Malcolm X (with Alex Haley), The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965)

This was thrilling for me to read, for both personal and intellectual reasons. My son, Sammy, is entering 9th grade next week at Bard High School Early College, Manhattan, the first of the BHSECs established and the sister school to my own BHSEC in Queens. At Bard Manhattan, they ask each class, including freshmen, to read a book over the summer, and the ninth-graders are reading The Autobiography. Stacy and I decided to read the book, so we could accompany Sammy and discuss it with him ahead of time. Talk about "concerted cultivation" among the Bildungsbuergertum! The book itself was gripping and fascinating. Previously I'd only read a couple of short excerpts. I knew the outlines of Malcolm X's conversion to Islam (or, really, the Nation of Islam) in prison and his subsequent conversion to true Islam, and to a less hostile and somewhat more cosmopolitan outlook, upon his hajj to Mecca in 1964, one year before his assassination by Nation of Islam gunmen. But I hadn't known the details and I hadn't known much about his life before the Nation of Islam, which itself had involved a primary metamorphosis into a hustler in Boston and Harlem. Intellectually, what was most interesting was to learn how different the Nation of Islam was from Islam proper. In addition to its Manichean view of originally Black (and good) Man and the "white devils" spawned by an evil mad scientist some 4,000 years ago, two radical deviations from Islam proper stood out: 1) the NoI elevated its leader Elijah Muhammad to the role of Messenger of God, replacing the original Muhammad, who appears to have played no role whatsoever in the NoI and 2) the NoI denied the existence of heaven and hell, describing these concepts as a ruse to anesthetize the downtrodden. The Nation of Islam seems to have been both a cult dedicated to Elijah Muhammad and also a creative, briefly somewhat successful, effort at nation building.

Mary Ann Glendon, Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse (1991)

Though written in what now feels like an entirely different epoch, this carefully argued book addresses a problem that still plagues us. Since the 1950s, more and more of our politics has been defined and argued over in terms of individual rights, which ostensibly are absolute, inhere in solitary rights-bearers, and imply no corresponding responsibilities. As a result, Glendon argues, complexity gives way to black-or-white thinking, legal conflict over these all-or-nothing stakes replaces compromise, and politics as the art of negotiation withers. The emphasis on hyperindividualistic rights fostered in our legal system subsequently shapes talk - and thought - in politics and everyday life. Occasionally the book addresses cultural and social changes, for example, the decline of civil society organizations. But mainly Glendon focuses on the early modern philosophical origins of rights talk and, especially, on the decisions of prominent American jurists. British and American law first deviated from continental law in this regard when Hobbes and Locke painted pictures of monadic individuals asserting their rights, while Rousseau retained more of the classical and Biblical traditions that had always paired responsibilities with rights. This distinction was wholly new to me. A further step on the American path to hyperindividualist conceptions of rights was taken by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who argued that law has no basis in morality. An especially valuable part of the book are Glendon's detailed comparisons of American and European or Canadian rulings on issues such as abortion or the legal duty to come to the aid of strangers. Rights Talk nicely complements the work of Michael Sandel, whom Glendon acknowledges as an influence, and other communitarian thinkers.

Adam Becker, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control The Fate of Humanity (2025)

This is a good (not great) book. It opened my eyes to the truly vast ambitions of today's tech billionaires. Ambitions here does not refer to wealth or political influence or anything else merely of this world, but something incomparably greater. Key ideas are the Singularity (the imminent time when AI blows past human intelligence, creating a radically different situation); the importance and inevitability of human colonization of space, including eventually the entire universe, perhaps with swarms of nanobots carrying human consciousnesses in silicon form; long-termism (the valuing of all future lives as highly as those now alive), etc. While there is some disagreement among the carriers of these ideas, there's general consensus that the long term human (or human-AI) colonization of the universe is of such great importance that all other problems fall by the wayside. The Singularity will usher in utopia - or perhaps apocalypse. These highly dubious ideas would not matter much, of course, were it not for the fact that their advocates have so much wealth and power. Becker skillfully explains the main ideas and nearly as skillfully he debunks almost all of them. He points to the deep inconsistency between, on the one hand, the tech billionaires' championing of science and, on the other, their refusal to face basic facts. He also offers a plausible account of some of the origins of, and motivations behind, these ideas: ultimately, they are rooted in Christian hopes to escape death and reach some kind of heaven, now conjoined to technological salvationism. Disseminating and funding these beliefs, especially the philosophy of effective altruism, gives the tech billionaires a patina of intellectual and even moral respectability. Their insistence on the overriding importance of the Singularity and "aligning" AI's interests with humanity's allows them to sidestep all other contemporary problems as trivial. I sometimes wished Becker had dug more deeply into certain topics. He tends to rely on interviews for his evidence. When it comes to precursors to this generation of science-obsessed utopianists, Becker never considers Condorcet and mentions Frederick Winslow Taylor only once in passing. Sometimes Becker assigns guilt by association, however tenuous. For example, the fact that these people talk of "colonizing" the universe associates them with European colonists (the only kind, apparently) and hence with racism. Capitalism, racism, and white men are sometimes tossed in, casually, as stock villains. In the end, though, these minor gripes don't detract too seriously from Becker's timely, valuable work.

Richard V. Reeves, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It (2022)

This is a superb and important book. Boys are not doing well in school. Men, especially those without college degrees, are not doing well in the labor market. These facts were known to me. What I hadn’t clearly seen was that the latter fact, in conjunction with the increased economic independence of women, has deprived many men of the sense that they have an important role to play in society. To them, it may indeed appear that “the future is female.” Reeves has a knack for presenting compelling quantitative evidence and for offering nuanced, but still clear, interpretations. His tone is sober, his judgment fair. Like Joseph Henrich (author of The WEIRDEST People in the World – about what makes Europe different), Reeves also knows how to present potentially controversial ideas in disarming ways. Thus, he makes the case that women, due to their role in bearing and nursing children, have an established role in society and even in the world. Men, on the other hand, without a necessary biological role beyond impregnating females, are more “fragile” – they have to construct their role in society. In a sense, Reeves’s argument here reminded me of the traditional view that Simone de Beauvoir skewered in her 1949 book The Second Sex. However, Reeves is no traditionalist; his claim here draws on standard evolutionary theories of differential parental investments in offspring; and – what I’m emphasizing here - his decision to cast males as “fragile” (like Henrichs to refer to Europeans as WEIRD) is rhetorically adroit. Reeves skillfully shows how this important issue of male struggles is being poorly served – like so much else – by our polarized politics. Democrats are generally unwilling to concede that gender disparities can run in both directions; Republicans are rhetorically more sympathetic to men, but offer few real solutions, instead harking back to traditional gender roles. Reeves offers concrete suggestions, such as delaying boys’ start of school by a year, getting more men into HEAL (Health, Education, Administration, Literacy) professions, and, most ambitiously, taking steps to foster a new male identity – one which ties men to their families as both equal breadwinners to their wives and as equal caretakers of their children.