Some good reads

I'm cramming to get my pleasure reading (defined to include true bedside-table reading and reading that has a professional advancement benefit but is hard to fit in during the semester) done before the start of the semester. Three recent books to recommend:

Christopher Buckley, Supreme Courtship. This one is old news; I think it came out in 2008 or so. The premise is that the president, who doesn't really want to be president but was the right man at the right time and consented, has had two utterly unimpeachable Court nominees "Borked", one on the amusing basis of a junior-high-school-newspaper review of To Kill A Mockingbird, in which he said the story dragged on at times (thus was seen as having racist tendencies, or whatever). President Vanderdamp thus picks Pepper Cartwright, a smart, sassy, likable, and apparently highly attractive television judge, to fill the vacancy. The first part of the book is devoted to her confirmation hearings, during which she demonstrates disinterest in the job, no inclination to seek to appease the opposing forces in the Senate, and extraordinary quickness of wit. The exchange with the hostile committee members, which occupies Chapter 11 and 12 of the book, represents the heights of political satire. In one early exchange, the committee chairman, Senator Mitchell, refers to Cartwright's judicial record. She responds, "'I brought with me my whole judicial record.' She placed boxed sets of [her television show] Courtroom Six DVDs on the [table]." Antitrust law get a nod; Cartwright corrects one senator "on the actual wording of Leegin . . . ." And Cartwright silences the normally non-plussed Committee Chair Dexter Mitchell, who had asked the president for the nomination himself, by saying: "'It would take somebody with bigger cojones than I have to ask for this. It's not the sort of job anyone would solicit outright. Is it?'"

The book continues with the first of Cartwright's terms on the bench. It remains fresh and funny to the end. It's an easy read for a rainy Saturday, and I highly recommend it.

Tim Wu, The Master Switch. Spencer has reviewed this book and appropriately given it two thumbs up, so I won't say much -- but to say that it's an extraordinary lesson in the history of hi-tech industrial policy in the US. I'm learning backstories to cases I teach in class. I'm learning more about state of information regulation than I believed could be reduced to a single volume. And I'm enjoying every chapter. I might complain that Wu is advancing an agenda (with which I happen largely to agree), but he is being careful to offer arguments supporting contrary views. An amazing book.

Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error. Schulz is a journalist who has studied the history and psychology of reaching wrong conclusions. Her thesis seems to be that we are destined to be wrong, even most of the time; we should not be embarrassed to be wrong, but recognize it as a natural state of affairs; and only by being wrong can we actually advance as a civilization. The book is a back-door entry into innovation theory, although Schulz doesn't so pitch it. She notes that cultures that don't allow experimentation, which usually produces false starts and dead ends but occasionally produces amazing break-throughs, ultimately stagnate and whither away. So "wrongness" is a synonym for "diversity" and "competition." Again, highly recommended.

Later, a report on some Kindle reading -- Freidman's Capitalism and Freedom is the current selection.