For some reason, Jack Kerouac is pretty well-known in european academic/intellectual spheres. Karp having studied in Germany, maybe it’s where he picked it up.
Arnold wrote: "So the book reinforced my belief that one can find plenty of broad intellectual curiosity in the business community." Many academics suppose that this quality is found only among themselves, but they are mistaken. Before retirement as a tax and business lawyer I worked closely for years with business executives and found that a good many of them were far more intellectually perspicacious than academics or for that matter media figures recognize.
I worked in the music business for a decade and then non-profit / international Ed for a decade. It became increasingly clear that mid to top talent in the former is an order of magnitude beyond the latter. Worse is that the latter seems to have no idea how to identify and develop talent. I dare say there is a dearth of perspicacity ;)
On the road slipped into the prep school and Ivy League English canon. Ironically, I was assigned on the road, but I discovered Wolfe on my own. The latter is probably too subversive.
" interests me because I think of the October 7 attack by Hamas as more analogous to Pearl Harbor than to 9/11."
My first thought was they weren't all that analogous but maybe they are. I was thinking Hamas' chances of victory are really close to nil but maybe Japan's was too. As for their goal, Hamas' goal seems to be river to sea and surely Japan's goal was not to displace/eradicate Americans. Which brings me to a question I've never heard addressed - what was their goal?
The Japs thought they'd cripple the Am fleet, especially the aircraft carriers (which weren't there...), as well as a planned second bombing run to explode the fuel supplies, which they didn't do because they didn't know where the aircraft carriers were.
The crippling of the US fleet was expected to give them time to consolidate their islands & navy -- the US was a secondary target. They wanted some agreement with the US to allow them to keep the conquered parts of China. They were expecting the US would tire of the war before the US won. More like a WW I ending, with them in control of China.
(This is what was taught at the US Naval Academy in 1975...)
Hamas didn't expect total war, or even as much as they got -- the Israelis haven't been willing to fight as much in the past. Both aggressors miscalculated.
It's not clear Russia's calculations have fully failed, tho.
Thanks for the details on Japan. I did a little reading and found similar but you added details that make sense.
Agreed on Hamas and Israel.
I suspect Russia's calculations, whatever they were, failed in many ways. It can't be good showing the world how inept one's military is. Same for killing so many of the country's young men and the hit on the economy, to say nothing of becoming a far greater pariah as seen by most of the world. That said, one could argue they may have gained something if NATO backs off on expansion.
Some books are referenced so often and in many places its seems to me reading them is a rite of passage. I have not read On the Road, but I plan to at some point, and I expect Americans of a certain age drawn to literature would have read it in high school, university or on their own at some point in their lives. Soon enough immigrants to the USA, like me, finally decide what is the big deal and make a point of reading these titles that are perpetually on best lists of some form or another or referenced in other literature.
I tried reading On The Road in college, which you would think is the prime age for it. Couldn't get into it. The best I can say about it is that it, uh...delivers what it promises, which is a story about a guy on a long road trip.
Conquest's First Law is, "Everyone is conservative about what he knows best."
Michael Crichton's "Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect" says that when you read an article about something you know about, you realize the reporting is full of errors, and totally unreliable and misleading, but then you go to the next article about something you don't know about and you immediately forget the journalists can't be trusted to be accurate and absorb the content as factual.
Handle's Destructive Synthesis is that modern conservatives forget how bad things can get and reflexively presume institutions should be preserved, except for the ones they know best, which they are confident are so captured and so far gone in being corrupted from their ostensibly primary mission into serving the left's political agenda, that they simply must be blown up and burned to the ground.
I am an engineer who finds faults in EVERYTHING. I worked for the Army Corps of Engineers and there was plenty there to find fault with but I thought they were highly effective in their work and I saw nothing serving the left's agenda. Among many other things, Keystone is the most well-known example where the Corps position was rather contrary to the left activists.
A related topic is waste, fraud and abuse. Waste was far more common than fraud and abuse. Some is unavoidable in a large bureaucracy, whether public or private. On top of that there is a lot of regulation by the Corps mandated by Congress that one might see as bureaucratic waste.
I did some disaster response work including going to the Pentagon on 9/11 and WTC four days later. I learned that huge waste in disaster response is unavoidable. One must be prepared for all kinds of contingencies, both before event and during response, which mostly never happen. (Aside: Schwarzenegger sunk a lot of money into an emergency response cache that would have been of huge benefit when COVID hit but wasn't maintained by his successor and was mostly useless.)
I also did quite a bit of work with FEMA. Even as an outsider, their bureaucracy seemed worse and their people less competent but I saw no indications of a left-leaning agenda. Maybe my view was too limited or maybe that was too long ago, that part of my career ending about 2010.
Re the footnote: by that logic the authors have spent hours reading the wit and wisdom of Herbert Hoover. Or Jackson Pollack. I would sooner bet they have read no book by any of those mentioned.
I mean, I’m not being judge-y. The mention of Thomas Hart Benson made me wonder if we were talking about the Missouri Senator, or his grand-nephew, the painter with the very signature style. (Who also painted camouflage for the first war Navy - I’ve now read both their Wikipedia pages.)
… And whose daughter took his money and joined the Mel Lyman cult. As also the children of the ex-pat novelist Kay Boyle. And some other people who played jug band instruments. And some women who realized that cooking breakfast for them got them closer to God (Mel) so he could get It (the message, usually referred to indirectly, absent specifics) out into a dead world.
Which led me to a fun Rolling Stone article on same, from 1971.
And I watched a video of the Jim Kweskin jug band at Newport, acting wacky without any actual jokes, which I’m thinking may be a tell.
I'm perplexed by the surprise. My son and his friends were big Monty Python Holy Grail fans when in high school. They knew all the lines. Other than it seeming less interesting, why not "On The Road" for someone of a later generation?
I am in my early 30s, and I read *On the Road* in high school. A teacher in my random midwestern rustbelt hometown mentioned it, and it sounded interesting--I already listened to a lot of jazz. Coincidentally, Scott Alexander also wrote a hilarious review of it here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/02/book-review-on-the-road/. This book seems more popular than you'd think.
I'm not sure hilarious is the word I'd use but his take on the book sounds about right to me. Thanks for sharing the link, I think. Maybe I didn't need to read a review of a book I wasn't sure why I read.
You know there 2 famous Thomas Hart Benton’s: the senator and a painter. I am assuming the senator but you also mention Pollack so my assumption may be incorrect.
Born in the 60's, my generation, growing up in the 80's lived through constant cultural references to the people , books and music of the decade of our birth. Even in my engineering school, Jack Kerouac's 'On The Road' had a cachet. And 'The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test' was passed around and read by many of my friends, especially the Deadheads. And, this song got quite a bit of airplay in the late 80's -https://genius.com/10000-maniacs-hey-jack-kerouac-lyrics
For some reason, Jack Kerouac is pretty well-known in european academic/intellectual spheres. Karp having studied in Germany, maybe it’s where he picked it up.
Arnold wrote: "So the book reinforced my belief that one can find plenty of broad intellectual curiosity in the business community." Many academics suppose that this quality is found only among themselves, but they are mistaken. Before retirement as a tax and business lawyer I worked closely for years with business executives and found that a good many of them were far more intellectually perspicacious than academics or for that matter media figures recognize.
I worked in the music business for a decade and then non-profit / international Ed for a decade. It became increasingly clear that mid to top talent in the former is an order of magnitude beyond the latter. Worse is that the latter seems to have no idea how to identify and develop talent. I dare say there is a dearth of perspicacity ;)
Don't forget Bush and Cheney. They completed to see who could read more books. Pretty sure all nonfiction.
On the road slipped into the prep school and Ivy League English canon. Ironically, I was assigned on the road, but I discovered Wolfe on my own. The latter is probably too subversive.
Also, Nick Zamisca was a jr. associate on one my teams straight outta law school. Palantir likes to hire lawyers for generalist policy roles.
" interests me because I think of the October 7 attack by Hamas as more analogous to Pearl Harbor than to 9/11."
My first thought was they weren't all that analogous but maybe they are. I was thinking Hamas' chances of victory are really close to nil but maybe Japan's was too. As for their goal, Hamas' goal seems to be river to sea and surely Japan's goal was not to displace/eradicate Americans. Which brings me to a question I've never heard addressed - what was their goal?
Am I missing another way they are analogous?
The Japs thought they'd cripple the Am fleet, especially the aircraft carriers (which weren't there...), as well as a planned second bombing run to explode the fuel supplies, which they didn't do because they didn't know where the aircraft carriers were.
The crippling of the US fleet was expected to give them time to consolidate their islands & navy -- the US was a secondary target. They wanted some agreement with the US to allow them to keep the conquered parts of China. They were expecting the US would tire of the war before the US won. More like a WW I ending, with them in control of China.
(This is what was taught at the US Naval Academy in 1975...)
Hamas didn't expect total war, or even as much as they got -- the Israelis haven't been willing to fight as much in the past. Both aggressors miscalculated.
It's not clear Russia's calculations have fully failed, tho.
Thanks for the details on Japan. I did a little reading and found similar but you added details that make sense.
Agreed on Hamas and Israel.
I suspect Russia's calculations, whatever they were, failed in many ways. It can't be good showing the world how inept one's military is. Same for killing so many of the country's young men and the hit on the economy, to say nothing of becoming a far greater pariah as seen by most of the world. That said, one could argue they may have gained something if NATO backs off on expansion.
Surely AK didn't mean Oct 7 and Pearl Harbor were analogous because both attackers were being blockaded by the countries they attacked.
Some books are referenced so often and in many places its seems to me reading them is a rite of passage. I have not read On the Road, but I plan to at some point, and I expect Americans of a certain age drawn to literature would have read it in high school, university or on their own at some point in their lives. Soon enough immigrants to the USA, like me, finally decide what is the big deal and make a point of reading these titles that are perpetually on best lists of some form or another or referenced in other literature.
I tried reading On The Road in college, which you would think is the prime age for it. Couldn't get into it. The best I can say about it is that it, uh...delivers what it promises, which is a story about a guy on a long road trip.
I read it when I was about 45. By coincidence, a friend read it at the same time. Not a bad book but neither of us saw why it gets so much attention.
Conquest's First Law is, "Everyone is conservative about what he knows best."
Michael Crichton's "Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect" says that when you read an article about something you know about, you realize the reporting is full of errors, and totally unreliable and misleading, but then you go to the next article about something you don't know about and you immediately forget the journalists can't be trusted to be accurate and absorb the content as factual.
Handle's Destructive Synthesis is that modern conservatives forget how bad things can get and reflexively presume institutions should be preserved, except for the ones they know best, which they are confident are so captured and so far gone in being corrupted from their ostensibly primary mission into serving the left's political agenda, that they simply must be blown up and burned to the ground.
I am an engineer who finds faults in EVERYTHING. I worked for the Army Corps of Engineers and there was plenty there to find fault with but I thought they were highly effective in their work and I saw nothing serving the left's agenda. Among many other things, Keystone is the most well-known example where the Corps position was rather contrary to the left activists.
A related topic is waste, fraud and abuse. Waste was far more common than fraud and abuse. Some is unavoidable in a large bureaucracy, whether public or private. On top of that there is a lot of regulation by the Corps mandated by Congress that one might see as bureaucratic waste.
I did some disaster response work including going to the Pentagon on 9/11 and WTC four days later. I learned that huge waste in disaster response is unavoidable. One must be prepared for all kinds of contingencies, both before event and during response, which mostly never happen. (Aside: Schwarzenegger sunk a lot of money into an emergency response cache that would have been of huge benefit when COVID hit but wasn't maintained by his successor and was mostly useless.)
I also did quite a bit of work with FEMA. Even as an outsider, their bureaucracy seemed worse and their people less competent but I saw no indications of a left-leaning agenda. Maybe my view was too limited or maybe that was too long ago, that part of my career ending about 2010.
Re the footnote: by that logic the authors have spent hours reading the wit and wisdom of Herbert Hoover. Or Jackson Pollack. I would sooner bet they have read no book by any of those mentioned.
I mean, I’m not being judge-y. The mention of Thomas Hart Benson made me wonder if we were talking about the Missouri Senator, or his grand-nephew, the painter with the very signature style. (Who also painted camouflage for the first war Navy - I’ve now read both their Wikipedia pages.)
… And whose daughter took his money and joined the Mel Lyman cult. As also the children of the ex-pat novelist Kay Boyle. And some other people who played jug band instruments. And some women who realized that cooking breakfast for them got them closer to God (Mel) so he could get It (the message, usually referred to indirectly, absent specifics) out into a dead world.
Which led me to a fun Rolling Stone article on same, from 1971.
And I watched a video of the Jim Kweskin jug band at Newport, acting wacky without any actual jokes, which I’m thinking may be a tell.
My husband: what are you doing?
Me: Oh, I’m reading.
“I think of the October 7 attack by Hamas as more analogous to Pearl Harbor than to 9/11.”
Could you please explain why you think of October 7 as more analogous to Pearl Harbor? I genuinely do not understand the reasoning/logic.
"I wonder how Kerouac got in here."
I'm perplexed by the surprise. My son and his friends were big Monty Python Holy Grail fans when in high school. They knew all the lines. Other than it seeming less interesting, why not "On The Road" for someone of a later generation?
I am in my early 30s, and I read *On the Road* in high school. A teacher in my random midwestern rustbelt hometown mentioned it, and it sounded interesting--I already listened to a lot of jazz. Coincidentally, Scott Alexander also wrote a hilarious review of it here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/02/book-review-on-the-road/. This book seems more popular than you'd think.
I'm not sure hilarious is the word I'd use but his take on the book sounds about right to me. Thanks for sharing the link, I think. Maybe I didn't need to read a review of a book I wasn't sure why I read.
Came here to recommend that Scott Alexander review, which I also find hilarious.
You know there 2 famous Thomas Hart Benton’s: the senator and a painter. I am assuming the senator but you also mention Pollack so my assumption may be incorrect.
The painter
Arnold, I think it was you who inspired me to read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_Chic_%26_Mau-Mauing_the_Flak_Catchers
Born in the 60's, my generation, growing up in the 80's lived through constant cultural references to the people , books and music of the decade of our birth. Even in my engineering school, Jack Kerouac's 'On The Road' had a cachet. And 'The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test' was passed around and read by many of my friends, especially the Deadheads. And, this song got quite a bit of airplay in the late 80's -https://genius.com/10000-maniacs-hey-jack-kerouac-lyrics