My name is Andy Brown and I’ve served as the Manager of College Communications since April 2021. A voracious reader since I was very young, I’ve often looked for ways to pursue that passion in my career.
In my previous role at a medical association, I started a series of articles where I reviewed a medicine-related book once a month. Over time, the series built up an engaged following of physicians and medical students. So, after spending nearly a year meeting many bright published scholars, I saw an opportunity to engage with the UChicago community and bring a similar book club to our online channels.
Learning and teaching through authored works is a foundational component of the University of Chicago’s College’s style of education and rigorous pursuit of knowledge. Many faculty members in the College contribute through the authorship of countless impressive books, both within and beyond their academic interests.
As such, this winter, the College is launching a quarterly UChicago College Book Club, featuring published books by College faculty that are anticipated to be of interest to the community. In each book club entry, the College will share a summary of the featured book, thoughts from the author and aspects of the book that UChicago faculty, staff, students, parents, and alumni may find compelling.
All book club entries will be housed on the College news website, and we invite all members of the community to read along and submit their own favorite faculty-written books for consideration.
The first selection of the year is "An Anthropology of the Machine: Tokyo’s Commuter Train Network" by Michael Fisch, an associate professor of anthropology and of social sciences in the College. I started with this book because it perfectly exemplifies the multidisciplinary critical thinking ability of the College’s faculty.
With a population creeping towards 40 million, Tokyo is the largest city in the world. To meet the transportation needs of this dense metropolis, the city is oriented almost entirely around a meticulously developed, high functioning commuter train network. It is, as Fisch puts it on the back cover of the book, “one of the most complex technological infrastructures on Earth.” But you don’t have to take my word for it, take a look at this map.
On a given weekday morning in Tokyo, a 10-car train zips from station to station every two minutes, carrying roughly 400 commuters per car. One might assume that a transit system operating well over capacity would leave itself little room for error and rely on a rigorous operational commitment to timetables. But, as Fisch explains, train operators constantly face delays and are forced to adjust their schedules on a daily basis.
It is the gap between the “painstakingly calculated” principal timetable, which “refers to the temporality clock time and delineates a schedule,” and the operational timetable, which “reflects the lived tempo of the city and train network,” that Fisch spends much of the book studying (p. 5).
Operation beyond capacity in an efficient manner, he argues, relies on both train operators and commuters to maintain (or “finesse”) this gap. The operating system is built to account for aberrant events.
Fisch argues that this system doesn’t work due to precision—it works because there’s a mutual attentiveness between the operators and the commuters, who work around daily obstacles together.