The Yugo: The Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History by Jason Vuic

The first time I physically remember hearing the Yugo referenced in pop culture was seeing Die Hard with a Vengeance on TV (this must have been 1997 or so, when I was 12 or 13), though I must have known about it before because I laughed: Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson drive a commandeered Yugo down a busy freeway, and when Bruce (John) complains about their pokey pace, Samuel (Zeus) replies “It’s a Yugo; it’s built for economy, not for speed!”

I somehow realized or knew, though I don’t remember how or when I would have learned it, that the word “Yugo” was a punchline for a car only a few steps better than a pennyracer. Jason Vuic’s The Yugo is the story of how the hapless automobile came to be the butt of so many jokes, but also how it ever-so-briefly was a commercial success, and how one enigmatic business was behind it all.

Malcolm Bricklin (born 1939) began his foray into the automotive industry in the 1960s. He made a name for himself by starting an American import company which sold Subaru 360 models to dealers in the United States. To modern readers, this might not seem like a bad idea, but at the time, Subarus were basically matchbox cars, and Consumer Reports labeled the 360 as “The Most Unsafe Car in America”. Bricklin sold his share of Subaru of America, Inc. to his business partner; incidentally, this company would later become a very successful one.

Between the disastrous early days of Subaru of America and the cataclysmic entirety of Yugo America, Bricklin managed to created his own custom car, the Bricklin SV-1, a futuristic car with gullwing doors and an acrylic exterior; 2,854 were manufactured in the mid-70s after Bricklin conned the city of New Brunswick into subsidizing the operation. Bricklin’s habit of making wild, fantastic promises and then completely and utterly failing to deliver are running themes in the story of both Bricklin and the Yugo. It’s very possible that the episode of The Simpsons where Homer discovers a long-lost half-brother (“Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?“) has veiled references to the SV-1, although it probably acts as an umbrella joke for a number of failed car designs.

My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard...

After the 1979 oil crisis, the 1980s saw the slow return of muscle cars and luxury cars to the American market; prices and sizes crept steadily upward. Bricklin, believing there was a well-defined market for a cheap, small economy car (a blind optimism that would be his downfall), began importing Fiat cars from Italy, but eventually stumbled across a small, cheap export from Yugoslavia, technically transliterated as the Jugo (but pronounced, and eventually respelled, as Yugo). The car was built by the Zastava corporation, a government-controlled automobile manufacturer (and, during the internecine Balkan crisis, briefly and arms manufacturer), in what was then a Communist but not Soviet-block country. To put it succinctly, the Yugo was a copy of a poor Fiat design, made by largely unskilled workers in an environment more concerned about employing everybody rather than increasing quality of efficiency; it was a cheap piece of shit that fulfilled a market niche in a very poor Communist country. That it ever became (ever so briefly) immensely popular in the United States, and thereafter universally reviled and mocked, has a little to do with the fundamentally poor construction of the car and a lot to do with the obstinacy and near-fanatical optimism of its American cheerleader, Malcolm Bricklin.

...they're like, "It's better than yours"....

What many people don’t realize is that despite its current reputation, Bricklin’s imported Yugoslavian turd was, for a very short time, all the rage. Bricklin predicted the market for cheap compact cars—a niche almost entirely unfulfilled in the early 1980s—and he was entirely correct; so when news of a car costing less than $4000 hit, both dealers and consumers clamored to get on the waiting list. The Yugo experiment quickly began to unravel as a couple of things happened. First, the public quickly realized what an unmitigated disaster the car was; even with extensive aftermarket revision, the product coming out of Yugoslavia barely passed minimum U.S. regulatory requirements, and bottomed out on Consumer Reports and other watchdog publication tests. Second, other foreign manufacturers such as Honda and Hyundai began to reenter the compact market with much higher standards of quality, even if it meant a high market price than the excretory Yugo.

Bricklin was eventually kicked out of the company he created with a generous severance package of around $10 million (he was considered too erratic and his history too failure-ridden to attract investors), a move which ruffled his feathers but was much more than he deserved, since the company imploded shortly thereafter. An endless succession of reorganizations, additional loans, and further failures marred the company, and before long their assets were liquidated and the American-Yugoslavian partnership plopped into the gutter of history. Oddly enough, the Yugo itself only stopped being manufactured in 2008; Eastern Europe, with its lax safety laws and continuously-fumbling economy, apparently still had use of such a car until recently.

This all seems a straightforward tale, and it largely is. Even without the benefit of foreknowledge of the Yugo’s demise and infamy, one can quickly determine from Vuic’s exposition that the Bricklin has doomed every enterprise he’s come in contact with. And the notion of a ridiculous subcompact from a struggling Communist country carving a secure niche in the American market is a stretch even without the nearly criminal lack of quality. Vuic’s explanation of Bricklin’s involvement (leadership, if you can call it that), and the details of the Yugoslavian side of the relationship is genuinely informative; certainly, it explained things about the Yugo of which I was unaware. There are stretches however, as Bricklin and his import company keeping kicking the can down the road with more lies and loans, where the narrative becomes monotonous, saved only by the reader’s growing incredulity that such a debacle managed to survive as long as it did.

Arguably by Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens’ recent diagnosis of cancer is bad news for all the readers who appreciate his profound and prolific output as a writer of political journalism, social commentary, and literary review (this latter, naturally, encompassing both the former). A man who “writes faster than most people talk” naturally generates no small œuvre. Hitchen’s last book of collected writings was Love, Poverty, and War in 2003, and it’s no surprise that Arguably, his latest compendium—and morbidly, the last which will not be posthumous—is a hefty eight-hundred pages of essays hand-picked from Hitchens’ various media—Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, Slate, and no few introductions to reissued classics—without likely exhausting the pool.

The topics selected here, of course, tend away from his articles for Slate which are more topical, and would not fare well when several years removed from their source. More impressive to me, as always, are Hitchens’ monthly literary reviews for The Atlantic and his various and sundry topics of criticism for Vanity Fair. In this respect, of course, one does not even need to buy the book; most of the essays reproduced here are still viewable online, with the exception of his introductions to published books. But it’s easy, especially given The Hitch’s prolificacy, to overlook the significance of this particular set of essays plucked from the much larger corpus. More interesting than any individual essay itself, perhaps, is the fact that it is in this collection at all.

All American

The entries in Arguably are grouped loosely by some shared subject or quality. First in queue is a series of pieces about [in]famous Americans, ordered roughly by chronology. Some are old Hitchens hobby-horses, including Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine; another chronicles Jefferson’s handling of the (Muslim) Barbary pirates as a way of presaging the current global problem of Islamic fundamentalism. Even more interesting than this, perhaps, or because Jefferson in particular and the Founding Fathers in general are hardly untrod territory, are his essays about Twain—at least obliquely, as the main thread of the essay is Hitchens’ excoriation of Fred Kaplan—and Vladimir Nabakov as revealed by the famously transgressive Lolita.

Some of these topics are simply here because they are Americans by nationality. Others seem to be here because they say something distinctly American; there is no surprise that Hitchens’, early a socialist and lately a something, should find no small import in the topic of Upton Sinclair, perhaps the most famous of early American socialists, and the way in which his points of issue are persistent… for which see Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation (2001), not necessarily for the gruesome details of figurative and literal sausage-making, but for dwelling on “those whose lives are lived at the point of production”.

Eclectic Affinities

The next section strikes me as miscellany, or a dumping ground for essays that would not go easy into that dark category. Incidentally, however, it contains some of Hitchens’ best pieces of this anthology. Of particular note are his treatment of Dr. Samuel Johnson (he of the first appreciable dictionary) in a review of Peter Martin’s Samuel Johnson: A Biography; a review of an poetic anthology by Philip Larkin, whose contribution to the world of poetry is perhaps critically underappreciated because he is more infamous than famous.

There’s a customary piece on Animal Farm (Orwell is never far from Hitchens’ pen), but even more interesting is a historical piece about Karl Marx’s early career as a journalist (the lens through which Hitchens reviews a compendium of Marx’s early work), before he became better known as a social philosopher of sorts. Hitchens finds it fascinating, as I do, to see the germ of Marx’s later calling present in his journalism: Marx’s targets tended to be the suppression of free inquiry and the maltreatment of the lower class of the sort that typified the mid-to-late 19th century. I can imagine that Hitchens himself must feel some intimate connection to this topic, as the germ, if not the later sprout, must have been at the root of his own early attachment to British socialism, and his lifelong distaste for tyranny.

Amusements, Annoyances, and Disappointments

I would categorize this section as the humorist in Hitchens, or at least Hitchens at his most playful, for it not for the inclusion of a somewhat more serious piece about the late Stieg Larrson, author of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and its sequels. Others are sufficiently lighthearted, notably Hitchens’ controversial piece on why he thinks women simply aren’t as funny as men unless they’re lesbians, but also (among others) a piece on political sex scandals in the wake of Larry “Wide Stance” Craig‘s rather public debacle, a scathing denunciation of Prince Charles, and, oddly enough, a well-worded rant on how much Hitchens hates it when waiters at upscale restaurant presume to pour wine that a table has already purchased.

Offshore Accounts & Legacies of Totalitarianism

A much longer section—no surprise given the subject of Hitchens’ contemporary journalism—deals with foreign policy, much of it having to do with the “Axis of Evil” and associated actors, including North Korea, Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan. One notable inclusion is the tale of Hitchens experience with waterboarding, wherein the journalist—a staunch support of the invasion of Iraq, remember—concludes quite definitely that the experience constitutes torture… this at a time when conservatives all over the map were falling over themselves to, at best, declare it “harsh interrogation” or some other sickly euphemism or, at worst, make barely mask their disappointment that America isn’t doing much worse. Hitchens’ essays on the Middle East are very much in line with his public appearances and other essays, and not of particular note. More interesting is his essay on the Jewish lobby and the latent anti-Semitism which is still disturbingly widespread; or his more general view of humanitarian intervention, which helps to illuminate the underlying ethos that informs his political and social positions.

It would be easy to say that Middle East foreign policy has come to dominate Hitchens’ writing in the last few years; more accurately, it has come to dominate his TV appearances while the War in Iraq was still big news and before his phase as an outspoken atheist took over following the publication of God Is Not Great. In his writing, Hitchens remained as global as ever, and his aversion to totalitarianism remained as consistent as ever, whether near the fertile crescent or not; hence the inclusion of his thoughts on Vietnam, Cuba, Tunisia, and postwar Germany. There were those on the Left who puffed up their plumage and got very offended when Hitchens became perhaps the most vocal and eloquent proponent of military intervention in Iraq, and it seemed somehow incongruous with his leftist history. But one can easily see a thread which has informed all of Hitchens’ positions, including his apparently strange stance on Iraq, and which persists today in other locales as well.

The next section (“Legacies…”) deals again with foreign policy, but through the lens of literary reviews, including books about or reviews of Victor Klemperer, Isabel Allende, and Arthur Koestler. Because the locus of these reviews ends up being less about the book and more a lesson in history and Hitchens’ own opinion about the foreign policy involved, it once again makes sense that these essays directly follow his collection of essays which deal more immediately with his political ideals and foreign policy implications.

Words’ Worth

The final section, and the one which stands out as my personal favorite, deals both with words and the rights to use them. This latter topic touches upon such obvious and contemporary issues as the Danish cartoons lampooning Muhammad and the violence of response, or the autography of Ayaan Hirsi Ali (a Somali apostate who became active in Dutch politics and now works at the American Enterprise Institute).

With a lighter heart, Hitchens touches upon the foibles of language, such as the rise of “like” as a filler word for young adults, or the particularly British phrase “fuck off”, and ends with a rather poignant piece about the accumulation of books in his apartment, which (though written in 2008, before the news of his cancer) seems as though it could be interpreted as a metaphor for the acceptance of death. The accumulation of books—of knowledge—either read or unread, known or unknown, and the realization that one cannot finish or store them all.

Like all compendia, Arguably has crests and troughs, some absolute and some arising from the reader’s judgment. Of no departure from history, and of no surprise to longtime readers, this collection embodies the best and worst about Christopher Hitchens: an acerbic wit, a vast hunger for knowledge, a boastful bit of pride, a decent, solid, but occasionally old-fashioned worldview, a stubborn but consistent political worldview, and incredibly talent for wordsmithing, and a mind with few equals in this generation. It’s difficult to say, as of December 2011, just how much longer Hitchens will be around, but Arguably is another volume of examples, as if we needed any, why he will be sorely missed when he’s gone.

Chocolate Wars by Deborah Cadbury

If you’re curious as to the strange coincidence that someone named Cadbury is writing a book about the history of British chocolatiers, cease your cogitating: Deborah Cadbury is, in fact, a direct relation of the family which ran the largest chocolate business of the isles, though she is admittedly several steps laterally distant from the immediate chocolate-making family. If, now that you know this, you’re troubled as to the possibility that Deborah Cadbury may not, therefore, be the most reliable narrator, you may once again cool your firing neurons, because I can say with little hesitation that your fears are justified.

Chocolate Wars comes out just as Cadbury, long a staple of British industry, was acquired by Kraft foods in 2010. I can’t say for certain if the book was written in response to the takeover, but Cadbury in her introduction makes no bones about her stance:

This book is a modest challenge to [Irene Rosenfeld, Kraft CEO] and to Kraft. If her wordsa re to be taken as anything more than platitudes, and if Kraft is truly to respect the values of Cadbury, it must understand its particular traditions and history. The story of Cadbury, in a way, is the story of a different kind of capitalism.

This “different kind of capitalism” to which she refers is what she calls “Quaker capitalism”, an umbrella term identifying the successful businesses of 19th-century Quaker entrepreneurs who eschewed massive profits in favor of paternalism. If you remember the less-than-successful planned community of Pullman, Illinois, you understand the basic gist of Cadbury, but while Americans have become leery of planned communities to the failure of many paternal American companies, these sorts of things did work for a long time in Britain, and Cadbury is one of the most successful examples.

The author does not dedicate any verbiage to the origins of consumable chocolate (which, although interesting, is a topic whose scope exceeds that of the book), choosing instead to begin at a time when chocolate consumed in Europe was mostly in the term of cocoa drinks. The undisputed king of global chocolate manufacturer was Nestlé, a Swiss company which got its start selling manufacturing condensed milk and baby formula; to this mix was added first a triumvirate of British manufacturers—Cadbury, Fry’s, and the Taylor Brothers—and later by the American giants Hershey and Mars. So how did Cadbury, at one time the smallest of operations, eventually become the largest chocolate manufacturer on the British isle? Some is luck; some is successful corporate espionage; still some is potentially, as Deborah Cadbury implies, a result of Cadbury’s progressive policies with respect to their employees.

Though told, by and large, in a single narrative, The Chocolate Wars is comprised of two parallel themes: one is the rather mechanical (if creative) expansion of the market for chocolate confections, the scientific or industrial breakthroughs required to satisfy that demand, and the rise and inevitable decline (or rather, subsumption by publicly-traded food conglomerates) of Victorian chocolatiers; the second, though, is a narrative about just what the legacy of such Quaker companies (and, by extension, other long-standing companies not borne of the modern tendency for conglomeration and mergers) tells us about business and what we’ve become as a globe of consumers.

I still don't know what nougat is. Probably for the best.

With respect to the first narrative, Cabury’s book is fine if unspectacular. Cadbury, like other dynastic businesses within its market and without, has a history of by-the-bootstraps work, near-failures, and steady expansion. This linear and rather predictable narrative ends, ingloriously (and the author emphasizes this sentiment) with its merger with Kraft. Consider, for a moment, that between 1824 and 1969, Cadbury was called Cadbury, and made a variety of chocolate confections, mostly famously its “Dairy Milk” bar; in 1969, it merged with a soft drink company, apparently because it provided a short-term profit to shareholders, and from that point it was known as the droll “Cadbury Schweppes plc” until its demerger in 2008, when the soft drink part of its business became the laborious “Dr. Pepper Snapple Group Inc.” The trail here is clear to see even with Deborah Cadbury drawing particular attention to it; we can watch a simple, prestigious chocolate-making business devolve into a series of financial transactions, marked by names which aren’t indicative of anything except perhaps the umbrella firm which holds them. The notion of shareholders, and a company board acting in the short-term interests of shareholders rather than the long-term interest of the company, is obviously anathema to the livelihood of an autonomous business, and Deborah Cadbury expects us to see this as she does. Most of her narrative, after all, is building up Cadbury as not simply a business, but an institution wrapped up in British nationalism and our rosy-eyed ideals of egalitarian societies and corporate paternalism.

In the second narrative, then, Cadbury’s anti-Kraft sentiment is well-honed and well-placed. It also seems like an inevitability; after all, the successive generations of Cadbury men became less and less Quaker, first consenting to advertising and “fancy boxes”, and then with record profits, expansion, mechanization, and eventually public trading. All of this represents a slow decline into the “modern” economic era, which seems at once coldly sensible and absolutely anathema to the pastoral tale which we’ve been reading, and which our inner selves still want to be common.

There’s a lot to be said for corporate paternalism, especially as relates to the success of firms like Google and modern theories about motivation. The Chocolate Wars doesn’t touch upon them except in the sense that the rise and downfall of Cadbury as an autonomous organization shows us everything that’s good about business, and everything that’s bad about the modern financial system’s approach to them.

Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker by Kevin Mitnick

Social Engineering was my hobby horse as an undergraduate IT major; I say this as though I’m an old veteran of the IT industry, but I’m not—I’m a fresh-faced, startup-mentality programmer. One of the reasons I always focused on social engineering in my various papers and projects, however, is I was exposed early to the idea of Kevin Mitnick. This isn’t to say I was particularly familiar with his exploits, or even well-versed in the technology of his area, but the notion that you could con your way into systems without necessarily programming or “hacking” was easy enough to understand.

At the time Kevin David Mitnick dominated the national news, there was no first-person narrative available for consumption. Prior to his conviction, of course, Mitnick would not publish a book of his exploits; after his conviction, one of the restrictions placed upon him was an inability to profit from books or films about his hacking for seven years. In the meantime, several books came out from journalists of varying proximity to Mitnick himself. One was Jonathan Littman’s The Fugitive Game, a narrative crafted in part from Littman’s conversations with Mitnick while he was on the run from the FBI. The other is Jonathan Markoff’s Takedown, which is a largely sensationalistic work with as much fiction as fact; Markoff, as it happens, was a New York Times reporter who was responsible for most of the hysteria and a lion’s share of the misinformation about Mitnick in those years. The idea that Mitnick had access to secret NSA databases, or that he’d hacked into NORAD, or that—as one prosecutor actually said in court—he could launch nuclear missiles by whistling into a phone, was largely the invention of Markoff the Fabulist and the long trail of phone company stooges that Mitnick left writhing and thrashing in his wake.

zomg hacker!

Ghost in the Wires is the first attempt by Mitnick to tell the story of those turbulent years in his old words. On the one hand, this means that we can avoid any speculation and hearsay; on the other hand, it’s a convicted felon writing about his years performing felonies. I’m not familiar with all of the laws in this regard, but it’s possible—hell, likely—there are arrestable offenses that Mitnick committed that nobody knows about. It’s unlikely that Ghost in the Wires contains any revelations, but at least we can expect it to be better than Takedown.

Our popular conception of hacker emphasizes their technical skills; we picture strange men in dark rooms interpreting binary code and issuing cryptic commands into a command-line prompt; coding malware in C and Assembler; sniffing TCP/IP packets and cracking encryption keys. Certainly, there’s an element to hacking which involves all of these things. There’s also an element, at least in Kevin Mitnick’s case, which involves fraud and impersonation and blustering into order to trick and manipulate one’s way into systems, rather than managing the entire feat via technological skills alone. Many modern writers tend to forget, when writing about Kevin Mitnick, that he was a very skilled technologist; because so many of his “hacks” involved simple impersonation, it’s easy to forgot that he was an adept at hacking computer systems programmatically, especially when it came to the de rigueur enterprise system of that time, DEC’s VMS. Ghost in the Wires reminds us that, though social engineering was often used to acquire information, or access to a system, technical expertise was needed to do anything with that access.

It’s been hypothesized (see Douglas Coupland’s JPod for mention of the subject within a fictional narrative) that the programming or technical community has a higher-than-average incidence of autism-spectrum disorders, simply because of the way disorders like Aspergers tend to emphasize concentration and technical ability. For a hacker like Kevin Mitnick however, such a diagnosis is impossible; as he himself mentions, his real skill as a hacker came from his ability to speak boldly with strangers while impersonating system users and to modify his story on the fly. Stutterers and bashful speakers need not apply when it comes to calling Nokia in Finland and pretending to be one of their U.S. engineers.

I see three main points to take away from Ghost in the Wires that are interesting and/or important:

It sucks to be one of the first well-known hackers in popular culture. Preceding Kevin Mitnick’s rise to infamy was Kevin Poulsen, perhaps the first “hacker” in the modern, pejorative sense of the term, to be arrested with national attention. But Mitnick captured the media attention in a way that, I think, has yet to replicated. His exploits came at a time when our culture was just young and naïve enough to believe just about anything told to them about technology, but invested enough in this whole “Internet” thing to be frightened by the possibilities. He was a scapegoat, at the right time; I would say “with the right crimes”, but of course most of the public panic about Mitnick’s abilities was based upon fairy tales.

Technical expertise or no, the ability to bullshit well is paramount. Technical brilliance will only get you so far in life; to achieve anything truly impressive requires bridging the gap between what can be accomplished with computer code and the real-life (personnel security, physical security, security through obscurity) obstacles in the way. This is also a frightening proposition for CIOs and network administrators, because it underscores what is still the case just about everywhere you go: people are the weak link in your security. Forget about that unpatched Apache flaw, or SQL injection, or overly-broad permissions—actually, don’t forget about them: they’re still important—because even a perfect technical system is meaningless when employees distribute credentials without performing the same sort of identification, authentication, and authorization steps that any decent information system implies.

Kevin Mitnick without an FBI manhunt might still be a minimum-wage worker. What happened to Kevin Mitnick was ridiculous. I don’t mean that Mitnick should necessarily have escaped punishment for hacking, as technically he did commit fraud and intrusion; however, the charges levied against him were farcical and largely fabricated; his five or so accumulated years spent in prison, including a long stint in solitary confinement, an injustice. The hysterical hue and cry in the media who latched onto the salable story of Mitnick-as-terrorist is an indictment of the journalists involved and the slavering readership who pay money for salacious sensationalism. All of that being said, one could argue that without an FBI manhunt, high-profile court case, and front-page coverage, Kevin Mitnick might still be a poor loser working Tier 1 tech support by day and hacking for fun at night. Instead, he’s now at the helm of a thriving security consultancy and manages a busy schedule of corporate speaking engagements. A worthwhile trade-off? Hard to say, and though Mitnick recognizes the irony, he doesn’t make any easy statements as to whether he’d do anything different; as readers, we end up not being sure what we think, either. It’s not satisfying in that regard, but at least Mitnick respects our intelligence.

Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883 by Simon Winchester

I’ve been familiar with Simon Winchester only for his two books about the Oxford English Dictionary, namely The Professor and the Madman and The Meaning of Everything. I’d made the lazy assumption that Winchester major field of interest was, therefore, dictionaries and language in general. It wasn’t until I picked up Krakatoa that I noticed his bibliography is not only voluminous, but multifarious as well, spanning people, major events, and obviously major publications.

For no particular reason, I happened the other day to be reading reviews of the 1997 film Volcano and its contemporary Dante’s Peak, both summer-blockbuster volcano movies, the latter of which fared slightly better under the critical scorn of volcanologists and the commonsensical layperson, but the former of which was typical studio schlock which played fast and loose with geophysics. Strangely enough, movies like this manage to sell volcanoes short on both ends: despite the way in which the volcano becomes the morbid, leering central actor, they tend to underportray the sheer destructive force and—perhaps even more importantly—the long reach of eruptive effect; at the same time, the caricatured bogeyman the volcano becomes also exaggerates the long build-up and subtle characteristics that are often more important than the loud bang at the end.

The talents of a journalist like Winchester, however, afford us some assurance that the August 27, 1883 explosion of Krakatoa in modern Indonesia, won’t be a tawdry affair. In fact, in keeping proper reverence for the fundamental idea of volcanic eruptions building up over time, Winchester spends no mean amount of time describing everything but Krakatoa. He begins with a history of geology and biology, covering the gradual discovery of tectonic plates, continental drifting, and other mechanistic things which are the ultimate cause of volcanic activity. This is more involved than you might think, and while Winchester’s treatment of geological history isn’t exhaustive, it has invests enough time and supposes enough intellectual curiosity on the part of its readers to avoid thrift with details. It’s followed by a brief history of the acquisition of the Java and Sumatra islands by the Dutch, whose colonial holdings had by this point been otherwise taken by force.

The eruption of Krakatoa is, of course, the pièce de résistance, and while there’s plenty to be said about its violent, fiery throes, the eruption itself was largely as we might expect. On the day when the dam finally broke, the power of the explosion completely disintegrated the small island of Krakatoa, hurled enormous amounts of ash fifty miles into the air, created tsunamis that wiped out whole villages, and generated a soundwave that was heard as far away as Australia. The official reporting by the occupying Dutch tallied the death toll at 36’417.

That's the most foul, cruel, and bad-tempered rodent you ever set eyes on!

Less morbid and exciting but potentially more interesting is the notion that the shockwave from Krakatoa’s final eruption actually reverberated across the global a total of seven times, as though the entire planet was a too-small room and Krakatoa was a bad rock band with a souped-up amp. Think for a minute about the sort of power required to generate a shockwave that will not only traverse the entire planet, but do so seven times. It’s easy for us to visualize the pyroclastic flows (lava), or even the blast of smoke and dash and debris from the summit of a conical volcano (your vanilla science fair variety), but it’s beyond the pale of our imagination and/or intellect to appreciate the scale of forces involved. In a culture wherein a “atomic bomb” is the ne plus ultra of large and destructive forces, does the notion that Krakatoa was equivalent to 13’000 of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima have any real meaning?

Winchester’s tactic, then, is not necessarily to impress upon us the exceptional scale of Krakatoa (though he does that, too), but rather to explain why Krakatoa’s 1883 eruption is important.

It’s not the first; it’s not the last. 1883 is not the first time that the island of Krakatoa or some geological variant of it has erupted; there have been as many as three eruptions in recorded history, and potentially more before that, but we have no real way of knowing. Even more importantly, we can rest assured that despite the apparent finality and resolution with which the island exploded in 1883, the volatile nature of the tectonic plates in that region assure us the formation of more islands and, almost invariably, more eruptions. Out of the metaphorical and potentially literal ashes of Krakatoa have risen its successor island, Anak Krakatoa, which grows 5cm per week. Further eruptions are not a speculation, in fact, as the region has experienced recorded volcanic activity in the intervening years; nothing, however, has come close to matching the 1883 eruption for size or violence.

It was the first major volcanic eruption to occur when relatively fast world-wide communication was a possibility. More important to Winchester, in keeping with his theme of Krakatoa’s eruption as a signal event in a perfect storm of scientific progress, is to point out that Krakatoa’s eruption was the first major calamity to occur in the age of the telegraph. News of the eruption was to reach the Western world (e.g., England, and its papers) within days, which sounds slow in modern terms but was a major achievement for the time. Britain, among other nations, had developed by this point a scientific culture which reacted swiftly to the news (noting, among other things, that their barographs registered the shockwave), even if the geological science which would explain the volcanic liveliness of the region wouldn’t come to fruition for many more years; Though the idea was proposed as early as the 16th century, it wasn’t formalized in any real sense until Alfred Wegener formalized the theory in 1912; even then, the hypothesis was popularly dismissed as nonsense until as recently as the 1950s!

It would be all too easy for the story of Krakatoa be given as a list of casualties, or a loosely-coupled succession of horror stories. This would be, irrespective of its gravity and however accurate, somewhat puerile and narrow in its scope. Though the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa remains the king of the hill in some respects—it’s believe to be the loudest sound in modern history, for instance—it is definitionally not unique. It is fair to say that Krakatoa’s death-spasm simply happened to occur at a particular interesting point in the history of humanity, and our reaction to and presence proximate to this event says every bit as much about our species as it does about volcanology.

Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky

The proposition to create a whole book about what appears a simple and straightforward substance may seem rather daunting. Certainly, one expects that salt could provide a number of amusing or amazing anecdotes, but 500 pages worth? In Kurlansky’s defense, he manages to tell a tale more full-figured than a smattering of interesting errata, but I can’t help but feel as though there was at least 75 pages worth of fluff.

In a move that surprised me, Salt contained very little scientific information about salt beyond a desultory admission of its basic chemistry; to wit, what we call “salt” is actually the compound sodium chloride. Properly, a “salt” is any combination of a metallic element (e.g. sodium, a soft metal) and a nonmetallic element (e.g. chlorine, a deadly gas), and not all of them taste salty. Furthermore, although modern medicine hysteria has fingered sodium as a culprit for hypertension and other ills, the human body needs salt for a number of different things. But beyond these basics, Kurlansky’s focus is very much on salt’s historical and political important, which hinges upon two important points.

For the thousands of years before refrigeration, salt was how people kept food edible. Think about all the foods you currently enjoy which involve some sort of fermentation or brine: pickles, sauerkraut, soy sauce, corned beef, anchovies, etc. Though they are now staples of our diet because we have developed a cultural taste for them (and many of them are damn tasty), they originated not because somebody necessarily thought that putting fresh food and ground up rock in a barrel until it filled with weepy discharge was a good idea for a snack, but because without some way to keep meat and vegetables from decaying, all of our ancestors would have starved to death. It’s difficult to overstate this: without salt, we would not be here. The vital importance of the substance to just about everyone made it a linchpin for governments and societies: governments taxed it as a reliable source of revenue, and people demanded it in larger quantities and lower prices. Gandhi’s famous march to the sea, after all, was about the onerous British salt tax; the French Revolution was—arguably—sparked into life by the long-standing and much-reviled French salt tax, the gabelle.

Eat your heart out, heroin

Salt was a source of revenue and a measure of control for the ruling class. For the very reasons listed above, salt tended to be an important but oft-forgotten player in armed conflict, both internecine and otherwise. Southern salt manufacturing plants in Viriginia and Florida were favorite targets of the Union army during the Civil War, for instance. Although the South lagged behind the North in most supplies and logistical respects, I don’t think its an exaggeration to say that the South’s difficulty in obtaining adequate supplies to salt to feed its troops was a major contributor to its eventual defeat. For as long as salt has been an important component in the preservation of food, its manufacture and distribution has been regulated, taxed, and in many cases monopolized by a single entity given exclusive rights by the government.

Early on, most was was gathering via the complicated process of evaporating sea or marsh water in large, shallow pans and scraping the crust of salt that resulted. Optionally, fire could be used to help the evaporation, but of course that was a lot of energy to expend for a small amount of salt. It was not until historical recency, the mid 19th-century, that large-mining rock salt from quarries or underground mines became cheap; early mines, like the Wieliczka Salt Mine in Poland (beginning in the 13th century) were dangerous and expensive. The advent of steam power and industrial machinery finally made salt mining viable and drove prices down. The aforementioned Wieliczka mine, for instance, closed down in 1996.

All of this is fascinating and to Kurlansky’s credit. Less fruitful, however, is his insistence upon filling his book with old recipes from various cultures. I can see some merit in including perhaps one excerpt from an ancient Chinese text about the preservation of fish or vegetables using salt. But I don’t exaggerate when I say that the book is full of these recipes, all variations on the same theme, and I fail to see their import to the narrative. To the contrary, they’re distracting and unnecessary, and I can’t understand what motivated Kurlansky to sprinkle them so liberally in what is otherwise an engaging historical treatise.

Bad Astronomy: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from Astrology to the Moon Landing 'Hoax' by Philip C. Plait

Phil Plait’s Death From the Skies! was one of my favorite books the year I read it; it was not only solid science writing, but also just lurid enough to appeal to my nascent morbidity.

When I first saw Bad Astronomy, I thought it was a new book, but in fact it’s almost ten years old; published in 2002, it is Plait’s foray into the world of popular science, and something of a companion piece to the blog of the same name he started in 1999.

Bad Astronomy is just what you might expect, especially if you’re familiar with Plait’s work; unlike Death From the Skies, which was a somewhat narrowly-focused work about impending doom, and which maintained a narrative tone through which was geared by its topic, Bad Astronomy is a loosely-coupled collection of articles about astronomical topics that people get wrong. Such topics include pervasive and important misconceptions such as the moon landing qua hoax or astrology, while others are merely pedantic corrections of malformed phrases such as “the dark side of the moon”. Yet other items aren’t even really “bad astronomy” at all, such as when Plait explains why stars appear to “twinkle”.

Venus is in the third house; therefore, the moon landing is a hoax

As so often happens, I find most satisfying the sections wherein Plait tears down the peddlers of snake oil, googly-eyed astrologists, tinfoil-wearing conspiracy loons, and phony corporations selling nonexistent naming rights to stars. Of course, Plait excoriates them in a book read by people who don’t believe in them in the first place, so it doesn’t take the same chutzpah or create the same glee as watching, say, James Randi humiliating psychics and astrologers on national TV. But while taking fraudsters to task may seem more satisfying, I feel as though Plait is at the top of his game when he’s not dealing with antiscientific malcontents, but rather with simple misconceptions, phrasal foibles, and human interest stories.

The chapter on balancing an egg on its end during the equinoxes (spoiler: it has nothing to do with equinoxes), for instance, is wonderful for its playfulness; it includes Plait’s own voyage of discovery, including a marathon session of attempted egg balancing which did prove that it is possible to balance eggs on any day of the year—the relatively difficult has much to do with the care of the balancer and the perturbations in the eggshell. If you’ve ever looked closely at an egg, you may have noticed tiny imperfections, which can act as kickstands. Part of what makes the egg-balancing chapter such a good one is that it manages to cover all the bases. Plait identifies a problem: every equinox, local news and even (perish the thought) misguided science teachers repeat a well-worn fiction, namely that eggs can only be balanced on their long ends during the equinoxes. The justification for this is never explicit, but rather vague hand-waving about the gravitational alignment of the earth on the equinoxes. What’s more, as Plait points out, it is trivially easy to disprove: if hypothesis is that eggs can only be balanced on the equinoxes, the null hypothesis is that eggs can be balanced at any time. And yet, no one seems ever to bother trying to balance on egg on non-equinoxes. Except Phil Plait, of course, who did just that with the aid of his wife.

Of course, there’s no perfidy here; the egg-balancing error is simply the result of a poorly-worded mid-20th-century article in Time which managed to get so thoroughly entrenched in our cultural consciousness because it’s repeated so very often by well-meaning people who don’t understand science very well. Such is our plight.

If you’re a follower of Plait’s blog, there won’t be much new in Bad Astronomy; it mostly serves as a “best-of” which cleans up and expands upon topics he’s already covered. As a formal compendium of Plait’s best stuff, it’s a decent addition to any bookshelf and certainly worth the read.

1776 by David McCullough

I read McCullough’s biography of John Adams three years ago and found it every bit as amazing as the Pulitzer committee did. In the course of describing John Adams’ life, especially his role in the Continental Congress, involved no small number of words about the Revolutionary War; however, Adams being a congressman and not a military man, the martial details of that time period were largely absent from the book.

1776 was, apparently, written as a sort of companion piece to that biography. It’s both trademark McCullough and also somehow disappointing.

I should qualify that last statement by noting I’m not disappointed with the quality of the book, but rather with McCullough’s decision to cover only a single year, and then only the martial aspects of it. He flirts with so many other interesting topics—the signing of the Declaration, for one, as well as the character of George Washington and some of his more dynamic generals—but veers off before covering them intimately because 1776 is by a large a window into the trials and tribulations of the American army; the brilliant acts and enormous blunders of Washington; the overwhelming military power and curious hesitancy of British commanders. This, I find, is disappointing, if only because I could envision 1776 as a book of thrice the length, covering all the topics I would love McCullough to turn his dazzling skills upon.

But what we have is Washington, a rather green general, whose success in Boston in early 1776 was followed by an unbroken string of failures, as his army deserted him, the British snatched New York from under his nose, and he managed to avoid the complete collapse of the rebellion only by dint of repeated retreats. As if the year was tailor-made for the scope of McCullough’s book, however, Christmas of 1776 witnessed Washington’s rather miraculous crossing of the Delaware and capture of 1,000 Hessians (Germany mercenary soldiers) at Trenton, an important symbolic victory that lifted the flagging spirits of the Americans and put wind in Washington’s sails.

Washington had excellent PR people

I’m not exaggerating, however, when I say that the entire middle of 1776 is a savage beating of the American army, and Washington’s competence as a general. McCullough even goes out of his way to describe Washington’s successful retreats as military successes, which generosity perhaps betrays in McCullough the same love for Washington as an icon that all of history has seemed to have for the man, however justified. One gets the sense that our history is as it is because of a fortunate confluence of circumstances. The Bros. Howe, of the British Army and Navy, were conservative, and their wish to spare both British and American lives, if possible, created crucial hesitations which allowed the American army breathing room. A more aggressive strategy by the British would have almost certainly doomed the fledgling rebellion.

McCullough begins his book with George III’s address to congress (this, actually, before his “madness”, likely porphyria, was really an issue, and the monarch was actually quite popular), which is an interesting and important choice. Though much of Britain rallied behind the George’s adamant stance, there was no small measure of displeasure, both popularly and in the houses of Parliament, expressed at the notion of sending warships to America. McCullough doesn’t delve too deeply into the basis for this displeasure, but the reader can ad-lib as necessary: war with America is too costly in money, or in lives; still others may have thought, though certainly they were in the minority, that America deserved to be an independent state if it so desired. The important conclusion to take away is that, despite George’s blustering in Parliament, and the committal of 60,000 combined British soldiers and hired Hessians by 1779, commanding officers on the British side were hesitant to spill too much blood; America was, after all, like Britain’s little brother; Britain had come to America’s aid when it quarreled with France, and France would come (critically) to America’s aid as it quarreled with Britain.

All of this is a roundabout way of saying that, disappointingly narrow as it might be, 1776 serves as an illustration of just how precarious the American situation was. It is easy, in retrospect, to ascribe the very existence of the United States to an inherent pluck and indefatigability—Luke demolishing the Death Star and the Emperor both with the Light Side of the Force. But it’s always good to remember just how narrowly and how fortunately the young nation accomplished what it did, when it did, in part because the conflict was, despite what Mel Gibson’s The Patriot might lead you to believe, a time when war was about as civilized as war can be, though of course this isn’t saying much at all.

Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer by Duncan J. Watts

There must be something about Dan Gardner that coerces me to read his topics in pairs. When I read Gardner’s last book, The Science of Fear, I immediately read Physics for Future Presidents as well, which had a fair amount in common.

Now Gardner’s latest book, Future Babble, is largely a sociological study, and what should I read immediately afterward but another sociology book, with no small amount of overlap. In fairness, Watts’ book ends up being the superior of the two.

When I was young, and first getting into classical music, I used to imagine that I was, say, the genius who wrote Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto #3, instead of Sergei himself. I would then wonder, because I was occasionally precocious, if the work could still be a widely-respected and deeply-loved member of the classical canon if it were written by some American schmuck in the last years of the 20th century. Sadly, I reasoned, probably not.

This is also one of Watts’ central points, albeit made with the Mona Lisa rather than a concerto. Watts builds up his argument around the notion of “common sense”, a notion we all know but would find difficult to accurate define or quantify. He falls back and punts with Carl Taylor:

By common sense I mean the knowledge possessed by those who live in the midst and are a part of the social situations and processes which sociologists seek to understand. The term thus used may be synonymous with folk knowledge, or it may be the knowledge possessed by engineers, by the practical politicians, by those who gather and publish news, or by others who handle or work with and must interpret and predict the behavior or persons and groups.

Our common sense tells us that the Mona Lisa is a great painting because, as Watts puts it, “it has attributes X, Y, and Z. But really what we’re saying is that the Mona Lisa is famous because it’s more like the Mona Lisa than anything else.” What we perceive to be common sense—namely, that a famous piece of art is great—is really backformed from our knowledge that the art is already famous. At this point, the subtitle(?) “Once You Know the Answer” should have an obvious meaning.

The same effect occurs in prediction-making, whence comes much of the overlap with Dan Gardner’s book. After an event has happened, it’s very easy to explain why… except that so often, this is never the explanation we would have given before it happened. Our common sense also tends to favor individual, dynamic actors, rather than an aggregation of low-level, systemic causes. In this, Watts politely savages Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, which ascribed major changes to the activity of a few significant people enacting large change. In fairness, I believe Gladwell acceded the point that a few “influencers” alone could not enact change without an otherwise critical mass; Watts suggests, however, that these kinds of social network dynamics are nondeterministic, with predictions thwarted even by small random variations.

The problem, as Watts repeatedly points out, is that unlike repeatable experiments, the iconic stories which inform our common sense only happen once; we cannot rewind them and try them a different way to see if our hindsight explanation is the correct one. Is Apple successful because Steve Jobs is a dynamic leader and a visionary? Our common sense tells us it is, but we really don’t know for sure with any scientific certainty.

Watts’ particular milieu, at least lately is the technological incarnations of those social networks—e.g. Facebook and Twitter, the latter of which he once used for a “Tipping Point”-style experiment. Sample size helps to illustrate Watt’s second big point, namely that no matter how well we understand the individual parts of a situation, it doesn’t necessarily mean we understand the whole. We see the trees, in other words, but manage to miss the forest. But the sum of most things is greater (or less, I suppose), than its parts, which is why point to a part in retrospect doesn’t make us any better at predicting the future. It’s also perhaps why Watts, who emigrated from the field of physics, virtually always formulaic and rational, understands better than anyone how social science is a trickster god in the pantheon of scientific disciplines; his introduction (which I thought strange at the time) was the story of his defection and the generally poor reception of social science by those who are expecting functional, mechanistic knowledge of the engineer or the chemist.

Personally, I’m just glad I’m not the only one who can’t explain Facebook.

Future Babble: Why Expert Predictions Are Next to Worthless, and You Can Do Better by Dan Gardner

Several years go, I read Dan Gardner’s The Science of Fear, which belongs to a genre of nonfiction I internally think of as “iconoclastic popular science”, or the “Everything you know is wrong” genre. Written for lay persons, such books purport to de[con]struct popular misconceptions about how things work, or to explain to the reader how they are being mislead, either on purpose or accidentally, by people who know better.

Other popular entrants in this genre are anything by Malcolm Gladwell and the Freakonomics books by Levitt and Dubner. By itself, the inclusion of a book in this genre doesn’t say anything about its quality or merit; what does seem to be the case is that, either because of the subject matter or because of the various empty suits in charge of the book’s publication, the marketing and even the content of the books tend to be afflicted with a snobby snideness at best and a conspiratorial air at worst.

The title of Future Babble is a good example. Future Babble: Why Expert Predictions Are Next to Worthless is, of course, an accurate reflection of the book’s content, but that last part, …and You Can Do Better is total marketing rot, because the point of the book is that you can’t do better, especially not “you” the average reader. At the heart of Future Babble is the notion that, despite a cottage industry of self-proclaimed “experts” peddling tell-it-all books and appearing as talking heads on the new fad of 24-hour news channels, it’s really, really hard to make accurate predictions about the future, even—especially—if you happen to be familiar with the subject. But our common sense should tell us that these people are wrong: not only do they all say different things (and therefore, by definition, some of them must be wrong), but they continue to do so with little or no regard for their past mistakes.

One is tempted to attribute such chicanery to malice, and of course in the case of doomsday prophets and the like, that may be closer to the truth. But pundits and politicos are generally well-meaning, if stupid; why do humans have such a persistent predilection for making and believing prognostications we know are likely false?

This question becomes the basis for Gardner’s follow-through. His initial argument, after all, leaves little room for argument. He comes out swinging with the work of Philip Tetlock of the University of Pennsylvania, whose long, comprehensive study of experts and their predictions proved the experts less accurate than simple statistical models, and only slightly smarter than dart-throwing chimps.

"This is my Jim Cramer impression..."

Tetlock borrowed a metaphor from Archilochus to explain variance within the experts themselves. He labeled generalists as “foxes”, and noticed that their predictions were less certain, in part because they included/admitted more factors; “hedgehogs” were the specialists—wonks, really—who know only one thing always changed or expanded the problem domain to include their narrow knowledge. Tetlock’s book on the subject is well known and still popular (for a social science book), and so one begins to wonder what the rest of Gardner’s book will be about. He warns us early on that he doesn’t want to spend the rest of the book calling out individual experts and ridiculing them; then he spends the rest of the book calling out individual experts and ridiculing them. From the batty Madam Zelda and Dorothy Martin (AKA Marian Keech) to academics like Paul Ehrlich; each is paraded in front of readers, their crimes read aloud, and if it’s not immediately obvious just how wrong they are (i.e. the world is still here), Gardner takes great pains to tell us. Admittedly, each new case Gardner brings up illustrates a facet of the psychological underpinnings of our desire for predictions. We find comfort in knowledge of the future, even when we know it’s wrong; when we emotionally invest in a prediction, proof against its correctness only redoubles our resolve. And, of course, no one ever wants to admit when they are wrong.

There isn’t much else to say about Future Babble, I’m afraid. It’s less compelling than The Science of Fear; though it’s not mean-spirited, it has the feel of a Cracked.com article—e.g. “10 Predictions That Were Totally Wrong”—occasionally glib, often repetitive, and interesting for a limited time only. As much as I may agree with the book’s content, I can’t help but feel blasé while reading it.