Stories Of Your Life and Others

I really don't know why I "review" some things on this blog and not others. I'll write a post about every video game I play, no matter how short or long. I'll review novels and nonfiction books, but not graphic novels. I used to review TV shows and movies and the occasional album, but haven't done that for ages.

One in-between medium is the short story collection. I usually don't review those, unless it can share a post with some other content, or feels particularly meaningful, or maybe if I just have a lot of free time on my hands.

 

The most recent short story collection I read was really excellent: Stories Of Your Life And Others by Ted Chiang. I'd previously read and loved his later collection, Exhalation. These days I mostly think about him as the author of the best article I've read yet on generative AI, where he brings a Neal Stephenson-esque mastery of knowledge, metaphor and opinion to shine clarity on an (often intentionally) obscure topic.

I vaguely think of Chiang as a science-fiction writer, and I'm not sure why. Most of his stories aren't really sci-fi: they aren't set in the future or in outer space. But the stories are comfortably within the realm of speculative fiction. Chronologically they're often set in historical or modern settings, and feel like they're set on our world, but an alternate version of our world with some fundamental difference. Not a branching point in history, like Man in the High Castle or Merchant Princes. Rather they're worlds where some key physical law works differently from ours: reality itself is different.

MINI SPOILERS

Jumping through some of the stories: I feel like this must have occurred to me in the past, but I don't recall previously noticing the similarity of Babel and Babylon. The story I know of the Tower of Babel is one of arrogance and punishment. The main character considers that possibility here, when he wonders about how God will respond to them digging into heaven: Will he be upset? Jealous? Proud? Flattered? Friendly? The story leads to a kind of cool transcendent understanding, revealing God without actually showing Himself, proving he exists through the evidence of nature rather than direct revelation.

There are a lot of religious themes and references in many of these stories, more than I'm used to encountering. I think that was the case in Exhalation as well; in that book, the opening story is rooted in Islam, with a respectful and deeply-considered teleology taking both Allah and man into account. This book has more Jewish and Christian references, which I'm personally more familiar with.

I'm not sure which story in this collection was my favorite, but Seventy-Two Letters was particularly compelling. This story had a lot of links to our own world, such as the religious practices and social upheavals of England in the 1800s, but (a) golems are real and widely commercialized; (b) so are protective amulets; and (c) the entire means of biological reproduction are different from our own. Like a lot of the stories in this collection, characters have different perspectives and disagreements, and it feels like Chiang honors them all. I can definitely sympathize with the metal-worker unionists who fear that their jobs are being threatened, and at the same time admire the protagonist for wanting to bring labor-saving conveniences to the poor masses. For a relatively short story there is such an interesting combination of lots of little ideas, combining into a world where everything seems to be about 15 degrees off of normal.

The title story, "Story Of Your Life", was the basis of the movie "Arrival". I've only seen that once and remember liking it. I think that the story is similar to the movie; I feel like there was more plot at the end of Arrival, but I may be mis-remembering. Reading this definitely makes me want to watch it again, though! Also, while reading this story, I briefly got confused about exactly how the aliens' language works. (Spoilers for China Mieville's Embassytown follow in this paragraph!) There's a throw-away line early on here, I think during her first session with the aliens, where she tries to orally repeat back a spoken line to the aliens. They don't respond to her when she speaks, only when she plays back the recording of their own voices. I went "Oh, that's right - these are the aliens where language is the same as thought, it's impossible for them to lie, and the only way they can hear you is if you mean what you're saying." But that isn't the deal for these aliens, it's the deal for the aliens in Embassytown! For these aliens, their deal is that they have an inverted view of causality to our own: instead of viewing the universe as a place where taking actions leads to results, they view the universe as a place where results necessitate the performance of actions. This impacts their grammar and writing, but also their entire way of thinking: not just "way of thinking" as in their philosophy, but how they perceive the universe. In order to learn their language, the linguist needs to understand their thoughts, and eventually comes to perceive as they do, aware of everything that will happen in her future, and still performing actions when she knows the results they'll lead to. Anyways! I think it's funny that there are multiple sci-fi linguist stories out there, and I only belatedly realized that several years after encountering them.

The last story (note: there are other stories I haven't mentioned here, but that doesn't mean they aren't good! Just that I can't think of anything significant to say about them!), "Liking What You See: A Documentary", feels like something that would unfold during a semester at Oberlin: a student movement, covered with language of social justice, and everyone reacting to it in some way. Like the other stories, this doesn't proffer a simplistic moral like "tech bad" or "tech good", but offers a kaleidescopic vision of how some change would impact different people and how they would feel about it. It was interesting to read the end notes where Chiang mentions that he'd like to try calli if it was available; I wouldn't necessarily have assumed that that was his position just from reading the story. The setting and overall tenor of the story feels very applicable to debates about campus activism, cancel culture and political correctness that are much in the news lately: but reading this story (from over 20 years ago!) reminds me that these are all evergreen topics, just freshly felt by each generation.

END SPOILERS

I thought this was a great collection with a lot of fine stories. Overall my favorite Chiang remains The Lifecycle of Software Objects from Exhalation, but everything I've read from him has been thoughtful and thought-provoking: more cerebral than a lot of literary fiction and more humane than a lot of speculative fiction.

Titan

I recently finished reading Titan, Ron Chernow's biography of John D. Rockefeller (Sr.). I think I've now read all of his biographies other than The Warburgs. It was a really interesting and good read!

I was interested in this book specifically because it was a Chernow book; I'm definitely familiar with the name Rockefeller, but wasn't very aware of his specific story or particularly interested in him. But I have really loved all of the Chernow biographies I've read. I was especially interested in this after having read the Grant biography, which took what I thought I knew as a boring story, and revealed a lot more interesting complexity and sparked a new appreciation for the man and his times.

In Rockefeller's case, I also found some unexpected personal connections to his life. One of the earliest examples was learning of his Baptist faith. Rockefeller had a much deeper religious life than the other Chernow subjects I've read, and Chernow spends a lot of time exploring his personal faith, describing how Baptist culture and theology helped shape his thinking and personality, and particularly the interplay between work, riches and faith.

As someone who grew up in a Baptist church (not "the" Baptist church!) a lot of this really resonated with me. Chernow does a great job at explaining the denomination's theology and culture. A huge factor is the independence of local congregations: unlike a lot of denominations that have top-down hierarchies, with powerful central bodies that select pastors and help drive initiatives, Baptist churches are self-directed, with each congregation calling its own pastors and making decisions. There's also a significant emphasis on the individual person; one of the core tenants of Baptism being that you must actively choose to join the church, rather than automatically enter as the member of a family. And there's a focus on individual people reading scriptures and developing a personal relationship with God; pastors can help instruct and guide but can't substitute for that effort. I thought Chernow's description was fair, accurate and helpful in understanding the mindset Rockefeller had.

It's also an interesting contrast with the other Chernow subjects, and I mused on Chernow's treatment of religion in his other books. Alexander Hamilton had very strong religious feelings as a youth and in the last years of his life, but for most of his career he didn't: there are some really interesting religious poems from early in his life, and some really sad letters from late in his life, but his most fervent and fertile political writings are almost wholly agnostic. George Washington seems to have had a powerful religious faith throughout his life, but it was completely private, something he didn't share even with his close friends and that he took pains to keep separate from all of his public acts. Ulysses S Grant doesn't seem to have been very religious, and Chernow doesn't spend much time on the subject with him. Pierpont Morgan had a pretty fascinating love of high Anglican church that seemed completely divorced from his private philandering immorality, which is kind of the opposite of George Washington's public stoicism and private religious feeling.

Religion kind of dovetails into one of the major themes of the book, charity, which was a big part of Rockefeller's life. Modern moguls like Bill Gates and Warren Buffer focused on making money for most of their lives, then turned to charity in their later years, but for Rockefeller giving seemed to be a passion at every stage of his career. From his very first underpaid job he carefully accounted for and gave directly to his church, to a variety of causes, and directly to individuals in need. Like much of his life this behavior was infused with a religious bend: he felt he had a calling to earn as much as he could and give away as much as he could.

I was surprised that, well into his forties, he personally read all of the (thousands!) of letters he received begging for money, and made decisions on whether and how much to give them. He felt a responsibility to give, but it wasn't an onerous obligation, but rather a source of delight, something that engaged him and he felt passionately about. Like modern philanthropists (and unlike many of his fellow tycoons) he especially wanted to treat "root causes", solving the conditions that led to poverty, rather than encouraging dependence.

It wasn't until relatively late in life that he acknowledged the need to delegate his philanthropy: he had too much money to give away, too many begging letters, and not enough time. So he established basically the first philanthropic organization that was wholly devoted to giving away a fortune. In the same way that we learn about Rockefeller's lieutenants and partners who helped him build a shadowy and nefarious oil monopoly, we also learn about the professional team that sought out worthy causes and directed great financial resources to where they could do great good.

I was also a bit surprised to learn that Rockefeller seemed to have a deep and genuine love for Black people. He and his family were committed abolitionists in the run-up to the Civil War. After the war, he became very involved in establishing centers for higher learning for former slaves, especially for black women: he funded and eventually endowed Spelmen College, the first college for black women in the United States. When he traveled, he loved visiting Black Baptist churches and singing in the congregation; that especially struck me since he was so loathe to socialize among his wealthy peers. Throughout his life he seemed much more at home rubbing shoulders with poor folks than with the elites.

The phrase "Rockefeller Republican" came along much later, but you can see the origin of the term in this book. Rockefeller was one of the original members of the Republican party who supported Abraham Lincoln and the Union, who championed both Black civil rights and big business. Standard Oil was overwhelmingly Republican, which generally meant pro-business (and often pro-graft), but also supporting education, immigration, and other positions that today we would consider socially progressive. (This accelerated under his son, John D. Rockefeller Jr., who more broadly embraced forward-looking and modern attitudes.)

Rockefeller was one of the primary Gilded Age plutocrats, but in lots of ways doesn't fit the mold. A cultural puritan, he avoided any hint of conspicuous consumption, was lean where his fellow barons were deliberately portly, and didn't socialize much outside of church. But I suppose that, as with most things in life, there really isn't a single template of "plutocrat" that most people follow: each individual was unique, we just created our own gestalt impression as we soak in the overall trends from the many individuals we view.

I was glad to read this so soon after House of Morgan, as the timelines and characters overlap and you get to see multiple perspectives on the same themes. Both books place a big emphasis on the ruinous competition of early capitalism: as new industries started (whether railroads or petroleum), new providers flooded into the market, creating massive over-investment and over-production, driving down prices below the break-even point, which in turn would drive those companies out of business, lead to massive unemployment and financial panics. Both Pierpont Morgan and John D. Rockefeller responded to this by driving to "increase efficiency" in eliminating redundancy, which in turn directly leads to monopolies.

I think Titan goes more into the nuts and bolts of how monopoly was achieved. It started with experiments in setting up cartels and pools, but those inevitably fell apart since the participants would invariably cheat and exceed their agreed-upon quotas. Eventually Rockefeller accomplished his goal via direct ownership, directly buying out all of his competitors, even if he was just going to shut down their operations rather than fold them into his own. Like Pierpont, Rockefeller didn't haggle and dicker over prices, and would over-pay to smooth over tensions if they advanced his goals. And also like Pierpont, you get the sense that he was driven at least as much by the sense of order, calm and purpose that came with consolidation, in contrast to the messy chaotic careening of the free market, and that may have driven them even more than the riches they earned.

I should take a moment here to step back and underline that monopoly is bad - a lot of this post, and a good deal of the book, focuses on the good and positive things Rockefeller accomplished, but the main reason that's interesting is because of how nefarious his reputation was, which was pretty fairly earned. In these early years of capitalism, the robber barons thrived in an environment with few or no laws to check their behavior, and most of what they did wasn't technically illegal at the time, but was plainly unethical. Out of all of Standard Oil's sins, its deception is probably the worst. Called "The Octopus" by contemporaries, it was a sprawling network of organizations with overlapping owners and boards, claiming to be separate while acting together to squeeze out competitors, wring concessions from vendors and pay off politicians. When Standard bought out a competitor, they would often have them retain their own name and brand, so customers would think that they had a choice when they really didn't. Die-hard Standard Oil haters would gladly pay a higher price for non-Standard kerosene, or die-hard anti-Standard oilmen would accept a lower rate when selling to a non-Standard refinery; but often times, those companies would actually be owned by Standard after all!

Rockefeller and Morgan used words like "efficiency" to describe what they were doing: making business more predictable, with consistent costs and manageable levels of growth. And, by those metrics, they did succeed: Rockefeller did achieve his goal of smoothing out the peaks and valleys in the price of oil, at both the production and the retail levels. You could go so far as to argue that he indirectly helped environmental conservation by slowing down the rate of madcap pumping, plugging everyone into a single network and keeping the faucet at a certain level rather than everyone frantically pumping as much as they could as quickly as they could. From that perspective, it's sort of managing the tragedy of the commons with the monopoly instead of the state.

As Standard's story continues, it turns into a great example of how a monopoly initially comes through power through innovation (superior refining techniques, transportation on railroads via new tanker cars vs. barrels on a flatbed), but once in power a monopoly will start to stifle innovation that threatens its supremacy (like Standard's vicious battles against oil pipelines, which are clearly superior to railroad transit). These are pretty direct parallels to, say, Microsoft or Google in our lifetime, as companies that were once disruptive and unlocked efficiency and value later became gatekeepers that blocked more innovative competitors from entering the market.

Ron Chernow amusingly but aptly notices that some of Rockefeller's writings sound surprisingly familiar to Marx and Engels, specifically in the contradictions of bourgeois capitalism and how it will destroy itself due to ruinous competition. The difference is that Marx sees monopoly as a step on the road to socialism, while for Rockefeller monopoly is the logical end state. That in turn made me think of Matt Stoller's distaste for socialism in Goliath, seeing it as another flavor of the same harmful large-scale consolidation as capitalist monopoly.

Also following on some of the themes from Goliath is the insight that a company can be good for consumers and simultaneously very bad for society and the country. Chernow only briefly references the fact that Standard Oil was able to deliver a high-quality product at a much lower price than any of its competitors, and continued to drive down its price throughout its existence. This is part of why Rockefeller saw himself as a force for good: at the end of the day, he was providing heat and light for people of modest means. The immediate losers were rival refiners, but it's hard to be too sorry for them: nearly all would have wanted to do what Rockefeller did. Standard Oil caused myriad broader harms: distorting other industries and companies to serve its own needs over their missions; strangling innovation; massive political corruption. Again, looking at our own time, this feels a lot like Amazon: Amazon is broadly liked since it lets people buy cheap products; but those cheap products are the result of a host of nefarious actions: labor abuses, tax evasion (which de-funds necessary social programs), squeezing manufacturers, encouraging production to move overseas, and so on. It's a reminder that "predatory pricing" can look appealing to us as consumers while rotting out the core of our economy.

While I'm mentioning other books: I'm also reminded of Piketty's observation that, beyond a certain point, wealth breeds more wealth, such that having money is much more important than intelligence or hard work. In Capital in the Twenty-first Century, he points out that Bill Gates' fortune during his years at Microsoft grew at the same rate as the fortune of Liliane Bettencourt (the L'Oreal heiress), despite the fact that Gates was innovating and working hard while Bettencourt did no work. Rockefeller seems similar in some ways: he spent 30 years building Standard Oil up from nothing into one of the most powerful and wealthy companies in the world; then retired in his 50s, almost completely stepped away from the business, and devoted his time and energy to philanthropy. And it was only after he stopped working that his wealth soared even higher and he became the wealthiest man in the country. Again, wealth is the biggest contributor to wealth.

I associate the Rockefeller name with Manhattan, so it was interesting to learn that he didn't move to New York until he was in his forties: he started Standard Oil in Cleveland, and led the network of companies from that area for most of his working career. Even when he did move to Manhattan, he very much brought his Midwestern sensibility with him: his social life continued to be limited to his local Baptist church and his immediate family, and he never took advantage of the many theaters or clubs in the area, nor ever entered the social schmoozing world of the Vanderbilts and other elites. Near the end of the book Chernow lays out how bitter Rockefeller felt towards Cleveland and Ohio: he felt that they were always trying to take advantage of his wealth and milk him and his activities, while New York mostly left him alone; as a result, New York ended up the beneficiary of an incredible amount of Rockefeller wealth channeled into public institutions: Rockefeller University, MOMA, the Cloisters, International House, Lincoln Center, Memorial Hospital (today's Sloan-Kettering), and many other schools and public spaces. What might Cleveland look like today, Chernow muses, if the Rockefellers had comfortably remained there to disburse their fortune? (Of course, my personal inclination is to tax the wealthy to invest in democratically-selected priorities rather than trust to their charitable choices, so I have a bit more sympathy for Ohio's state leaders than Chernow does.)

A regular reaction I had while reading this book was "Oh, I didn't know that Rockefeller started that!", and one of the biggest examples is the University of Chicago. I've been pretty well-acquainted with that school for most of my life, and I had no idea that it was (1) created whole-cloth by John D. Rockefeller, and (2) started life as a Baptist school. There's a really interesting saga there that shows a lot of Rockefeller's personality: he could be very generous, but hated feeling pressured for money, and the people who were most successful with him would be the ones who could casually mention some need, then patiently wait for years for him to respond. Rockefeller was initially leaning towards endowing a New York State seminary for Baptists, but that champion pushed him too hard, and mostly as a result he switched gears and selected Chicago instead. This kicked off another ongoing saga, where the brilliant William Rainey Harper blithely exceeded Rockefeller's frugal budgets, continually hiring the best and brightest professors from around the country and expanding the school, forcing an increasingly irritated Rockefeller to cover budgets way beyond what he envisioned. We also see how at times the Rockefeller connection could be counter-productive, as everyone would assume that a given institution had no need of further funds, harming their ability to raise money from other sources and become independent. Chernow devotes a lot of pages to the story, and it ends with what feels like an inspirational moral: ultimately, Rockefeller decides that he needs to set the institution free in order for it to thrive, and so he removes the few restrictions he had set on it and provides one (large!) last final gift. (Knowing the Rockefeller legacy does make me think that it may not be entirely coincidental that the Austrian School established a beachhead at Chicago.)

 

As with all of Ron Chernow's books that I've read, he does a great job at delving into the interior lives of his subjects, especially showing what their parents were like, how their childhoods unfolded, and how those experiences shaped their later ambitions or personalities. Rockefeller's father was known as "Big Bill": he was a charlatan and patent-medicine quack who roamed through the country swindling gullible yokels. He kind of sounds like Harold Hill, with a slightly darker streak. Big Bill was charismatic and entertaining, the sort of man who instantly made friends and who everyone liked; but he was not at all reliable. He would disappear in the middle of the night, without warning, leaving his wife Eliza to farm and raise six children. He was also unfaithful: he slept with their live-in housekeeper, fathering four children on two partners in the first two years after his marriage. Later in life he became a full-on bigamist, with an alternate identity and a second secret family, wife and kids, with each family unaware of the existence of the other.

In contrast, Eliza came from a religious family and was thrifty, hard-working, faithful and very dependable. John seems to have completely taken after his mother, modeling her ethic and stick-to-it determination; while John was completely silent about his dad in his correspondence and private writing, one can easily imagine that he actively rejected that model in favor of what he saw from his mom.

After reading so many of these late-19th/early-20th century books, I'm now able to recognize recurring secondary characters, particularly the high-profile prosecutors and congressional investigators who try to limit the immense power of monopolies. Samuel Untermyer, a common adversary, seems well-matched against Morgan in House of Morgan, but is roundly defeated by Rockefeller in Titan.

I learned a few new things while reading this book:

First, why people even cared about oil in the 19th century. I've always thought of oil as synonymous with gasoline, so why did people need it before we had cars or planes? At the time, there was a major market for illumination, and people burned kerosene in lamps to provide light, particularly at night. Whale oil (as in Moby Dick) had been favored for nearly a century; but by the time of the Civil War whales had been overhunted and were growing rare, so petroleum-based oil helped will the gap between the waning of the whales and the introduction of electric light.

Secondly, I learned the origin of using the word "trust" to describe monopolies of this period. I tend to associate "trust" with an individual grantor and small group of beneficiaries, like living trusts or trust funds in estate planning. It turns out that trusts like Standard Oil used the same legal mechanism, but wielded to a different end. At the time, corporations were much more restricted by state laws than they are today, and legally could not own property outside of the state in which they were incorporated. For big and sprawling entities like Standard Oil, that meant that they couldn't legally act as a single entity. Rockefeller's business partner Henry Flagler helped exploit a legal loophole where the state-based Standards (Standard Oil of Ohio, Standard Oil of New York, Standard Oil of Pennsylvania, etc.) were given in stock to individuals, and then those individuals selected Rockefeller and his board as trustees. So the legal fiction was that it was individuals coordinating rather than a corporation. Later on New Jersey relaxed their corporate laws, and Standard reorganized into a proper corporation, officially domiciled in New Jersey but owning property everywhere.

One other thing that struck me was the surprising scarcity and specificity of known deposits of petroleum. For a period of nearly twenty years, the only place in the entire world to have oil wells was western Pennsylvania. For much of Rockefeller's career, a cloud of uncertainty hovered over the entire endeavor: just how much of this stuff was there, and when would it run out? Was it worthwhile to invest in new and modern refining plants when the world's deposits of oil might run out in a year? They already knew that oil wells ran dry, and not every place you drilled produced oil, and nobody knew how much oil there was around the Oil Lands, or whether there was any oil at all outside of it. Decades later, new fields were discovered in Russia, then in Texas and California, but it wasn't until the mid-20th century when huge deposits were discovered under Saudi Arabia and Kuwait that the planet knew oil would last for at least a couple of generations. Chernow doesn't mention this, but I do wonder if that uncertainty was part of Rockefeller's success: people like the Morgans didn't like to invest in speculative and uncertain ventures, and a lot of smart people may have passed on competing in that space, until enough time had passed and Rockefeller had built an insurmountable lead. It also is interesting to realize that we've been aware of the limited fossil fuels for well over 150 years; I've tended to think that we're more aware of the limited supply now than we were in the past, but this book helped me realize that if anything we've become more blasé about the seemingly (but not actually) expandable supply of natural resources.

Chernow's writing style is kind of interesting. He generally moves chronologically forward through time, but frequently will call forward to some future event or (more often) consequence, and later will connect back from the reaction to the origin. A lot of Rockefeller's actions in the 1870s escaped scrutiny at the time because they were shrouded in secrecy and unknown by the public; Chernow will note now Ida Tarbell and others would later seize on some of these actions, which won't happen for several hundred more pages in this book. For example, he gives a brief glimpse at Tarbell growing up as a child in the Oil Lands, even though she hasn't been properly introduced as a character yet. Much later, Chernow focuses directly on her writing and Rockefeller's contemporary response (or lack thereof), while jumping briefly back to the actual events Tarbell was writing about. Chernow points out the facts that she got wrong or the stories she distorted, but also admires her vigor and effectiveness. Rockefeller and his cronies couldn't really challenge the specific things Tarbell and her fellow muckrakers got wrong without implicitly admitting that most of it was right. (This feels very different from today, in the age of Trump, where any mistake can be used to invalidate any and all information from the source of that mistake.)

Throughout these various biographies, I can see that Chernow generally likes his subjects, while not hesitating to show their dark sides and critique them. These books are fundamentally exercises in empathy: we're seeing where they came from, feeling what it was like to walk in their shoes, and that helps us understand why they did what they did, even if we don't think we would have done it. Chernow's Washington biography was great, among other reasons, because of how much it emphasizes Washington's slaves: not just the fact that he owned other human beings, but the book looks at the slaves as individuals, names them and tells their stories, and shows how Washington related to them: cases where he thought he was showing kindness, or his creepy obsession with hunting down runaways. Exploring that side of Washington doesn't take away from his great accomplishments, but the book also doesn't let Washington's accomplishments exonerate his slavery.

You can actually see that kind of empathy grow in the process of writing these books. President Grant makes a brief appearance in the background of the early part of this book, sketching the backdrop of the business-friendly post-Lincoln Republican party. In "Titan", Chernow breezily summarizes Grant and his administration as corrupt, echoing the conventional view of his presidency. Decades later, in Grant, Chernow will paint a much more nuanced and sympathetic view of Grant as a basically decent man with a few unfortunate blind spots, most relevantly a tendency to view successful businessmen as the equivalent of victorious generals, and a very naive trust in matters outside his expertise.

In this book, Chernow seems to admire Rockefeller's asceticism in an age of gilded debauchery, although he also criticizes it as sterile. He admires Rockefeller's rootedness with blue-collar common folks and his friendly connections with Black people. Chernow shows Rockefeller as someone who is doggedly determined. He wasn't a brilliant original thinker like Alexander Hamilton, but he would focus on a problem and keep working it until he came to the right solution. Rockefeller was also surprisingly collegial in how he ran Standard Oil. His critics presented Rockefeller as a single animating force behind this behemoth, but we see in these pages how everything was done by committee, and the company wouldn't take any action until the large board unanimously agreed, which could take months or years of discussion. Rockefeller was the first among equals in this group as the person with a plurality of shares, but he didn't browbeat others or enforce his will: he patently worked with them and won them over. He seemed to genuinely love his wife and kids, had genuine feelings for the church, and genuinely loved giving money away. He wrote about how important it was not to be ruled by wealth, which from almost anyone would sound sanctimonious and hypocritical, but in his case actually seemed to be true.

As for his downsides: while he wasn't solely responsible for all of Standard Oil's actions, he did a lot of shady things during his career: as noted above, striking secret agreements with railroad and other companies, creating "the Octopus", secretly owning supposed competitors. Rockefeller's home life receives mixed reports from visitors' accounts: his children mostly recall it as peaceful and stable, but to friends the Rockefellers' home seemed joyless and airless. On a personal level, Rockefeller could be surprisingly open-minded, but once he made up his mind he never changed it, which led him to dig in on bad decisions that he should have let go. Rockefeller could come off as proud and haughty to strangers, although that seems like mostly a defensive mechanism: he was never a very sociable person, and by middle age most new people he met just wanted his money, so he didn't form many new relationships and, until the last decade or so of his life, he stayed comfortably cocooned with his family, church, and a very small inner circle of trusted associated.

Chernow sums it up pretty well near the end of the book:

What makes [Rockefeller] so problematic - and why he continues to inspire such ambivalent reactions - is that his good side was every bit as good as his bad side was bad. Seldom has history produced such a contradictory figure. We are almost forced to posit, in helpless confusion, at least two Rockefellers: the good, religious man and the renegade businessman, driven by baser motives.

Unlike House of Morgan, this book focuses on John D. Rockefeller Sr. and not the entire Rockefeller lineage; that said, Chernow does write about his kids and grandkids, mostly through the lens of Rockefeller himself. This leads into a kind of surprising overlap with Against the Day, the Thomas Pynchon novel I read immediately before this. Near the end of both books, they focus on the Ludlow massacre during the Colorado Fuel and Iron Corporation's labor struggle. The novel and the biography even share some specific details, like the owners' thugs creating a modified car that they name the "Death Special", with armored plates attached to the side and two machine guns mounted on top for mowing down strikers.

Both books give a harrowing description on the final assault on the strikers' tent city, a night assault with the tents lit on fire and several women and children killed. Against the Day more closely tracks the point of view of the strikers; I think Frank Traverse is delivering weapons to the union organizers. Titan focuses more on the point of view of owners and managers, and especially the disconnect between the immediate overseers in Colorado and the distant capital owners in New York, while also dipping into the perspective of the workers. I don't think that Rockefeller is mentioned at all in Against the Day while the strikers are pretty well covered in Titan. That, in turn, makes me think of the socialist argument that labor can get by without capital, but capital cannot survive without labor.

So! A big book, for a big man who built a big business that defined big monopoly for generations. Again, I don't know if I would have been interested in this if it didn't have Chernow's name on the cover, but I'm delighted to have had the chance to read it: learning more about things I didn't know that I didn't know, in addition to continuing to color in my understanding of what is increasingly the most interesting period in history for me, the start of the capitalism era. At some point I should come up with a proper ranking of Chernow's books, but that will have to wait until after I wrap up with the Warburgs. In the meantime, though, I can say that this is as well-written and engaging as Chernow's other books, which is saying a lot.

Ad Astra

It's been a little while, but I dived (dove?) back into Stellaris. I've accumulated a few new DLC over the last couple of years thanks to the largesse of my brother, and enjoyed seeing what they added to the game, along with the regular procession of free game updates.

As is usually the case, I restarted a few times before landing on a keeper of a run. Some of the restarts were due to bad luck or bad decisions, but a big part was just getting reacquainted with the game and coming up to speed on the changes since my last run. A problem I frequently made was neglecting my military. Even with the game settings modified for less aggressive AI, they will definitely notice if you present a rich target with few guns and few allies. I like to play more pacifist games, but you're a lot less likely to get attacked if you have a big fleet.

There were two huge gameplay changes I noticed. The first was Unity. Previously, Unity seemed like the most useless abstract resource: it was useful in the first part of the game to unlock Tradition trees, but by the end of my games I would always be producing way more Unity than I could spend on Edicts; unlike most other resources, there's no way to convert it or cash it out. I would end up with huge surpluses despite never really investing in Unity-producing jobs or buildings, beyond the automatic ones like capitals. So I stayed far away from playing as Spiritualist or other approaches that seemed design to boost Unity.

In the current game, Unity has a lot more uses. It's the main currency for Leaders - more on that later, but where in the past you recruited them with Energy, now you pay Unity for recruitment and upkeep. There's also the dumping ground of Planetary Ascension. You can pay a large amount of Unity to boost the effects of your planet's designation; for example, if it's a Mining World, you'll get a bigger boost to Mineral production and cheaper maintenance for Miners; on a Science World, research complexes will get progressively cheaper and researchers require less upkeep. (I think the overall effect is similar to Centralize State in Europa Universalis IV.). Perhaps more importantly, it will also reduce the Empire Size impact from the districts and pops, which in turn will boost your overall research speed and tradition unlocks. The Unity cost for Planetary Ascension grown exponentially the more you use it, and even by the end of the game I still had use for more Unity.

Leaders have also been reworked; the overall impact is that they are more powerful, versatile and have more personality. You can select the abilities a leader gains when they level up, allowing you to groom and shape them as you like. These choices come from a semi-randomized list, so they will end up each being somewhat distinct, but you can still guide them to fit your planned strategy. You can manually select some leaders to serve on the government Council, where they will serve ministerial positions. These provide useful boosts to the empire - for example, a "Head of Research" will increase the Research Speed by an amount scaling on the level of the leader, while a "Minister of State" will increase the effectiveness of Improve Relations and the speed of operations like First Contact and Espionage. Leaders can also have abilities that apply buffs to the entire empire while they're on the Council, like increasing Stability or providing more Trade Value.

The roles of leaders have been adjusted as well. Generals and Admirals have been folded into a single "Commander" class, which I think is great - Generals felt really useless for most of the game. You can still take level-up powers that will make a given Commander better at space combat or ground combat, but they're interchangeable. Governors have been moved to a new "Official" class; these work similar to before, but you can now assign an Official to either the Galactic Community or your Federation, which is more impactful than the old Envoy-based approach. Finally, Science no longer requires a Scientist heading up each of the three main research categories; instead there's a single Head of Research on the Council. In addition to their traditional work with exploring, surveying and conducting archeology, Scientists can now also serve as the Governor on a planet. This isn't as effective as an Official, but it does produce a bigger boost for Research, so it can be a good move for research-focused worlds. Overall I found Scientists a lot less useful in the endgame in the new system than previously: once you've surveyed everything, there's very little for them to do.

Oh: And (again thanks to a gifted DLC) I had access to "Legendary Paragons", who are especially powerful and moderately expensive Leaders. They may appear randomly or as the result of some action (like certain archeology excavations). They have their own unique large portraits and dialogue on recruitment. They have more traits than an equivalent-level Leader would, including some unique traits unavailable anywhere else. They don't feel game-breaking, but give great flavor and were a lot of fun.

In all of my restarted games, I was trying to play the same type of empire: playing around with the new utility of Unity, I was a Spiritualist, Xenophilic, Pacifist Democracy with the Ascensionist civic. I was planning to boost Unity to cruise through the Tradition trees, while using Pacifism to keep my Empire Size low.

In my final successful run, I lucked out in a few ways. I had some friendly neighbors, instead of a bunch of Devouring Swarm Hive Minds. In particular, one Spiritual neighbor invited me to join a Holy Federation with them, which I had planned to do anyways once I had that option. I pretty aggressively recruited other friendly empires into the Federation as well, and we ended up with a nice defense pack that protected us against potentially hostile adversaries.

It's interesting all the variations that occur between games. In first few games, I had pretty interesting pre-FTL versions of Sol III (Earth) that were cool to observe, as well as a lot of pre-FTL civs in general; I haven't run across many of these before, and had fun running operations on them. Another recent game update has been getting unique technologies by observing "primitive" civilizations, and I'd unlocked a lot of those before getting stomped in an earlier game. In my final game I didn't get to build any observation posts until pretty late in my expansion, and only unlocked a couple of techs, but it's still fun to see all the different scenarios that can play out for these planets.

I had a couple of L-Gates in this game, and focused on getting Insights whenever I could, so I was able to unlock the L-Cluster before the mid-game year. It was definitely a risk to open it then, as I would have been completely unprepared for an invasion. It worked out really well, though: for the first time I got the outcome where you meet "The Gray", a super-powerful entity that takes the form of a massive warship; I think it has like 80k power or something. With that alone, I instantly flipped from the least powerful to the most powerful fleet in the galaxy, removing any risk of getting declared on.

I'd been looking forward to playing a Spiritualist game for a while. I was technically Spiritualist during my Megacorp televangelist run, but that was a bit different, with Spiritual just being an entree to draining rubes of their bank accounts. This game was more of a Shroud-focused excursion. I took the "Teachers of the Shroud" Origin, which was powerful and cool. You start off with Latent Psionic, which is a great perk in its own right and also basically gives you an extra Ascension Perk. You also have contact with the Teachers of the Shroud (the exact name is randomized, it can also be called something like the Shroud Coven), a Curators-style Enclave that's focused on Shroud stuff. This gives an unlockable wormhole-type connection with a distant part of the galaxy, possibly opening up a useful expansion path. There are some nifty purchases you can make from them, but the Influence cost kept me from indulging until pretty late in the game.

I've definitely played with the Shroud before, but I think this was my first time since they added the new Covenants. The only option used to be "End of the Cycle", a sort of doomsday pact with the devil where you would get very powerful for 50 years and then lose the game. There now are other covenants, which give a lot of perks and a few penalties. The Shroud is infamously RNG-based, and I burned a lot of energy, zro and time trying to get the Covenant I wanted or even any Boons out of the Shroud. Eventually I made contact and signed a Covenant with the Instrument of Desire; this has a lot of effects, the most useful being a straight-up boost to the resources produced by every. single. pop.

Around this time, I also started to muse about Becoming the Crisis. I've had Nemesis for a while, and thought it was cool that they added the option to become the bad guys, but never felt tempted to pursue that path. Now, though, I was mulling it over. Fighting the Unbidden for the fifth time didn't sound all that exciting, and as a Spiritual empire I was unlikely to trigger the Contingency. As a Pacifist and Xenophile I was doubly locked-out from choosing the Crisis Ascension Perk; but from Wiki-trawling I knew that proceeding along the Covenant line would eventually give me the option to reform into an Authoritarian Spiritualist, which would open the route to the Crisis. And, the more I thought about it, the more I enjoyed the dark narrative of this timeline: A peaceful and spiritual empire begins communing with spirits, gradually falls under their thrall, and eventually brings about the end of the galaxy. It has a nice resonance with the Ashen Veil of Fall from Heaven 2.

I delayed for a long time before picking it; I also wanted to get the mega-structure Ascension Perks and get those rolling before flipping to the Dark Side, but those are gated behind very late-game techs, so I spent a ton of time without my full Perk loadout. This kind of doubly penalized me in particular, since I was also pursuing Planetary Ascension: You can get more Planetary Ascension tiers (not to be confused with Ascension Perks) as you unlock more Ascension Perks, up until 5 tiers with 9 perks; once you get the 10th perk, you unlock an additional 5 tiers, letting you ascend to level 10. Reaching 10 basically removes that planet entirely from your Empire Size penalty. If I'd been able to reach that earlier, it could have had a significant impact on my research speed.

But, while I was waiting for those last Perks I had time to generally prepare and scheme for my diabolical plan. I finally picked up Become the Crisis in the late 2300s; that was late enough to build a huge tech lead over the rest of the galaxy and harden my defenses, but early enough that I didn't have to worry about Fallen Empires awakening or the actual Crisis starting.

One thing I learned from the wiki that I hadn't realized before is that there actually is a viable path where you pick the Become The Crisis perk without actually Becoming the Crisis. BtC proceeds through a series of tiers. In order to advance to the next tier, you need to both complete a Special Project (via research) and acquire a certain number of Menace Points (via various sources like destroying ships, invading planets, vassalizing empires, etc.). The Tiers grant really powerful abilities, balanced with a large Opinion malus with all other empires, and those abilities alone could be a really compelling reason to pursue the Crisis.

For me, the best intermediate benefits of BtC are the new War Goals and the Menacing class of ships. You gain the ability to declare war on any empire to either destroy them or "imposed inclusion", resulting in a vassalization. This bypasses the prep work that's usually necessary for a military expansion and lets you easily fire off wars at will.

"Menacing" ships parallel the main ship classes, with Menacing Corvettes, Menacing Frigates and Menacing Cruisers (but no Menacing Battleships). At first I wasn't clear on the benefit, but the biggest perk is that you construct Menacing ships with Minerals, not with Alloys; Alloys are incredibly precious, so being able to build a fleet (or a large chunk of one) with just Minerals is huge. Menacing ships upgrade with your tech, but unlike regular ships and defense platforms their build cost doesn't scale, and they always cost the same flat amount of Minerals; when new tech is available, you can upgrade for free. Finally, you can gain huge boosts to Menacing ship build speed, letting you almost instantly replenish any lost ships.

For me, I stuck with my regular fleet of Battleships as my main heavy hitters; but I switched to Menacing Corvettes for my rapid-response / quick interdiction fleets, and was really happy with how they worked.

While I was building Menace Points to progress the Crisis tiers, I basically started off with the weakest unaligned Empires I could find, used the "Imposed Inclusion" to vassalize them, then moved on to the next-weakest unaligned Empire. I mostly did this solo with my Federation Fleet, though my Holy Federation allies pitched in when they could.

By this point in the game, there were two big federations: the Holy League, where I had become President-For-Life and which dominated the northwest quadrant of the galaxy, and the Cosmic Pact, a mostly-xenophobic non-contiguous alliance based in the south and west. Roughly a third of the galaxy was unaligned, but as I approached the late 2300s all of them had become my vassals.

I was now getting ready to flip the switch. Fortunately you can select when to complete each Special Project, so before taking the final step I launched what I started to call my COINTELPRO phase: using my diplomatic skill to sow discord and chaos in the galactic institutions that could stop me.

In the Galactic Community, I had been steadily advancing Divinity Of Life resolutions to promote Spiritualist ethics; the last few steps actually outlaw some Materialist-type actions like Synthetic Ascension. I also moved through several Military Sanctions so violators' Naval Capacity would diminish. Just before Crisis-ing, I also pushed through the higher stages of Unchained Knowledge, which similarly penalize non-Materialist policies. The sum total put a lot of empires on the wrong side of galactic law, hamstringing their power broadly.

Of the two major federations, the Holy League was definitely the most powerful; mostly due to me, but those empires in general were strong compared to the Cosmic Pact. I used my unsurpassed powers to cripple the federation: I disbanded the Federation Fleet, set the Fleet Contributions to None, reduced Centralization to Minimal, switched most votes to require unanimous action, and, in my last act, abolished the Diplomatic Weight for voting. Whoever my successor as President would be, he or she would inherit a broken and unwieldy institution, incapable of reforming itself as a galactic power.

I also kicked off a war between the Holy League and the Cosmic Pact; I don't remember now what my War Goal was, it might have been a Liberation War against one of the members. I knew that after becoming the Crisis the galaxy would declare war on me, so I was hoping to set up a three-way fight, and that some of the Holy League / Cosmic Pact fighting would draw away attention from me.

It worked out even better than that: once I reached the final tier of the Crisis, there was a war declared against me; but only my former members of the Holy League were part of it. Holy League was fighting both me and the Cosmic Pact, while the Cosmic Pact was only fighting the Holy League and not me.

I wasn't expecting that, but on further reflection, it probably makes sense given the rules of warfare. I'm more familiar with the EU4 war rules at the moment than Stellaris, but I don't think the engine supports two nations being on the same side in one war while they're on opposing sides in another war. So given a pre-existing war, only one side could declare on me. It may just be luck that it was the Holy League that turned against me. (Which, the more I think about it, actually was the ideal outcome; otherwise I would have been stuck in my crippled Federation for the duration of the conflict.)

MINI SPOILERS

"Become the Crisis" actually has a really compelling narrative and structure, with some great writing and neat mechanics. Again, it reminds me a bit of the Ashen Veil in Fall from Heaven 2, and more broadly the Armageddon mechanics. Story-wise, your scientists become aware of the Shroud, and the great power latent in that realm, and become obsessed with tapping it. This starts off as a pure knowledge-based initiative, but gradually turns into an insatiable lust for power. By the end, your civilization's goal is to tear the veil between reality and the Shroud, unlocking unimaginable volumes of energy, which your population will use to transcend to a higher plane of existence.

Mechanically, you progress this by upgrading a megastructure called [checks the wiki] the Aetherophasic Engine Frame. You need enormous quantities of Dark Matter to upgrade it: 20,000 to start and a total of 140,000 in total. You get that Dark Matter by using special Star Eater ships; these are basically like the Death Star from Star Wars, but instead of blowing up planets you blow up stars, turning them into black holes and destroying all planets and anomalies in the system.

Blowing up a star also returns the system to being unowned, and it's a very melancholy feeling to see blank stretches beginning to march across the galaxy map, an inversion of the expansion of color that drives the early game.

At certain phases of the upgrade, Psionic Avatars will invade the galaxy. I'd assumed that they would only target my empire, but from scanning the galaxy map I noticed that they can appear everywhere, adding a hostile threat that impacts the whole galaxy. This makes me think again of FfH2, where threats like the Horsemen and Hell Terrain impose such specific universal harms that all empires are strongly incentivized to oppose the evil, even beyond the compelling motivation of not wanting to lose the game.

Overall I found the situation relatively easy to deal with. I'd completed my Gateway network, linking my capital together with heavily fortified Citadels on the borders of my empire. The Citadels alone could repel the periodic invasions from Holy League attackers, possibly with a couple of Defense Platforms lost, or I could quickly crush them by rushing through a fleet. The Psionic Avatars just lurked in their systems and were easily hunted down by my large fleets.

The biggest threat I faced were the Fallen Empires. I had two in this game, the Shard of Xenophobes and the Progenitors of Xenophiles. The Shard declared on me soon after I became the Crisis, and I wasn't sure why: their war goal is the standard lebensraum, but I'd carefully avoided ever expanding next to them. I did pick up a vassal who was a pre-FTL civ that has spawned right next to the Shard; I don't think that counts as one of my systems, but if the Shard had declared on my vassal maybe I'm the one who gets the war declaration? Or maybe they just declared because of the huge opinion malus ("Trying to destroy the galaxy: -1000") and the game used their existing standard text instead of a new one.

As usual, war against FEs is a little wonky; for decades their Economy and then their Fleets were considered "Pathetic" next to mine, but their Technology was still "Overwhelming", which means that their total power is a lot stronger than it looks on paper. Fortunately, FEs still have absolutely miserable AI for combat. They weren't quite as dumb this time as in the past: at least they were attacking my systems instead of flying to the opposite edge of the galaxy for no apparent reason; on the other hand, they tended to fly forward, take a system or two, then pause, return home for no apparent reason, and pause before trudging back to where they were before.

The Shard had two fleets, one of about 240k and the other around 120k; the bigger one zoomed straight into the northeast quadrant of the map, which I had carefully colonized behind the FEs, and had under-protected with Starbases since I hadn't planned to initiate any wars with them. So before long this fleet was hovering over a planet of mine and a scary stack of Space Marines was heading near them to drop.

Fortunately, the smaller fleet popped through a wormhole into the southwest quadrant of the galaxy and started making its way towards a chokepoint with a Citadel. I carefully timed out their arrival, then moved in my entire navy, 3 full fleets of battleships and another 3 fleets of corvettes. (Well, not QUITE entire - I had the Gray warform defending one Star Eater and a fleet of corvettes defending the other one. But most of them.) Despite their superior tech, I quickly overwhelmed them.

As usual, I was briefly tempted to continue fighting for a Victory, but quickly talked sense into myself for a White Peace. On paper I had a much higher Fleet Power, which gave a bonus for acceptance, and that single battle (which only actually destroyed a single Battlecruiser and two Escorts but sent a lot more MIA) gave something like 50% War Exhaustion. The calculus could have swung dramatically if they took a planet from me, so I was pleased to call off the war before that happened.

A year or so later, the Progenitors also declared war... against the Holy League! I'm still baffled why and how this happened; the Xenophiles are incredibly easy to get along with. But now my main opponents were fighting THREE wars: against the half of the galaxy in the Cosmic Pact, against little ole' me who's just trying to destroy the universe, and against an incredibly powerful Fallen Empire. The Progenitors swiftly took control of most of the Androj Commonwealth, the most powerful remaining empire in the Holy League.

In the meantime, I'd steadily been marching my Star Eaters through Holy League territory. I think you can destroy any star, including ones you own yourself, but I wanted to keep my existing empire intact. I was focusing on my former allies, although I would also blow up systems that they owned but the Cosmic Pact controlled during their war.

The graphics for blowing up stars are really cool. At first glance Stellaris is a typically stale Paradox UI, just a map with a ton of icons and text, and that's definitely the view you'll be looking at for 99.99% of your playtime; but when you do zoom in on systems, they can be quite beautiful, and space battles can look incredible, with lots of lights and effects. Whenever you open a system whose star has just been cracked, you'll see a remarkable explosion as the star explodes and the lights go out; I eventually realized that there's an ongoing animation for the entire process, where you can watch the Star Eater gradually powering up and emitting its beam and the desperate struggle of the astral entity to survive.

The free-for-all wars gradually wound down. The Holy League made peace with the Progenitors, at the cost of Humiliation, significantly harming their effectiveness. Hostilities with the Cosmic Pact wound down soon after. I was curious if the former Pact members would now join the war against me; they did not, although I was already near the end and maybe they would have once the truce ended or something.

I did have another war against the Shard. They immediately declared war the instant our truce was up, without sending me any demands first. This time I was prepared for their maneuvers, and I patiently waited for them to reach one of my armed-to-the-teeth citadels before teleporting in my entire fleet, wiping them off the map, and then quickly calling for a White Peace.

MEGA SPOILERS

A few other story beats continued to play out as I approached the end. There's an event where a massive psychic backlash emanates from the Shroud; according to the wiki, this should kill some random Psionic pops and Psychic leaders, but apparently since I had taken the Psionic Ascension we were prepared for that eventuality and didn't suffer any consequences. That was cool; some of the writing for BtC can feel a little odd as a Psionic Ascension empire since it sounds like the Shroud is a new and mysterious realm when we've actually been dipping in there on the regular for well over a century. But it was really neat to see specific reactions to our particular situations.

At long last, we finished upgrading the last stage of the frame and: Boom! The entire galaxy exploded! The energy released from the Shroud detonates all of the remaining stars in the galaxy, incidentally killing every living and mechanical entity throughout existence. Very dark, literally, but also really cool to see. In  my games I'm usually the one saving the universe from destruction, so it's neat to see what destroying the universe looks like!

Probably my favorite thing about Becoming the Crisis is that it very definitively ends the game at a specific point in time. In past Stellaris games, I'll often beat the Crisis with, like, 30 or 40 years left in the game, which means that if I want to record my score I have a very boring couple of play sessions where I'm just playing on high speed, typically ignoring all the empire management stuff and running out the clock. There was none of that here, just a big BOOM, then a nice clean map full of black holes with absolutely nothing to take my attention besides quitting.

END SPOILERS

Stellaris is one of those games that I can keep coming back to over and over again, a good combination of familiar and novelty. The core game mechanics have felt really fun for years, the randomness keeps things interesting, and the steady advancement of game updates and new expansions add lots of fun new bells and whistles. It would be a perfect "desert island" sort of game to just play over and over again; since it's always competing against other, often newer games that I want to play, I tend to go for years between campaigns, and it feels a little like a new game each time I come back to it.

Lately I've kind of had my eye on a couple of other Paradox games: Hearts of Iron IV and Vicoria 3 are both set in places and during times that I've lately been fascinated by, and I love the idea of playing as, say, Spanish Republicans during the Civil War or creating a socialist utopia in 1860s Germany. But do I really need yet another game that has dozens of DLC that I could easily play for hundreds of hours? Probably not, but that doesn't stop me from dreaming!