Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: A Mind at Play
WORK NOTES: with Rob Goodman
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://jimmysoni.com/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jimmysoni/ * http://jimmysoni.com/about/ * http://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Jimmy-Soni/441867512
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born in Toulouse, France.
EDUCATION:Graduated from Duke University, 2007.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Author; managing editor, Huffington Post, 2012-14. Featured TEDx speaker, Duke University, 2012. Formerly worked as editor at New York Observer and Washington Examiner, as campaign aide to Missouri Governor Eric Greitens, strategy consultant, McKinsey and Company, and as speech writer, Office of the Mayor of the District of Columbia. Former member of steering committee, The Mission Continues.
AWARDS:“Young Influentials” list citation, AdWeek, 2012; “People to Watch” list citation, MinMedia, 2012; “30 under 30 Media” list citation, Forbes, 2013; “40 under 40” list citation, Crain’s Communications New York, 2013; “Excellence in Online Media” citation, Anokhi, 2013; “Men of Vogue” list citation, Vogue India, 2013; “Most Poachable Tech Talent” list citation, Betabeat, 2014; “Lords of the Viral Internet” citation, Politico, 2014.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals and media outlets, including AdWeek, Atlantic, Business Insider, CNN, Huffington Post, Politico, and Slate.
SIDELIGHTS
Jimmy Soni was celebrated as one of the leading young technology gurus of the second decade of the twenty-first century following his graduation from Duke University in 2007. His career took off in 2012, when he was hired to be the new managing editor of the online magazine founded by Ariana Huffington, the Huffington Post. During his tenure there, Soni was cited by organizations ranging from Crain’s to Forbes to Vogue India as a rising star. His varied interests were recognized by his books, cowritten with fellow Duke University graduate Rob Goodman: a biography of the influential Roman statesman and Stoic philosopher of the first-century BCE Cato the Younger (Rome’s Last Citizen: The Life and Legacy of Cato, Mortal Enemy of Caesar), and A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age. Soni’s reputation as a leader in electronic media led him to explore the life of Shannon, a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology whose “noteworthy discoveries,” stated a Publishers Weekly reviewer, “include a way to rationally design circuits using Boolean algebra, and information theory, which understands communications as bits.”
Soni’s tenure at the Huffington Post was cut short by allegations that he had sexually harassed female colleagues. The women were known as fellows, but they were under his supervision and were essentially interns. “In early April [2014],” stated Danny Wicentowski in the Riverfront Times, “two fellows, who had not dated or slept with Soni (but were friends with fellows who had), approached their section editor about Soni’s entreaties. He had created an atmosphere, they said, in which many felt that if they didn’t flirt with Soni, their chances of landing a full-time position would suffer.” “One month later, in May 2014, the Huffington Post announced that Soni was leaving his post” to take up a new position in his parents’ native India, Wincentowski continued. “Announcing his appointment to the position,” “wrote Jeremy Barr in Politico, “Huffington said, `In his 9 months with HuffPost, Jimmy has proven himself to be a man of many talents.'” “One month after that,” Wincentowski explained, “he left the company.”
Following his exit from the Huffington Post, Soni moved on to work for the gubernatorial campaign of Eric Greitens, a former Navy SEAL who ran a successful campaign to become governor of Missouri. According to Wicentowski, Soni and Grietens had a professional relationship stretching back to 2011, and Soni had served on the steering committee of The Mission Continues, which provides recent veterans with the opportunity to use the skills they learned in the military to help local communities.
In 2012, the same year he was hired by the Huffington Post, Soni and Goodman released his biography of Cato, Rome’s Last Citizen. Cato was best known for his opposition to Julius Caesar in the Roman Senate—he committed suicide rather than serve Caesar after the latter’s victory in the Roman civil war–but he was also an influential proponent of the philosophy of Stoicism. The philosophy gained ground in first-century Rome, and was later adopted by many more modern figures, like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, who admired its principles. “Cato was my gateway drug into stoicism,” Soni reported in an interview appearing in the Daily Stoic. The philosophy emphasizes the importance of living a balanced life, recognizing that fretting over the things one cannot control is counterproductive. “There’s a scene from Homer’s The Odyssey that is arguably the original `life hack’: the story of Odysseus lashing himself to his ship’s mast to avoid the temptation of the Sirens’ song,” he explained in an interview with Andy Orin appearing on LifeHacker. “A whole body of research exists now that validates the story’s underlying lesson, which is that our willpower is substantially more limited than we think it is—but that we can engineer circumstances that determine our behavior. I try to apply that concept—`lashing yourself to the mast’—whenever I can. Think about the binding structures you can build to force yourself to do the things you avoid.”
Cato’s example led Soni to begin practicing Stoicism himself. “I’d always been a fan of Roman history, particularly the history of the late Republic,” Soni said in his Daily Stoic interview. “There’s a lot of drama in that period, and a lot of fascinating figures. People, for instance, like Julius Caesar and Cicero, who were giants of their day. I had read a few biographies of figures from that time, and I went on Amazon to buy a biography of Cato, just assuming, because he was who he was, that there would be one on offer. When I didn’t find one, I called up a friend of mine.” Soni comes “from the world of journalism,” declared Ann Pedtke in the Historical Novel Society, “… and thus write[s] with a verve not always found in academic biographies.” “The authors succeed brilliantly,” concluded a Kirkus Reviews contributor, “in bringing this fascinating statesman to life.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Financial Times, July 20, 2017, review of A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age.
Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies, fall, 2013, Dwight D. Murphey, review of Rome’s Last Citizen: The Life and Legacy of Cato, Mortal Enemy of Caesar, p. 361.
Kirkus Reviews, September 1, 2012, review of Rome’s Last Citizen; May 15, 2017, review of A Mind at Play.
Library Journal, September 1, 2012, Evan M. Anderson, review of Rome’s Last Citizen, p. 108.
Publishers Weekly, July 9, 2012, review of Rome’s Last Citizen, p. 50; May 1, 2017, review of A Mind at Play, p. 50.
Washington Times, July 16, 2017, Gary Anderson, “A Mind at Play: The Mathematical Prodigy Who Gave the World ‘Bits.’”
ONLINE
Armchair General, http://www.armchairgeneral.com/ (January 7, 2013), Adam Koeth, review of Rome’s Last Citizen.
Daily Stoic, https://dailystoic.com/ (February 14, 2018), “The Life and Legacy of Cato: An Interview with Author Jimmy Soni.”
Historical Novel Society, https://historicalnovelsociety.org/ (November 1, 2012), Ann Pedtke, review of Rome’s Last Citizen.
Jimmy Soni Website, http://jimmysoni.com (February 14, 2018), author profile.
Lifehacker, https://lifehacker.com/ (April 23, 2014), Andy Orin, “How I Work: Jimmy Soni, Managing Editor of the Huffington Post.“
New American, https://www.thenewamerican.com/ (October 18, 2012), Joe Wolverton II, review of Rome’s Last Citizen.
Politico, https://www.politico.com/ (May 21, 2014), Jeremy Barr, “HuffPost M.E. Jimmy Soni Transfers to India.”
Poynter, https://www.poynter.org/ (May 22, 2014), Andrew Beaujon, “HuffPost Names New Managing Editor as Jimmy Soni Moves to India.”
Quantum Times, http://thequantumtimes.org/ (October 6, 2017), Ian Durham, review of A Mind at Play.
Riverfront Times, https://www.riverfronttimes.com/ (November 16, 2017), Danny Wicentowski, “Governor’s Adviser Jimmy Soni Is Again Exhibit A in Bombshell Sex Harassment Report.”
Jimmy Soni
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jimmy Soni
Born Toulouse, France
Occupation Author, columnist, editor
Nationality American
Alma mater Duke University (BA)
Jimmy Soni is an author and former managing editor of The Huffington Post.[1][2]
Background[edit]
Soni was born to Rajasthani parents in Toulouse, France, and raised in Chicago, Illinois.[3] He attended Duke University and graduated in 2007.[4] During his time at Duke he was chairman of the Honors Council and Vice President of Duke Student Government.[5][6]
Career[edit]
Soni has been the managing editor at The Huffington Post since January 2012.[7] Previously he had worked as a strategy consultant at McKinsey and Company, as well as a speech writer at the office of the Mayor of the District of Columbia.[8]
Soni has co-authored several pieces with fellow Duke graduate Rob Goodman; their work has been featured in Politico, The Huffington Post, Business Insider, AdWeek, and The Atlantic, among others.[1][2][7][9][10] In 2012, Thomas Dunne Books a division of St. Martin's Press, published their first book, a biography of Cato the Younger, titled Rome's Last Citizen: The Life and Legacy of Cato, Mortal Enemy of Caesar.[7][11][12]
In 2017, Simon & Schuster published their biography of Claude Shannon, A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age.[13] The book received positive reviews from the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Nature and others.[14][15][16] In an interview with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Soni explained that part of the reason he wrote A Mind at Play was that he was drawn to Shannon's personality and wanted to read a biography about him, but "it turned out there wasn’t one."[17]
In 2012, Soni was named to AdWeek's "Young Influentials", a list of 20 people under 40 "who are wicked smart and rebooting your world".[2] He was featured at a TEDx event held at Duke University in March 2012.[5][18] The In May 2014, Soni transferred to India where he was in charge of launching the Huffington Post in the country.[19] He left the company before the launch to focus on writing a book.[20] Later, reports surfaced saying more than a book prompted his departure: Internal complaints and a sexual harassment investigation of his management style were cited by current and former employees at the time—Arianna Huffington declined to comment on the matter.[21][22]
In 2014, Forbes named Soni one of the 30 people under 30 years of age in the media.[23] That same year the New York Observer listed him as the most "poachable" tech talent.[24] Previously, Soni was named one of Crain Communications' 40 Under Forty talents.[25]
In 2016, Soni worked with Eric Greitens on his successful campaign for Governor in Missouri.[26]
In November of 2017 Melanie Ehrenkranz wrote an article for Gizmodo detailing Jimmy Soni's sexual harassment of interns as well as his sexual relationship with an 18 year old intern. It is reported that when asked why Soni's group of fellows was predominantly white, blonde women he answered "Yeah, I'm using it to find myself a wife." It was also reported that he was sent to India because of the allegations of those he supervised. [27]
The Life and Legacy of Cato: An Interview With Author Jimmy Soni
Jimmy Soni is the author of Rome’s Last Citizen: The Life and Legacy of Cato, Mortal Enemy of Caesar, a biography of Cato the Younger. Soni’s forthcoming biography of mathematician, Claude Shannon, will be published in 2017.
What came first, your interest in stoicism or your interest in Cato the Younger? What initially sparked that interest?
It was the latter: Cato was my gateway drug into stoicism. I’d always been a fan of Roman history, particularly the history of the late Republic. There’s a lot of drama in that period, and a lot of fascinating figures. People, for instance, like Julius Caesar and Cicero, who were giants of their day. I had read a few biographies of figures from that time, and I went on Amazon to buy a biography of Cato, just assuming, because he was who he was, that there would be one on offer. When I didn’t find one, I called up a friend of mine, and we set out to write the first full-length biography of him. Hence both Rome’s Last Citizen and my interest in Stoicism were born.
It was in the early research about Cato, his life, and his impact that I first dove into Stoicism—and like others, I immediately saw its utility in my life. I consider myself fortunate that I came to Stoicism through Cato, because he was the one who most powerfully lived its values early on. He took it from what it was—sort of a Roman-era Scientology—and made it into a mainstream practice. By the time I finished writing the biography, I was reading as many Stoic texts as I could get my hands on.
What is the biggest lesson you took away from all your time examining Cato’s life? How can that be applied today?
lastcitizenProbably the biggest lesson is just the power of Cato’s example: He really does develop something of an immunity to other people’s feelings, opinions, to his own pain and discomfort, to anything outside his control. To be fair, we’re judging him in light of what others have written about him, and we know from the record that he had moments where he gave himself over to grief or anger. But for the most part, he seems to have willed himself into a life lived on a relatively even keel. That came directly from Stoic practices.
My favorite Stoic moment from Cato is when he’s in a bath house and a fight breaks out. Someone punches Cato in the face. When he’s asked about it later, he says, “I don’t remember even being hit.” It’s probably a moment that was exaggerated for the benefit of history, but it’s still amazing to think that he had such steely self-resolve that even a punch in the face didn’t faze him.
(For what it’s worth: The biggest lesson from Cato’s outside of Stoicism is the danger of carrying your principles too far. Cato’s inflexibility is, in part, what undid the Roman Republic—so for all that we can look to him as a Stoic symbol, his life is also a cautionary tale.)
Is there a book or stoic you most recommend to someone who is unfamiliar with the philosophy? Why?
It’s a dead-even tie between Meditations by Marcus Aurelius and Letters from a Stoic by Seneca. Those two books tend to be the way most people find their way into Stoicism, and with good reason: These are books that have stood the test of a couple thousand years of time and were written by men who lived lives full of action. Especially in the case of the Meditations, it’s hard not to be impressed by the fact that the guy giving you all of this how-to-live advice also happens to be the Emperor of Rome, the most powerful man of his era. So if he can follow what’s in his private journals, or if he’s even trying to, in the midst of battles and political intrigue and threats on his life and all that, surely you can figure out how to add a dose of Stoicism to your life?
I would add that one of the best ways to get into the Stoic “philosophy” is not to think about it as a philosophy at all. That’s one of the big lessons of Ryan’s work, and the Daily Stoic book itself. It’s why the people I know who read about Stoicism also tend to read their weight in biographies: It’s easier to see these lessons lived out in the lives of others than to think about them in the abstract. Even to learned people, the ancient texts can be a tough read. But a biography of George Washington? Much easier. If you want to find an effective way into Stoicism, start with a biography of a known practitioner and see what it did for them.
How do you use stoicism in your life? A daily practice? Occasional review of stoic texts?
Here’s the truth: I don’t use enough of it. For a while, I was reading Meditations every day, and I found that to be a valuable exercise for what it was. But then I fell off the wagon. Now I dive back into it when I need it the most. I wish I had more regular engagement with the original texts themselves, but there are only so many hours in the day and there are so many other things on my reading list.
The way I tend to think about and practice stoicism now is in acronym form: WWASD? What would a Stoic do? Just to be clear, I don’t have a lot of patience for people who walk around referring to themselves as Stoics; in my experience, they tend to be the people who are the least “Stoic” of all. But asking the question, “What would a stoic do in this situation? How would a stoic handle this conversation or interaction?”…those kinds of exercises put me in the right frame of mind. They tend to leech the emotion and ego out of situations, or at least enough so that I’m led to greater clarity.
Is that a formal stoic exercise? Probably not. But then I’m wary of formalizing something like stoicism too much. The whole point of this school of thought was that it was meant to be a school of thought and action. I like that about it. There’s no certification needed, and thank goodness for that.
Do you have a favorite stoic quote?
There are too many to count, but my absolute favorite, were I forced to choose, would be the one from Marcus Aurelius:
“Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.”
Jimmy Soni is an author, editor, speechwriter, and partner at the creative advisory Brass Check. His written work and commentary have appeared in Slate, The Atlantic, and CNN, among other outlets. With Rob Goodman, he is the coauthor of Rome’s Last Citizen: The Life and Legacy of Cato, Mortal Enemy of Caesar and A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age.
Jimmy Soni was managing editor at The Huffington Post from January 2012-2014. Previously he had worked as a strategy consultant at McKinsey and Company, as well as a speech writer at the office of the Mayor of the District of Columbia.
Soni has co-authored several pieces with fellow Duke graduate Rob Goodman; their work has been featured in Politico, The Huffington Post, Business Insider, AdWeek, and The Atlantic, among others.
In 2012, Jimmy, published his first book a biography of Cato the Younger, titled Rome’s Last Citizen: The Life and Legacy of Cato, Mortal Enemy of Caesar. Soni’s forthcoming biography of mathematician, Claude Shannon, will be released in 2015.
HONORS & AWARDS
Betabeat’s Most Poachable Tech Talent — 2014
Politico Magazine feature “Lords of the viral internet” — 2014
Forbes 30 under 30 Media — 2013
Crain’s 40 under 40 New York — 2013
Anokhi “Excellence in Online Media” 2013
Vogue India “Men of Vogue” — 2013
AdWeek “Young Influentials” — “20 under 40 who are wicked smart and rebooting your world”
MinMedia 2012 “People to Watch”
Jimmy Soni has served as an editor at The New York Observer and the Washington Examiner and as managing editor of Huffington Post. He is a former speechwriter, and his written work and commentary have appeared in Slate, The Atlantic, and CNN, among other outlets. He is a graduate of Duke University. With Rob Goodman, he is the coauthor of "Rome's Last Citizen: The Life and Legacy of Cato, Mortal Enemy of Caesar" and "A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age."
HuffPost M.E. Jimmy Soni transfers to India
By JEREMY BARR 05/21/2014 07:19 PM EDT
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The Huffington Post has reshuffled its masthead, replacing managing editor Jimmy Soni with national editor Kate Palmer.
Soni will leave the No. 3 editorial position and head to India, where The Huffington Post plans to launch a new edition.
"We are getting ready to announce our partnership and timeline for HuffPost's launch in India," editor in chief Arianna Huffington said in a statement provided to Capital confirming the move. "It has been Jimmy's dream to spearhead the launch in India, where his parents were born and raised, and as India is such a huge and important market for us, I'm delighted that he will be there from the beginning of this effort until the launch."
Huffington said that Soni will return to New York in a new role after the site is up and running.
Palmer came to the site in May 2012 from The Onion, where she served as managing editor. She was deputy managing editor for Foreign Policy magazine before that.
"Kate Palmer has done a fantastic job as National Editor, and I'm excited for her to build on her many accomplishments in her new role as Managing Editor," Huffington said.
Soni's deputy managing editor Elyse Siegel has also taken on a new role, with the title of director of global growth strategy.
As Capital reported on May 8, in an article about the site's evolving editorial strategy, Soni's management style, described by some as imperious, has not always been well-received.
"Part of my goal is to preserve the culture that started nine years ago when HuffPost was a small, scrappy place," he told Capital at the time. "I'm also proud that I've empowered people to really take leadership positions. The newsroom is stronger, smarter and better than it was."
A former chief of staff to Huffington, Soni has served as managing editor since March 2012, when he was promoted to the position at age 26. He was previously a management consultant for McKinsey and a speechwriter for the mayor of Washington, D.C.
Announcing his appointment to the position, Huffington said, "In his 9 months with HuffPost, Jimmy has proven himself to be a man of many talents — dedicated, highly organized, a good listener, a first-rate problem solver, and an unwaveringly upbeat and positive presence in the newsroom."
Governor's Adviser Jimmy Soni Is Again Exhibit A in Bombshell Sex Harassment Report
Posted By Danny Wicentowski on Thu, Nov 16, 2017 at 8:44 am
Still a top communications adviser at the time, Jimmy Soni, right, accompanied Missouri Governor Eric Greitens to a vandalized Jewish cemetery in February. - PHOTO BY DANNY WICENTOWSKI
PHOTO BY DANNY WICENTOWSKI
Still a top communications adviser at the time, Jimmy Soni, right, accompanied Missouri Governor Eric Greitens to a vandalized Jewish cemetery in February.
Jimmy Soni, a former aide to Governor Eric Greitens, is in the news again this week — and Greitens isn't answering questions about why a man who was accused of sexual harassment was on his campaign payroll as recently as September.
As Greitens was preparing to take office as Missouri governor last year, he started getting questions about his hiring of Soni to be his administration's top communications adviser. In 2014, Soni had left a managing editor position at the Huffington Post amid a cloud of suspicion that his ouster was in fact connected to a pattern of sexual harassment.
Not surprisingly, the hiring drew condemnation from the state's Democratic Party, but Greitens brushed off criticism with his trademark bluster. In January, Greitens dodged questions about Soni from the Springfield News-Leader, saying that he would not respond "to the kind of ridiculous allegations of desperate political opponents who are just bringing up unfounded accusations from the past."
Still, about three months later, Soni left the job, which had come with a $119,158 salary. Greitens spokesman Parker Briden told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that the separation was amicable: "The plan had always been for him to help us during the transition and the early days of governing, and then move on to prepare for his upcoming book launch in July and spend time with his young family."
However, according to campaign finance records, Greitens' campaign committee, Greitens for Missouri, continued to pay Soni for communications work. The two payments, in August and September, totaled $8,000.
Those payments came despite evidence that Soni was indeed pushed out of the Huffington Post after AOL, the company's corporate parent, investigated him for sexually harassing young female employees in the company's Editorial Fellows program — basically, interns.
In 2014, Gawker interviewed eight current and former Huntington Post employees. The employees claimed that Soni used the internship program "as a continually-replenished pool of potential romantic partners."
Although the staffers who spoke to Gawker did not accuse Soni of explicitly pressuring women for sex by offering promotions or raises, he was known to "aggressively" court female fellows. One staffer said his behavior met the definition of "classic sexual harassment."
From the Gawker report:
The matter evidently came to management’s attention in early April [2014] when two fellows, who had not dated or slept with Soni (but were friends with fellows who had), approached their section editor about Soni’s entreaties. He had created an atmosphere, they said, in which many felt that if they didn’t flirt with Soni, their chances of landing a full-time position would suffer. The section editor notified higher-ups, triggering an investigation.
One month later, in May 2014, the Huffington Post announced that Soni was leaving his post as managing editor in order to helm the website’s India edition. One month after that, he left the company.
Soni would find support within the fledgling Greitens administration. The journalist had a history with the political newcomer: Greitens lists Soni as one of the editors of his 2011 book The Heart and the Fist. Soni had also served on the steering committee for the non-profit veterans-aid organization Greitens founded, the Mission Continues.
The allegations of sexual harassment against Soni got new life in December 2016, when the administration added Soni to its transition team. While much of the initial criticism was based on the 2014 Gawker article, the Kansas City Star re-reported the story. Its article, which cited interviews with five of Soni’s former Huffington Post colleagues, came to the same conclusion: Soni had been investigated by corporate lawyers from AOL for sexual harassment involving interns and subsequently allowed to resign.
And the story's not dead yet.
In recent weeks, as allegations of sexual harassment have rocked Hollywood, media outlets have also come under fire. Huffington Post became one of them on Monday, when Gizmodo revisited the Soni story, publishing a bombshell update based on interviews with nine current and former Huffington Post employees.
This time, the story made it clear that Soni's behavior was enabled by no less than the company's founder, Arianna Huffington. Gizmodo reporter Melanie Ehrenkranz "not only independently confirmed that the investigation was indeed the reason for [Soni's] transfer, but that Huffington knew about his actions before they were reported to HR, according to a former employee with direct knowledge of the investigation."
It's not clear what role Soni has played in the Greitens administration since his publicized departure earlier this year — or what his work for the governor entailed last summer. During Soni's time with the governor's transition team, the Kansas City Star reported that the former journalist had "helped craft the inaugural speech and state of the state address and served as a communications adviser in Greitens’ office."
We reached out to Greitens' spokesman Parker Briden yesterday with questions about the payments to Soni last summer, as well as the governor's stance on the allegations of sexual harassment.
Briden did not respond by press time.
Follow Danny Wicentowski on Twitter at @D_Towski. E-mail the author at Danny.Wicentowski@RiverfrontTimes.com
How I Work: Jimmy Soni, Managing Editor of the Huffington Post
Andy Orin
4/23/14 3:00pmFiled to: HOW I WORK
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The Huffington Post is, of course, one of the landmark blogs of the internet, and has grown into a diverse outlet that covers everything from politics to entertainment to local news. Overseeing the editorial operation is Jimmy Soni, whose own work has been featured in The Atlantic, Politico, and more. We caught up with Jimmy to learn how he manages his workload and the HuffPo empire.
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Location: New York, NY
Current Gig: Managing Editor, The Huffington Post; Author of Rome's Last Citizen: The Life and Legacy of Cato
One word that best describes how you work: Intensely
Current mobile device: iPhone 5s; iPad
Current computer: MacBook Air at work; MacBook Pro at home
What apps/software/tools can't you live without? Why?
For reading, I swear by Pocket. Truth told, I don't know how I managed without it. I work on the web and I consume more media than I care to admit, but the internet can be quicksand for the curious. Pocket lets me avoid all that and binge-read, and it saves more time than arguably any other app I use. Otherwise, I'm a low-tech reader. It's hardcovers and paperbacks by the armful. These days, my apartment is just a glorified storage unit for my books.
For work, G-Chat is the lifeblood of our newsroom, but I use Adium to confine chats to a holding pen away from email. I'm a fan of Dropbox for writing projects, and Google Calendar and Gmail for, well, everything. Backblaze hums in the background, quietly saving everything to the cloud for that inevitable day when my laptop and my coffee become better acquainted. I've started playing around with Boomerang, the email app, and I've found it useful. Also, for anyone who is subscribed to too many newsletters and email lists, Unroll.me is a lifesaver. Finally, I love Jumpcut, a souped-up copy-and-paste app that seems almost needless until you start using it, at which point you can't imagine life without it.
What's your workspace setup like?
I have a standing desk (pictured above), and I evangelize about it every chance I get. By all accounts, sitting is a modern plague; some have gone so far as to call it "the new smoking." So I stand, and while it was an adjustment at first, now I feel out of sorts when I sit for too long. Were it socially acceptable to get a treadmill desk, I'd get one in a heartbeat. One quick recommendation: The book that sealed it for me on the whole sitting-versus-standing debate was Eat Move Sleep, by Tom Rath. It's a fast read, and it's that rare book that encourages reflection on familiar things like food and sleep.
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What's your best time-saving shortcut/life hack?
There's decent research on "decision fatigue," the notion that you only have so deep a well from which to make choices throughout the day. The same is true of willpower. If you accept that both your ability to choose and your ability to act are limited, you discover the virtue of routines. I try to "pre-program" as many of the mundane decisions (what to have for lunch, what to wear, etc) as I can. A rough regularity on the insignificant things helps preserve energy for the significant ones. For me, each day's rhythm tends to resemble the next, and while this might seem ridiculously simple, it's actually a hard thing to manufacture. Even thinking in these terms can increase what you can get done.
What's your favorite to-do list manager?
A single Google doc. Keep it simple.
Besides your phone and computer, what gadget can't you live without and why?
I'm a big fan of kettlebells. The kettlebell is the ultimate "hack": it's a small piece of equipment, but you can do an astonishing array of things with it, even in a small space. Keeping a kettlebell around also quiets the well-there-simply-isn't-enough-time-for-the-gym voice in my head.
What everyday thing are you better at than everyone else? What's your secret?
Deploying obscure historical references. I've got an endless supply.
What do you listen to while you work?
An omnivorous—and slightly embarrassing!—Spotify list that contains everything from rap to bhangra to EDM to pop to classical. I listen to music when I'm writing but not when I'm reading. I like to lose myself in books, and I can't do that with a soundtrack.
What are you currently reading?
On weekends, I alternate from books to articles for a few hours until I've had my fill. With books, I like to read two to three at a time. At the moment, I'm making my way through The Most Powerful Idea In The World by William Rosen and What It Takes by Richard Ben Cramer. I also try to read one book I've read before for every three or so new books I read; I find that most are better the second time around.
Are you more of an introvert or an extrovert?
Extroversion is essential in this job, one in which you are dealing with all manner of creative and organizational challenges that are best tackled through teamwork and discussion. But when I'm off the clock, I spend heaps of time alone. There is a side of my personality that treasures long stretches of uninterrupted time for reading and writing and thinking.
What's your sleep routine like?
I work for one of the world's great sleep evangelists, Arianna Huffington, so this question gets more than the usual attention in our newsroom. To be honest, I've transformed in recent years. In my pre-HuffPost life, I wore my sleeplessness as a badge of pride. But the science on sleep is overwhelming, and it has made me a convert. I now try to get quality sleep every night, and I try to make sure the quantity is there, too. One app that's helped is F.lux. It adjusts the light on your computer to the time of day, so the lighting from your screen isn't as harsh at night. It's a subtle change, but I do feel a difference.
Fill in the blank: I'd love to see _________ answer these same questions.
Among the living: Louis C.K., Reed Hastings, Dean Karnazes, Sheryl Sandberg, Tobias Wolff.
Among the departed: Michel de Montaigne, George Marshall, Henry Thoreau, James Baldwin.
What's the best advice you've ever received?
An old one from Marcus Aurelius: "Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present."
Is there anything else you'd like to add that might be interesting to readers/fans?
There's a scene from Homer's The Odyssey that is arguably the original "life hack": the story of Odysseus lashing himself to his ship's mast to avoid the temptation of the Sirens' song. A whole body of research exists now that validates the story's underlying lesson, which is that our willpower is substantially more limited than we think it is—but that we can engineer circumstances that determine our behavior. I try to apply that concept—"lashing yourself to the mast"—whenever I can. Think about the binding structures you can build to force yourself to do the things you avoid.
HuffPost names new managing editor as Jimmy Soni moves to India
BY ANDREW BEAUJON · MAY 22, 2014
TAGS:
MediaWire
Arianna Huffington
The Huffington Post
Jimmy Soni
Huffington Post Managing Editor Jimmy Soni will move to New Delhi to help get HuffPost India off the ground, Arianna Huffington wrote in a note to staffers Wednesday night. National editor Kate Palmer will be the publication's new m.e., and "We will be recruiting a new National Editor," Huffington wrote.
Soni will return "to the newsroom in a new role, the way Nico Pitney left his position as Managing Editor and returned as Head of Product."
Joe Pompeo wrote earlier this month that Soni is a "divisive figure" in the HuffPost newsroom, someone who has "clashed with senior figures in the newsroom, according to numerous insiders, who described him as imperious and arrogant, albeit hard-working and devoted to the site."
Soni "sees himself as more of a change agent," Pompeo wrote. "The newsroom is stronger, smarter and better than it was," he told Pompeo.
Soni, Jimmy: A MIND AT PLAY
(May 15, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Soni, Jimmy A MIND AT PLAY Simon & Schuster (Adult Nonfiction) $27.00 7, 18 ISBN: 978-1-4767-6668-3
The life of the man called "the father of information theory."Claude Shannon (1916-2001) made a contribution of signal importance to the modern world when he was only 21: he divined that instead of using mechanical switches, a modern computer would better employ electrical switches that, quite apart from simply controlling electrical flow, could also, "in principle, perform a passable imitation of a brain." That is, a machine could be designed to use logic. This scientific insight, write former Huffington Post managing editor Soni and journalist/speechwriter Goodman, co-authors of Rome's Last Citizen: The Life and Legacy of Cato, Mortal Enemy of Caesar (2012), ranks among the most important of the 20th century. Shannon went on to work in wartime cryptography and met fellow mathematician Alan Turing, but each was so constrained by security clearances that they could not compare notes and do something even bigger and better than Enigma and other projects. This account lacks a little of the spark and scientific depth of, say, Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs, but it covers the bases well. The authors write fluently, for instance, of how Boolean logic influenced Shannon's discovery: "And because Boole had shown how to resolve logic into a series of binary, true-false decisions, any system capable of representing binaries has access to the entire logical universe he described." They go on to describe some of Shannon's later discoveries, including a kind of algebra of genetics that might have been too much ahead of its time, as well as his considerable eccentricities. Shannon spent much of his later life tinkering rather than producing work approaching his youthful contributions. Still, readers will be intrigued by a mad scientist who rode the halls of Bell Labs atop a unicycle while juggling, a feat at which he did not excel. A welcome and inspiring account of a largely unsung hero--unsung because, the authors suggest, he accomplished something so fundamental that it's difficult to imagine a world without it.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Soni, Jimmy: A MIND AT PLAY." Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491934120/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=4e3bdeb1. Accessed 11 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A491934120
A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age
264.18 (May 1, 2017): p50.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age
Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman. Simon & Schuster, $27 (380p) ISBN 978-1-4767-6668-3
A key figure in the development of digital technology has his achievements, if not his personality, burnished in this enlightening biography. Journalists Soni and Goodman, authors of Rome's Last Citizen, explore Claude Shannon's breakthroughs as a scientist at MIT and Bell Labs in the 1930s and '40s in electronics and telecommunications. His noteworthy discoveries include a way to rationally design circuits using Boolean algebra, and information theory, which understands communications as bits and shows how to compress them and remove noise--methods that underlie DVDs, the Internet, and much else. The authors' rundown of the science behind these advances, probing everything from the structure of language to the transatlantic telegraph, is lucid and fascinating. Unfortunately, Shannon's retiring demeanor and uneventful life don't make for a dramatic narrative. The authors' interpretation that Shannon's mental "playfulness" stimulated his scientific creativity also seems misconstrued: his serious accomplishments were achieved before the age of 33, when he was working at assigned tasks; during his later life he pursued various interests--whimsical robots, chess-playing machines, a scientific study of juggling--but achieved nothing noteworthy. Still, Soni and Goodman open an engrossing window onto what a mind hard at work can do. Agent: Laura Yorke, Carol Mann Agency. (July)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age." Publishers Weekly, 1 May 2017, p. 50. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491575333/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=2a72b354. Accessed 11 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A491575333
Goodman, Rob: ROME'S LAST CITIZEN
(Sept. 1, 2012):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2012 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Goodman, Rob ROME'S LAST CITIZEN Dunne/St. Martin's (Adult Nonfiction) $26.99 10, 16 ISBN: 978-0-312-68123-4
Insightful biography of Cato (95 B.C.-46 B.C.), enemy of Julius Caesar. Goodman and Huffington Post managing editor Soni write not from the viewpoint of academic historians, but rather as students of the classics who want to pass on the rich history of Rome from the time of Sulla to the death of Caesar. They carefully cite all the classic works that the non-Latin reading public may have missed. Plutarch's biography of Cato is the most detailed, but the authors diligently temper his didactic history with facts gleaned from a wealth of sources. Cato devoted his life to stoicism even though his grandfather fought to ban the rigid Hellenic philosophy. During Cato's time, Rome suffered from homegrown terrorism, a debt crisis, multiple foreign wars and a widening economic gap. He raged against corruption brought on by wealth and empire and desperately fought for limited government. Most particularly, he fought against both Pompey and Caesar in their struggles to control Rome. He disliked Pompey, but his greatest fear, soon to be realized, was the reign of Caesar. Few of Cato's writings survive, so his legend comes largely from the near-deification by those who began to write about him after his disturbing suicide. Cicero, who both knew and fought with Cato, was the first to laud his political legacy; from there it never stopped. Virgil, Caesar, Seneca and Augustine wrote about Cato. Dante paid him the ultimate compliment in making Cato one of only four pagans who escaped hell in the Divine Comedy. Joseph Addison's Cato, A Tragedy was required reading throughout the 18th century, and George Washington carried it with him and had it staged at Valley Forge. The authors succeed brilliantly in bringing this fascinating statesman to life.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Goodman, Rob: ROME'S LAST CITIZEN." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Sept. 2012. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A301262319/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=977d04a9. Accessed 11 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A301262319
Rome's Last Citizen: The Life and Legacy of Cato, Mortal Enemy of Caesar
259.28 (July 9, 2012): p50.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2012 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Rome's Last Citizen: The Life and Legacy of Cato, Mortal Enemy of Caesar
Rob Goodman and Jimmy Soni. St. Martin's/Dunne, $26.99 (368p) ISBN 978-0-312-68123-4
Brave, self-sacrificing, and successful as a military commander, the great Roman statesman Cato (95-46 B.C.E.) also engaged in all-night drinking bouts and served as the public face of Stoicism--a philosophy regarded as contrary to Roman identity in his time. He is perhaps most famous for committing suicide rather than serve Caesar and betray his beloved Republic. In their sometimes compelling but more frequently lackluster biography, Goodman (a former Capitol Hill speechwriter) and Soni (the Huffington Post's managing editor) use the very few sources we have to trace Cato's life, from his early military service and his attempts to curtail electoral bribery in 54 B.C.E. to his scandalous divorce from and remarriage to Marcia, and his suicide. Cato's vision for the Republic, say the authors, rested on the myth of a simpler and purer past. Cato failed to restore that past, however, for he possessed a shallow view of the present. Besides their lackluster prose, Goodman and Soni aren't fully convincing in their effort to show either that Cato, rather than Pompey, was Caesar's true nemesis, or that Cato's legacy is instructive for our times. Agent: Laura Yorke, Carol Mann Agency. (Oct.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Rome's Last Citizen: The Life and Legacy of Cato, Mortal Enemy of Caesar." Publishers Weekly, 9 July 2012, p. 50. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A296255818/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=63025558. Accessed 11 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A296255818
Goodman, Rob & Jimmy Soni. Rome's Last Citizen: The Life and Legacy of Cato, Mortal Enemy of Caesar
Evan M. Anderson
137.14 (Sept. 1, 2012): p108.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2012 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Goodman, Rob & Jimmy Soni. Rome's Last Citizen: The Life and Legacy of Cato, Mortal Enemy of Caesar. Thomas Dunne: St. Martin's. Oct. 2012. 384p. bibliog, index. ISBN 9780312681234. $26.99. BIOG
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
In a rare modern biography of Marcus Cato the Younger, a rival of both Caesar and Pompey, Goodman, formerly a Democratic speechwriter, and Soni (managing editor, Huffington Post) argue that understanding Cato and the many legends surrounding him will help readers understand both the current American political climate and contemporary notions of freedom. This argument falls flat whenever it relies on modern terms and framing, because it results in anachronisms in the depiction of Cato. Nonetheless, there are great moments here: Cato, struggling in Utica after the defeats at Pharsalus and Thapsus, is revealed in all his flawed humanity. Where others (e.g., Adrian Goldsworthy in Caesar: Lift, of a Colossus) are inclined to view Cato as a hypocrite, using his virtue and stoicism as another tack to rise in the high-stakes world of late Republican Rome power politics, Goodman and Soni take a more nuanced approach, broaching many questions, never answering firmly. This makes for a more revealing portrait of a real man and demonstrates just how much a symbol Cato has become. VERDICT The biographical elements, rather than the references to current politics, will be of great interest to generalists fascinated by this period in Roman history and wanting more than the typical Caesarian or Pompeian perspectives. As such, recommended.--Evan M. Anderson, Iowa State Univ. Lib., Ames
Anderson, Evan M.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Anderson, Evan M. "Goodman, Rob & Jimmy Soni. Rome's Last Citizen: The Life and Legacy of Cato, Mortal Enemy of Caesar." Library Journal, 1 Sept. 2012, p. 108. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A302111120/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=e01dbb5a. Accessed 11 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A302111120
Rome's Last Citizen: The Life and Legacy of Cato, Mortal Enemy of Caesar
Dwight D. Murphey
38.3 (Fall 2013): p361+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 Council for Social and Economic Studies
http://www.jspes.org/
Rome's Last Citizen: The Life and Legacy of Cato, Mortal Enemy of Caesar
Rob Goodman and Jimmy Soni
Thomas Dunne Books, 2012
The mission statement adopted by National Review when the magazine was started in the United States in 1955 featured a statement by William F. Buckley: "A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it." This was a declaration, in effect, of brave futility. During the more than half-century since that mission statement was written, nothing has better described the circumstance of that ever-present but dwindling assembly of Americans who look back on the Republic (albeit somewhat mythologized) created by the eighteenth century Founding Fathers as the epitome of what America ought to be.
There is a striking similarity between this predicament and that into which Cato the Younger (95-46 BC) was born in first-century BC Rome. The great-grandson of Cato the Elder (the stern Censor known as the defender of Roman morals and opponent of the Hellenistic influences favored by Scipio), the younger Cato had the misfortune of being born into the century in which the degeneration of the Republic reached its culmination, leading to the rule of the Emperors. Just as with many Americans of recent decades, this Cato fought the irresistible tendencies of his time, sensitive to a great loss and "standing athwart history" as an embodiment of his own personal devotion to the ideal he valued so greatly.
Cato has been seen by history in varying ways over the centuries, although he is seldom thought of today. He was revered by Romans during the generations that followed him, who looked back on the mos maiorum (the Republic, or more literally "the custom of our fathers") as the best time in their history and at him as its champion. Rome's Last Citizen's authors tell us that Augustine reduced this to a merely conditional respect, seeing Cato as a secular hero whose life was centered in "the City of Man rather than the City of God." This view prevailed during the Middle Ages. By the time of the Enlightenment, however, Cato's image was not only rehabilitated, but exalted. The American Founding Fathers looked to classical examples for inspiration, and Cato the Younger (to whom we shall refer simply as Cato) was for them a preeminent figure among the ancients. Joseph Addison wrote Cato: A Tragedy in the early eighteenth century, and it became America's longest-running play until its record was eclipsed by Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman in the twentieth century. It had run for eighteen years even before George Washington was born. Despite the Continental Congress's taking a harsh view of staging plays as a type of luxury, and of Addison's play in particular as a "British import," Washington had it performed at Valley Forge to inspire his American forces there. Indeed, Washington patterned himself after Cato, and as a young man had studied the Stoic philosopher Seneca's dialogues. Ben Franklin was one who "kept a diary of his efforts toward the attainment of 'moral perfection.'" Patrick Henry and Nathan Hale are remembered for their use of phrases taken from Addison's Cato. A collection of 144 letters written by two Englishmen and signed "Cato" started appearing in the London Journal in 1720, and "became the age's most influential popularization of natural rights and limited government."
The American adulation of Cato speaks to the eighteenth-century American's value system, which is especially noteworthy because it stands in such contrast to the tone of American society today. Goodman and Soni (1) avoid writing Cato's story, as Plutarch did, as a moral parable; but they do nevertheless tell us that "Cato made a career out of purity ... disdaining power ... [a] politician above politics." A principled upholder of what was at that time seen as "liberty" (2) and of Roman law, he was, and was perceived by his contemporaries as, an incorruptible pillar who "had no price." That even friendship couldn't entice him to bend a norm is illustrated by his having denied Cicero the celebration of a "triumph" he didn't think was deserved. Rome in the first century BC was a cauldron of contending, power-hungry personalities, and it was Cato--not a sycophantic bone in his body--who stood against them, defiantly setting off against their claims the ideal of the Republic. In order to embody "unabashed traditionalism," Cato went barefoot and dressed like Romulus; i.e., wearing "the simple, outmoded clothing of Rome's mythical founders." Lest he seem to us to have been a rough-hewn rustic, Goodman and Soni point out that Cato's only surviving letter displays a deft subtlety, expressed with "smoothness and grace."
These characteristics were formed out of a mixture of his great-grandfather's example, his love of the Roman myth, and his deep commitment to Stoic philosophy. We recognize Cato in Goodman and Soni's description of Stoicism: "uncompromising ... practice of virtue ... indifference to all things outside the circle of conscience ... pain was welcome as a chance to grow in virtue ... the Stoic love of fate ... contentment even when half dead of thirst." (Although these values are easy enough to understand, there was more to Stoic philosophy, such as its paradoxes, that made it rather esoteric.)
This sense of life was well suited to someone standing heroically, as Cato did, for a lost cause, and has typified men of conscience in all ages who have, in dramatically large arenas or even in the more mundane issues of everyday life, seen themselves as something apart from their fellows and have sought meaning in who they were. What is perhaps surprising is that Stoic values and Cato's example were so important to America's Founding Father generation. Those were men who weren't standing for a lost cause, but one that was on the ascendant. It was a sense of life that certainly fit an age in which men would risk their "lives, fortunes and sacred honor," but instead of fitting it to lost causes or revolutionary times it is perhaps most appropriate to think of it as something that describes a certain type of human being in any time or place. The Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset was in The Revolt of the Masses especially sensitive to the difference between the ordinary man and "the man of excellence." (3) He wrote that "it is the man of excellence, and not the common man who lives in essential servitude. Life has no savour for him unless he makes it consist in service to something transcendental ... This is life lived as a discipline--the noble life ... Nobility is synonymous with a life of effort, ever set on excelling oneself...."
Goodman and Soni have written an excellent and most readable account of Cato's life. Our one criticism of them comes with regard to the critique they make of him. Saying that "politics is founded on successful compromise and coalition building," they observe that Cato "did precious little to reform that system's deep sources of weakness and corruption." This allows them to conclude that "Cato's reputation was far out of proportion to his effectiveness." They say "it is hard to disagree with [historian Muriel] Jaeger: 'Cato had renounced the role of the savior of Rome for the salvation of his personal integrity."
The most obvious reason for disagreeing with this critique is that the authors would assign Cato a thoroughly quixotic task. By the first century BC, Rome had moved so far from the "Roman virtues" of the Republic that there was no hope of putting the pieces together again. Cato tried, but himself eventually became convinced of its futility. What sort of "effectiveness" could realistically be expected of him, given the characteristics of his generation?
A more important reason to disagree is that Goodman and Soni have cast their criticism on a wholly different spiritual plane than Cato's--or of any man of the sort described by Ortega as a "noble man." This is to say, they have missed the point. There are human beings (no doubt a good many, actually) to whom "effectiveness" is not the ultimate value. They are concerned with life's meaning, which they find in an almost infinite variety of ways, of which "success" is at most one. (4) Many people, centered on the practical, will no doubt identify with Goodman and Soni's critique; but others will find reason to think it expresses a mediocre sense of life.
We commented above about the gulf that lies between the values of America's Founding Father generation(s) and the tone of American society today. The essence of this gulf is to be found in the loss of any focus, now, on "virtue." This is a loss to which economic theory, which in the nineteenth century developed as a "social science" rather than as an overall philosophy of a free society, has long contributed. "Virtue" is not a positivist value, and does not lend itself to statistical analysis. It, and the whole complex of ideals with which it was associated, have long been ignored as an irrelevancy. This reviewer is reminded of his work over the years as a volunteer judge at high school debate tournaments. He found that the debaters had been given to believe that the only arguments that were considered apropos to a debate subject were those that concerned monetary costs or other things that could be measured. This was pure insensate positivism. It is a mistake, of course, to think of this intellectual change as the only source of the move away from "virtue." There have been many cultural and intellectual forces at work.
The first century BC was one of the pivotal times in the history of Western civilization, and in telling Cato's life the authors of Rome's Last Citizen (5) have given a gripping account not only of his biography, but also of Rome, and its predicament, during those years. It is an amazingly good book.
(1) The authors are not academic historians, but rather widely published journalists and commentators who have proved themselves excellent historians. Goodman has been a speech writer in both the U.S. House and Senate, and a writer of opinion pieces for The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. Soni, also at one time a speech writer, is the managing editor of The Huffington Post.
(2) The reason for a qualified reference to "liberty" is that the Republic was in fact an oligarchy, with a huge slave base and population of urban poor. It is hardly appreciated in the context of our rather unthinking lack of perspective today that liberty developed historically within select populations. Cato championed liberty, but it's worth noticing that he declined to free and arm slaves so they could fight on his side in the final (and quite desperate) confrontation with Caesar in north Africa. The reason, we are told, was that "Cato was not about to seize any man's property." The similarity of this to the rationale of the Dred Scott decision in the United States written in the 1850s by President Andrew Jackson's appointed Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney is striking. Both illustrate how it has often been taken for granted historically that liberty is the natural right of those, but only of those, within a dominant body politic. This seems hypocritical to our egalitarian age, but in fact it was in each case a major incremental step in the development of the concept of personal freedom. This is so even though the more restricted application of liberty represented by the Dred Scott decision was rapidly giving way to a consensus favoring a more universal application.
(3) It ought not to be necessary to explain that the word "man," when so used, is not intended to refer only to males. The explanation is needed only because Americans have since the 1970s so totally conformed to the demands of feminist ideology that they have made a virtual taboo out of what had until then been quite an obvious usage.
(4) It's worth noticing that Ayn Rand, merging Nietzsche with the free-market ideals of Ludwig von Mises, fashioned the creators of successful capitalist enterprises as noble men in the Ortegan aristocratic sense (although the hero in her early play, The Night of January 16, was just a thug, not a creator, providing a window into Rand's more purely Nietzschean side). It is one of Rand's major contributions that she revealed a high moral dimension in capitalism, something that its detractors have been loath to see and that isn't very much in evidence in the deteriorated "crony capitalism" that passes as free-market economics today.
(5) The book's title is based, of course, on the fact that those who followed Cato were no longer "citizens" of Rome. They had become "subjects" of what was henceforth an "Empire."
Murphey, Dwight D.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Murphey, Dwight D. "Rome's Last Citizen: The Life and Legacy of Cato, Mortal Enemy of Caesar." The Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies, vol. 38, no. 3, 2013, p. 361+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A356353837/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=e5241659. Accessed 11 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A356353837
The mathematical prodigy who gave the world ‘bits’
By Gary Anderson - - Sunday, July 16, 2017
ANALYSIS/OPINION:
A MIND AT PLAY: HOW CLAUDE SHANNON INVENTED THE INFORMATION AGE
By Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman
Simon & Schuster, $27, 384 pages
Many people, most notably Al Gore, have claimed to be the father of the information age; but Claude Shannon probably deserves the most credit. In 1948, he wrote an article that is considered to be the “Magna Carta” of information technology. In their book “A Mind at Play,” Jimmy Son and Rob Goodman explain how this nearly forgotten American genius revolutionized the way we think about communications.
Shannon was a mathematical prodigy who could actually do things. As a boy in rural Michigan, he turned barbed wire fences into telegraphs. Later in life, he built the first chess playing computer as well as robots and a juggling clown. All of this was done just for fun, but he was a legitimate American scientific giant with multiple advanced degrees in math and engineering.
Claude Shannon was of draft age when conscription was introduced as America reluctantly stood on the brink of entry into World War II. He was a person who did not like being in large groups of people and realized that soldiering was not probably a good fit. Instead, he contributed to the war effort by working at the legendary Bell Labs skunk works and his efforts at creating an unbreakable code contributed immeasurably to victory.
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This book can be read on two levels. The first is a study of how an authentic first-rate mind worked through the noise of communications theory to create the theoretical backbone of the information age. For mathematical idiots such as myself, the sections on the math may be a little much.
However, the story of Shannon as a fascinating human being is readable and compelling. By 1937, he had figured out that binary switches were the key to the foundation of the digital computing. In 1948, he wrote the bombshell “The Mathematical Theory of Communications.” It introduced the concept of the “bit” and eventually changed the world. His academic awards and reputation were formidable and he became a legend in the relatively closed worlds of information mathematical theory, but he remained modest and an interesting character in his own right.
Like Ben Franklin, Shannon’s work was play, and the two activities were inseparable. One can imagine him coming up with a cryptographic solution while working on a chess problem or banging out a jazz tune. The authors argue that he was a true generalist and they make a convincing case of it.
Mr. Soni and Mr. Goodman are solid researchers; they bring Shannon to life both as a scientist and an intriguing individual. The authors make his story readable as well as informative. This was a guy who could juggle and ride a unicycle at the same time as being a jazz enthusiast while leading the world into the information age. He was an American original.
Despite a failed early marriage to a leftist activist in the 1930s, Shannon went on to find the love of his life and became a devoted husband and father. In later life, he was a professor of legendary proportions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology until Alzheimer’s Disease cut his productive life tragically short in 2001. I once did a book review of the life of Thomas Edison, and I found myself despising the man more with every turn of the page. That was not the case with Shannon; he was a genuinely decent human being.
Shannon believed that machines had the potential to someday surpass the human brain in cognitive ability with artificial intelligence (AI). He envisioned the possibility of a machine like Big Blue defeating the world’s greatest chess player or the Watson AI beating the likes of Ken Jennings on “Jeopardy.”
He saw that as a good thing, and he truly believed that the technologies that he was pioneering were a force for good in the world. The term “singularity” now means the point at which artificial intelligence will meet and then surpass human capability. This has deeply concerned genius level current thinkers including Stephen Hawking who believe it may become a real threat. Some think it will happen by the end of the decade; others think at least by the mid-century.
Had Shannon lived to see us this close to singularity looming, what would he have thought? He would probably have tried to invent governors that would prevent AI from killing people. He was an optimist after all; but how would he have viewed the probability of them demanding equal pay for equal work and voting rights? Shannon’s playful mind would have enjoyed the challenge.
• Gary Anderson is a retired Marine Corps Colonel who lectures at the George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs.
The man who paved the way for the information age
A biography of Claude Shannon invites us to celebrate the Midwestern mathematician’s pioneering work on binary code
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Richard Waters
JULY 20, 2017 5
The best biographies of scientists, like those of athletes, are all about the journey. We know the breakthrough will be made, the trophy won. The pleasure comes from reliving the moment the world changed.
That said, making the discovery of a dry theory into a page-turner presents a particular challenge. Especially if you include the occasional equation.
The theory that put Claude Shannon in the history books was foundational for the information age. Shannon’s magnum opus, The Mathematical Theory of Communication, hardly sounds like a work for the masses, though Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman say that its publication in the late 1940s was followed by a wave of popular interest — something that barely seems imaginable in our own times.
Soni and Goodman’s subject in A Mind at Play is part of the line of early-20th-century Midwestern tinkerers who went on to lay the foundations for the computer era. Whether he was building radios or something more ambitious, such as the makeshift elevator in a friend’s family barn, Shannon’s boyhood passions were mechanical.
That yielded to an interest in mathematics, the field where he made his mark. But a life-long fascination with the mechanical, married to a facility for abstraction, were the qualities that defined him. It fell to Shannon to come up with the ultimate abstraction of the information age, the ones and zeros of digital technology.
Breakthroughs in maths, according to Soni and Goodman, are the preserve of the young. Shannon’s master’s thesis, produced at the age of 21, certainly bears that out. He was the first to see the possibility of reducing logic to a series of instructions that could be processed by simple electrical components, represented by switches.
Though A Mind at Play sometimes feels like the intellectual equivalent of eating what’s good for you — it can take a lot of chewing — Soni and Goodman are at their best when they invoke the wonder an idea can instil. They summon the right level of awe while stopping short of hyperbole. As they write of this first glimpse of the power of machines to process logic: “‘The laws of thought’ had been extended to the inanimate world”.
Shannon’s main contribution came a decade later. His insight was that, at its heart, information can be separated from both the meaning of a particular message and the medium over which it is transmitted. Any message — whether a moving image, a spoken sentence or a piece of text — could be reduced to a code expressed in binary digits.
At the time, Shannon was working for a telephone company — he was at Bell Labs, the AT&T research arm where many of the early computing breakthroughs were made — so it isn’t surprising that he came at information theory by way of trying to solve a communication problem.
Information moving through the analogue world faces inherent limitations. Interference on a phone line can degrade the signal. And the amount of information that can be transmitted is limited by the capacity of the line.
Converting information into binary code, as Shannon proposed, offered two practical answers. One was that code could be stripped to the barest minimum needed to communicate a specific meaning. This was the idea behind digital compression, the technique that makes it possible to send today’s digital video signals over limited bandwidth. The other insight was that information could be transmitted perfectly over any line, even in the face of interference. All it took was to enhance the digital code, adding redundant “signal” to make up for the loss in transmission.
If Soni and Goodman manage to make the key ideas the centrepiece, they also succeed in maintaining interest in the man behind the theory. It isn’t always easy. A retiring, self-effacing man with an ironic sense of humour and a way of disarming his interviewers, Shannon did not leave many gold nuggets for his biographers to uncover.
Maths prodigies — like sports heroes — present another inherent problem for the biographer. If glory comes early, how do you make sense of the whole life?
Shannon lived more than 50 years longer, enough to see the information age become a reality. Nothing much in the way of human drama enlivens the story. There were glancing encounters with Albert Einstein (who may or may not have known who he was), a brief friendship with Alan Turing, and a simmering rivalry with fellow information theorist Norbert Wiener that failed to catch fire.
Whimsical inventions occupied much of Shannon’s attention: an electronic gadget to win at roulette, a paper on the mathematics of juggling (another life-long passion), a series of mechanical devices, such as the mouse designed to find its way out of a desktop maze.
Soni and Goodman try to stitch these strands together into a theory of scientific creativity. It was his ability to engage with any problem that intrigued him — to play intellectually, even (or especially) if there was no obvious purpose — that defined Shannon’s interests. The same brain that was so enthralled by unicycles also dreamt up a theory that underpins the modern world.
But none of that gets any nearer to explaining the nature of genius. Nor does it bring us nearer to understanding how a mind can conceptualise something that has never before been thought. In the face of ideas that change the world, there is only wonder.
A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age, by Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman, Simon & Schuster, RRP$27, 384 pages
Richard Waters is the FT’s US West Coast editor
Photograph: Getty
Review: A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age by Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman
Ian Durham October 6, 2017 Book Reviews 0
I am somewhat embarrassed to say that, until now, I never knew all that much about Claude Shannon personally. I, of course, knew that he ostensibly “invented” information theory and I’d read sections of some of his more important work. But aside from routinely using Shannon entropy in calculations, he never much crossed my mind. So I was more than a little surprised to discover that, until now, no one had ever published a biography of Shannon. There were a few books that discussed Shannon in the broader context of the history of information theory, but none that focused solely on him. Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman’s biography, A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age (Simon & Schuster, 2017, $27.00, list price) thus fills a much-needed gap in the history of science, technology, and culture.
I have to admit that the book started off a bit rocky. Early on the authors spent a little too much time quoting Walter Isaacson and James Gleick (who have both written books on the history of information theory) and not enough time checking some simple facts. For instance, in describing the home-built telegraph on Shannon’s childhood farm in Gaylord, Michigan, they describe communication on the system as taking place at “lightspeed”. While this is a common mistake of the general public (though one that continually perplexes me), one would think that authors digging deeply into the history of a technology would understand it a bit better. At times they also try just a bit too hard to turn a memorable phrase (“A digital watch is nothing like the sun; an analog watch is the memory of a shadow’s circuit around a dial.”) That said, the book did noticeably improve, and I soon found myself engrossed.
Shannon was a remarkable man. Though he is known for information theory, he made seminal contributions to a wide variety of fields including what was perhaps the first mathematical analysis of the topic. Early on in his career, in a meeting with Hermann Weyl at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where Shannon would spend a year on a fellowship, he a few rather prescient comments. As Soni and Goodman write,
What if the mathematical model for a message sent over telephone or telegraph wires had something in common with the models for the motion of elementary particles? What if the content of any message and path of any particle could be described not as mechanical motions, or as randomized nonsense, but as random-looking processes that obeyed laws of probability—what physicists called “stochastic” processes? Think of the “fluctuations in the price of stocks, the ‘random walk’ of a drunk in a sidewalk”—think, for that matter, of a clarinet solo—happenings that were less than fixed by more than chance: maybe “intelligence” and electrons were alike in that way, taking haphazard walks within probability’s bounds. That got Weyl’s attention.
Truth be told, I don’t know who first came up with the idea of a quantum walk but this exchange with Weyl in 1940 seems to come tantalizingly close. Unfortunately, at this point, Soni and Goodman immediately jump to discussing Shannon’s interactions with Einstein. That highlights my only other complaint about the book: it’s a little too “breezy.” More than once I was disappointed that there wasn’t just a bit more depth.
That said, I do think the authors did an admirable job capturing Shannon as a person and, as the book progressed, they included more material culled from interviews with Shannon’s family. In particular, I think they did a good job capturing that grey area between engineering and pure math and science. That seems to have been the area Shannon inhabited. He was a brilliant mathematician who could think in highly abstract ways and yet he was also an inveterate tinkerer who could build amazingly useful devices (and not-so-useful devices: he once built a flame-throwing trumpet) with his own hands in his basement workshop. Sadly, today’s society has little use for this sort of person. It’s a testament to the values of those times that Shannon spent a good portion of his career at the phone company. As the authors note
By the time Shannon joined Bell Labs, the curious mix of techniques, talent, culture, and scale had turned the modest R&D wing of the phone company into a powerhouse of discovery. It was an institution that churned out inventions and ideas at an unheard-of rate and of unimaginable variety. In [Jon] Gertner’s words, “to consider what occurred at Bell Labs … is to consider the possibilities of what large human organizations can accomplish.”
At one time robust and vibrant R&D departments that valued knowledge for its own sake were more common. In addition to AT&T and Western Electric, who jointly ran Bell Labs, GE, Westinghouse, IBM, Xerox, and others had large R&D arms that routinely made ground-breaking discoveries, many of which won Nobel Prizes. Eight Nobel Prizes have been awarded for work performed at Bell Labs alone. While there certainly appears to be a reasonable investment in R&D at places such as Microsoft, Google, and others, one wonders if they have the freedom to do what was done at places like Bell Labs. But that’s a topic for another post.
In short, I found Soni and Goodman’s biography of Claude Shannon to be very good. It certainly had its rough spots and I had some quibbles, particularly near the beginning, but the majority of the book was engrossing in the way any good biography should be. It is well worth a read and Claude Shannon, with his flame-throwing trumpet and unusual juggling experiments, is a worthy subject.
As a final note, if you ever find yourself in Cambridge, Massachusetts, look for Shannon’s grave in Mount Auburn Cemetery and be sure to check the back of the headstone. Hidden from view by a bush is an inscription of his famous entropy formula. It is well-known in the physics community that Ludwig Boltzmann’s headstone at the Vienna Zentralfriedhof has his entropy formula carved on the front. It seems very much in character that Shannon’s would be carved on the back of his own.
Posted on Jan 7, 2013 in Books and Movies
Rome’s Last Citizen – Book Review
By Adam Koeth
Rome’s Last Citizen: The Life and Legacy of Cato, Mortal Enemy of Caesar. Rob Goodman and Jimmy Soni. Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, 2012. Hardback. 366 pages. $26.99
One of the first questions many Americans will assuredly ask themselves if they come across Rob Goodman and Jimmy Soni’s book, Rome’s Last Citizen: The Life and Legacy of Cato, Mortal Enemy of Caesar is: Who is Cato? More importantly, why publish an entire book about a relatively obscure Roman political leader in 2012? Why should 21st Century America care who Cato is?
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By narrating the life and career of the Roman political giant, who his friends and enemies were, and how he affected the course of the Republic, Goodman and Soni make it clear that there are many parallels between the Roman Republic of Cato’s time and our own democratic society. In fact, there are ties between Cato and the very beginning of the United States of America, including a theatrical version of the famous Roman Stoic who holds a very important place within the Founding mythos. Most of the Founding Fathers (to use the most popular term) considered themselves late 18th-century Catos, men who did not necessarily pick up the sword themselves, but used their words and their actions to halt British transgressions against the American colonies. As Goodman and Soni point out, everyone from Nathan Hale to Benjamin Franklin aped Cato’s words and deeds, elevating the Roman from an antiquated figure lost to history into a potent symbol for liberty.
The one American most affected by Cato’s life and the theatrical play that took London and the American colonies by storm, however, was a man who picked up the sword in defense of his country: George Washington. The American Cincinnatus, the man who put down his sword and retired to a (supposedly) quiet retirement after his victory against the British, had a lot in common with Cato. If it was not in his nature to be a quiet, proper, relatively humorless man, Washington learned it from Cato—which is saying a lot, since Washington never had a proper education. Goodman and Soni note that Washington had the play based on Cato’s life performed at Valley Forge, when American fortunes and American morale plummeted. The tale of Stoic virtue, rigidness, and liberty tinged with tragedy seemingly affected the men who witnessed the play, including Washington himself, and morale began to creep up from its lowest point.
The adoption of Cato by the American Revolutionary generation only tells part of the Roman’s connection to modern America. Throughout their book, Goodman and Soni tell of a powerful elite who controlled Roman politics through bribes, force, and coercion; sex scandals at the highest levels that rocked Roman society; enemies on the fringe of the Roman empire who nibbled at the edges of the civilized world before exploding into open warfare; and a combination of urban and rural poor who were ground under the sandaled feet of the rich and powerful. Indeed, the popularity in England of the play Cato, Goodman and Soni point out, harkened to the public’s fears of a “new, moneyed elite – of the growing power of stock companies and banks.”
If any of the above sounds familiar, we need only think about the state of American political life today, where super PACs can raise and spend money at will in support of a candidate or cause of their choosing, with little to no oversight or responsibility for their messages. The poor and the middle class both bend under the strain of a system of taxation and spending that seems to have no clear goal or easy fix, a system where banks failed due to mismanagement and corruption—only to enjoy resurrection at the hands of the government. American society faces open challenges from radical elements within the Muslim world and a continued face-off against “rogue” nations such as Iran and North Korea, and American men and women face combat on a daily basis in far-away Afghanistan. While this may seem like an overly simplistic evaluation of American society (and indeed it is), it also serves to bolster the similarities between Roman society during Cato’s lifetime and the America of today.
In the end, Goodman and Soni reintroduce Cato to America as both an inspiration and a warning. Cato’s Stoic virtues do serve as a potential check against the myriad of problems that plague American political life. Cato’s unwillingness to take a bribe, his careful management of his—and the Republic’s—money, and his willingness to stand by his beliefs even if it meant making political enemies can serve as an example to modern-day politicians.
The example, however, is definitely less than stellar. Cato’s inflexibility worked to both personal and public detriment. His filibusters against several of his opponents and their issues served to grind the Roman Senate to a halt, and his personal involvement and opposition to elections and their results often led to deadlock at the highest levels of Roman government. Above all, Cato served as one of the (often-overlooked) factors that led to a massive civil war and the eventual victory of Julius Caesar.
Well-written and insightful, Rome’s Last Citizen is not only interesting for the historical perspective it sheds on Cato and Rome, but also for the light it sheds on the similarities between Rome and modern America. Goodman and Soni picked a perfect historical actor to reintroduce to the 21st Century, and a perfect time to do it.
Adam Koeth is a recent graduate of Norwich University with a Master’s of Arts in Military History. He also holds a Bachelor’s of Arts degree in History from Ohio University. A native Ohioan, Adam lives with his wife and two children near Columbus, and enjoys reading everything he can get his hands on, writing, and watching sports – even if it’s the Cleveland Browns.
ROME'S LAST CITIZEN
The Life and Legacy of Cato, Mortal Enemy of Caesar
by Rob Goodman & Jimmy Soni
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KIRKUS REVIEW
Insightful biography of Cato (95 B.C.–46 B.C.), enemy of Julius Caesar.
Goodman and Huffington Post managing editor Soni write not from the viewpoint of academic historians, but rather as students of the classics who want to pass on the rich history of Rome from the time of Sulla to the death of Caesar. They carefully cite all the classic works that the non-Latin reading public may have missed. Plutarch’s biography of Cato is the most detailed, but the authors diligently temper his didactic history with facts gleaned from a wealth of sources. Cato devoted his life to stoicism even though his grandfather fought to ban the rigid Hellenic philosophy. During Cato’s time, Rome suffered from homegrown terrorism, a debt crisis, multiple foreign wars and a widening economic gap. He raged against corruption brought on by wealth and empire and desperately fought for limited government. Most particularly, he fought against both Pompey and Caesar in their struggles to control Rome. He disliked Pompey, but his greatest fear, soon to be realized, was the reign of Caesar. Few of Cato’s writings survive, so his legend comes largely from the near-deification by those who began to write about him after his disturbing suicide. Cicero, who both knew and fought with Cato, was the first to laud his political legacy; from there it never stopped. Virgil, Caesar, Seneca and Augustine wrote about Cato. Dante paid him the ultimate compliment in making Cato one of only four pagans who escaped hell in the Divine Comedy. Joseph Addison’s Cato, A Tragedy was required reading throughout the 18th century, and George Washington carried it with him and had it staged at Valley Forge.
The authors succeed brilliantly in bringing this fascinating statesman to life.
Pub Date: Oct. 16th, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-68123-4
Page count: 368pp
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 14th, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1st, 2012
Rome’s Last Citizen: The Life and Legacy of Cato, Mortal Enemy of Caesar
Rob Goodman and Jimmy Soni. St. Martin’s/Dunne, $26.99 (368p) ISBN 978-0-312-68123-4
MORE BY AND ABOUT THIS AUTHOR
Brave, self-sacrificing, and successful as a military commander, the great Roman statesman Cato (95–46 B.C.E.) also engaged in all-night drinking bouts and served as the public face of Stoicism—a philosophy regarded as contrary to Roman identity in his time. He is perhaps most famous for committing suicide rather than serve Caesar and betray his beloved Republic. In their sometimes compelling but more frequently lackluster biography, Goodman (a former Capitol Hill speechwriter) and Soni (the Huffington Post’s managing editor) use the very few sources we have to trace Cato’s life, from his early military service and his attempts to curtail electoral bribery in 54 B.C.E. to his scandalous divorce from and remarriage to Marcia, and his suicide. Cato’s vision for the Republic, say the authors, rested on the myth of a simpler and purer past. Cato failed to restore that past, however, for he possessed a shallow view of the present. Besides their lackluster prose, Goodman and Soni aren’t fully convincing in their effort to show either that Cato, rather than Pompey, was Caesar’s true nemesis, or that Cato’s legacy is instructive for our times. Agent: Laura Yorke, Carol Mann Agency. (Oct.)
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Reviewed on: 07/09/2012
Release date: 10/16/2012
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Thursday, 18 October 2012
Book Review: Rome's Last Citizen: The Life and Legacy of Cato
Written by Joe Wolverton, II, J.D.
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Book Review: Rome's Last Citizen: The Life and Legacy of Cato
“The victorious cause was dear to the gods; the lost cause, to Cato.” This is the inscription (in Latin) inscribed on the Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery. It serves to remind visitors not only of the sacrifice of Confederate soldiers who fought and died in the Civil War, but also of the length of the shadow of a man who lived over 2,000 years ago.
Marcus Porcius Cato the Younger is the subject of a new biography by Rob Goodman and Jimmy Soni entitled Rome’s Last Citizen: The Life and Legacy of Cato, Mortal Enemy of Caesar.
Goodman and Soni begin their study of the life of Cato the Younger by relating the high esteem in which he was held by the men and women of the Founding generation. George Washington, for example, inspired the weary battle-worn Continental troops at Valley Forge with a performance of a dramatic retelling of the story of Cato written by Joseph Addison. Many of Washington’s colleagues in the pantheon of American liberty also considered Cato the acme of republican virtues they sought to emulate. The authors write:
Washington’s peers studied and memorized the tragedy. They quoted it, consciously and unconsciously, in public statements and in private correspondence. When Benjamin Franklin opened his private diary, he was greeted with lines from the play that he had chosen as a motto. When John Adams wrote love letters to his wife, Abigail, he quoted Cato. When Patrick Henry dared King George to give him liberty or death, he was cribbing from Cato. And when Nathan Hale regretted that he had only one life to give for his country — seconds before the British army hanged him for high treason — he was poaching words straight from Cato.
George Washington, John Adams, and Samuel Adams were all honored in their time as “The American Cato” — and in revolutionary America, there was little higher praise. When Washington wrote to a pre-turncoat Benedict Arnold and said, “It is not the power of any man to command success; but you have done more — you have deserved it,” he too lifted the words from Addison’s Cato.
So much of this man Cato, who heroically and habitually placed principle above politics, endeared him to the founders of the American Republic. This "Catophilia" was not confined to the new republic’s secular leaders, however. Throughout the new nation, pastors preached sermons praising the virtues of Cato. Take for example this excerpt from a sermon delivered in 1793 by renowned pastor Peter Thacher to an artillery company in Massachusetts:
Why does it hurry me to the field of blood, the place of execution for the friends of American liberty? Whom does it there call me to see led to the scaffold with the dignity of Cato, the fortitude of Brutus, and the gentleness of Cicero marked deeply on his countenance?
Cato’s name was conspicuous among many of the tracts and political pamphlets of the day. Whether in a classroom, at home with a tutor, or simply from a reading of literature, every educated colonial was familiar with and fascinated by the name and the deeds of Cato the Younger.
As recorded above, the founders spoke of Cato in letters and in speeches, they quoted him in diaries and recalled him in dramas. They sought to remember his virtues that thereby they might come to resemble them.
Although not their intention — a biography of Cato would be a very oblique endorsement — much of the authors’ praise of Cato brings to mind a modern statesmen so steadfast in his refusal to compromise for the sake of political advantage that many have dubbed him “Dr. No.”
Regardless of whether one considers his obstinacy to be a virtue or a vice, there is little doubt that in many of this book’s descriptions of Cato one recognizes similar traits in Ron Paul.
Speaking of the Senate of Cato’s day, the authors write that it was “an awesome assemblage of gray-haired eminences, the symbol of Rome’s republican heritage, and a body crippled by personality politics, rigged elections, ritualized bribery, and sex scandals.” Is the Congress where Ron Paul has fought valiantly and often alone for the preservation of our Constitution not similarly plagued?
And: “Cato made a career out of purity, out of his refusal to give an inch in the face of pressure to compromise and deal.” Or:“Roman politics was well-oiled with bribes, strategic marriages, and under-the-table favors; Cato’s vote famously had no price.” And, finally, Cato was “Rome’s most credible voice on the constitution’s sanctity.”
It is difficult to ignore the allusions to an American politician who for decades has displayed nearly identical resistance to the powerful forces whose influence and wealth have silenced other would-be resisters.
Veiled, and almost certainly unintended, references to Ron Paul are not the only types and shadows of modern America found in this book. There are many events recounted in Rome’s Last Citizen that serve as a cautionary tale for Americans weary of our own republic’s moral and economic decline.
Cicero, Cato’s contemporary and notable foe of tyranny in his own right, remarked that the decline of the once noble republic was evident in the fact that “the Roman name is held in loathing, and Roman tributes, tithes, and taxes are instruments of death.” Does this lamentation not accurately describe a world where Americans are heavily taxed and that money is then sent overseas to court the fidelity of allies who often have used that money to purchase weapons that have killed American soldiers sent to “liberate” the people from dictators? What about the thousands of men and women killed as a result of President Obama’s drone war? Do they not hold the name of the United States in loathing as a result of our president’s use of taxes to purchase fleets of drones that daily deliver death to scores of targets who pose no credible threat to our national security?
At this point in their story, Goodman and Soni relate the violence and bloodshed of the tyranny of Sulla. Sulla is infamous for having compiled a proscription list — a list of names of those he considered enemies of the state and who could be killed without recrimination. Again, reading the authors’ description of Sulla is eerily familiar to modern Americans. Of Sulla they said, he was “feared like a king, free to dole out spoils like a king, and like a king, able to kill with a word.” The similarity of such a scenario to our own time is unsettling.
It was not despotism in dictators alone that drew Cato’s ire. He also saw in his own Senate a class of politicians who “always valued [their] mansions and villas, [their] statues and pictures, at a higher price than the welfare of [their] country.” Is this not an apt description of the self-seeking crony capitalism that keeps America at war and keeps the lawmakers who clamor for constant combat comfortably situated in their seats of power?
This well-crafted retelling of the life of Cato ends with a backhanded slap at Cato for failing to embrace “successful compromise” and build coalitions upon which politics is founded. The authors ask: “If the Republic was in the crisis that Cato described, wasn’t it worth a more-than-ordinary effort?” Cicero expressed similar frustration: “When affairs demanded a man like [Cato] for office, he would not exert himself nor try to win the people by kindly intercourse with them.”
Cato could not be bought, he could not be cajoled, he would not compromise, and he “would not recognize a tyrant’s legitimacy by accepting his power to save.”
In the end, perhaps the lesson we, the heirs of Rome’s republican past, learn from the life of Cato is that we are a generation who sadly will find it difficult to “rebuild a freedom [we] had only known from hearsay.”
There is time, however, to save this republic and deflect it from the trajectory toward tyranny upon which it has been set by enemies of liberty. As one writing under the pseudonym Cato wrote before the days of the War for American Independence:
"Thus it is that liberty is almost everywhere lost: Her foes are artful, united, and diligent; Her defenders are few, disunited, and inactive.”
If we are to be victorious and succeed where Cato failed, we must be learn to be united and active in the defense of liberty and the Constitution.
Rome’s Last Citizen: The Life and Legacy of Cato, Mortal Enemy of Caesar
BY JIMMY SONI, ROB GOODMAN
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Biographies abound for the colorful personalities of the Late Roman Republic: Caesar and Cleopatra, Pompey and Cicero. But one of the most influential figures of the period – in politics, in philosophy, on the military front – is often relegated to the sidelines. Cato is frequently dismissed as a stodgy old republican, a hopelessly rigid stoic who wastes time on high-minded protests in defense of impossible ideals. Yet Cato left a legacy that continued to fuel idealistic causes long after his death, from the remaking of Rome under Augustus to the American Revolution almost eighteen centuries later.
With Rome’s Last Citizen, Rob Goodman and Jimmy Soni bring Cato out of the shadows. Digging deep to find personal letters and other echoes of Cato’s voice, the authors reveal the complex man – competent yet fallible, impassioned yet sometimes uncertain – who worked tirelessly behind the scenes to avert the fall of the republic as Caesar’s Civil War unfolded.
Goodman and Soni hail from the world of journalism and political speechwriting, and thus write with a verve not always found in academic biographies. While this book can’t succeed entirely in making Cato a likeable character, it at least reveals the fully human man behind the mask.
Review
APPEARED IN
HNR Issue 62 (November 2012)
REVIEWED BY
Ann Pedtke