Bad Blood by John Carreyrou was the most unputdownable book that I read in 2018. The book reveals that the truth is sometimes stranger than fiction. Reading the astounding details on Theranos, once a revered Silicon valley unicorn and a health care startup, I had to constantly remind myself that many narrated incidents did take place, and the names are real people that walk among us in flesh and blood today. The indelicate machinations of the principal actors in the book are comparable to the over-the-top villainy that we read in airport thrillers and potboilers. Some of them are composites of miscreants in Robin Cook’s medical thrillers and John Grisham’s legal thrillers.1 The victims carry the quiet fatalism of the…
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To cover 400 years of American business history or capitalism is a daunting task. Fortunately, the author Bhu Srinivasan is up to the challenge. Penguin Press, 2017. Bhu Srinivasan, 500 pages. Srinivasan, from what appears from the blurb, is a successful venture capitalist. He evinces genuine admiration for both writing and capitalism. However, the book does suffer from what any attempt to trace 400 years of American capitalism would be constrained by. The absence of a strong overarching thesis. To get around this constraint, Srinivasan devices a set of themes and chapters. (Without much ado, I reproduce the chapters classified under themes. The chapters that I thought were strong, I highlighted in bold.) Chapters: Venture, Tobacco, Taxes, Cotton, Steam, Canal, Railroads, Telegraph,…
Leave a CommentThe past is more opaque than the future. Even when we know the “rough” history of what transpired, it is sometimes hard to imagine, how things were before the natural evolution into the current “normalcy” occurred. I imagine that, very soon, it would be astounding to consumers that Amazon did not own any stores, and Apple did not make any phones. How was life before that? In this respect, Barbara Garson’s The Electronic Sweatshop is revelatory, because it discusses a mind-and-place that is hard to imagine because many automated things came to be. For examples, she writes (Pg. 177), When typewriters were first introduced, their operators were also called “typewriters”. Later they became typists. So far in the electronic office,…
Leave a CommentAt Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowan posted his ten favorite science fiction novels. A very interesting list that includes some of my favorites. I have read 9 out of those top ten. (I have not read the highly rated The Three-Body Problem, by Liu Cixin, of which I have only heard rave reviews. I hope to read it soon). I doubt that I will ever be able to read all Science Fiction that I would like to read. But, the list made me think of what my favorites would be. For the list, I am considering books I have loved reading when I read them (some in early-teens), and books that I have continued to come back to and enjoy, with no…
Leave a CommentElena Ferrante, like Thomas Pynchon, in a galaxy of admired literary stars, shines with an idiosyncratic allure of being anonymous. However, unlike Pynchon, the name “Elena Ferrante” itself is an assumed pseudonym. The identity of the author has been a source of intense speculation and prurient journalism. I found the book, My Brilliant Friend, mesmerizing and quite strange. I loved the bildungsroman aspects of lower-middle-class teens living in 1950s Naples: the dreamy aspirations, the class divide, petty squabbles contained in a neighborhood at an infinite distance to the Neapolitan Sea. Ferrante is at her best, I think when describing the complicated transition from childhood, both emotional and physical, into female adolescence. Especially the latter. I also found the text in My Brilliant Friend measured,…
Leave a CommentHow to think about the role of Artificial Intelligence in Operations? Many people talk up AI, IoT, automation, etc, as the Fourth Industrial Revolution (following steam power, electricity, and computerization). Here is an example. I am more persuaded by the counter-arguments. For example, see a post by Luke Muehlhauser arguing there was only one industrial revolution, because one of the revolutions is substantively larger than, and different from the others, as exhibited in the figure below (data from the site). The Second Machine Age, by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, which ironically, I read on paper, explores the effects of the rapid digitization and information technological advances (AI, Automation, etc) on the nature of work, wealth and society. Brynjolfsson and McAfee…
Leave a CommentGrowing up in India, one saw the image of Gandhi everywhere. Gandhi was Mahatma (“great soul”), whose aura soared above the martyrs of struggle for Independence. Gandhi’s bespectacled visage is still a universal presence on rural committees, on non-profit logos, in drawing competitions, and in children’s “fancy dress” parades on his birthday celebrations. He is etched on the Indian currency bills and sketched in collective memories, but always with the same imagery: the charkha (the wheel), the round spectacled bald head, the walking stick on which his spindly weight rested, the white khaddar fabric and time-piece, and the ever-present smile. Even as Gandhian lifestyle fades into the distant past, with memories being re-layered in celluloid hues of Kingsley’s face, Gandhi’s round spectacles…
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