Writers of the Future is one of the few contests targeted explicitly at early career writers, with realistic financial rewards rather than "exposure" (people die of exposure, you know). Stories are chosen by a panel of scifi elders quarterly. With such a collection, there's going to be a lot of variance, but I enjoyed 7 of these 8 stories.

I'd like to call out for special attention "The Shadow Man" by Donald Mead, which is a creepy and wistful look at life in Hiroshima after the nuclear bomb, and "The Assignment of Runner ETI" Fiona Lehn, which has a great Hunger Games style athletic-competition as public policy endurance race at the center of a story about teamwork and human limits.

The Orphan Master's Son is a fantasy about a place that shares many of the names and characteristics of the country we call North Korea. Pak Jun Do is the titular Orphan Master's Son, a boy as despised as his father's other charges, who moves through some of the stranger 'human resources' of the regime: tunnel warrior, kidnap squad specialist, radio operator on a spy ship, an emissary to Texas. He moves through beautiful little scenes of light and darkness and open water, sharks and rowers and family, a beautiful study of alienation and loyalty to the regime, that closes, as all this things do, with a trip to the gulag.

The second half of the book focuses on "Commander Gu", taekwondo champion, husband of beloved national movie star Sun Moon, Minister of Prison Mines (read, secret Uranium mining). Gu has betrayed the regime, and is being interrogated by the scientific torturers of Division 42 to discover the extent of his betrayal. Gu and Pak are of course the same person, and the story moves across the impostor's journey to the heights of North Korean society, how he becomes intimate with Sun Moon (the most dangerous emotion in a totalitarian regime), and his final heroic sacrifice.

On a sentence to sentence level, this is a beautiful book. But the only parts that ring true are the little meditations on darkness in tunnels and in the night sky at the beginning of the book. The line that defines this book is something like: "In America, men matters and stories change. In North Korea, stories matter and men stay the same." The result is basically operatic (that most Juche of all art farms), melodrama stretched past the breaking point of absurdity and back around to the other side. Reading this, I couldn't help but think of Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer, which covered many of the same themes of identity and loyalty so much more ably. At the end of the day, for all his research (and a trip to North Korea), Adam Johnson is still a white guy with a MFA. His characters are all outwardly loyal, but inwardly dissidents. Their interiority is basically American, and I think a much more interesting angle would have been is "well, what if not?" Totalitarian regimes are basically a life pressed into the format of an opera, and compared to some other literary looks at totalitarian regimes, Johnson plays this opera pretty straight. This is not Solzhenitsynian human dignity in the face of the absolute, or the comic nihilism of Victor Pelevin's Omon Ra. It's a soap opera in a nice suit. Very good for what it is, but not capital-L Literature.

Meyer and Kunrether synthesize years of experience to develop a model for why individuals and organizations consistently fail in the face of crisis, and offer some brief policy recommendations. Their work is anchored in cognitive psychology, particularly Kahneman's Thinking Fast, and Slow. System 1 is fast and intuitive, but prone to serious cognitive biases. System 2 is deliberative, but requires good information lacking in a crisis. Six cognitive biases in particular, prevent preparedness for disasters.

To quote:
1) Myopia: A tendency to focus on overly short future time horizons when appraising immediate costs and the potential benefits of protective investments--especially the hyperbolic discounting of upfront costs now vs harms years in the future.
2) Amnesia: a tendency to forget too quickly the lessons of past disasters.
3) Optimism: a tendency to underestimate the likelihood that losses will occur from future hazards.
4) Inertia: a tendency to maintain the status quo or adopt a default option when there is uncertainty about the benefits of investing in alternative protective measures.
5) Simplification: a tendency to selective attend to only a subset of relevant factors when making choices involving risk.
6) Herding: a tendency to base choices on the observed actions of others.

In this short volume (125 pages, including notes), they run through the biases and case studies, with a light breezy tone reminiscent of top level journalism rather than the bludgeoning of an academic paper. They suggest a process they deem a Behavioral Risk Audit to meet each of the biases head on. For example, low probability risks can be compared to driving in sunny and snowy conditions, or risk of a disaster can be stated over 25 years rather than annual. The Ostrich Paradox is a little light, but a great introduction to a new angle on risk assessment and management.

ADHD Nation is an important look at the history and widespread use of stimulant medication to treat ADHD. Schwarz delivers a detailed historical account, punching up what could be a rather dry narrative by focusing on the career of Dr. Keith Conners, an elderly childhood psychiatrist who was a key figure in popularizing the widely used Conners Scale for diagnosing ADHD and who has since turned against the disorder, and Jamison Monroe and Kristin Parber, two young adults who's diagnosis of ADHD served as an entry point to substance abuse problems, and who recovered to run a rehab center.

The story bounces across America, and from the 1930s onwards, but always returns to two main themes. First, the medications used to treat ADHD are potent stimulants which are frequently abused by patients seeking stronger highs. Second, ADHD itself is a product of Big Pharma, an artificial market by barely-legal ploys involving hidden payments to influential doctors, consumer advertising that bypass FDA regulations by not mentioning drug names, and scientific malpractice via poorly designed studies.

I literally wrote my dissertation on this topic, and on the one hand, Schwarz isn't wrong on any factual particular. He's right to target "ADHD is both under-diagnosed and over-diagnosed" as a meaningless cliche, and his expose of the very fragmentary system whereby serious stimulants can be prescribed indefinitely on the basis of five minute interview. On the other hand, he's not an academic, and that means that he lacks a strong idea of how medical research should be done, or what counts as trustworthy information about psychiatry for the public. The focus on a handful of very serious cases of drug abuse obscures whether an initial prescription of stimulants lead to ongoing problems (post hoc ergo propter hoc), or the systematic effects on millions of kids who are neither ADHD wrecks, nor stimulated into amphetamine psychosis. A similar focus on ADHD purely as a product of marketing ignores the fact that it fits into a very real hole in our society, an anxiety about merit and competition and fairness that would exist with or without the drugs.

A good book, and one which I wish had come out a few years earlier, so I could have included it in my diss, but not the last word on ADHD.

Merchants of Doubt reads like a case presented by the prosecution. Oreskes and Conway look at several late 20th century scientific controversies: the link between cigarettes and cancer; the risks of nuclear weapon, the damage done by acid rain, CFCs and the ozone layer, and above all climate change, to find that these controversies extend far beyond the limits of reasonable doubt. This is no accident, but rather the result of a deliberate public relations strategy formulated by a small group of Cold War physics, propagated by a network of conservative think tanks, and funded by companies with a business model that creates threats to human life.

The scientists are Fred Singer, Frederick Seitz, Robert Jastrow, and William Nierenberg. All of them parleyed real scientific work around the Manhattan Project and the early Cold War into political positions connected with the Republican party. In the mid 60s, as the dangers of smoking became apparent, the tobacco industry began supporting scientific research to create a bench of trial experts to cast doubt on the link between cigarettes and cancer. Seitz, Nierenberg, and Jastrow founded the staunchly freemarket George C. Marshall Institute in 1984 to provide structure for for their work. Singer was loosely affiliated with the network. The charges are serious enough, and timeline involved complex enough, that I'll leave the details to the book. Whatever the nature of the debate and the connection between science and policy, the goal was always to inhibit regulatory action by the government, and the playbook almost identical.

The Merchants of Doubt playbook is not laid out in the text, so I'll do it here:

Step 1 is Developing the Controversy: This begins innocently enough with emerging scientific issue of regulatory significant and locating legitimate uncertainties. Science is always incomplete, and particularly in early stages models may be crude approximations with unclear causal mechanisms. But rather than contributing actual work, (the scientific CVs of the merchants are notably thin post-1970) criticize the science for lack of realism and certainty, without offering testable hypotheses of your own. Extend personal uncertainty to willful density. Hold up official government reports through bureaucratic delays and denying consensus.

Step 2 is to Launder the Controversy: Demand equal time for "your side" to a news media that lacks the time or expertise to check the validity of both sides, and knows that a story headlined "scientists argue" is more interesting than "scientists say". Launder your own credentials in an unrelated field to present yourself as an expert on whatever is required beyond all standards of professionalism. A scientist might master two fields, but cannot master the details of physics, atmospheric modeling, epidemiology, forest ecology, and so on. Develop press materials which mimic scientific articles in style and format, but have not passed review. Present glowing assessments of your position in friendly media like The Wall Street Journal.

Step 3 is to Amplify the Controversy: Make sure everybody, not just friendly venues, sees the conflict. Get politicians and media figures to present your views as fact. Accuse your opponents of politicizing science and scientific misconduct. Attack, slander, and when necessary, lie. Cast attacks on your own evidence and backing as censorship akin to that suffered by Galileo. The end goal is to make the controversy the story, leaving doubt in the public mind long after the science has settled.

I believe that Oreskes and Conway's case, as presented, is bulletproof. The titular merchants of doubt systematically violated scientific norms out of an ideological commitment that any sin was valid in pursuit of their political goal. They accused the scientific community of tampering with evidence and ideological bias, two acts which they were consistently and shamelessly guilty of.

The end of this book, where Oreskes lays out the motives of these scientific antagonists, is not as strong. She describe an ideological journey, where Cold War anti-communists came to believe that anything was permissible in defense of American liberty. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, they made the errors of identifying Free Market Fundamentalism as the only economic system compatible with American democracy, and environmentalist sentiment of all sorts as the new communism. Rather than a blind faith in the efficiency, justice, and wisdom of markets, environmentalism recognizes many market failures of externalities, imperfect information, and various kinds of monopolies and technological lock-in. The ultimate logic of environmentalism is simple: The freedom to pollute cannot indefinitely stand above ecosystem integrity and human life. It's opponents would rather commit mass suicide than stop believing this.

Merchants of Doubt is not a scholarly book, despite exhaustive research and footnotes. The authors include a chapter on Rachel Carson and the posthumous attack on Silent Spring because I believe Oreskes sees Carson as role model. Silence Spring wasn't strictly science either; it was a case prepared for public opinion, and one the launched the modern environmental movement.

The point of both Silent Spring and Merchants of Doubt was to launch a movement. As I write this review, on the day of the first March for Science, that movement is ever more necessary. We live in a world trending towards Step 4, a nihilistic universal skepticism that expertise is even possible, that's there's anything other hidden motives and a desire for power in claims of scientific authority. Oreskes and Conway argue that we can't do our own science, that at a certain point there must be faith in the integrity of what's presented, because no-one can understand the full extent of the network that is activated in making a scientific claim. This may be correct, but it's also unsatisfying.

The tactics developed by the merchants of doubt are a near perfect psuedo-science, carrying all the epistemic markers of scientific validity while containing a deadly poison of social paralysis. In this moment of Trumpian "alternative facts", we need to do more than push back against doubt, we need to make producing it a marker of perfidy, partaking in it a road to self-destruction rather than further prestige. I don't yet know how to do that, but Merchants of Doubt precisely lays out the cause of our present troubles.

Obviously I'm a fan of Cordwainer Smith, though I as mentioned, his longer works left me cold. Nostrilia is the keystone in the Rediscovery of Man arc, 15000 years in the future when the Lords of the Instrumentality return Old Old Earth to danger and vice, and the Underpeople (animals made to look like humans) rise to join the community of sentient beings in their own way. This book is almost indescribably strange, a picaresque romp through the dark of Jungian soul, and the heights of human ambition.

At this point, a call along the lines of "We need to break down this disciplinary silos and get those eggheaded professors working together on a project that matters" is conventional wisdom, not a radical cry to action. In this deeply researched empirical work, Jacob torches this hoary piece of conventional wisdom, showing disciplines as durable organizing factors in intellectual work, characterized by fluid boundaries and a internally synthetic views.

Jacobs categorizes disciplines by two factors: First, the present of an internal labor market, a la Stephen Turner. Second, an omnipresence in American colleges and universities. By his measure, there are eight first tier disciplines: Biology, chemistry, English, history, mathematics, political science, psychology, and sociology. Economics, physics, and philosophy are nearly as common, then computer science, anthropology, art history and the classics. After that things get rather fragmented. A closer look at what students major in show that traditional liberal arts disciplines tend to be cannibalized by preprofessional majors; communications rather than English, or business rather than economics. Likewise, a study of the 700 odd new journals founded in 2008 showed that roughly 40% described themselves as interdisciplinary, but that these integration was a narrow focus on specific topics, rather than a broad synthesis across fields. Two case studies, of education and American studies, show the difficulties in maintaining intellectual quality and vigor in interdisciplinary program, which may tend to become backwaters, or unable to sustain their integrity against college pressures.

Jacobs' thesis, clearly and elegantly presented, is that knowledge must be organized in some way, and that disciplines provide a way to cover broad curriculum (English) while allowing scholars to specialize (19th century British decadent poets). Disciplines link big departments at big public universities with small departments, and even lone scholars at smaller campus. Disciplines provide a set of standards and a market for intellectual knowledge and scholars. To the extent that interdisciplinarity endeavors succeed, it is because they replicate disciplinary structures.

Far less polemical than I expected, this book is vital for anyone who works in American higher education.

Eric Frank Russell was a B-lister of the Campbellian Golden Age. A decent enough prose stylist, Russell sent his square jawed astronauts against big cosmological themes like intelligence, conquest, and survival, with mixed results. His stories have a tendency to culminate in punchline based around some element deliberately hidden from the writer, and worse the punches feel likely off compared to a true master like Isaac Asimov. A few of the stories drag on for far longer than they have to.

That said, this collection includes the military bureaucratic farce Allamagoosa, which is worth reading (google will get you there) if you haven't yet. Make sure you know where your Offdog is, sailor.

There's a lot more published about psychological pathology than there is about positive emotions. Jamison follows up her breakthrough memoir An Unquiet Mind with a multidimension study of exuberance, a bubbly, playful, extremely joyful emotion that seems inextricably tied to what we consider the good life.

Jamison weaves together literary analysis of classic children's stories (Winnie the Pooh, The Wind in the Williow), with biographies of exuberant men (Teddy Roosevelt, P.T. Barnum), and summaries of the psychological research. Exuberance is associated with play in almost all mammals, and play seem to serve key functions in learning, socialization, and allowing organisms to cope with risk. Exuberance may be even more fundamental, as Jamison links it to the burst of life in the spring and summer, and to the human ability to experience divine creation. Exuberance has a dangerous side, wearing out people and trending towards mania.

But for all the bubbles, this book offers little insight about exuberance itself, coming down to the safe psychological conventional wisdom that it's a mood that ranks high on both sensation (it feels good) and energy (you want to do more). Exuberance seems like one of those innate traits that stable from birth, either you're exuberance or you're not.

I don't know what Star Maker is, but it's sure not a novel. An Englishman lying on a hillside is mentally carried into deep space, where after frolicking with the stars, he enters into telepathic communion with a member of a race of Other Men, intelligent aliens with a society based on taste as our is based on sight. From this initial point, Stapledon explores a diverse galaxy of intelligent aliens evolved on different lines, using the expanding collective consciousness as lens. Each society is beset by a kind of industrial crisis, taking different forms, but generally a conflict between anarchic individualism, tribal primitivism, and oppressive totalitarianism. Species which transcend their crisis enter into a utopian society, and telepathic community with the galactic whole, which defeats war itself, has a brief conflict between planetary species and the living star, and then settles into perfecting its collective mentality in an attempt to reach the supreme being, which the collective intelligence deems the Star Maker. Eventually, this immensely wise intelligence finds its creator, which is immensely greater, and has created many universes operating on many laws of good and evil.

It's a fantastic cosmological voyage and speculation, but almost entirely devoid of plot or character. And in the end, it's shockingly conventional. The Star Maker is... basically the Christian Gods. Capitalist societies reach a historical crisis, which either kills them or transforms them into Marx's utopian communism. A lot of ideas which have become stock in scifi seem to have appeared here first, and it's an ambitious book, but one which I can't honestly recommend.