Who Is Government?

(edited by Michael Lewis)

This collection of eight essays (most of which were originally published in The Washington Post in 2024 and were later collected in book form) was a book club pick, and I liked it but am not sure how much I’ll ultimately retain from it—though that might be a me problem. Almost every piece in the book is a profile of a person (or sometimes a team of people) working in some department of the US federal government: there’s an essay about Christopher Mark, who works at the Department of Labor and has done important work in mine roof safety over many decades, and an essay about Ronald E Waters and his work at the National Cemetery Administration. There’s an essay about NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab and one about Jared Koopman, who works on “a small cyber-crime team” at the IRS. There’s an essay about Pam Wright and her work at the National Archives, and one about Olivia Rynberg-Going, who’s a paralegal at the DOJ, and another about Heather Stone at the FDA and her vision of creating a “mechanism so that doctors who treated rare disease could report their cases”. Probably my favorite essay in the book is the one that isn’t about a person: “The Number”, by John Lanchester, is about the Consumer Price Index and its history and some of what it’s used for, and the complexity of the whole idea of measuring price changes over many categories of items over many decades. I like the odd/interesting facts and figures that Lanchester cites in this essay, and his argument that “the gathering of data represents our ambition for a stable, coherent society.”