In 2016 I watched lot of television, as usual, but a disproportionate amount concerned the election. Very little entertainment there. The exceptions were the late, lamented “With All Due Respect” and “The Circus.” I will also miss Diane Rehm who kept me company as I walked around the block each day. Luckily, “Full Frontal with Samantha Bee” and John Oliver’s “Last Week Tonight” live on to skewer the unrighteous for another year.
In the parts of TV slightly more fictional than the Trump and Clinton campaigns, “Good Behavior” is in some ways a worthy successor to “Justified.” The sadly cancelled “Braindead” with the winsome Mary Elizabeth Winstead will be missed, but the charming “Stranger Things” looks as if it will return. “River,” “London Spy,” “Bosch,” “The Tunnel,” “Goliath,” “Gommorah,” The Night Of,” “Better Call Saul,” Silicon Valley,” “Vicious,” “Veep,” “Divorce,” and “Shameless” made my hit parade. My wife was hopelessly smitten with “Outlander” and “Poldark.”
I’m still not sure that “Westworld” and “The Man in the High Castle” are going to be worth the trip. I was aboard “Berlin Station” for the whole ride, but the wrapping up seemed hasty, assumed the audience was smarter than I was, at any rate, and left several questions unanswered.
In a similar vein, “Mr. Robot” may be too clever or convoluted for its own good. And “Billions” was dramatically disappointing given the firepower of the cast. I’ve given up on “Falling Water,” but may end up falling for “Search Party.” Finally, I wish there had been more comedies in 2016 that actually managed to amuse me, but as they say: “Dying is easy, comedy is hard.”
Looking back at the books I read in 2016, I am surprised by how many I’d heartily recommend. Two on Shakespeare, “1599” and “The Year of Lear,” both by
James Shapiro, are excellent at placing the big guy in his historical context and showing us that his audiences saw allusions in the plays to contemporary events that pass us by.
“The Accidental Superpower” is a rethinking of why we are the global top dog, and a lot of it has to do with climate, demography, geography and other factors beside our supposed cleverness or moral superiority. “Sapiens” is a revealing look at what makes us tick, as is “The Incredible Unlikeliness of Being,” a crushing refutation of the anti-evoultion crowd. If you needed more evidence.
“Dark Money” by Jane Mayer is a masterful excavation of the ways in which the economically powerful contrive to turn their money into political power to their advantage and at the expense of the rest of us. “Hillbilly Elegy” was a timely look at those on the losing end of this equation, and helped explain the roots of the Trump vote. And “The Making of Donald Trump” shows what we’re in for, based on his very dubious past behavior.
“Hellhound on His Trail” is a real life thriller about the hunt for the killer of MLK. The best novel I read in 2016 is set in the same era as that assassination, the war in Vietnam, and the rise of the national-security state. It is one of Ward Just’s justly admired peeps inside the folkways and mechanisms of Washington, “In the City of Fear.”
I am a sucker for international intrigue, historical spy fiction and the like, so I read the latest offerings of Charles McCarry, Robert Wilson, Alan Furst, Daniel Silva and the new installment of the Bernie Gunther saga by Philip Kerr. If you are new to these, you should begin at the beginning with “Berlin Noir.”
Finally, early in the year I read “FlashBoys” by Michael Lewis, another of his reliably fascinating books about things I have no interest in until he shows me they exist and proves just how interesting they are. And I finished the year in the same way, with his latest, “The Undoing Project.”
It concerns an odd couple of Israeli psychologists, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, who demonstrated what many of us have long suspected — that humans are fallible, and that the more clever they think they are, the bigger the mistakes they are going to make.
Notably, they refuted once and for all the absurd notion behind much of economic theory that economic man is a rational actor. Economics was long based on the notion that people made decisions to maximize utility. These two psychologists showed instead that they often sought to minimize regret. That is, they behaved not for economic reasons but for emotional reasons. In demonstrating this they unintentionally gave birth to the burgeoning field of behavioral economics.
A central tenet of their new understanding is that we do not naturally think rationally, but by means of metaphor and narrative and analogy and stereotype. By comparisons with models in our heads. “The stories we make up, rooted in our memories, effectively replace probability judgements.” These mental shortcuts are handy and work well, until they don’t.
Researchers gathered rules about how to look for cancer in scans from expert radiologists, then wrote an algorithm to codify their behavior. But in practice the algorithm actually outperformed the experts. Why? Because they didn’t actually follow their own rules. As Amos once said, he wasn’t studying artificial intelligence but natural stupidity.
This is not just hilarious, but scary because, as they point out, “wherever there is uncertainty, there has to be judgement.” And it isn’t exercised rationally by doctors, CEOs, economists, generals, Trump or Putin. As Kahneman suggested, “an organism equipped with an affective and hormonal system not much different from that of a jungle rat” now has “the ability to destroy every living thing by pushing a few buttons.”
Read “The Undoing Project” immediately. Then try to get a peaceful night’s sleep.