Astral Codex Ten

The Outlier

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The Outlier

Article

The Outlier is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 6 times across 6 issues between May 23, 2022 and October 17, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “The full list of Book Review Contest finalists is: … The Outlier”; “The Outlier is actually intended to be a positive reappraisal of Carter’s presidency”; “The Outlier (biography of Jimmy Carter)“. It most often appears alongside ACX, Jimmy Carter, Making Nature.

Metadata

  • Category: Books
  • Mention count: 6
  • Issue count: 6
  • First seen: May 23, 2022
  • Last seen: October 17, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Open Thread 225
May 23, 2022 · Original source
1: The full list of Book Review Contest finalists is: Consciousness And The Brain, Making Nature, The Anti-Politics Machine, The Castrato, The Dawn Of Everything (EH’s review), The Future Of Fusion, The Illusion Of Grand Strategy, The Internationalists, The Outlier, The Righteous Mind (BW’s review), The Society Of The Spectacle, and Viral.
Your Book Review: The Outlier
July 08, 2022 · Original source
But I wondered what, if any, hidden depths lay within the peanut farmer. Also, I wanted to enter this contest, and I didn’t want to pick a book that I thought a bunch of other people might also review. So I turned to The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter, by Kai Bird. Like Carter, this book seems to have been largely forgotten. It won a Pulitzer, but I had never heard of it until I googled “best book about Jimmy Carter.” It seems to have gotten a lot less attention than similar recent biographies about Grant, Roosevelt, and Truman, and it’s hard to imagine it ever becoming a TV show or a musical.
Inline links: The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter
Although it may not be clear from this review, The Outlier is actually intended to be a positive reappraisal of Carter’s presidency. The author clearly admires Carter’s iconoclasm and moral backbone, and he interprets many of Carter’s decisions through the most positive lens he can—for example, by blaming failures like the hostage crisis on listening to the wrong advisors. His thesis is that Carter was a man ahead of his time: decades before today’s public debates over race, our use of natural resources, and government hypocrisy, Carter looked the country in the eye and forced us to confront the looming end of American exceptionalism. But we didn’t want to hear the message—so we shot the messenger.
Nonetheless, the slipperiness of its protagonist ultimately left me unsatisfied with this book. In the end, The Outlier is a lot like the Carter presidency itself: easy to like and in certain ways admirable, but ultimately a missed opportunity.
Open Thread 239
August 28, 2022 · Original source
The Outlier (biography of Jimmy Carter)
Inline links: The Outlier
Book Review Contest 2022 Winners
September 02, 2022 · Original source
The Outlier, reviewed by Max Nussenbaum. Max writes at Candy for Breakfast.
Inline links: The Outlier, Candy for Breakfast
Kora In Hell, reviewed by Lucas Paletta. Lucas is a writer from Buenos Aires, Argentina. He blogs (in Spanish) at www.stackdamage.com.ar. I really enjoyed all of these. A few notes of special praise: The Internationalists was probably most fascinating, in the sense of describing a strange historical episode I didn’t know about before. The Outlier was similar and I give it high marks for making Jimmy Carter interesting. Consciousness And The Brain was a whole new neuroscience theory I knew nothing about and I expect to reread it a bunch of times to try to get it to sink in. Sam Altman sent me an email saying he enjoyed the review of The Future Of Fusion Energy. The Making Nature review did a great job talking about and analyzing a trend I’d never thought about before, far beyond even what was in the book. I think about Exhaustion every time I see a CFS patient - specifically, about the claim that 19th century psychiatrists would prescribe a “West cure” of going off and doing cowboy things on a ranch; I haven’t yet recommended that to anyone, but like I said, I think about it often. God Emperor of Dune and Kora In Hell were the token fiction and poetry reviews; I thought they did a spectacular job overcoming the difficulties of reviewing their respective media. I was reading some of the non-finalists and found 1587 in there and was surprised it hadn’t reached finalist status and decided to promote it; based on your votes it seems like that was the right choice. My process for picking finalists was kind of haphazard; I had you rate all reviews on a scale of 1-10, anyone above 8 got in automatically, and then I picked my favorites from the reviews between 7 and 8. This was sort of unfair, and meant there were some reviews that scored better on the voting than finalists but weren’t finalists themselves, and others that I liked better than some finalists but couldn’t pick. All of these are Honorable Mentions. You’ll notice some of them are politically charged, and yes, I did sort of discriminate against these (though not so much that I wouldn’t have picked them if they’d made it above 8). They are: Unsettled, reviewed by Julius S. Julius is a machine learning engineer from San Diego. He blogs at Curious About Ideas.
Inline links: Kora In Hell, www.stackdamage.com.ar, Unsettled, Curious About Ideas
Book Review Contest 2023 Winners
September 15, 2023 · Original source
Public Citizens, reviewed by Max Nussenbaum. Max writes at Candy for Breakfast. You may remember him from last year's review of The Outlier, about the life of Jimmy Carter.
Inline links: Public Citizens, Candy for Breakfast, last year's review of
Non-Book Review Contest 2025 Winners
October 17, 2025 · Original source
JFK Assassination Conspiracy Theories, reviewed by Max Nussenbaum. Max was a finalist in previous contests with his reviews of The Outlier and Public Citizens. He writes at Candy for Breakfast and begrudgingly acknowledges that Lee Harvey Oswald probably acted alone.
Inline links: JFK Assassination Conspiracy Theories, The Outlier, Public Citizens, Candy for Breakfast