Books

• Thaler, Misbehaving
• Roth, Who Gets What
• Ritchie, Intelligence
• Demick, Nothing to Envy
• Allitt, The Industrial Revolution

I’m not Murray’s intended audience for By the People, but I found it pretty interesting after the first couple chapters, even though I probably agree with Murray about very little in the policy space.

I read the first 1/4 of Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence. It’s fairly good for what it is, but it’s the “bunch of random cool stories about history” kind of macrohistory, not the data-driven kind of macrohistory I prefer, so I gave up on it.

Music

This month I listened to dozens of jazz albums while working on my in-progress jazz guide. I think I had heard most of them before, but it’s hard to remember which ones. My favorite listens I don’t think I’d heard before were:

• Paul Bley, Solemn Meditation (1958)
• Roland Kirk, I Talk with the Spirits (1964)
• Andrew Hill, Lift Every Voice (1970)
• Pat Martino, Baiyina (The Clear Evidence) (1968)

Music I particularly enjoyed from other genres:

• Son Lux, Bones (2015)

Movies/TV

I totally loved Inside Out (2015). It’s one of the contenders for best Pixar film ever.

TV’s Wayward Pines is badly written in some ways, but its 5th episode is one of the most satisfying mystery/puzzle resolutions I’ve ever seen. The first four episodes build up a bunch of bizarre mysteries, and then the 5th episode answers most of them in a way that is surprising and rule-constrained and non-arbitrary (e.g. not magic), which is something I see so rarely I can’t even remember the last time I saw it on film/TV.