Books first mentioned on podcasts in week 2024-W05

“So Patrick says I'm a big fan of the podcast It would be insightful if the two of you could talk about the potential failures of a meritocracy like the one discussed in the Meritocracy Trap by Daniel Markovits Are you familiar with this book I haven't read the Meritocracy Trap, but I'm pretty familiar with these arguments against meritocracy”

“There is another book on this topic of merit and meritocracy This one was written by one of the professors I took a course with at Harvard named Michael Sandel It was called Justice At the time, it was the largest lecture class at Harvard”

“Yeah I mean, if you go back, I don't know how many decades, but I think it was Nicholas Lemann's book The Big Test, which gives you a little history of these Ivy League admissions Lemann says, you know, there was a time in the history of these elite universities that the way you got in was what your last”

“So Mike, there’s an economist named Robert Frank, and he wrote a book called Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy Okay And I would say the through line in a lot of these arguments, including Sandel's, is that when you get into Harvard, you think you earned it”

“My guest will be Cat Bohannan, who has written an absolutely stunning book; it's called "Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution."”

“James Cone wrote a book called 'Malcolm and Martin: Dreams and Nightmares.'”

“But I just finished All About Love by bell hooks, and you know, she often talks about the wandering life with lovelessness and that searching for it and not having it, and I feel like that goes hand in hand with what you’re saying, right?”

“Well, you know, I had written this book titled 'Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism' in 2018. And this new one is called 'The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science.'”