Having created lists of concerts I have attended, bands I have heard, galleries I have visited, etc, I overlooked theatre and dance productions I have seen. Herewith a list, sometimes annotated, to be updated as and when I remember additional events.
The latest in a sequence of lists of recently-read books:
Anita Raghavan [2013]: The Billionaire’s Apprentice: The Rise of the Indian-American Elite and the Fall of the Galleon Hedge Fund. (New York: Business Plus). This is a fascinating and excitingly-written account of the rise and fall of several people, many of them Americans of South Asian descent, associated with the activities of the Galleon hedge fund. First among these is billionaire Tamil-American Raj Rajaratnam, founder of Galleon, and convicted insider-trader. In the next tier are his many insider informants, primaily Rajat Gupta and Anil Kumar, both prominent partners of McKinsey and Company, a management consulting firm. Indeed, Gupta was three times elected global MD of McKinsey by his fellow partners, and thus the book has lots of fascinating information about The Firm and its operations, incidental to the main story.
Insider trading is a strange crime. Surely most traders engaged in trading for its own sake (and not hedging some activity or transaction in non-financial markets) seek to take advantage of something they know that others don’t, even if it is just knowledge arising from more clever or faster analysis, or the knowledge that comes from aggregating views across multiple trades. And who, exactly, are the victims here, since any trading requires a willing counterparty? But even if insider-trading is not considered an evil, there is great dishonour in breaching confidences gained in positions of trust, and there seems little doubt that Rajaratnam’s informants did that.
An odd feature of the book, where so many prominent Indian Americans and South-Asian businesspeople are name-checked, is the failure to mention Praful Gupta. As far as I am aware, the two Guptas were no relation, and met when they were fellow students at Harvard Business School. Rajat Gupta, in a newspaper interview in 1994, said they became and remained very good friends. While Rajat pursued a career with McKinsey, Praful became a management consultant and partner with Booz, Allen & Hamilton, and later a senior executive with Reliance Industries.
An annoying feature of the writing is the author’s repeated confusion about tense. On page 217, for instance, we read, “In 2005, Lloyd Blankfein’s predecessor and former secretary of the Treasury Henry M. “Hank” Paulson Jr. had approached Gupta about joining the Goldman board of directors.” But Hank Paulson only became Secretary of the US Treasury in 2006, where he remained until January 2009. At the time this sentence was written by Raghavan in 2012 or 2013, Paulson was a former Treasury Secretary, but not in 2005, the time referred to at the opening of the sentence. There are similar instances of inaccurate or confused tense on pages 257, 288, 347, and 362, and no doubt more that I did not catch. These appear so frequently that one is tempted to consider them not mere lapses nor evidence of a non-grammatical linguistic style, but indicative of a more fundamental difference between the author’s conceptualization of time and that of most speakers of English. There are also a number of confusions or ambiguities of subject and object, and of deictic markers, in sentences throughout the text.
Having written posts on influential non-fiction books and on influential fiction books, I thought it interesting to list pieces of music that have influenced me. To start with, I’ve confined myself initially to western art music (aka “classical” music). Jazz and world music to come in due course. The music is listed in alpha order of composer surname. Some pieces were introduced to me by friends, whom I thank with a Hat Tip (HT).
The latest in a sequence of lists of recently-read books:
The book has four very interesting accounts:
1. Crumpton’s perceptive reflections on the different cultures of CIA and FBI, which are summarized in this post.
2. The account of the preparations needed to design, build, deploy, and manage systems of unmanned air vehicles (UAVs, or drones) in Afghanistan. The diverse and inter-locking challenges – technical, political, strategic, managerial, economic, human, and logistic – are reminiscent of those involved in creating CIA’s U2 spy-plane program in the 1950s (whose leader Richard Bissell I saluted here).
3. The development of integrated Geographic Information Systems (GIS) for tactical anti-terrorist operations management in the early 2000s. What I find interesting is that this took place a decade after mobile telecommunications companies were using GIS for tactical planning and management of engineering and marketing operations. Why should the Government be so far behind?
4. An account of CIA’s anti-terrorist programs prior to 11 September 2011, including the monitoring and subversion of Al-Qaeda. Given the extent of these programmes, it is now clear why CIA embarked on such an activist role following 9/11. George Tenet remarked at the time (in his memoirs) that such a role would mean crossing a threshold for CIA, but until Crumpton’s book, I never understood why this enhanced role had been accepted at the time by US political leaders and military leaders. From Crumpton’s account, the reason for their acceptance was that CIA was the only security agency ready to step up quickly at the time.
Bergoglio seems to understand something his brother cardinals appear not to – that the Catholic Church (and other fundamentalist and evangelical Christian denominations) are not seen by the majority of people in the West any longer as places of saintliness, spiritual goodness, or charity, but as bastions of bigotry, irrationally opposed to individual freedom and to human happiness and fulfilment. In its campaigns against gay marriage rights, euthenasia, abortion, and other private moral issues, the Church opposes free will not only of its own clergy and lay members, but also of other citizens who are not even Catholic adherents. Such campaigns to limit the freedoms and rights of non-believers are presumptious, to say the least. The Catholic Church does a great deal of unremarked good in the world, work which is sullied and undermined by the political campaigns and bigoted public statements of its leaders.
The book is poorly written, with lots of repetition, and several chapters reprising the entire argument of the book, as if they had been stand-along newspaper articles. The author clearly thinks his readers have the minds of gold-fish, since interview subjects are introduced repeatedly with descriptions, as if for the first time.
The photo shows one of the demonstrations of the The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, held weekly since 1977 to protest the junta’s kidnap, torture, and murder of Argentinian citizens. We should not forget that the military regimes of South America, including the Argentinian junta of Videla, were supported not only by the Vatican and most local Catholic clergy (with some brave exceptions), but also by the US intelligence services, including during the administration of Jimmy Carter.
The latest in a sequence of lists of recently-read books:
The photo shows the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, from 1954 home of the Berliner Ensemble.
With so many blogs being written by members of the literati, it’s not surprising that a widespread meme involves compiling lists of writers and books. I’ve even succumbed to it myself. Lists of mathematicians are not as common, so I thought I’d present a list of the 20th century greats. Some of these are famous for a small number of contributions, or for work which is only narrow, while others have had impacts across many parts of mathematics.
Each major area of mathematics represented here (eg, category theory, computer science) could equally do with its own list, which perhaps I’ll manage in due course. I’ve included David Hilbert, Felix Hausdorff and Bertrand Russell because their most influential works were published in the 20th century. Although Hilbert reached adulthood in the 19th century, his address to the 1900 International Congress of Mathematicians in Paris greatly influenced the research agenda of mathematicians for much of the 20th century, and his 1899 axiomatization of geometry (following the lead of Mario Pieri) influenced the century’s main style of doing mathematics. For most of the 20th century, mathematics was much more abstract and more general than it had been in the previous two centuries. This abstract style perhaps reached its zenith in the work of Bourbaki, Grothendieck, Eilenberg and Mac Lane, while the mathematics of Thurston, for example, was a throwback to the particularist, even perhaps anti-abstract, style of 19th century mathematics. And Perelman’s major contributions have been in this century, of course.
And here’s my list of great mathematical ideas.
While making lists of artists whose work speaks to me, here’s my list of classical composers likewise. Of course, I don’t necessarily like everything these composers wrote.
The alert reader will notice the absence of Richard Wagner. This is deliberate.
Here is a listing of visual artists whose work speaks to me. Minimalists and geometric abstractionists are over-represented, relative to their population in the world. In due course, I will add posts about each of them.
The latest in a sequence of lists of recently-read books:
In succession to this post which seems to have originated a meme, herewith two lists of novels – one list influential when younger, and the other later, with influence measured by strength of memory. In each case, I include a couple of works of non-fiction, because of their superb writing.
The rules only allow listing of one book per author. In fact, all the books of some writers would merit inclusion. In this group, I would include Brautigan, Camus, Conrad, Faulkner, Gordimer, Ishiguro, H. James, Joyce, Maugham, Perec and Turgenev.
Influential when younger:
Influential more recently:
As these lists may indicate, there are some writers (eg, James, Turgenev) whom one may only appreciate after a certain age and passage of years.
On the other hand, for various different reasons, books by the following authors do not speak at all to me.
For some of these authors, the issue may be a generational one: for example, I know of no members of late Generation Jones or later-born readers who appreciate that early-Baby Boomer obsession, A Dance to the Music of Time, Powell’s long-winded novel sequence. Added 2013-02-12: The age threshold of my personal sample is confirmed by that of Max Hastings, writing in 2004:
Anthony Powell’s fan club, always far smaller than that of his contemporary Evelyn Waugh, will continue to shrink as admirers die off and are not replaced. Nobody whom I know under 40 reads his books, while Waugh’s position as the greatest English novelist of the 20th century seems secure.”
Of course, not everyone shares my low opinion of Roth’s work.