Book: The Great Oom: The Improbable Birth of Yoga in America by Robert Love

Love, Robert. 2010. The Great Oom: The Improbable Birth of Yoga in America. Viking.

Perhaps surprisingly, the "Great Oom" is actually a person, namely a fellow called Pierre Arnold Bernard, who played a key role in the importation and development of hatha yoga into the United States. The book chronicles his Midwest origins, including his initial encounters with yoga in, of all places, Lincoln, Nebraska, his sojourn on the west coast, his years in New York City and then his years of success and eventual decline, brought on by the Great Depression, in the small town of Nyack-on-Hudson. He received the "Great Oom" nickname from the press, and it ended up following him throughout his life.

Bernard's personal journey offers plenty to interest the reader. It also sheds a broader light on American life, especially in the teens, twenties, and thirties. Then, like now, celebrities and the rich gravitated to Eastern mysticism and health fads. Then as now the media loved a moral panic, especially one involving the bodies of the rich and famous. Then, as now, people like Bernard become less daring with age and success. Indeed, my one complaint about the book concerns how little the reader learns about how Bernard saw his own public and private evolution over the course of his life. Overall, I quite enjoyed the book. 

If you think you'll like it, you will.

I purchased this book many years ago at the Crazy Wisdom bookstore in Ann Arbor.

Economics Moment of Zen #20

Reviewer #2: "I did not enjoy reading the paper, which is a slog to get through."

Reviewer #3: "This is a very nicely written, easy to follow, and thorough analysis ..."

The good news is that these divergent views apply to a paper I am handling as an editor, rather than a paper on which I am an author!

UW Live on Immigration

 

The UW Live show provides a link between the University of Wisconsin-Madison and its alumni base, though of course anyone can follow along. In that regard, it also embodies the "Wisconsin idea" that the university should benefit everyone in the state, which is taken more seriously on campus than I expected when I first arrived.

The show was explained to me as a partial substitute for in-person road shows in Chicago and Florida and other places with lots of alumni. The livestream costs less than the road shows and reaches more alums. In this case, we had more than 450 steady viewers of the initial livestream. 

Several of my colleagues appear in earlier episodes, including Ananth Seshadri, Kim Ruhl, and Lydia Cox. The host, Mike Knetter, is an economist who used to be the boss of the alumni association and the foundation.

Two of the sources I found most useful in preparing are this AEI piece on the fiscal costs of immigration and this Pew report on the number of undocumented immigrants.

Thanks to those who have pressed me over the years to do more public engagement. 

Book: Qualitative Literacy by Mario Luis Small and Jessica McCrory Calarco

Small, Mario Luis and Jessica McCrory Calarco. 2022. Qualitative Literacy: A Guide to Evaluating Ethnographic and Interview Research. University of California Press.

This (short) book lays out clear standards by which outsiders can judge the quality of qualitative empirical research in the social sciences. It has in mind in particular ethnographic work, in which the researcher embeds themselves into a context, thoughtfully observes, takes lots of notes, and then attempts to construct meaning from the notes. It also discusses, and applies the same conceptual framework to, research based on in-depth semi-structured interviews. I am a sometimes consumer of ethnographies and have often wished for a book like this one, as I, not at all surprisingly, never received any formal training in ethnographic methods along the way, though I could certainly rank the many ethnographies I have read over the years on some implicit quality scale.

The authors organize their book around the notions of cognitive empathy, heterogeneity, palpability, follow-up, and self-awareness. Cognitive empathy comes first, and has a special salience in polarized times when it seems deficient on all sides. But ethnographers really need it in a way that ordinary folk do not, for without it they can never hope to really understand their subjects. Heterogeneity basically means that if everyone in some group comes off as identical, then the ethnographer has done a bad job, in the sense that they have surely missed important features of those they purport to study. Palpability means sharing telling details rather than just offering generalities. Follow-up means investigating interesting bits as they come up during fieldwork (or in a long-form interview). Put differently, it means not rigidly adhering to some ex ante research plan. In qualitative work, as in quantitative work, the most interesting bits will sometimes be those that depart from the explicit or implicit "pre-analysis plan", which of course does not imply that the pre-analysis plan was not worth doing. And self-awareness means the researcher needs to thing about how they - their features and their words and their behavior - affect the content of their research. 

Overall, a remarkably clear and concise guide. Nothing was super surprising to me, but I found the value-added from organizing the material into a clean conceptual framework and providing many examples both real and contrived quite large.

Recommended to consumers (and producers!) of qualitative research.

I ordered this book from the Seminary Coop Bookstore in Chicago.

Book: VIXI by Richard Pipes

Pipes, Richard. 2003. VIXI. Yale University Press.

I read Pipe's book "Survival is Not Enough" back in college. That book reinforced my own views on the Soviet Union, which were based in part on an in-person visit in 1979 as part of a broader European tour with a student group. Since then, I have purchased several of his books used, though this, his memoir, is the first I have managed to read.

His life divides rather neatly into a sequence of parts: growing up in Poland as a Jew, escape from Poland just in time, education in the United States, life as a Harvard professor, his time on the National Security Council during the Reagan administration, a somewhat different life (due to his higher public profile) back at Harvard after that, and then retirement. As with many academics, retirement for Pipes just means more time for research and less time spent on teaching and administration (there is a reason for the quip "I need to retire to get some work done" that one hears among economists).

I found the initial part about growing up in Poland in the 1920s and 1930s and then leaving (with a fair amount of uncertainty of success) for the United States and the part about his time in the Reagan administration the most interesting, perhaps because being a history professor is a lot like being an economics professor and I already know how that goes. The Poland and DC components read quite differently: the former basks in the glow of a gentle nostalgia, the latter bluntly settles a lot of scores. Pipes argues that he had real effects on policy and thereby helped speed the demise of the Soviet Union, surely a worthy life contribution for anyone.

I enjoyed the book a great deal, both as academic memoir and as history. Recommended.

I found this at some used bookstore somewhere, and not that long ago, but do not recall which one.

Statistical software visual pun

 Hat tip: An old friend.

Book: Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again by Katherine Angel

Angel, Katherine. 2022. Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and Desire in the Age of Consent. Verso.

The book presents a critique of current consent-based, heavily contracted norms regarding sexual interactions from what one might call a left-humanist perspective.

If that sounds like something you would find interesting, you'll like the book.

I purchased this book at the Dussman English Bookshop in Berlin. It has the virtue of being open quite late so that one can stop by on the way from from dinner.