Weekend Reading: Stand

I’m a cyclist. I like cycling for my commute, fast rides, rides in the suburbs, fat biking in the snow. I like watching competitive cycling: men’s and women’s races. I watch more women’s racing because of Kathryn Bertine.

Kathryn Bertine details her activism for equality with women’s cycling in Stand. It’s a memoir detailing the ups and down in her professional life, and the ups and down in her personal life. All those ups and downs are framed in the story of her efforts to get a women’s version of the Tour de France and move towards equality between women’s professional cycling and men’s professional cycling.

My first request is that you pay more attention to women’s cycling. The women’s races are as exciting as the men’s races. There is a chicken and egg problem with women’s cycling. Fewer people are watching it because there is less coverage and inferior coverage. There is less coverage and inferior coverage because the producers think fewer people are watching.

I picked up GCN+ this year to watch cycling races. I tried to watch as many women’s races as men’s races. When I click on a story about men’s racing, I make sure to click on a story about women’s racing. I usually buy a watercolor from Greig Leach each cycling season. This year I bought all women’s races, realizing that my shelf was just art from the men’s races. My favorite was this example of the results of Karthyn’s efforts for equality in cycling. Lizzie Deignan winning the first Paris Roubaix Femmes:

Equality. Once you know the teams and the riders, it’s more enjoyable. Whether it’s the men or the women on the bikes.

Kathryn is a bad ass athlete and a fantastic writer. I first came across her writing in As Good as Gold. She worked for ESPN documenting her quest to make the 2008 summer Olympics in Beijing. She tried lots of sports: triathlon, modern pentathlon, team handball, luge, rowing, open water swimming, racewalking, track cycling, and road cycling. She was unsuccessful in most of those. She was a competitive triathlete, but not at an Olympic level. Turns out she was excellent at cycling and that experience led to her pro career.

It was the vast difference in treatment of the men’s and women’s professional cycling that lead to Stand. She encountered clear discrimination and dismissive treatment by those running the professional cycling organizations. Sponsors were not there for women’s cycling because there was so much less coverage of women’s cycling. There was so much less coverage because the cycling organizations were not promoting the races and therefore there were fewer sponsors. I view it as a terrible circle of passing the blame.

It took someone like Kathryn to stand up and push for equality. Stand is her story in this push for equality.

I’m going to spoil part of the ending. Kathryn established The Homestretch Foundation to provide temporary housing and other resources to professional or elite athletes—primarily female athletes—who face financial and economic discrepancies. If you’ve gotten this far down the page and aren’t a book reader, please consider sending a donation to The Homestretch Foundation.

Weekend Book Reading: First

Every day is starting to feel like a Saturday: A ton of work to do, but I don’t have to go into the office tomorrow. A lot of my free reading time is consumed with trying to understand what is going on with the current pandemic. When I’ve had enough of that, I’ve been attacking my to-read pile.

I recently finished First: Sandra Day’Connor by Evan Thomas.

It’s a great biography of the first female US Supreme Court Justice. Born in El Paso and raised on a cattle ranch in Arizona, she grew up in a time when women didn’t usually have careers.

She left home at 16 to go to college and then law school at Stanford. Even though she graduated in the top of her class, law firms only offered her a job as a legal secretary. Eventually she landed an unpaid position as deputy county attorney and had to share space with a secretary.

Her rise to the highest court in America seems almost prescient with her ranch-honed determination, brilliant mind and nose for politics.

Upon reaching the Supreme Court in her biography, Mr. Thomas starts weaving important Supreme Court cases into the story. And practical items as well. The building didn’t have a women’s bathroom nearby for her when she arrived.

Mr. Thomas apparently had wide access to her personal journals, her husband’s diary and her family. He paints a detailed and insightful portrait of an extraordinary woman.

If you’re looking for a book to read while cooped up because of the coronavirus, I recommend this one. Unfortunately (but for good reason) my local bookstore is closed. You can still get it through Amazon. I listened to it as an audiobook through Audible.

Weekend Reading: None of the Above

There were massive problems at the schools in Atlanta. Funding problems choked schools from needed capital investments and programming dollars. There was pressure to perform well on standardized tests under the No Child Left Behind Law, with fewer resources.

That pressure was too much for some principals and school teachers. They cheated and changed answers on their students tests.

Shanti Robinson is one of the teachers who went to trial for cheating on the standardized tests. She tells her story in None of the Above.

The cheating was discovered with statistics. The tests for the whole school system were reviewed to see how often there were signs of erasure which resulted in answers being changed from wrong to correct. They found some statistical anomalies where some classrooms had a much larger amount of those correcting erasures. So much so, that the only way it could have happened was someone changing the answers.

Post-test, Ms. Robinson and other teachers were told to erase “stray marks” from the test booklets. Some teachers interpreted that to mean fix the wrong answers. Ms. Robinson claims that she just erased the doodles in the test booklets.

The problem is that Ms. Robinson’s class was one of those with a statistically high number of erasures from wrong to right answers. Someone changed her students’ answers.

She goes down a common path of criminal mentality by loading up None of the Above with all of the other problems with the Atlanta school system and all of the other people who are doing things that hurt the students in the school system. The authors attack real estate deals that use a projected increase in tax revenue in an area to help fund a real estate development project. They attack charter schools and the state bureaucrats. There were lots of problems in the Atlanta school system greater than Ms. Robinson’s alleged cheating.

Spoiler alert: Ms. Robinson goes to trial after prosecutors play hardball with the principals, teachers and administrators accused of cheating. They bring RICO charges. Ms. Robinson complains about the prosecutor’s zeal and overly harsh charges. She complains about the fairness of the judge.

I didn’t find Ms. Robinson’s story compelling or believe her claims of innocence. I’m not sure she made the changes, but she fails to acknowledge that someone clearly made changes.

There are better sources for discussions of public education, testing and charter schools. I found the authors’ discussion of them to merely be a distraction from the cheating scandal.

Disclosure: The publisher sent me a copy of the book and asked for a review.

Weekend Reading: 2020 Commission Report on North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States

Jeffrey Lewis’s first novel is speculative fiction with a terrifying title: 2020 Commission Report on North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States. It’s attempting to give us hindsight about the future. Obviously, from the title, things go wrong. Very wrong.

Mr. Lewis is expert on the North Korean nuclear weapons program. He is the Director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. His team has played an important role in revealing the extent of the North Korean nuclear program. He also puts together a suprisingly interesting and enjoyable (if slightly terrifying) podcast, the Arms Control Wonk, on disarmament, arms control and nonproliferation.

Mr. Lewis is well aware of North Korea’s arsenal and mindset of its crazy leader.

For the MAGA inclined, you will not like the portrayal of President Trump. He is not the cause of the attacks. His off-cuff statements are easily misunderstood by a paranoid regime. That leads North Korea to escalate through misunderstanding the actions and statements from the Trump administration.

Mr. Lewis shows us that many of steps that lead to his fictional war have been in place well before President Trump and his unorthodox approach.  The US has stationed bombers in Guam for over a decade and they practice sorties to the Korean peninsula on a regular basis. The “denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula” called for at the recent US North Korea summit was, in the view of North Korea, an agreement for the US to disarm.

US intelligence assessments have assumed that Kim Jong-un is a rational actor, and would never take the suicidal step to start a nuclear war. Mr. Lewis thinks that is wrong. His view is that faced with the threat of regime change, North Korea may see a nuclear strike as his best hope of survival. Even if it’s not, what is there to lose.

The 2020 Commission Report is an incredibly well written book and a page-turner. You know from the title what’s going to happen, but you can’t help watch the dominoes fall.

Weekend Reading: Bad Blood

Add Bad Blood to the top of your to-read list.

Bad Blood tells the terrible story of Theranos and its founder, Elizabeth Holmes. She took the Silicon Valley habit of vaporware and “fake it ’til you make it” to medical devices. The Theranos machines were unreliable, if they worked at all. Bad software will mess with a company’s data. Bad medical devices could kill people.

To be a bit sympathetic to Ms. Holmes, it wasn’t all about the money. I’m sure she enjoyed the public admiration and accolades. The book doesn’t have her talking about rolling in piles of cash. Ms. Holmes was passionate about her vision of a revolution in health care to save lives and improve health outcomes. She was motivating the Theranos employees to go along with the bad acts to achieve the revolution.

She believed the entrenched blood testing laboratories, Quest Diagnostics and LabCorp, were out to stop her and stop the revolution. Doubts about the viability of Theranos’s products were perceived by Holmes as sabotage by the entrenched blood testing companies.

At some point she embraced the limelight and began believing her vision was working. Facts just got in the way. Success at the company was more likely if you told Ms. Holmes what she wanted to hear.

The company failed at corporate governance. Ms. Holmes had nearly all of the voting rights. There was no check on her power. The powerless board was full of statesman, not professional investors, corporate managers or medical experts. A Board of Directors with Henry Kissinger, former Secretary of State George Shultz, William Perry (former Secretary of Defense), , Sam Nunn (former U.S. Senator), and  James Mattis (General, USMC) is impressive. But they brought no expertise or guidance for a medical device start up.

Weekend Reading: Lake Success

Lake Success  will challenge you with an unlikable protagonist. Barry Cohen is an obscenely rich hedge fund manager who decides to leave his wife and autistic son to take a bus ride to reconnect with his college girlfriend. His travelling companion is a suitcase full of expensive watches.

My favorite passage from the book:

“Is it true that your chief compliance officer had no relevant experience in the financial industry? That his sole educational credential was a bachelor’s in Russian studies from Middlebury College? That you met him at a party thrown by your friend Joseph Moses Goldblatt at the Flashdancers Gentlemen’s Club?

Lake Success  uses Barry’s travels, failings and occasional successes to paint a portrait of America wrapped up in the Trump election.

I loved Gary Shteyngart’s writing. You should add Lake Success  to your To-Read List.

Weekend Reading: Can You Outsmart an Economist?

Can I outsmart the economist Steven Landsburg? I tried getting the answers right in his new book: Can You Outsmart an Economist?

The answer: No. I can’t.

Mr Landsburg’s book present us with 100+ puzzles to illustrate some principles of economics. The puzzles bleed into understanding the interpretation of those principles in statistics, law, math, science and philosophy. You can see the political implications of some of these puzzles as well.

The publisher provided me with a review copy and I felt ready for the challenge.  I felt pretty good as I went through the warm-ups questions in chapter 1. I didn’t get them all correct, but I quickly realized my errors.

The questions got harder and more in depth. Sometimes I got the right answer. Other times I did not. But I learned quite a bit. The book is less about the quizzes than it is about the principles each question is trying to get across to the reader.

You can test yourself.  Can You Outsmart an Economist? goes on sale September 25.

Weekend Reading: The Spider Network

When I was a junior corporate lawyer, I sat in a debt training session. One of the partners mentioned LIBOR. The explanation confused me. But as a young lawyer I didn’t know very much about the workings of high finance.

It turns out that the benchmark is hodgepodge of figures voluntarily submitted by banks with little market check or control. I’ve heard plenty of stories in the news. For a detailed look, I recently read The Spider Network: The Wild Story of a Math Genius, a Gang of Backstabbing Bankers, and One of the Greatest Scams in Financial History.

LIBOR—the London interbank offered rate, determines the interest rates on trillions in loans worldwide. LIBOR is supposed to reflect the interest rate at which member banks could borrow from one another that day. LIBOR is a global benchmark used to price all types of debt from credit cards, to variable rate mortgages, to complex derivatives and to corporate loans.

Very few people knew exactly how the rate was calculated. (That included that partner giving my training.) Even among the member banks there was widespread confusion as to its exact definition.

David Enrich of The Wall Street Journal manages to make Libor interesting in The Spider Network. His key to the story is telling the story of UBS interest rate derivative trader, Tom Hayes. This socially inept, if not autistic guy, is set up to be the fall guy for the LIBOR scandal.

Banks had lots of internal conflicts on their LIBOR submission. The rate a bank submits is indication of its credit worthiness. If it submits a rate that is higher than its peers, people may wonder if there is a problem at the bank.

The other major conflict is that the banks have traders, like Tom Hayes, who could make money or lose money on their positions depending on whether LIBOR goes up or down.

“LIBOR is a widely utilized benchmark that is no longer derived from a widely traded market. It is an enormous edifice built on an eroding foundation—an unsustainable structure,” stated CFTC Chairman J. Christopher Giancarlo in his opening remarks at the CFTC’s Market Risk Advisory Committee meeting last week. At the same meeting  Commissioner Rostin Behnam identified noted that “LIBOR has been subject to pervasive fraud, abuse, and manipulation. Since June 2012, the CFTC has levied sanctions of more than $3.3 billion for LIBOR-related misconduct.”

I would recommend The Spider Network to learn more about the LIBOR mess.

 

Weekend Reading: What the Eyes Don’t See

Government failed Flint, Michigan. In April 2014, Flint changed its water source from treated Detroit system to the Flint River. Officials failed to apply corrosion inhibitors to the water. As a result, there was a serious public health danger. The Flint River water caused lead from aging pipes to leach into the water supply.

The city was crushed when GM closed it’s Flint plant in the 1980s. The city was in deep financial trouble in 2011 when the state stepped in to control the local government because of a blooming city budget deficit. The switch of water sources was to save money and the failure to apply corrosion control was a further cost-cutting measure.

There are plenty of sources of information on this crisis. I was interested in What the Eyes Don’t See because it is told from the perspective of a whistleblower.

Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha is a pediatrician at Flint’s public hospital. She was an employee of the government, calling out the government for its failures. People noticed the poor quality of the water, but the city and state claimed to have run proper tests and found it to be safe.

Dr. Mona talked with an old friend at a cookout and was sent some leaked documents causing her to question whether the water was “safe.” She was able to use the hospital blood test data to identify a noticeable spike in patients’ blood lead levels after the water supply switch.  Then it was a battle against her employer, the city and the state government.

For some criticism, I think the tile of the book and the cover art totally fail to properly convey the message of the book. I failed to notice it the first time it was made available to me by the publisher. At first glance, it seemed like some existential book about hope. Only on a second look did I catch what the book it actually about. The publisher was still nice enough to send me a review copy.

The book offers a great insight in the obstacles of a whistleblower. In this case it was not for financial gain or some battle to be correct. Dr. Mona was doing her job. As a pediatrician, her job was to keep the city’s kids healthy. The city was failing. Dr. Mona had doubts about her study. She was attacked by the government, her employer. A Michigan Department of Environmental Quality spokesperson accused her of being an “unfortunate researcher” who was “splicing and dicing numbers.”

The book is worth adding to your to-read list.

Weekend Reading: World War II at Sea

I try to keep looking for ways to interact with my kids in new ways. My son loves reading about military history, so I though I would add a book on that topic to my reading list. Reading it together would give us more things to talk about.

Oxford University Press was kind enough to send me a review copy of its upcoming release: World War II at Sea: A Global History by Craig L. Symonds. My son and I jumped in and enjoyed this narrative of the naval war and all of its belligerents, on all of the world’s oceans and seas, between 1939 and 1945.

If that sounds like a lot. It is. At almost 800 pages, it’s a tremendous collection of the events of World War II through the lens of big steel ships.

I have to admit, I knew bits and pieces of World War II history, but I never put it all together to figure out the chronology of events and how they related to each other.

The book opens with 1930 London Conference, an early attempt at an arms treaty. The goal was to limit the tonnage of naval ships to prevent a build up in naval power among Great Britain, France, Italy, the United States and Japan. The arguments over the numbers of battleships at the beginning of the war become out of touch. Mr. Symonds shows how these limitations on naval warfare become misplaced as the strategies and purpose of the navies changed rapidly during the war. WWII brought major technological advances in warfare that radically changed naval strategy. That conference failed to address aircraft carriers. By the end of the war, aircraft carriers were the key naval strength.

World War II at Sea covers all of these major engagements and their interconnection with other aspects of the conflicts:

  • the U-boat attack on Scapa Flow
  • the Battle of the Atlantic
  • the “miracle” evacuation from Dunkirk
  • the battles for control of Norway fjords
  • Mussolini’s Regia Marina, the fourth-largest navy in the world, but ineffective for a lack a fuel
  • Japanese naval power of the Kidö Butai
  • Pearl Harbor
  • Midway
  • the forced neutrality of the French navy and eventual scuttling
  • the landings in North Africa and into Italy
  • the Normandy invasion

I found the story-telling to be top notch. It’s not easy to keep no many battles, ship and personalities in context. I found Mr. Symonds to have done a masterful job of illuminating the mechanics of large-scale warfare in water and the key role it played.

As for my son, he knew most of this information separately. He appreciated so much being put together in place to add more context to the underlying events. He felt it was too brief at times for the areas he wanted to dive more deeply into.