Since the summer I had been swimming with a pair of cheap goggles I bought at the community pool in Islington. My memories of the pool are still vivid. The changing room furniture was probably acquired during the ’84-’85 miners strike and as a whole the place had a strong Thatcheresque feeling. The water was surprisingly shallow — in freestyle I could reach the bottom with my hand. Most visitors were naturally packed in the fast lane, where they swam side-by-side or just lounged by the wall, chatting. On a rare occasion a brave swimmer would rush from one side to the other at enormous speed only to rest there for several minutes. The goggles I bought there were similarly unimpressive.

Last week at last I brought myself to purchase a new proper pair, an 2012 version of the faithful ones. I only did a bit over seven hundred yards today, but my first impressions are overwhelmingly positive. They are intended for racing so their profile is small, but still allow good – even peripherally – sighting. The rubber barrier is perfectly waterproof and the tinted lenses have a calming effect. Can’t wait to break more personal bests again.

After two months of having an iPhone, I am no longer so certain. Just during the past week I have managed to appear like an idiot when corresponding with two of my professors. With a bit of imagination “by and hands” may mean the same as “by and chance,” but it’s a stretch.

On the flip side, at least I’m already in the debugging stage.

Truth to be told, I’m mostly interested in only reading about Larry Summers. Suskin made him the main villain of the book — the cause of everything that went bad with Obama’s administration — and I’m curious what he’s saying about one of my most favorite economists and personalities.

Update: still crashing when rendering graphs, probably because they got less complicated. Overall, my progress can be summarized by the title of Lenin’s 1904 pamphlet, “one step forward, two steps back.”

Does a book have a right to its own life? A right to liberty, property and pursuit of happiness? Is its ownership a form of slavery? Is it morally just for it to leap for freedom?

Last week I finally bought a book by Ayn Rand. Though I had been vaguely familiar with her philosophy, I had never read anything besides a few articles in magazines. The Virtue of Selfishness looked like a good, succinct introduction to objectivism. I was nearly done with it when accidentally I left it on a couch in the base area of the Big Sky ski resort this afternoon. Too bad.

I cannot say my views are often aligned with Rand’s, particularly on the subject of societal rights, but it sure as been an enlightening read.

The book is a collection of essays of Rand and Nathaniel Branden and it’s Branden’s writings that are closer to me. A trained psychotherapist, he approaches philosophical questions with self-esteem serving as determinant of values. I recommend On Pleasure.

In a cab to his hotel on 2nd and 45th, splintering headache from hangover heightened his normal rudeness and made him tell the cabdriver that in his company he finally realized why cabdrivers are called scumbags. Finally in his hotel room, Self habitually downed a bottle of duty-free whisky and drifted to sleep to be fresh for days of absolute Manhattan misery.

He lost — terribly — in tennis, was spied upon, paid for a prostitute who happened to be pregnant. All that in pursuit of his first feature movie. But the film was not occupying his mind: rather he contemplated where his girlfriend Selena was and who were the people she had been fucking. Conversation with his friend did not bring him closer to her whereabouts: “I don’t know where she is,’ said Alec. ‘Lying in a pile of cocks somewhere. Wiggling her bum in some penthouse. Take your pick.”

——

Since early July, when I read for the second time the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, all my readings have been been non-fiction. Nothing wrong with that — they all have been highly engaging and informative, but they did not tell a story.

Last week I finished Christopher Hitchens’s memoirs, Hitch-22. Mid-way through the book, just after he finishes recollecting his Oxford years, I fell into mild  depression — his life has been far more interesting than mine.

Known for dropping names, Hitchens devotes a few chapters to his closest friends. Salman Rushdie and James Fenton get their dedicated pages and so does Martin Amis, a son of Kingley Amis who authored the next book on my reading list Everyday Drinking. Amis is regarded as one of the best British writers of the 20th century and Hitchens’s accolades persuaded me to venture back into novels and pick up his Money: A Suicide Note.

After two chapters I must admit Amis’s fame is deserved. Thus far everything about the book has been superb. It has been a welcomed distraction from grad school applications and, however infrequent, thesis work.

The book is highly engaging and I’m glad I read it. Much like first-year med school students,  I occasionally self-diagnosed myself with an illnesses and cured myself as soon as I learnt its effects were not always positive. The book, however, is not perfect. For one it tends to repeat itself. Many of the portrayed personalities seem to have suffered from an almost identical type of abnormality (eg, Roosevelt and Kennedy). This leads to a second point: selection bias. Ghaemi partially acknowledged this problem, claiming that these were the leaders who faced major crises. A definition of major crisis is never provided. Crises like Korean War would surely qualify. Thus Ghaemi provides an well-researched and entertaining read, but fails, in my eyes, to convince me his thesis is correct.

Another book I just finished is Walter Badgehot’s Lombard Street A Description of the Money Market. Written in 1873, it explains how a central bank should behave in a crisis. Badgehot was a Britton (and the first editor of The Economist, no less!) and the book is centered around the events and actions of Bank of England. He draws lessons from recent crises and shows what the Bank could have done better. He offers advice on the government of the bank, as well as on the structure of private and joint-stock banks, which were being founded at rapid pace.

I assume many of Badgehot’s ideas have been tested in practice since the publication of this guidebook. I can’t be more specific for I’m not too familiar with the Bank of England, and Amazon does not carry a book on the topic that wouldn’t a reprint from 1900. The book’s central messages (in times of crises, lend freely, at high interest, against sound collateral) nonetheless remains valid.

With these books finished, I must focus on my grad school applications. I’m entering a period of self-imposed moratorium on purchases of further texts until Sunday (an exception may be the MWG’s Microeconomic Theory, which I may need for my work).  Next on my shopping list are Hitch-22 (Hitchens), Keynes Hayek: The Clash that Defined Modern Economics (Wapshott) and Essays in Persuasion (Keynes).

The TV show follows two groups of true Americans heroes who, with god’s blessing, drive heavy machinery into Alaskan nature in futile, overly dramatic, attempts to find gold. Over and over again.