What I Just Read

A must-read for shipping investors--and even if you're not, it will likely make one out of you. It's a fun story, hilarious at times, and it teaches readers all kinds of nuances about investing. Our main character, running his own little hedge fund, finds out by pure accident that the Baltic Dry Index is down 97% (!) over the course of just three months. It makes him curious, and this curiosity takes him on a downright Dantean journey through the shipping industry.  He's outwitted left and right: first by savvy bankers in Germany, then by even savvier Greeks. And then, in an awful moment of weakness, he gets lured into buying a "tramp" (a very old, nearly used-up ship needing massive repairs) at what seems like a good price. The industry nearly eats this guy alive more than once, but he comes out the other end a true Shipping Man.  This should be mandatory reading for MBA students. I think back to all the terminally boring "case studies" I had to read ov...

Another competently written mystery from Donna Leon. I'd recommend this book--and series--to any Italophile, especially if you're curious about Venice. This is the second "Brunetti" novel, and it starts with a dead man floating in one of Venice's canals: young, an American (the Italians could tell by his teeth), with a professional-looking knife wound, through his ribs into his heart.  The mystery deepens when Brunetti discovers the victim is from the US military, stationed at the American army base in Vicenza. And when Brunetti meets his superior officer, she strangely gives off an almost animal terror at learning of his death. Worse, she dies by a clearly staged "suicide" shortly thereafter.  This is a story about corruption, a theme explored in Brunetti #1 as well, but here it runs much deeper, to an international level: where those engaging in the corruption can't be touched and where the individual is powerless to stop it.  I wonder if it's ...

The central idea of  The Art of Contrary Thinking  is to accept, humbly, that most opinions are ill-formed--including our own. Opinions are emotional, imitative, and usually driven by contagion, either from other people or from propaganda. Worst of all, opinions are usually built upon embarrassingly little thought, yet we aggressively defend, justify and rationalize them.  The practice of contrary thinking "is a way out" as the author puts it. The techniques of contrary thinking range from automatically adopting the opposing belief, to reversing the arrow of cause and effect, to flipping a problem around several different ways to consider it from several angles. In other words, this book teaches you to install a deceptively simple, preemptive subroutine into your thinking--a near-miraculous subroutine that automatically causes you to resist herd thinking, prompts you to seek opportunity where none seems apparent, and even helps you resist propaganda. Charlie Munger,...

If you pick up  End Times  at all, I recommend reading only Chapter 7: State Breakdown, which walks through several interesting historical examples of state collapse, including Afghanistan, the Soviet Union and Ukraine. Otherwise, with its clickbait title, lack of focus, noticeable errors, and even a certain amount of copypasta from his prior work, readers may get a sinking feeling that author Peter Turchin sausaged out End Times  to meet a marketing deadline. This book was much, much weaker than his  earlier  War and Peace and War .  It can be revealing to read a book's acknowledgments for clues about the author's struggles writing it. Here we learn that after feedback from an early reader, Turchin "extensively restructured and streamlined the storyline." Unfortunately, End Times  remains poorly structured, certain chapters remain badly unfocused, and the book could have used yet another restructuring and streamlining before publication. Most imp...