to be done to redress the situation but are up against the fragmented dysfunction of the federal government and the malicious indifference of the Trump White House. One key figure is Charity Dean, a deputy director of California’s Department of Public Health, who becomes, in the days of Covid’s first emergence, a kind of underdog heroine in the fight to get the federal authorities to take the threat seriously. Then there are Richard Hatchett and Carter Mecher, who shaped pandemic planning in the George W Bush administration, and later, with Dean and others, worked from outside the nucleus of power to try to mitigate the unfolding catastrophe. If this is a superhero story, it’s one that lacks a supervillain. Though you might expect a book by Lewis about the US government’s grotesque mishandling of the pandemic to be a late entry into the Big Trump Book canon, the 45th president is a mercifully peripheral presence in its pages. As with his last book, The Fifth Risk, Lewis’s approach here is to find a small number of unheralded individuals working within vast systems, and use them to portray the workings (or, in this case, not-workings) of those systems. The malevolent force in The Premonition is institutional malaise. Lewis’s underlying argument here, though, is hardly compatible with the conservative “big government doesn’t work” boilerplate, which posits centralisation as the root of all societal evil. Rather, he portrays a system that is both incredibly vast and insufficiently centralised. “There’s no one driving the bus,” as Joe DeRisi, one of Lewis’s main subjects, puts it. DeRisi, a biochemist who developed an extremely useful technology for rapid viral testing, spends much of the book banging his head against institutional brick walls in an attempt to get his innovation adopted as part of a wider campaign against Covid. And so although the book’s action takes place within the context of the Trump administration’s drastic mishandling of the crisis, Lewis is more interested in the political conditions that exist before the pandemic. Fiasco though Trump’s leadership was, there is no attempt to lay the entire blame for the crisis at the feet of his administration. To put it in medical terms, Lewis diagnoses Trump as a comorbidity.” This book is an eye opener and really shows what happens when the government works and when it doesn’t. Here is a good review from the NYT - https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/06/books/review/the-premonition-michael-lewis.html

Revisionist History - Malcolm Gladwell and Adam Grant – Adam Grant and Malcolm Gladwell are also very popular these days. Each of them has a book that’s been recently published. In this PODCAST they interview each other about their books and the thinking they underlies their work. Worth a listen that may lead you to want to read these books. Here is the summary from the PODCAST itself: “Whenever Malcolm and Adam Grant cross paths on the book tour circuit, it's always a good time. Here are pieces of two conversations from Clubhouse: one about Malcolm's The Bomber Mafia and another about Adam's Think Again”: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/revisionist-history/id1119389968#episodeGuid=789efd8c-bf07-11eb-ba8e-efaaddb9639e

Thank you for your ongoing engagement and participation.

And remember to stay safe, stay healthy and to docket daily.

Jon