Gift Guide 2023

Gifts that Systematic Hatreds readers might actually like

There’s a longer post waiting in drafts, but there’s nothing quite like seeing those “Your payout is on its way” emails pop up in my inbox to prod me to provide you with content. (Yes, people do pay for this, and I do love them for this, and it really does help keep this project going!) And so you’re getting the gift guide a few days earlier than I’d planned, because it’s a lot easier to write up!

These are books that I’ve particularly enjoyed over the past few years. You may like them too, and people on your gift list might like them too! I have actually read these and personally recommend them.

A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought this Through?, Kelly and Zach Weinersmith

A spirited guide to the new era of space and polemic against rapid human settlement of … well, anything beyond the troposphere, A City on Mars is a serious but readable rejoinder to generations of space colonization propaganda.

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There Are No Accidents: The Deadly Rise of Injury and Disaster—Who Profits and Who Pays the Price, Jessie Singer

Cars kill people every day, and cars kill more Americans now than they have in years. Singer’s book discusses how car crashes were initially received (as tantamount to homicide) and how generations-long projects by automotive interests led to a redefinition of car crashes as just a way of living—as “accidents” that couldn’t be avoided, even though, as she points out, they can. You will see the costs of car culture much more clearly after reading this book.

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The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics, Mae Ngai

Gold rushes in California, Australia, and South Africa during the nineteenth century drew fortune-seekers from all over the world to colonial frontiers. There, Ngai argued, core questions about property, racial ordering, and citizenship would be worked out. In the face of a putative Chinese “threat”, white society would respond by seeking to control and stem immigration—and develop a new set of frames and ideas relating to Asian immigrants and relations between global powers.

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The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia—And How It Died, Philip Jenkins

Christianity began in the Middle East, but by the 1500s it was principally a European affair. European-derived societies tend to gloss over the inconvenient fact that the Christian heartland was overtaken by rivals and conquerors, but besides the temptations of vanity such narratives overlook the varieties of Christian thought and practice that were extinguished, leaving European models as far more influential than they otherwise would have been.

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The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science, Michael Strevens

Stevens argues that science is defined by a social practice that requires its practitioners to ignore a lot of what we normally think is beautiful (poetry, beauty, satisfaction, etc.) just to focus on whether a proposition can be falsified empirically. In one sense, this is pop Popper, but it is also a description about how a social rule and set of expectations can bind (eventually) even the most political and unscientific researchers.

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Four Revolutions in the Earth Sciences: From Heresy to Truth, James Lawrence Powell

This is a history of geology. It turns out to be enormously exciting and frustrating stuff. You may not know this, but the acceptance of the theory of plate tectonics is younger than Star Trek or the Beatles. How and why did geologists resist ideas like plate tectonics? Religion, politics, and academic feuds.

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Infrastructure: A Guide to the Industrial Landscape, Brian Hayes

How does the world of humans really work? What actually sustains our society and our lives? We live in a world of miracles that are so far beyond our comprehension that we turn our eyes from the evidence all around us. Hayes explores the built and infrastructural world behind contemporary industrial societies’ experience—everything from transportation to food to mining to power. You will quite literally never look at the ordinary marvels of 21st century society in the same way.

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Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door—Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy, Christopher Mims

Global trade is an abstraction, but the trade in goods that links consumers to producers is not. Every item in every Amazon box has to be made somewhere and then shipped, stored, and distributed before it can be delivered. Mims tells this story in its contemporary form.

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Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall, Zeke Faux

What the hell was that? Faux’s book suggests that NFTs, crypto, SBF, and all the rest was really what it appeared to be to most of us: an utter fraud based on the flimsiest of foundations (except, perhaps, for the stablecoin Tether at the core of the story). Not a technical story but a financial one, Faux lays out the schemes, frauds, and harms that crypto wreaked on its way to its implosion.

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The Institutional Revolution: Measurement and the Economic Emergence of the Modern World, Douglas W. Allen

Slightly uneven, Allen’s book will nevertheless change how you think about English/British society from the 16th to 19th centuries. This is an age that was dominated by aristocracy, but how could such a parasitical class be effective in managing the spread of an empire and the development of an industrial revolution? Allen argues that aristocratic norms and standing were highly adaptive in overcoming agency problems in an era of severe information asymmetries, where governance was better regulated through indirect means. Even the purchase of rank in the British Army, apparently the culmination of venality, turns out to be an effective way of aligning incentives. Once bureaucrats developed better ways of measuring talent and performance, however, such bizarre institutions could be replaced by more rational mechanisms.

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The Gun, C.J. Chivers

Nuclear weapons loom large in the culture, but the AK-47 has actually killed more people than The Bomb. Chivers tells the story of the Kalashnikov and other modern weapons in a readable, compelling book that places guns at the center of history—and contemporary society.

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How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘N’ Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music, Elijah Wald

This isn’t a book about the Beatles: it’s a book about how the rise of recording technology in the 20th century destroyed how music was once made and heard. Before the rise of the record player, the most influential creatives in the pop music world were composers, who earned money from the sale of sheet music that buyers could use to play their hits on their home instruments. The steady rise of recording technology transformed pop music from a participatory to a consumerist industry. Along the way, it interacted with—and more often reified than challenged—American racial barriers, culminating with the demise of multiracial rock n’ roll as a music segment in the 1960s and the rise of market-segmented rock (for whites) and soul/R&B (for Blacks).

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