Here we go again!

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My annual reading list. You can follow previous years’ lists by clicking back through this link.

First, the historical and professional work. Let me use the same language I use ever year, since it’s a lot of books and people wonder how this is possible:

I read these books for my own purposes–to prepare for teaching, to keep up or catch up on the historiography in my fields, occasionally to broaden my horizons. So I do not read every word of these books, nor do I generally read for factual information. I read for preparation for my work, whether my own professional writing, to inform my blog posts, to prepare for new courses, or to think through harder questions. That often means simply being aware of the basic outlines of a book so that I can go into more detail later when I need to write about a given subject. I also included the few books on contemporary politics I read this year, since there’s not much sense separating those out from historical books given my writing. And lest you think this is some exercise in weirdness, it allows me to references these books for years and most of my books are generated out of doing this work.

This year saw a bit more historical reading than usual, but I don’t think I actually read more. Rather, new history books are just really short. Comparing today to the 90s is amazing in terms of length. Mostly I think it’s for the best.

I put asterisks next to 20 books I thought LGM readers should really read. These aren’t necessary the best books here, though there is some overlap, but rather ones that are a bit more accessible and also very good. There are certainly more than 20 very fine books here, but here are 20 of them for you. I am happy to spend part of the day discussing the various books in comments, if you want or. have questions or whatever.

1. Jenny Carson, A Matter of Moral Justice: Black Women Laundry Workers and the Fight for Justice ***
2. Marc Dixon, Heartland Blues: Labor Rights in the Industrial Midwest ***
3. Pamela Riney-Kehrberg, When a Dream Dies: Agriculture, Iowa, and the Farm Crisis of the 1980s
4. Jessica Wang, Mad Dogs and Other New Yorkers: Rabies, Medicine, and Society in an American Metropolis, 1840-1920
5. Elena Schneider, The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade, and Slavery in the Atlantic World
6. Christopher Boyer, Political Landscapes: Forests, Conservation, and Community in Mexico
7. Gregory Smoak, ed., Western Lands, Western Voices: Essays on Public History in the American West
8. Moon Ho-Jung, Menace to Empire: Anticolonial Solidarities and the Transpacific Origins of the U.S. Security State
9. Conor Morrissey, Protestant Nationalists in Ireland, 1900-1923
10. Kate Clifford Larson, Walk with Me: A Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer ***
11. Errol Wayne Stevens, In Pursuit of Utopia: Los Angeles in the Great Depression
12. Christina Greene, Free Joan Little: The Politics of Race, Sexual Violence, and Imprisonment
13. Jordan Biro-Walters, Wide Open Desert: A Queer History of New Mexico
14. Alexandra Harmon, Reclaiming the Reservation: Histories of Indian Sovereignty Repressed and Renewed
15. Darnella Davis, Untangling a Red, White, and Black Heritage: A Personal History of the Allotment Era
16. Pablo Mitchell, Coyote Nation: Sexuality, Race, and Conquest in Modernizing New Mexico, 1880-1920
17. Cathy O’Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy
18. Judith Stepan-Norris and Jasmine Kerrissey, Union Booms and Busts: The Ongoing Fight over the U.S. Labor Movement
19. David Wheat, Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, 1570-1640
20. Jennifer Eaglin, Sweet Fuel: A Political and Environmental History of Brazilian Ethanol
21. Maurice Hobson, The Legend of the Black Mecca: Politics and Class in the Making of Modern Atlanta
22. Meng Zhang, Timber and Forestry in Qing China: Sustaining the Market
23. Thijs Brocades Zaalberg and Bart Luttikhuis, Empire’s Violent End: Comparing Dutch, British, and French Wars of Decolonization, 1945-1962
24. Steven Friedman, Prisoners of the Past: South African Democracy and the Legacy of Minority Rule
25. Tani Barlow, ed., Formations of Colonial Modernity in East Asia
26. Susan Nance, Rodeo: An Animal History
27. Susan Sleeper-Smith, Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest: Indian Women of the Ohio River Valley, 1690-1792
28. Patrick Burke, Tear Down the Walls: White Radicalism and Black Power in 1960s Rock
29. Jessica Ordaz, The Shadow of El Centro: A History of Migrant Incarceration and Solidarity
30. Natalia Molina, A Place at the Nayarit: How a Mexican Restaurant Nourished a Community
31. Charlotte Coté, A Drum in One Hand, A Sockeye in the Other: Stories of Indigenous Food Sovereignty from the Northwest Coast
32. Alaina Roberts, I’ve Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land
33. Thomas Mackaman, New Immigrants and the Radicalization of American Labor, 1914-1924
34. Pekka Hamalainen, Indigenous Continent: The Epic Conquest for North America  ***
35. Terence Young, Heading Out: A History of American Camping
36. Diane C. Fujino and Robyn Magalit Rodriguez, Contemporary Asian American Activism: Building Movements for Liberation
37. Jun Uchida, Brokers of Empire: Japanese Settler Colonialism in Korea, 1876-1945
38. Jeff Ordower and Lindsay Zafir, eds., Power Lines: Building a Labor-Climate Justice Movement ***
39. Allyson Hobbs, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life ***
40. Soyica Diggs Colbert, Radical Vision: A Biography of Lorraine Hansberry ***
41. Kathryn Gin Lum, Heathen: Religion and Race in American History
42. Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, Classroom Wars: Language, Sex, and the Making of Modern Political Culture ***
43. Paul A. Shackel, The Ruined Anthracite: Historical Trauma in Coal-Mining Communities
44. Eric Zolov, The Last Good Neighbor: Mexico in the Global Sixties
45. Joshua Reid, The Sea is My Country: The Maritime World of the Makahs
46. Adam Moore, Empire’s Labor: The Global Army That Supports U.S. Wars ***
47. Chris Otter, Diet for a Large Planet: Industrial Britain, Food Systems, and World Ecology
48. Musab Younis, On the Scale of the World: The Formation of Black Anticolonial Thought
49. Bronwen Everill, Not Made by Slaves: Ethical Capitalism in the Age of Abolition
50. Judy Tzu-Chun Wu and Gwendolyn Mink, Fierce and Fearless: Patsy Takemoto Mink, First Woman of Color in Congress
51. Adria Imada, An Archive of Skin, an Archive of Kin: Disability and Life-Making during Medical Incarceration
52. Frederick Hoxie, This Indian Country: American Indian Activists and the Place They Made
53. Timothy Morton, Humankind: Solidarity with Non-Human People
54. Andrew Hazelton, Labor’s Outcasts: Migrant Farmworkers & Unions in North America, 1934-1966
55. Luis Aguiar & Joseph McCartin, eds., Purple Power: The History and Global Impact of SEIU
56. Courtney Fullilove, The Profit of the Earth: The Global Seeds of American Agriculture
57. Peter Coclanis, The Shadow of a Dream: Economic Life and Death in the South Carolina Lowcountry, 1670-1920
58. Daniel S. Moak, From the New Deal to the War on Schools: Race, Inequality, and the Rise of the Punitive Education State
59. Pekka Hamalainen, Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power ***
60. Erik Kojola, Mining the Heartland: Nature, Place, and Populism on the Iron Range
61. Ronald W. Schatz, The Labor Board Crew: Remaking Worker-Employer Relations from Pearl Harbor to the Reagan Era
62. James M. McPherson, For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War
63. Erika Lee and Judy Yung, Angel Island: Immigrant Gateway to America
64. Paul S. Hirsch, Pulp Empire: The Secret History of Comic Book Imperialism ***
65. Louis P. Masur, The Sum of Our Dreams: A Concise History of America
66. Clayton Howard, The Closet and the Cul-de-Sac: The Politics of Sexual Privacy in Northern California
67. Alice L. Baumgartner, South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War
68. James Poskett, Horizons: The Global Origins of Modern Science
69. Jeannie N. Shinozuka, Biotic Borders: Transpacific Plant and Insect Migration and the Rise of Anti-Asian Racism in America, 1890-1950
70. Sean Ehrlich, The Politics of Fair Trade: Moving Beyond Free Trade and Protection
71. Jane Berger, A New Working Class: The Legacies of Public Sector Employment in the Civil Rights Movement
72. Erin Woodruff Stone, Captives of Conquest: Slavery in the Early Modern Spanish Caribbean
73. Andrew Egan, Haywire: Discord in Maine’s Logging Woods and the Unraveling of an Industry
74. Stephen Chambers, No God But Gain: The Untold of Cuban Slavery, the Monroe Doctrine, and the Making of the United States
75. Nan Enstad, Cigarettes, Inc.: An Intimate History of Corporate Imperialism ***
76. Joy Lisi Rankin, A People’s History of Computing in the United States
77. Sheila McManus, Both Sides Now: Writing the Edges of the American West
78. Lucas Bessire, Running Out: In Search of Water on the High Plains
79. Rachel Walker, Beauty and the Brain: The Science of Human Nature in Early America
80. Elizabeth Ellis, The Great Power of Small Nations: Indigenous Diplomacy in the Gulf South
81. Kevin Grant, Last Weapons: Hunger Strikes and Fasts in the British Empire, 1890-1948
82. Amy Aronson, Crystal Eastman: A Revolutionary Life ***
83. Tony Michaels, A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York
84. Brian Hochman, The Listeners: A History of Wiretapping in the United States
85. Anna Willow, Understanding ExtrACTIVISM: Culture and Power in Natural Resource Disputes
86. David B. Williams, Homewaters: A Human and Natural History of the Puget Sound
87. David Wilson, Northern Paiutes of the Malheur: High Desert Reckoning in Oregon Country
88. Gabriel Valle, Gardening at the Margins: Convivial Labor, Community, and Resistance
89. Michael Dwyer, Upland Geopolitics: Postwar Laos and the Global Land Rush
90. Isabella Kasselstrand, Phil Zuckerman, and Ryan T. Cragun, Beyond Doubt: The Secularization of Society
91. Blake Scott Ball, Charlie Brown’s America: The Popular Politics of Peanuts ***
92. Kathleen Cairns, At Home in the World: California Women and the Postwar Environmental Movement
93. Thomas A. Castillo, Working in the Magic City: Moral Economy in Early Twentieth-Century Miami
94. Emily Marker, Black France, White Europe: Youth, Race, and Belonging in the Postwar Era
95. Ellen Spears, Rethinking the American Environmental Movement Post-1945
96. John M. Findlay, The Mobilized American West, 1940-2000
97. Sunil Amrith, The Burning Earth: A History *** (Wrote Review of this in the LA Review of Books)
98. Mark S. Ferrara, The Raging Erie: Life and Labor Along the Erie Canal
99. Shane Bauer, American Prison: A Reporter’s Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment ***
100. Jonathan Gienapp, The Second Creation: Fixing the Constitution in the Founding Era
101. Anita Huizar-Hernandez, Forging Arizona: A History of Peralta Land Grant and Racial Identity in the West
102. Sandra Bolzenius, Glory in Their Spirit: How Four Black Women Took on the Army During World War II
103. William Marotti, Money, Trains, and Guillotines: Art and Revolution in 1960s Japan
104. William B. Taylor, Theater of a Thousand Wonders: A History of Miraculous Images and Shrines in New Spain
105. Pavla Simkova, Urban Archipelago: An Environmental History of the Boston Harbor Islands
106. Maurice Crandall, These People Have Always Been a Republic: Indigenous Electorates in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, 1598-1912 ***
107. Diana K. Johnson, Seattle in Coalition: Multiracial Alliances, Labor Politics, and Transnational Activism in the Pacific Northwest, 1970-1999
108. Nicholas Mulder, The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool in Modern War ***
109. Alberto Garcia, Abandoning Their Beloved Land: The Politics of Bracero Migration in Mexico
110. Amanda Frost, You Are Not America: Citizenship Stripping from Dred Scott to the Dreamers ***
111. Timothy E. Nelson, Blackdom, New Mexico: The Significance of the Afro-Frontier, 1900-1930
112. Pablo Piccato, A History of Infamy: Crime, Truth and Justice in Mexico
113. Victor Seow, Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia
114. Michael Jonas, Scandinavia and the Great Powers in the First World War
115. J. Bradford DeLong, Slouching Toward Utopia: A Economic History of the Twentieth Century ***
116. James C. Benton, Fraying Fabric: How Trade Policy and Industrial Decline Transformed America
117. Rebecca Kosmos, Intertwined: Women, Nature, and Climate Justice
118. Naoko Wake, American Survivors: Trans-Pacific Memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
119. Michael A. Verney, A Great and Rising Nation: Naval Exploration and Global Empire in the Early U.S. Republic
120. Vincent DiGirolamo, Crying the News: A History of America’s Newsboys
121. Rebecca Sharpless, Grain and Fire: A History of Baking in the American South
122. Jennifer Bess, Where the Red-Winged Blackbirds Sing: The Akimel O’odham and Cycles of Agricultural Transformation in the Phoenix Basin
123. Annelise Heinz, Mahjong: A Chinese Game and the Making of Modern American Culture
124. Davide Orsini, The Atomic Archipelago: US Nuclear Submarines and Technopolitics of Risk in Cold War Italy
125. Benjamin T. Smith, The Mexican Press and Civil Society, 1940-1976
126. Dillon J. Carroll, Invisible Wounds: Mental Illness and Civil War Soldiers
127. Elizabeth Grennan Browning, Nature’s Laboratory: Environmental Thought and Labor Radicalism in Chicago, 1886-1937
128. Jalane Schmidt, Cachita’s Streets: The Virgin of Charity, Race, and Revolution in Cuba
129. David Stiller, Water and Agriculture in Colorado and the American West: First in Line for the Rio Grande
130. Andrew Curley, Carbon Sovereignty: Coal, Development, and Energy Transition in the Navajo Nation
131. Thomas Fleischman, Communist Pigs: An Animal History of East Germany’s Rise and Fall
132. Sonya Lipsett-Rivera, The Origins of Macho: Men and Masculinity in Colonial Mexico
133. K. Norman Johnson, Jerry F. Franklin, and Gordon H. Reeves, The Making of the Northwest Forest Plan: The Wild Science of Saving Old Growth Ecosystems
134. Thomas J. Campanella, Brooklyn: The Once and Future City (note: If you know anyone in your life who is a full on Brooklyn person and who likes a readable history with a ton of pictures, this would make a good gift)
135. David L. Parsons, Dangerous Grounds: Antiwar Coffeehouses and Military Dissent in the Vietnam Era

Last year, I started keeping track of presses I read from, which I thought would be interesting. So here’s this year’s list (if they don’t all add up, well, fine) and the top 10 presses over the last two years:

1. North Carolina—12
2. Oxford—11
3. Chicago—10
4. Harvard—8
5. Illinois—8
6. Washington—8
7. California—7
8. Princeton—7
9. Pennsylvania—5
10. Duke—5
11. Cornell—4
12. Yale—4
13. NYU—3
14. Nebraska—3
15. Cambridge—3
16. Oklahoma—2 
17. Verso—2
18. Norton—2
19. Routledge—2
20. Penguin—2
21. Massachusetts—2
22. Basic—2
23. Johns Hopkins—2 
24. Arizona—2
25. New Mexico—2
26. New Press—1
27. Kansas—1
28. Utah—1
29. Crown—1
30. Wits University (South Africa)—1
31. McFarland—1
32. Mariner (Harper Collins)—1
33. Texas A&M—1
34. Columbia—1  
35. Rutgers—1
36. Beacon—1
37. Texas Tech—1
38. Bloomsbury—1  
39. Colorado—1
40. Pittsburgh—1
41. LSU—1
42. Nevada—1
43. Oregon State–1

Top 10 over two years:

1. Oxford—21
2. North Carolina—20
3. Illinois—14
4. Harvard—13
5. Chicago—12
6. California—12
7. Washington—11
8. Princeton—11
9. Duke—9
10. Yale—9
11. Cambridge—9

Washington is so high for two reasons–I write in environmental and Pacific Northwest history so naturally I am going to read a preponderance of books in those two fields. Illinois is there because of labor history, though I find myself reading less labor history these days as the entire field has shifted to discussing neoliberalism in the 1970s, which has value, up to a point, but not like this.

Now onto the fiction and literary nonfiction. I beat my all time reading list of 68 and that was 2020, when I had lots of time. Of course, I’ve been on sabbatical this fall, so that explains a lot of it. But I’m pretty happy to have read 70. Asterisks are books I’ve read before. I guess what I’d say about this year is a lot more plays than normal (intentional), a ton of international fiction, a few classics (a goal in 2025 is to read more of these), an OK number of music books (probably should read more in 25), and a reengagement with Philip Roth in the last few weeks, who might have been a terrible person but who was a great writer, funny, amazing discussions of American identity, and a true master of prose.

1. Jean-Patrick Manchette, The Mad and the Bad
2. Steacy Easton, Why Tammy Wynette Matters
3. Charles Portis, The Dog of the South
4. Emi Yagi, Diary of a Void
5. Margo Price, Maybe We’ll Make It
6. Joe McGinniss, The Selling of the President 1968
7. Chrétien de Troyes, Ywain: The Knight of the Lion**
8. Tommy Orange, There There
9. Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian***
10. Harald Voetmann, Awake
11. Philip Eil, Prescription for Pain: How a Once-Promising Doctor Became the Pill Mill Killer
12. John McPhee, Rising from the Plains,**
13. Joan Didion, A Book of Common Prayer**
14. Heinrich Böll, The Lost Honor of Katarina Blum
15. Richard Ford, The Ultimate Good Luck
16. Le Thi Diem Thuy, The Gangster We Are All Looking For
17. Karen Tei Yamashita, Tropic of Orange
18. Albert Cossery, Proud Beggars
19. Laila Lalami, The Other Americans
20. Carl Hiaasen, Double Whammy
21. Abdulrazak Gurnah, Afterlives
22. Michiko Aoyama, What You Are Looking For is in the Library
23. Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, The Most Secret Memory of Men
24. Toni Morrison, A Mercy
25. Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman
26. Studs Terkel, Working
27. C. Pam Zhang, Land of Milk and Honey
28. Will Hermes, Love Goes to Buildings on Fire: Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever
29. Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore**
30. Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives***
31. Antonio Tabucchi, The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro***
32. Carl Hiaasen, Lucky You
33. Arthur Miller, The Crucible
34. Homer, The Odyssey **
35. Jonathan Escoffery, If I Survive You
36. Richard Thompson, Beeswing: Losing My Way and Finding My Voice, 1967-1975
37. Satoshi Yagisawa, Days at the Morisaki Bookshop
38. Jean-Patrick Manchette, The N’Gustro Affair***
39. Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
40. Eugene O’Neill, Complete Plays, 1913-1920
41. Alex Harvey, Song Noir: Tom Waits and the Spirit of Los Angeles
42. Leonard Sciascia, The Day of the Owl
43. Tobias Wolff, In the Garden of the North American Martyrs
44. Phil Klay, Missionaries
45. James Wilcox, Modern Baptists
46. John Bleasdale, The Magic Hours: The Films and Hidden Life of Terence Malick
47. Wole Soyinka, Isara
48. Colin Escott, Hank Williams: The Biography
49. Sally Rooney, Normal People
50. Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men
51. Henrik Ibsen, Enemy of the People, (Arthur Miller adaptation)
52. Tsitsi Dangarembga, The Book of Not
53. Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris
54. Jean-Patrick Manchette, Fatale
55. Shoji Morimoto, Rental Person Who Does Nothing
56. Nanni Balestrini, We Want Everything
57. Itamar Vieira Junior, Crooked Plow
58. Werner Herzog, Every Man for Himself and God Against All
59. Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer***
60. Jose Saramago, Baltasar and Blimunda***
61. Ivan Doig, This House of Sky**
62. Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses**
63. Pramoedya Ananta Toer, This Earth of Mankind
64. Morgan Talty, Fire Exit
65. Roberto Bolaño, The Spirit of Science Fiction
66. Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
67. Dave Zirin, Brazil’s Dance with the Devil: The World Cup, the Olympics, and the Fight for Democracy
68. Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer***
69. Peter Handke, The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick
70. Philip Roth, Zuckerman Unbound***

Let’s talk books today!

The post 2024: A Historian’s Reading List appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

There aren't that many movies specifically set on New Year's Eve, but one of the best is The Hudsucker Proxy (1994), Joel and Ethan Coen's visually striking, affectionate homage to classic Hollywood screwball comedies. The film turned 30 this year, so it's the perfect opportunity for a rewatch.

(WARNING: Spoilers below.)

The Coen brothers started writing the script for The Hudsucker Proxy when Joel was working as an assistant editor on Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead (1981). Raimi ended up co-writing the script, as well as making a cameo appearance as a brainstorming marketing executive.  The Coen brothers took their inspiration from the films of Preston Sturgess and Frank Capra, among others, but the intent was never to satirize or parody those films. "It's the case where, having seen those movies, we say 'They're really fun—let's do one!'; as opposed to "They're really fun—let's comment upon them,'" Ethan Coen has said.

They finished the script in 1985, but at the time they were small indie film directors. It wasn't until the critical and commercial success of 1991's Barton Fink that the Coen brothers had the juice in Hollywood to finally make The Hudsucker Proxy. Warner Bros. greenlit the project and producer Joel Silver gave the brothers complete creative control, particularly over the final cut.

Norville Barnes (Tim Robbins) is an ambitious, idealistic recent graduate of a business college in Muncie, Indiana, who takes a job as a mailroom clerk at Hudsucker Industries in New York, intent on working his way to the top. That ascent happens much sooner than expected. On the same December day in 1958, the company's founder and president, Waring Hudsucker (Charles Durning), leaps to his death from the boardroom on the 44th floor (not counting the mezzanine).

A meteoric rise

To keep the company's stock from going public as the bylaws dictate, board member Sidney Mussburger (Paul Newman) proposes they elect a patsy as the next president—someone so incompetent it will spook investors and temporarily depress the stock so the board can buy up controlling shares on the cheap. Enter Norville, who takes the opportunity of delivering a Blue Letter to Mussburger to pitch a new product, represented by a simple circle drawn on a piece of paper: "You know... for kids!" Thinking he's found his imbecilic patsy, Mussburger names Norville the new president.

Meanwhile, a reporter for the Manhattan Argus, Amy Archer (Jennifer Jason Leigh), is skeptical about this new "idea man" and cons her way into becoming Norville's secretary to find out what's really going on. At first, everything goes according to the board's plan. Norville's proposal for the "dingus" is fast-tracked into production and dubbed the Hula-Hoop by marketing. It's shaping up to be a spectacular failure until a little boy finds a discarded Hula-Hoop on the street and demonstrates a variety of tricks while playing with it.

The Hula-Hoop becomes a national sensation. The company's stock soars instead of crashing and Norville basks in unexpected glory. Frankly, the success goes to his head. But the ruthless Mussburger has a few more tricks up his sleeve. Is Norville any match for his machinations? Maybe he is, with a little timely magical intervention to ensure a happy ending.

A fad is born

Unfortunately for the Coen brothers, The Hudsucker Proxy was not their hoped-for mainstream success. It was a box office bomb, grossing just $11.3 million worldwide against a production budget of between $24-$40 million. Reviews were mixed, with critics declaring the film something of a technical pastiche that lacked humanity—all style with little substance and too many sly references to classic films from Hollywood of yore. But as often happens, the film withstood the test of time, amassing a strong cult following over the last 30 years.

Even the film's harshest critics had nothing but praise for the film's stunning cinematography and production design, a tribute to the distinctive vision of its directors. Visual effects supervisor Michael McAlister, in a 2019 interview, called The Hudsucker Proxy his favorite of the many films he's worked on: "It's the only movie that I've worked on that I wouldn't change one frame of film under my department's domain."

This is a mythical version of New York City, created with miniatures of all the iconic skyscrapers, crammed together into a single area to evoke a bygone Manhattan. (The models were later used for films like Batman Forever and Godzilla.) There are shades of Art Deco and Frank Lloyd Wright, mixed in with darker dystopian touches reminiscent of films like 1985's Brazil.

I've never understood the early criticisms, but then, I've always been a fan of screwball comedies and appreciate that the Coen brothers played this one straight, rather than trying to make a clever satire. It's the sheer earnest good cheer they bring to the film that makes The Hudsucker Proxy so eminently watchable, year after year—reminiscent of It's A Wonderful Life (1946), Mr. Deeds Goes To Town (1936), Sweet Smell of Success (1957), and similar feel-good fare.

A second chance

You've got smart, snappy dialog and rapid-fire delivery in the style of 1940s comedies like The Front Page. Jason Leigh specifically modeled Amy Archer's vocal and physical mannerisms on Rosalind Russell's reporter in that film, as well as on Katharine Hepburn. Robbins plays Norville's wide-eyed optimism to perfection and Paul Newman's rasping delivery ("Sure, sure") and smug confidence makes Mussburger the perfect screwball comedy villain.

You've also got the fast-talking elevator operator, Buzz (Jim True) for comic relief, firing off bad puns about the former president's suicide ("When is a sidewalk well-dressed? When it's WARING Hudsucker! Get it?"), John Mahoney as Argus chief editor Al, and Bruce Campbell as Amy's dim-witted misogynist colleague, Smitty. The Coen brothers even employ a couple of dyspeptic diner patrons, Benny and Lou, as narrators to provide the needed exposition in the scene where Amy picks up an unwitting Norville with the old mother's lumbago ruse ("she's good, Lou").

Ultimately, The Hudsucker Proxy is an uplifting fable about why it matters to be good and decent, even in a cut-throat world that values nothing but profit. Those pursuits didn't bring Waring Hudsucker true happiness, after all, leading to his voluntary departure for the Great Hereafter. As he wrote in his final missive, "Failure should never lead to despair. That despair looks only to the past, in business and in love. The future is now." It's a fitting reminder for us all as 2024 draws to a close.

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Comments

It’s becoming an organized crime tactic:

Card draining is when criminals remove gift cards from a store display, open them in a separate location, and either record the card numbers and PINs or replace them with a new barcode. The crooks then repair the packaging, return to a store and place the cards back on a rack. When a customer unwittingly selects and loads money onto a tampered card, the criminal is able to access the card online and steal the balance.

[…]

In card draining, the runners assist with removing, tampering and restocking of gift cards, according to court documents and investigators.

A single runner driving from store to store can swipe or return thousands of tampered cards to racks in a short time. “What they do is they just fly into the city and they get a rental car and they just hit every big-box location that they can find along a corridor off an interstate,” said Parks.

A friend sent this to me from a Denver restaurant.

I have a lot of thoughts. Here are 5:

1. Why the fuck does this exist?
2. Who would pay $16 for an unmixed pile of ingredients?
3. Who, for the love of whatever god you choose to worship, puts corn and pepitas in guacamole, but no chiles?
4. Why even go out to eat in a day and age when you pay this much for an unmixed appetizer?
5. How much profit seeking is the owner trying to wring out of diners by making them to the labor themselves?

Christ…….

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There is rarely time to write about every cool science paper that comes our way; many worthy candidates sadly fall through the cracks over the course of the year. But as 2024 comes to a close, we've gathered ten of our favorite such papers at the intersection of science and culture as a special treat, covering a broad range of topics: from reenacting Bronze Age spear combat and applying network theory to the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, to Spider-Man inspired web-slinging tech and a mathematical connection between a turbulent phase transition and your morning cup of coffee. Enjoy!

Reenacting Bronze Age spear combat

An experiment with experienced fighters who spar freely using different styles. Credit: Valerio Gentile/CC BY

The European Bronze Age saw the rise of institutionalized warfare, evidenced by the many spearheads and similar weaponry archaeologists have unearthed. But how might these artifacts be used in actual combat? Dutch researchers decided to find out by constructing replicas of Bronze Age shields and spears and using them in realistic combat scenarios. They described their findings in an October paper published in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

There have been a couple of prior experimental studies on bronze spears, but per Valerio Gentile (now at the University of Gottingen) and coauthors, practical research to date has been quite narrow in scope, focusing on throwing weapons against static shields. Coauthors C.J. van Dijk of the National Military Museum in the Netherlands and independent researcher O. Ter Mors each had more than a decade of experience teaching traditional martial arts, specializing in medieval polearms and one-handed weapons. So they were ideal candidates for testing the replica spears and shields.

Of course, there is no direct information on prehistoric fighting styles, so van Dijk and Mors relied on basic biomechanics of combat movements with similar weapons detailed in historic manuals. They ran three versions of the experiment: one focused on engagement and controlled collisions, another on delivering wounding body blows, and the third on free sparring. They then studied wear marks left on the spearheads and found they matched the marks found on similar genuine weapons excavated from Bronze Age sites. They also gleaned helpful clues to the skills required to use such weapons.

DOI: Journal of Archaeological Science, 2024. 10.1016/j.jas.2024.106044 (About DOIs).

Physics of Ned Kahn’s kinetic sculptures

Shimmer Wall, The Franklin Institute, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Credit: Ned Kahn

Environmental artist and sculptor Ned Kahn is famous for his kinematic building facades, inspired by his own background in science. An exterior wall on the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh, for instance, consists of hundreds of flaps that move in response to wind, creating distinctive visual patterns. Kahn used the same method to create his Shimmer Wall at Philadelphia's Franklin Institute, as well as several other similar projects.

Physicists at Sorbonne Universite in Paris have studied videos of Kahn's kinetic facades and conducted experiments to measure the underlying physical mechanisms, outlined in a November paper published in the journal Physical Review Fluids. The authors analyzed 18 YouTube videos taken of six of Kahn's kinematic facades, working with Kahn and building management to get the dimensions of the moving plates, scaling up from the video footage to get further information on spatial dimensions.

They also conducted their own wind tunnel experiments, using strings of pendulum plates. Their measurements confirmed that the kinetic patterns were propagating waves to create the flickering visual effects. The plates' movement is driven primarily by their natural resonant frequencies at low speeds, and by pressure fluctuations from the wind at higher speeds.

DOI: Physical Review Fluids, 2024. 10.1103/PhysRevFluids.9.114604 (About DOIs).

How brewing coffee connects to turbulence

Trajectories in time traced out by turbulent puffs as they move along a simulated pipe and in experiments, with blue regions indicate puff "traffic jams." Credit: Grégoire Lemoult et al., 2024

Physicists have been studying turbulence for centuries, particularly the transitional period where flows shift from predictably smooth (laminar flow) to highly turbulent. That transition is marked by localized turbulent patches known as "puffs," which often form in fluids flowing through a pipe or channel. In an October paper published in the journal Nature Physics, physicists used statistical mechanics to reveal an unexpected connection between the process of brewing coffee and the behavior of those puffs.

Traditional mathematical models of percolation date back to the 1940s. Directed percolation is when the flow occurs in a specific direction, akin to how water moves through freshly ground coffee beans, flowing down in the direction of gravity. There's a sweet spot for the perfect cuppa, where the rate of flow is sufficiently slow to absorb most of the flavor from the beans, but also fast enough not to back up in the filter. That sweet spot in your coffee brewing process corresponds to the aforementioned laminar-turbulent transition in pipes.

Physicist Nigel Goldenfeld of the University of California, San Diego, and his coauthors used pressure sensors to monitor the formation of puffs in a pipe, focusing on how puff-to-puff interactions influenced each other's motion. Next, they tried to mathematically model the relevant phase transitions to predict puff behavior. They found that the puffs behave much like cars moving on a freeway during rush hour: they are prone to traffic jams—i.e., when a turbulent patch matches the width of the pipe, causing other puffs to build up behind it—that form and dissipate on their own. And they tend to "melt" at the laminar-turbulent transition point.

DOI: Nature Physics, 2024. 10.1038/s41567-024-02513-0 (About DOIs).

Network theory and Bach's music

In a network representation of music, notes are represented by nodes, and transition between notes are represented by directed edges connecting the nodes. Credit: S. Kulkarni et al., 2024

When you listen to music, does your ability to remember or anticipate the piece tell you anything about its structure? Physicists at the University of Pennsylvania developed a model based on network theory to do just that, describing their work in a February paper published in the journal Physical Review Research. Johann Sebastian Bach's works were an ideal choice given the highly mathematical structure, plus the composer was so prolific, across so many very different kinds of musical compositions—preludes, fugues, chorales, toccatas, concertos, suites, and cantatas—as to allow for useful comparisons.

First, the authors built a simple "true" network for each composition, in which individual notes served as "nodes" and the transitions from note to note served as "edges" connecting them. Then they calculated the amount of information in each network. They found it was possible to tell the difference between compositional forms based on their information content (entropy). The more complex toccatas and fugues had the highest entropy, while simpler chorales had the lowest.

Next, the team wanted to quantify how effectively this information was communicated to the listener, a task made more difficult by the innate subjectivity of human perception. They developed a fuzzier "inferred" network model for this purpose, capturing an essential aspect of our perception: we find a balance between accuracy and cost, simplifying some details so as to make it easier for our brains to process incoming information like music.

The results: There were fewer differences between the true and inferred networks for Bach's compositions than for randomly generated networks, suggesting that clustering and the frequent repetition of transitions (represented by thicker edges) in Bach networks were key to effectively communicating information to the listener. The next step is to build a multi-layered network model that incorporates elements like rhythm, timbre, chords, or counterpoint (a Bach specialty).

DOI: Physical Review Research, 2024. 10.1103/PhysRevResearch.6.013136 (About DOIs).

The philosophy of Reddit's AITA

Count me among the many people practically addicted to Reddit's "Am I the Asshole" (AITA) forum. It's such a fascinating window into the intricacies of how flawed human beings navigate different relationships, whether personal or professional. That's also what makes it a fantastic source of illustrative common-place dilemmas of moral decision-making for philosophers like Daniel Yudkin of the University of Pennsylvania. Relational context matters, as Yudkin and several co-authors ably demonstrated in a PsyArXiv preprint earlier this year.

For their study, Yudkin et al. compiled a dataset of nearly 370,000 AITA posts, along with over 11 million comments, posted between 2018 and 2021. They used machine learning to analyze the language used to sort all those posts into different categories. They relied on an existing taxonomy identifying six basic areas of moral concern: fairness/proportionality, feelings, harm/offense, honesty, relational obligation, and social norms.

Yudkin et al. identified 29 of the most common dilemmas in the AITA dataset and grouped them according to moral theme. Two of the most common were relational transgression and relational omission (failure to do what was expected), followed by behavioral over-reaction and unintended harm. Cheating and deliberate misrepresentation/dishonesty were the moral dilemmas rated most negatively in the dataset—even more so than intentional harm. Being judgmental was also evaluated very negatively, as it was often perceived as being self-righteous or hypocritical. The least negatively evaluated dilemmas were relational omissions.

As for relational context, cheating and broken promise dilemmas typically involved romantic partners like boyfriends rather than one's mother, for example, while mother-related dilemmas more frequently fell under relational omission. Essentially, "people tend to disappoint their mothers but be disappointed by their boyfriends," the authors wrote. Less close relationships, by contrast, tend to be governed by "norms of politeness and procedural fairness." Hence, Yudkin et al. prefer to think of morality "less as a set of abstract principles and more as a 'relational toolkit,' guiding and constraining behavior according to the demands of the social situation."

DOI: PsyArXiv, 2024. 10.31234/osf.io/5pcew (About DOIs).

Fractal scaling of trees in art

<em>De grijze boom</em> (Gray tree) by Piet Mondrian, 1911. Credit: Public domain

Leonardo da Vinci famously invented a so-called "rule of trees" as a guide to realistically depicting trees in artistic representations according to their geometric proportions. In essence, if you took all the branches of a given tree, folded them up and compressed them into something resembling a trunk, that trunk would have the same thickness from top to bottom. That rule in turn implies a fractal branching pattern, with a scaling exponent of about 2 describing the proportions between the diameters of nearby boughs and the number of boughs with a given diameter.

According to the authors of a preprint posted to the physics arXiv in February, however, recent biological research suggests a higher scaling exponent of 3 known as Murray's Law, for the rule of trees. Their analysis of 16th century Islamic architecture, Japanese paintings from the Edo period, and 20th century European art showed fractal scaling between 1.5 and 2.5. However, when they analyzed an abstract tree painting by Piet Mondrian, they found it exhibited fractal scaling of 3, before mathematicians had formulated Murray's Law, even though Mondrian's tree did not feature explicit branching.

The findings intrigued physicist Richard Taylor of the University of Oregon, whose work over the last 20 years includes analyzing fractal patterns in the paintings of Jackson Pollock. "In particular, I thought the extension to Mondrian's 'trees' was impressive," he told Ars earlier this year. "I like that it establishes a connection between abstract and representational forms. It makes me wonder what would happen if the same idea were to be applied to Pollock's poured branchings."

Taylor himself published a 2022 paper about climate change and how nature's stress-reducing fractals might disappear in the future. "If we are pessimistic for a moment, and assume that climate change will inevitably impact nature's fractals, then our only future source of fractal aesthetics will be through art, design and architecture," he said. "This brings a very practical element to studies like [this]."

DOI: arXiv, 2024. 10.48550/arXiv.2402.13520 (About DOIs).

IDing George Washington’s descendants

A DNA study identified descendants of George Washington from unmarked remains. Credit: Public domain

DNA profiling is an incredibly useful tool in forensics, but the most common method—short tandem repeat (STR) analysis—typically doesn't work when remains are especially degraded, especially if said remains have been preserved with embalming methods using formaldehyde. This includes the remains of US service members who died in such past conflicts as World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and the Cold War. That's why scientists at the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System's identification lab at the Dover Air Force Base have developed new DNA sequencing technologies.

They used those methods to identify the previously unmarked remains of descendants of George Washington, according to a March paper published in the journal iScience. The team tested three sets of remains and compared the results with those of a known living descendant, using methods for assessing paternal and maternal relationships, as well as a new method for next-generation sequencing data involving some 95,000 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in order to better predict more distant ancestry. The combined data confirmed that the remains belonged to Washington's descendants and the new method should help do the same for the remains of as-yet-unidentified service members.

In related news, in July, forensic scientists successfully used descendant DNA to identify a victim of the 1921 Tulsa massacre in Oklahoma City, buried in a mass grave containing more than a hundred victims. C.L. Daniel was a World War I veteran, still in his 20s when he was killed. More than 120 such graves have been found since 2020, with DNA collected from around 30 sets of remains, but this is the first time those remains have been directly linked to the massacre. There are at least 17 other victims in the grave where Daniel's remains were found.

DOI: iScience, 2024. 10.1016/j.isci.2024.109353 (About DOIs).

Spidey-inspired web-slinging tech

stream of liquid silk quickly turns to a strong fiber that sticks to and lifts objects. Credit: Marco Lo Presti et al., 2024

Over the years, researchers in Tufts University's Silklab have come up with all kinds of ingenious bio-inspired uses for the sticky fibers found in silk moth cocoons: adhesive glues, printable sensors, edible coatings, and light-collecting materials for solar cells, to name a few. Their latest innovation is a web-slinging technology inspired by Spider-Man's ability to shoot webbing from his wrists, described in an October paper published in the journal Advanced Functional Materials.

Coauthor Marco Lo Presti was cleaning glassware with acetone in the lab one day when he noticed something that looked a lot like webbing forming on the bottom of a glass. He realized this could be the key to better replicating spider threads for the purpose of shooting the fibers from a device like Spider-Man—something actual spiders don't do. (They spin the silk, find a surface, and draw out lines of silk to build webs.)

The team boiled silk moth cocoons in a solution to break them down into proteins called fibroin. The fibroin was then extruded through bore needles into a stream. Spiking the fibroin solution with just the right additives will cause it to solidify into fiber once it comes into contact with air. For the web-slinging technology, they added dopamine to the fibroin solution and then shot it through a needle in which the solution was surrounded by a layer of acetone, which triggered solidification.

The acetone quickly evaporated, leaving just the webbing attached to whatever object it happened it hit. The team tested the resulting fibers and found they could lift a steel bolt, a tube floating on water, a partially buried scalpel and a wooden block—all from as far away as 12 centimeters. Sure, natural spider silk is still about 1000 times stronger than these fibers, but it's still a significant step forward that paves the way for future novel technological applications.

DOI: Advanced Functional Materials, 2024. 10.1002/adfm.202414219

Solving a mystery of a 12th century supernova

Pa 30 is the supernova remnant of SN 1181. Credit: unWISE (D. Lang)/CC BY-SA 4.0

In 1181, astronomers in China and Japan recorded the appearance of a "guest star" that shone as bright as Saturn and was visible in the sky for six months. We now know it was a supernova (SN1181), one of only five such known events occurring in our Milky Way. Astronomers got a closer look at the remnant of that supernova and have determined the nature of strange filaments resembling dandelion petals that emanate from a "zombie star" at its center, according to an October paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The Chinese and Japanese astronomers only recorded an approximate location for the unusual sighting, and for centuries no one managed to make a confirmed identification of a likely remnant from that supernova. Then, in 2021, astronomers measured the speed of expansion of a nebula known as Pa 30, which enabled them to determine its age: around 1,000 years, roughly coinciding with the recorded appearance of SN1181. PA 30 is an unusual remnant because of its zombie star—most likely itself a remnant of the original white dwarf that produced the supernova.

This latest study relied on data collected by Caltech's Keck Cosmic Web Imager, a spectrograph at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii. One of the unique features of this instrument is that it can measure the motion of matter in a supernova and use that data to create something akin to a 3D movie of the explosion. The authors were able to create such a 3D map of P 30 and calculated that the zombie star's filaments have ballistic motion, moving at approximately 1,000 kilometers per second.

Nor has that velocity changed since the explosion, enabling them to date that event almost exactly to 1181. And the findings raised fresh questions—namely, the ejected filament material is asymmetrical—which is unusual for a supernova remnant. The authors suggest that asymmetry may originate with the initial explosion.

There's also a weird inner gap around the zombie star. Both will be the focus of further research.

DOI: Astrophysical Journal Letters, 2024. 10.3847/2041-8213/ad713b (About DOIs).

Reviving a “lost” 16th century score

Fragment of music from The Aberdeen Breviary: Volume 1 Credit: National Library of Scotland /CC BY 4.0

Never underestimate the importance of marginalia in old manuscripts. Scholars from the University of Edinburgh and KU Leuven in Belgium can attest to that, having discovered a fragment of "lost" music from 16th-century pre-Reformation Scotland in a collection of worship texts. The team was even able to reconstruct the fragment and record it to get a sense of what music sounded like from that period in northeast Scotland, as detailed in a December paper published in the journal Music and Letters.

King James IV of Scotland commissioned the printing of several copies of The Aberdeen Breviary—a collection of prayers, hymns, readings, and psalms for daily worship—so that his subjects wouldn't have to import such texts from England or Europe. One 1510 copy, known as the "Glamis copy," is currently housed in the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh. It was while examining handwritten annotations in this copy that the authors discovered the musical fragment on a page bound into the book—so it hadn't been slipped between the pages at a later date.

The team figured out the piece was polyphonic, and then realized it was the tenor part from a harmonization for three or four voices of the hymn "Cultor Dei," typically sung at night during Lent. (You can listen to a recording of the reconstructed composition here.) The authors also traced some of the history of this copy of The Aberdeen Breviary, including its use at one point by a rural chaplain at Aberdeen Cathedral, before a Scottish Catholic acquired it as a family heirloom.

“Identifying a piece of music is a real ‘Eureka’ moment for musicologists," said coauthor David Coney of Edinburgh College of Art. "Better still, the fact that our tenor part is a harmony to a well-known melody means we can reconstruct the other missing parts. As a result, from just one line of music scrawled on a blank page, we can hear a hymn that had lain silent for nearly five centuries, a small but precious artifact of Scotland’s musical and religious traditions.”

DOI: Music and Letters, 2024. 10.1093/ml/gcae076 (About DOIs).

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