Let's play strip global thermonuclear war

The 100/nonfiction

rivkat — Fri, 21 Jan 2022 20:51:20 GMT

So, I basically took 2020-2021 off in almost every way and am slowly getting back to a new normal. And one thing I finally did was finish The 100. And now I am mad--mad enough that I've lain in bed fretting for a couple of nights! Which may be displacement but is still annoying. I haven't been this mad at an ending since BSG. It was all pointless! The solution to humanity was to get rid of it! This was not a happy ending but the show seemed to want it to be! Killing Bellamy was in fact pointless! The show seemed to want Clarke's last killing to be badass ("pencils down" is indeed badass) but also wrong? Even though the dude was literally running Omelas? I cannot accept that Bellamy was right to be into this guy, but I can accept that he would be, though Octavia and Echo also got over that pretty damn quick. Urgh. I don't want the show to have ended in S2, despite that season's perfection, but strange women lurking in stars handing out ascension is no way to run a system of government.

Sheera Frenkel & Cecilia Kang, An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination: Yes, FB is as bad as you think it is. From the lack of internal safeguards that let male engineers look up the information of women they were interested in—one of whom tracked down a woman with whom he’d had a fight after she left the hotel where they’d been staying--to crushing competition, it’s an organization out of control. The worst stories are about FB’s indifference to non-English speakers, where an inability to even understand hundreds of languages left FB ignorant of the genocidal campaigns being conducted on the site, particularly in Myanmar. The one person in charge of monitoring Myanmar spoke only Burmese, out of the about 100 languages present—as if a German speaker were responsible for moderating all Europe. Then FB refused to share information about deleted posts to prove the military’s responsibility for the genocide. “Facebook would cooperate … only if the United Nations created a mechanism to investigate human rights crimes. When [the relevant person] pointed out that the United Nations had such a system in place, known as the Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar, the Facebook representative looked at him with surprise and asked him to explain.” With great power does not, in fact, come great responsibility—not unless either law or an ethical compass provide it.

Eyal Press, Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America: Really good, horrifying book about the way that we make low-paid workers responsible for doing the worst things in our society, then blame them for having done those things within structures that make their bad behavior almost inevitable. This “dirty work” requires the tacit consent of “good people,” maybe even more in a democracy than in an autocracy. After all, how are we going to deal with all the mentally ill people we have decided not to care for outside of prison, or fight the wars we’ve decided to fight without lots of troops on the ground? Covers prison health care, military drone operators, slaughterhouse workers, and other jobs that most people don’t aspire to or pretend are noble (not, for example, police officers and teachers, who are also given individualized blame for structural failings including the structural failings that socialize them into behaving badly, but are also lionized in the abstract). For example: “Nobody told Curtis and his fellow guards to get brutal. But no one really needed to tell them this. It was enough to pay them modest salaries to enforce order in overcrowded, understaffed prisons that were neither equipped nor expected to do much else.”
These jobs tend to evoke disgust and shame, affecting both how others see the workers and often how the workers see themselves—Press discusses the idea of “moral injury,” especially in the context of drone operators. Although you might think they’d treat death like a video game, many of them instead react negatively—and they end up seeing more death and destruction than most Special Forces on the ground. Moral injury is a useful concept, Press argues, because PTSD, while also descriptive, can depoliticize and individualize what is a problem of what the system asked the individual to do. Meanwhile, drone operators aren’t seen as “real” soldiers, a status deriving “from the very thing that made drone warfare appealing to politicians and the public”—it saved money and lives on our side.

Press emphasizes that many of the workers he talks to are not the primary victims of the systems they work in—prisoners, foreigners subject to drone strikes, and maybe animals are--but they are also suffering as they cause suffering, and we should not let individualized blame obscure that they are doing what we as a society want them to do. This is particularly true because these are jobs disproportionately filled by poor people without other opportunities and people of color, walled off from others by geography, fences, and other barriers so we don’t have to think about them. Hedge fund guys, disproportionately white, don’t face the same stigma even as they do lots of damage, and they are rewarded with money and prestige for doing so. So, when the BP oil rig exploded, even the workers’ families understood that images of oil-covered birds would generate more public outrage than pictures of the loved ones they’d lost. But when these workers try to challenge unsafe conditions, they find they’re easily replaced, unlike high-tech workers whose protests are often heeded. (Interesting contrast to Tyler Schultz’s narrative of whistleblowing about Theranos—he definitely suffered, but his suffering had a point, which most of these workers can’t say.) “What do we owe these workers? At a minimum, it seems to me, we owe them the willingness to see them as our agents, doing work that is not disconnected from our own daily lives, and to listen to their stories, however unsettling what they tell us may be.” (Of course, this framing accepts that they aren’t likely to be reading the same books as “we” are.)

You should read it; it’s mostly about the US though there are a few fascinating comparisons, such as to research on the prison system in France, which also found that guards were ashamed of what they did for a living. In Norway, where the prison system is much more rehabilitative, the staff seemed much prouder (though he doesn’t have the same depth of ethnographic data).

Behavioral Science in the Wild, Nina Mažar & Dilip Soman, eds.: Really interesting overview of difficulties translating behavioral science/nudges into working policy. Consistently, policies have much smaller effects than they do in the lab—a “voltage drop.” That doesn’t mean we should stop—the average effect of a government nudge is significant and positive, and even a 8% change in behavior can mean a lot of people helped, but it is worth thinking about how we go from 30% in the lab to 8% in practice. A lot of this seems to be explained by publication bias: studies that don’t show a (big) result don’t get published.

Sometimes the nudge was the wrong lever. For example, whether organ donation is the default or opt-in varies across countries; when Wales flipped the default, the organ supply didn’t seem to increase, perhaps because a default opt-in can be overridden by family members. It’s possible that, pre-intervention, a country’s default simply matched its population’s overall willingness to donate organs.

Sometimes the studied nudges systematically vary from implemented ones. Academic nudges are more likely to be delivered in person and to be about asking people to choose between 2 options, both of which are more effective than other types. The government may face barriers changing a service from opt in to opt out despite the effectiveness of that kind of nudge. Still, nudges are generally quite cheap for government, with often no marginal cost to changing how they communicate (though if we wanted them more effective, we’d need more people to do things in person).

But backfires are possible. A South Korean test of messages to deter excess credit card spending worked for 12% who were the heaviest spenders but backfired for 88%; maybe better targeting would have helped. A Mexican pension experiment showing people how much they’d have for retirement with the goal of encouraging savings showed a similar backfire effect (though that may have shown that they were targeting the wrong problem for that group, which was invested in a low performing pension fund).

The contributors constantly emphasize that context is everything. “Every detail of how the intervention is implemented matters. The fundamental behavioral insight, say peer comparison, may transfer as is, but how it is packaged and delivered often does not.” So, for example, different groups may need different tones, different timing/frequencies of messages, and different graphics. It was fascinating to learn that, at ASU, “a four-year school with a traditional student body,” an intervention to help students get more financial aid needed to email both students and their parents. “But at CUNY, students tend to be older, commonly with children of their own, and are often the first in their families” to go to college; they didn’t need emails to their parents. ASU emails written in a friendly, casual tone were “approachable and unintimidating,” but they seemed “unprofessional and untrustworthy” to CUNY students, “who see college as providing a service more than an experience.” For recorded messages, having the research assistants record them leads to hangups, but voice actors and clear scripts get listened to more.

There’s an interesting chapter on debiasing interventions and how we shouldn’t try to change people’s minds, but rather “redesign their systems and environments, so that biases have no place to hide.” You may have heard of blind auditions and their effects on gender bias, but there’s also guidance on job listings, replacing words like “entrepreneurial” and “strong” with neutral synonyms like “creative” and “dedicated”—the latter attracted more women, who represented 4% more of the resulting pool, but also more applicants in general, especially “men who were more weakly identified with their gender.” In evaluating job candidates, it helps to compare individual responses “horizontally,” by “looking at one question or criterion for all applicants and then moving on to the next question or criterion,” instead of trying to assess each candidate separately. The chapter didn’t talk about this, but I expect it may fight back against the known problem that position requirements get shaped to the strengths of the most attractive male applicant. Likewise, it may help to change numerical evaluations, as dumb as that sounds. It turns out that “[e]valuators are actually less likely to give 10/10 – an indicator of perfection and brilliant performance – to high-performing women,” but a 1-6 scale instead “closed the gender gap on perfect scores.” And within organizations, an opt-out scheme for consideration for promotion helps women by eliminating the gender gap in who puts themselves forward.

What about environmental acts? Can we avoid moral licensing/backlash? How do we get people to think of themselves as the kind of people who are environmentally responsible? Turns out that people who take “small, ‘token’ public actions such as a social media post supporting environmentalism” can behave less responsibly afterwards, whereas if you can get them to take “larger, effortful actions” or private actions like a home energy audit, that can have positive spillover effects on their other actions.

But again, everything has to be contextualized. One great chapter discussed localization in Kenya: The researchers started with “a well-cited intervention from psychology to induce mild stress …, in which those assigned to the treatment group were given a mock job interview in front of a panel of ‘experts’ while those assigned to the control group were simultaneously to give a speech about a friend.” It didn’t work in Kenya, because public speaking was not culturally understood as stressful and also, as one respondent asked, “Why are we being interviewed by butchers?” The experiment had followed the Western convention of “white coats = scientists.”

Alex Wellerstein, Restricted Data: Fascinating history of US nuclear secrecy. Big takeaways: after the initial burst of post-Hiroshima/Nagasaki fights about secrecy, the US declassified substantial amounts in order to promote the business of nuclear power; capitalism opposed national security (if you assume, which was hotly contested, that secrecy promoted national security). It’s also a story about the importance of know-how and material access versus just abstract scientific knowledge, which is apparently not as much help in making a bomb as you might have thought—Wellerstein refers to this as the idea that there was “a secret” or “nuclear secrets” as opposed to a thick web of know-how.

Tyler Schultz, Thicker than Water: Audible original in the voice of a Theranos whistleblower (and not accidentally, grandson of George Schultz). Really powerful illustration of how even someone raised to value truth and public service, with economic security and cultural privilege, can be intimidated to the point of near-breakdown by legal threats—even those from a fraudster. He speaks affectingly about how he felt betrayed by his beloved grandfather and about how the pressure of the threat of a lawsuit against him, and the associated surveillance, made him so distressed that the reason that he didn’t buy a gun was that he was too worried he might use it on himself.

David M. Perry & Matthew Gabriele, The Bright Ages: During the Dark Ages (as you may know them), Europeans were actually doing all kinds of things, including interacting with Africa and Asia, developing religion and culture, and both fighting and trading amongst themselves, not just going on Crusades and killing Jews (though they did a fair amount of those things too). Leans too hard on repeating “the Bright Ages” for my taste, and focuses on kings and queens more than ordinary people, but I thought it fit interestingly with David Graeber’s last book about how the quiet/meaningless/unrecorded periods of history might well have been better, and more meaningful, for the average person than the nearby exciting/war-filled times.

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Yuletide, Legends of Tomorrow, fiction

rivkat — Mon, 03 Jan 2022 20:43:08 GMT

A Partial List of Things They Changed in the Movie (2626 words) by rivkat
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Speed (1994)
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Annie Porter/Jack Traven
Characters: Annie Porter, Jack Traven, Harry Temple
Summary:

Harry lives. Other parts of life go on too. Note: I ignored Speed 2 because I never saw it. It does not exist in this universe.

I've been bingewatching Legends of Tomorrow and ...it is definitely its own thing. If Black Lightning is "Luke Cage, but they're enjoying making it," then LoT is "2000s comics like Batman/Superman, but (mostly) live action"--CGI is now cheap enough that they can do basically any ridiculous thing that could happen in the comics. I mostly like the singing though, let's face it, without Victor Garber the singing talent average dropped a ton. I love that a Muslim character declines to become a god for a day because drinking wine is super haram. I love the stoner superhero. I think it might have run its course, but maybe there are more depths of absurdity to plumb.

Charles Stross, The Revolution Trade: Third in the revised Merchant Princes series; the US knows about worldwalkers now and is out for blood—and oil from the less-developed worlds, where it’s just sitting under the territory we know as Texas. Plenty of other stuff is happening politically in two other worlds as well, including a political revolution where Miriam was trying to start an industrial revolution. Stross could definitely use an Ameri-picker for small details of speech when he’s trying to write Americans, but I had fun anyway. He gets a lot of mileage out of the misunderstandings that let nations lurch into war—misunderstanding intent, misunderstanding goals, misunderstanding what counts as a stable situation. And his alternate Iraq war is, sadly, much more successful than the real one even though he probably thought he was being pessimistic.

Charles Stross, Empire Games: Seventeen years after the original trilogy, the US recruits Miriam’s daughter and trains her as an operative to spy on the timeline they’ve found that has advanced enough technology to threaten them. Meanwhile, Miriam’s adopted timeline is progressing rapidly with its borrowed technology and push to catch up, but politically is still quite unstable. Very much a transitional volume to get to the next part.

Charles Stross, Dark State: Now things start to happen in this second volume of the new trilogy—Miriam’s daughter starts her spy mission and immediately things go sideways, but fortunately for her she’s been trained by a German deep cover spy and the new American Republic has a use for him too. As it turns out, they are also dealing with a succession crisis and are trying to get the Pretender’s daughter to renounce her claim to the throne and accept citizenship in return for money and freedom from the breed-mare status of European princesses. But the extraction is complicated. And… cliffhanger.

Adrian Tchaikovsky, Ogres: Ogres dominate the humans they rule. But when one human strikes back, he starts a journey to heroism and rebellion. Onto this basic formula, Tchaikovsky applies his interests in genetics, politics, and politically relevant genetic traits. Most of the novella is in the second person, for a reason.

Rebecca Roanhorse, Fevered Star:Second in this series based on pre-Columbian cultures with a city to which the gods have returned, much to the city’s detriment. Contending political and sorcerous forces and lots of bloodshed ensue. For fans of magic crossed with palace politics.

Aliya Whiteley, Skyward Inn: Jem is human, formerly working on a planet that humans are colonizing, partially driving out the native intelligent species, which is close enough to humanoid for serious misunderstanding to be easy. She and her alien companion—with whom she is in what seems like unrequited love—now run an inn in an Earth province that has seceded from modernity (chips in the head/expansionism, mostly) and sell the alien brew that restores pleasant memories to immediate experience. Her son is one of the POV characters, and he’s callow and unpleasant enough to make reading not super pleasant either. Humanity as destroyer, I think, but I admit I couldn’t finish.

Daniel Abraham, Age of Ash:New trilogy opener, set in the city of Kithamar, where many races mingle. When Alys’s brother is killed, her revenge quest sets her into affairs magical and political. Meanwhile, the young woman hopelessly in love with Alys is being drawn to the other side of the conflict, in service of a foreigner searching for her son. It’s a good starter.

Kate Elliott, Unconquerable Sun: The most operatic of space operas. Sun is her mother’s heir, but her mother doesn’t plan to release control over the empire any time soon, and just got married to a new wife who is already pregnant with a potentially competing heir. Sun’s victories in battle may help her but also arouse her mother’s jealousy, and when one of Sun’s companions is killed, the replacement is a resentful young woman who has big family drama of her own. Lots of fighting on space and on the ground, some romance, and much politics. (Loosely based on Alexander the Great, I think.)

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nonfiction

rivkat — Thu, 23 Dec 2021 23:20:09 GMT

This entry will not display properly no matter what I do; v. frustrating

Benny Morris, 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War:

Published in 1969, it is extremely detailed in terms of military history and covers both Arab and Israeli failures and atrocities, though there’s nothing uncontroversial in this area. Arab nationalism and Zionism were both locked in opposition and mutually reinforcing as Jews poured into Palestine, spurred by the Holocaust and the world reaction to it, and the British tried to appease their Arab clients without pissing off the far more pro-Jewish and then pro-Israeli Americans. The UN proposed a partition, which the Arab states didn’t accept and which initially proposed to leave a substantial (approaching close to half the population) Arab minority in the Jewish territory. Instead, the Arab states invaded (Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Egypt), but were hampered by poor equipment, limited manpower, and a focus on making sure that no independent Palestine came into existence; they preferred to divide the territory among themselves and the existence of Israel didn’t necessarily seem that much worse than a Palestinian state, not that any of the leaders could say so publicly. Things got worse for them in terms of materiel because of an arms embargo once the war started, whereas the Jews were used to buying weapons on the black market and successfully got a lot through, with the help of substantial funds from Jews in the US and elsewhere and of trained military personnel (including a number of Christians), many of whom had learned their skills fighting against the Nazis.

Though the nascent state was in real danger of disappearing, things got better for Israel as the fighting went on. Nonetheless the entire Jewish state was mobilized for war, as the Arab countries weren’t, and the war footing couldn’t go on forever. With a lot of international pressure, mostly against the militarily more successful Israelis, it didn’t. But it turns out that an absence of peace can last a very long time, especially since the Arab states didn’t do much to integrate Palestinian refugees. Although the number of Jews expelled from Arab states was roughly equivalent to the number of Arabs expelled from Israeli territory, Israel made many more efforts to integrate the former (though they apparently remained a seriously right-wing, anti-Arab voting bloc), while Arab states kept the refugees segregated in camps, creating a reserve army of potential anti-Israel fighters. Weak states have trouble making peace, and the first two Arab leaders who seriously conducted peace negotiations were murdered (King 'Abdullah in 1951 and Anwar Sadat).

David Graeber & David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity: Sprawling and fascinating, though already subject to challenge on questions like “did whites captured by Native peoples routinely decide that Native ways of living were better?” The core of the book is the argument that there is no natural evolution from farming to autocracy to (hopefully) democracy/republican government. Instead, lots of governance formations have been possible and tried over the course of history, and sedentary farming is not correlated with the rise of kings in the way we casually learned in school; matters are far more contingent and complex, though raider-kings are often seen on the periphery of settled cities. “Roughly 6,000 years stand between the appearance of the first farmers in the Middle East and the rise of what we are used to calling the first states; and in many parts of the world, farming never led to the emergence of anything remotely like those states.” Different peoples seem to have rejected authoritarian politics, or allowed them at some times of the year and not at others. Some forager cultures valued leisure over hard work; others did the opposite (e.g., in Northwestern California). The domain of ritual authority, which enables claims of exclusive ownership—of secret knowledge, usually—has regularly contended with egalitarianism in other areas of life. We are not as stuck as we think. Even the use of torture to cement a community can play out in different ways—in Europe torture showed the power of the sovereign over everyone, but in Wendat cultures in what’s now America, torture was applied to non-member warriors to highlight that violence was entirely unacceptable within the community.

They survey lots of different periods and kinds of evidence, finding plenty of cities without kings in the historical record. Part of this is about asymmetrical standards of proof: “Scholars tend to demand clear and irrefutable evidence for the existence of democratic institutions of any sort in the distant past. It’s striking how they never demand comparably rigorous proof for top-down structures of authority.”

Among the fascinating claims: Archaeologists now treat mass killings “as one of the more reliable indications that a process of ‘state formation’ was indeed under way.” At a ruler’s death, members of the royal household would be slaughtered in “the first few generations of the founding of a new empire or kingdom,” and then the process would fade to nothing or to symbolism. This assertion of power over the household was a process of “turning violence into kinship,” related to slavery (where people who cared physically for other people were defined as property) and to the way that “all the kings’ subjects are imagined as members of the royal household.” They speculate that monarchy’s appeal

has something to do with its ability to mobilize sentiments of a caring nature and abject terror at the same time. The king is both the ultimate individual, his quirks and fancies always to be indulged like a spoilt baby, and at the same time the ultimate abstraction, since his powers over mass violence, and often (as in Egypt) mass production, can render everyone the same. It is also worth observing that monarchy is probably the only prominent system of government we know of in which children are crucial players … [I]nfants, pure objects of love and nurture, are only politically important in kingdoms and empires....
If you like this kind of thing, you might like the book. There’s also an extended discussion of the development of bureaucracy and accounting, which can be tools against inequality or for it. “[R]educing everything to numbers … provides a language of equity–but simultaneously ensures that there will always be some who fail to meet their quotas.” But that doesn’t mean they have to be expelled from the community—consistent with Graeber’s anarchist leanings, they suggest that, “[a]s anyone knows who has spent time in a rural community, or serving on a municipal or parish council of a large city, resolving such inequities might require many hours, possibly days of tedious discussion, but almost always a solution will be arrived at that no one finds entirely unfair.” Only large-scale sovereign power “and the resulting ability of the local enforcer to say, ‘Rules are rules; I don’t want to hear about it’ … allows bureaucratic mechanisms to become genuinely monstrous.”There’s also a fascinating discussion of specialization. Although “it is often simply assumed that states begin when certain key functions of government–military, administrative and judicial–pass into the hands of full-time specialists,” they argue that almost no early states were actually staffed by full-time specialists; they didn’t have standing armies. Still, “[i]f ‘the state’ means anything, it refers to precisely the totalitarian impulse that lies behind all such claims, the desire effectively to make the ritual last forever.”

Despite its length, the book could have used more development of its claims about women’s work and women’s power. It argues that the key technologies of early civilizations— “fabrics and basketry, the potter’s wheel, stone industries and beadwork, the sail and maritime navigation, and so on”—were likely women’s technologies, and that the concentration of power in individual hands was “accompanied by the marginalization of women, if not their violent subordination,” but doesn’t give as much attention to whether this, like other aspects of society, was actually flexible. Still, I liked the discussion of Minoan civilization, which seems to have involved a lot of female power, despite scholarly interpretations that downplay it “as clearly different, but ultimately impenetrable (a gendered sentiment if ever there was one).”

I haven’t even gotten into the discussion of whether the freedom of movement—the freedom to leave a situation you don’t like—is the foundation of all other freedoms and the thing that, once gone, often leads to autocracy. Or the question of how Native thinkers in America influenced Enlightenment thinkers in Europe, filtered through their preconceptions but also challenging their claims of moral authority. There’s a lot here, is what I’m saying.

Katrine Marçal, Mother of Invention: How Good Ideas Get Ignored in an Economy Built for Men:

Not exactly the book I thought I’d get, but interesting nonetheless. Ideas of masculinity kill men, and inventions—she starts with the example of the wheeled suitcase, invented multiple times but successful only once women started traveling a lot despite its apparently obvious superiority over non-wheeled cases. Electric cars had a good shot over internal combustion cars at the outset, but they were perceived as too feminine. They were first to get roofs (to protect a coiffure) and to position levers and controls to be less likely to catch on clothing. Even the electric starter on a standard internal combustion car was initially presented as convenient for women. At the same time, it was the adoption and standardization of these changes that paved the way, so to speak, for the car to become a widespread consumer product. “So long as gas cars needed cranking, they were of no use to anyone who needed to get to work on time, and thereby remained an object of leisure or sport.” The “feminine” touches turned out to be usability requirements.

Sexism does plenty of dumb things like that; I liked her discussion of midwives’ use of wooden horns to listen to the fetal heartbeat. Women are associated with wood, not metal; with the rise of doctors, European midwives were banned from even using metal instruments. It was easier to justify higher pay and status for male doctors that way. And yet, as she points out, “[a] task isn’t by definition more demanding simply for requiring the use of tools,” as the process of repositioning a baby in the wrong position for vaginal birth clearly shows. “The ‘feminine’ is equated to the low-paid as a direct result of our refusal to view what a woman does as technical.” Something natural and passed from mother to daughter surely can’t be difficult or innovative and deserving of reward! When women engage in care of elders or children and do it well without much formal training, “we take that as proof that the jobs are ‘low skilled’ and therefore shouldn’t be well remunerated,” but if a man is “naturally” good at something, that’s often the explanation for why he should be paid well. Authority figures recording or discussing workers often discuss men’s “skills,” but women’s “speed” and “accuracy,” as if they were things that just happened—bodies without minds.

Likewise, she traces failed expectations about robot replacement of workers to gendered ideas about the body. Quoting a roboticist, she notes that “AI researchers long regarded intelligence as the ability to tackle ‘the things that highly educated male scientists found challenging,’” such as chess and math theorems. Those researchers concluded that, if machines could play chess, they could obviously do everything else. But they couldn’t. “[M]any of the jobs robots have the most difficulty with are the very same jobs that we don’t value particularly highly on the labor market”: care work. Mordantly, she speculates that we might be on the cusp of a shift in which these attributes are redefined as male precisely to the extent they are seen as valuable, like the shift in computer programming. “Our grandkids will be taught that ‘emotional intelligence,’ ‘intuition,’ and ‘caring instincts’ have always been inherent to human nature, at least since Jesus washed the feet of his disciples ….” At the same time, our high tech is still “assembled largely by female human hands in India and China,” and the devaluation of women’s work can hold back technological developments by keeping women’s work too cheap to bother replacing. “Who will want technology to solve problems that remain invisible, since they are currently being taken care of by women for free?”

The book is great at emphasizing that these are choices; that government force is behind them; and that we can choose differently. Amusing/heartbreaking riff near the end: “There is a basic economic assumption in our society that women will perform care work without pay, demands, or gripes, so if nature is a woman, then she obviously has the same duty of care. She must always stand by and care for us, no matter how we behave. Otherwise she is a bad mother: BURN WITCH, BURN! … We want her to be beautiful and vulnerable, and only then are we inclined to protect her.”

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nonfiction

rivkat — Wed, 22 Dec 2021 22:06:56 GMT

Lacey Lamar & Amber Ruffin, You'll Never Believe What Happened to Lacey: Stories of incredibly racist things that have happened to the authors, two siblings, though mostly to Lamar, a noncomedian who lives and works in Omaha, whereas Ruffin is a comedian who writes for Late Night with Seth Meyers. What struck me—along with the believable but appalling racist hair-grabbing—was the way in which racial humiliation and economic dispossession went hand in hand. They lost jobs/didn’t get jobs/lost academic awards/were turned off of math/etc. in ways that benefited white people in concrete ways, but also explicitly signaled that Blackness was unwelcome; the economic and cultural functions of racism were inseparable.

Andrea Elliott, Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City: Powerful story of one bright, often-homeless child’s journey in NYC. “Don’t become a statistic is something Dasani hears all the time,” but she has very little control over that. She gets an opportunity to attend an intensive boarding school with its own dentists, doctors, hairstylists, etc. but brings her family ties and family trauma with her. As a teacher who fought her way out of similar circumstances, says: “She has what I didn’t have—all those young siblings,” the teacher says. “She has allegiance to them and that’s a problem, if any of them don’t see leaving as important.” The teacher worries about Dasani getting pregnant just to free herself: “It is easier to care for one baby than seven.” But even when that doesn’t happen, even away at school Dasani is bombarded with messages from home, seeing how her family falls further apart without her to be a substitute parent.

The book is good at explaining how the rules for getting help destroy other capacities, like everyone in a family having to skip school, work, and even court dates to stay all day at an intake office in order to get housing for that night. (After the NYT reported an earlier version of Dasani’s story, children no longer need to skip school.) As Elliott points out, when better-off families are in crisis, friends and relatives “drop off casseroles or make phone calls to doctors … because no family can properly function—much less attend therapy—when the electricity has been cut or the fridge is empty.” But caseworkers don’t generally provide food or transportation, just dictate that food should be provided and appointments for therapy/parenting classes made, or the children will be taken away.

The individual stories are mixed with statistics, such as that 20 percent of caseworkers quit family services after a year. “They often leave due to ‘burnout,’ a condition that is never applied to the children, as if they run on eternal flames.”

Richard Delgado & Jean Stefancic, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, Third Edition:Short intro text; not sure it was as useful as some of the foundational texts like Patricia Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights. But kind of heartbreaking to read the 2017 edition and its rather mild hopes from 2021, when backlash is in full swing.

Katharine Hayhoe, Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World: A Christian climate scientist says there’s hope. Online especially we hear more from the 7% of unreachable rightwingers, but with the more uncertain middle we can appeal to shared values and concrete examples of how they are already being affected by climate change. I was not super convinced that many of us in the US will pay attention until it’s far beyond too late.

Joshua D. Rothman, The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America:In white memory, slave traders were despised even by most slaveowners; Rothman shows that they were in fact quite tightly linked with white power structures in the North and South. Using their private letters, he shows that they regularly reveled in their rapes and used enslaved women’s bodies to develop and maintain ties among them; they also used beatings and family separations strategically as well as for the pleasure of domination. They were sharp dealers; their violence occasionally bled over from the enslaved they tortured to the white people they dealt with. They often cut legal corners to make more money and push back against mild attempts to keep the horrors of the trade from respectable white viewers, leading to things like the bodies of enslaved people who’d died of communicable illness being dumped just outside of town. But they were also fully integrated with the rest of commerce, using credit and corporate forms like others, personally acquainted with people like Henry Clay and Andrew Jackson.

Jon Grinspan, The Age of Acrimony: How Americans Fought to Fix Their Democracy, 1865-1915: Really interesting book about how massive public participation in the post-Civil War era was linked with inequality, corruption, and other problems, and how political reformers chose reforms that both decreased corruption and suppressed participation among poor and nonwhite voters. I can’t do better than Grinspan’s introductory summary:

An incredible transformation of American politics took place around 1900, reconfiguring a public, partisan, passionate system into a more private, independent, restrained one. It took a terrible bargain. The well-to-do victors of the Gilded Age’s class wars chose to trade participation for civility. They restrained the old system, decreasing violence and partisanship, but diminishing public engagement along with it. Turnout crashed, falling by nearly one-third in the early twentieth century, especially among the working class, immigrants, young people, and African Americans.Grinspan doesn’t make causal claims about what might have been possible instead, but he does suggest that participation and violence might be linked in the American tradition, which is very worrisome for today. E.g., “[t]here was, by one account, gunfire at every Philadelphia election between 1870 and 1900.” Tattooed thugs showed up at the Pennsylvania statehouse, “arms menacingly folded across their chests, exposing their number 27 tattoos, standing as silent threats to any Pennsylvania Democrats who might vote wrong.”In response to the disruptions of the 19th century, he suggests, “[s]ome sought protection in political parties. Others looked for easy scapegoats, blaming corrupt politicians or Black Reconstruction. They created a cycle of rage, a self-perpetuating bad mood that simultaneously pushed citizens farther into partisanship while undermining their faith in democracy.” Parties offered the only apparent refuge from “an age of ruthless individualism”; with political parties the only source of a sense of community, Americans “abandoned the political fluidity that proponents of pure democracy had hoped the war might bring.”

The loss of Black political rights post-Reconstruction was part of a larger battle over democracy: whether participation was actually desirable. Class conflict made more wealthy and middle-class whites answer “no.” Reconstruction wasn’t destroyed by an elite bargain; it was “killed by political violence in the South and by the millions of White voters nationwide who gave up on it.” The larger context was one in which government seemed to stop working while also being the focus of attention.

Reformist politics tried to reduce the temperature of politics, but in exclusionary ways. For example, focusing politics on the written word instead of rallies “made politics less accessible to those who were illiterate, non-English speakers, or simply reluctant to study the issues closely,” and also shifted power to people who could deal with printers, more often professional politicians in big cities. Campaign materials shifted from torches, uniforms and hats—participatory tools that made the bodies of supporters themselves into the campaign—to signs and pins showing candidates’ faces, focusing attention on the executive instead of the people. “By beginning the switch from participatory objects to consumable trinkets, the 1896 election further increased campaigns’ reliance on money.” The increased costs of running a campaign reliant on literature decreased voluntary participation in rallies etc., which had previously been rewarded with patronage jobs. The secret ballot with candidate lists provided by the government, instead of preprinted ballots handed out by the parties for party-line votes, were also harder for illiterate and immigrant voters to use, by design.

Torn between the corruption of machine politicians and the condescension of reformers, millions of Americans chose corruption, then as now, “not because they were fools, but because they got something material or psychological from their participation.” This diagnosis by muckrackers made clear to reformers that it was the masses who needed to change, not just the politicians. Prohibition was part of it: closing saloons closed places where working-class men had organized politically and enjoyed the vibrant, violent process of politics. “Rather than a newly mobilized anti-alcohol vote, what was really happening was the suppression of the votes of saloon supporters.”

The collapse in participation from the resulting reforms was huge. In Mississippi, for example, the number of registered African American voters fell from 147,000 to 9,000 after a new state constitution. Presidential election turnout crashed from 79.3% of eligible voters in 1896 to 48.8% in 1924. Turnout “fell twice as much in states that introduced secret ballots which required voters to select individual candidates, rather than voting a straight party ticket.” Southern turnout dropped by half after 1900. “Just 17.5 percent of eligible South Carolinians voted in 1916. In the 1920 election, Jones County, Georgia, registered the lowest turnout in any U.S. county: 2.8 percent.” Nationwide, poor and immigrant voters disappeared, and “young first-time voters stopped turning out in high numbers to cast their ‘virgin votes.’” Indeed, even children of immigrants stopped voting: “in 1916, just one in five New Jerseyites with foreign-born parents voted.”

Instead of politics, many people turned to religious or other social organizations to find meaning and change. In these very same years, many major civic institutions were founded, including the Rotary Club (1905), the National Audubon Society (1905), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (1909), the Boy Scouts of America and Girl Scouts (1910, 1912), Kiwanis Clubs (1915), the American Civil Liberties Union (1920), and the revived KKK (1915).

Even women’s suffrage was part of these reforms:

For decades women’s suffrage activists had to counter claims that women voting would ruin the hypermasculine culture of election day. But in a new political world where the well-to-do were looking for ways to extinguish that old political culture, “doubling the respectable vote” became one of its greatest selling points. The irony of women’s suffrage was that the movement finally won the right to vote at the precise moment in American history when voting was coming to matter less.

All of this seems pretty awful, but Grinspan takes pains to remind us of one thing: “Americans became less likely to hurt each other over electoral politics.” Can we get participation back without the associated violence? It’s hard to be optimistic.

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fiction

rivkat — Tue, 21 Dec 2021 20:26:31 GMT

Seth Dickinson, The Monster Baru Cormorant: Second volume in the series featuring Baru Cormorant, taken from her home to serve the empire that conquered it and that despises her for her racial inferiority and her tribadism. I found it violent and confusing and more interested in jerking Baru and others around than I was in following the twists of the story.

Ilona Andrews, Blood Heir: Kate’s adopted daughter, much changed by her encounter with Moloch, returns to Atlanta to save Kate’s life, followed by a prophecy that if Kate sees her then Kate will definitely die. Lots of politics and magic ensue, and a bit of romantic longing. It’s what I wanted without requiring things in Kate’s life to get undone, which was nice.

Tobias Buckell, Shoggoths in Traffic: Short stories; the zombie pandemic one where we all die because racism was a little on the nose for me, though the fact that it was written in 2018 suggests that I need to keep reading. I preferred the retelling of The Emperor’s New Clothes where the news reports on the controversy and doesn’t judge. Buckell’s interest in complicity, including complicity with destroying the world as well as in smaller crimes, shows in various ways.

James S.A. Corey, Leviathan Falls: Final novel, they say, in the Expanse series. The core characters are older and changed, especially Amos, except in the ways he’s exactly the same (he’s not very communicative on the matter). Holden and Nagata do what they do—him rigid insistence and her subtle politics—and they try to deal with the fact that old gods are trying to kill them.

Xiran Jay Zhao, Iron Widow: Zetian volunteers as a concubine for the kaiju-fighting mechs that keep her country safe; concubines are routinely killed by the male pilots who consume their minds as part of piloting the mechs. But Zetian plans to kill the man who killed her beloved older sister. Among other things, she discovers that, in a mech, her bound feet don’t make it all but impossible for her to walk. But her plans are disrupted when she’s assigned to an equally disliked male pilot—a murderer who is allowed to pilot only because he’s stronger by a lot than anyone else. When he can’t kill her either, they become central to a planned attack—but still despised. I saw someone say that this seemed very second-wave feminist, in that the bad guys are just outright willing to harm women, and the society of which they are a part, because of misogyny, and that seems correct. Enough interesting threads were left hanging that I’d pick up the sequel.

C.M. Waggoner, The Ruthless Lady’s Guide to Wizardry: Fantasy starring a gutter firewitch who’s a bit too fond of gin. In an attempt to make the rent, she joins a crew of witches protecting a fine young lady before her marriage, one of whom is a respectable clanner who might be a great meal ticket for her. But things get complicated, both murderously and romantically, and she has to somehow infiltrate a drugmaking operation and make the very stuff that her mother is addicted to, in hopes of being able to save those she loves (and some she’s not so fond of). It’s a lot of fun, and includes a skeletal mouse named Buttons who is both cuter and more horrifying than he sounds like.

Songs of Love and Death: All-Original Tales of Star-Crossed Love, ed. George R.R. Martin: Contributions from big names including Peter Beagle, Jim Butcher, Marjorie Liu, Diana Gabaldon (different time traveler than Outlander, same idea), Robin Hobb, and Neil Gaiman, but I didn’t feel most of them. The Gaiman story was a nice chilly reversal of the imaginary girlfriend trope—a man’s high school imaginary girlfriend starts trying to reconnect with him.

Jacqueline Carey, Miranda and Caliban: A retelling from the perspective of the two titular characters. I found I didn’t like it as much as her LoTR retelling; patriarchy/colonialism has and keeps the upper hand throughout the novel, so be prepared.

Charles Stross, The Traders’ War: Second book in the Merchant Princes revised series; Miriam aka Helge is not settling well into her medieval princess role, instead getting into various trouble that leaves her much more powerless than a standard protagonist. But lots of politics are happening in all three worlds and she gets caught up in all of them. Also, various wars break out and there is a forced pregnancy (via reproductive technology). It is interesting but tends in the direction of “humans inevitably screw things up one way or another.”

Hark! The Herald Angels Scream, ed. Christopher Golden: Really more winter-themed horror than entirely Christmas-themed; a number of stories using the short story format effectively to end just as or before the really awful thing happens, like Scott Smith’s Christmas in Barcelona (child death). I disliked the last story by Sarah Pinborough, The Hangman’s Bride—it’s about the ghost of a murdered Japanese woman who ends up saving a white woman to be the new bride of her widower in Victorian England, so the function of the nonwhite horror trope is to give the surviving white people a happily ever after.

Nancy Kress, The Eleventh Gate: In the distant future, humanity is scattered across a few different planets, none of them Earth; some are run by libertarians (controlled by a single family because that’s how power works) and others are run by a corporate nanny state, with only Polyglot having something like democracy. When the discovery of a new gate between worlds, promising access to a new planet, destabilizes things, war breaks out and internal dissent threatens to take down both non-Polyglot regimes. It’s got Kress’s standard pessimism about governance as well as a lot of palace intrigue and some sf on the nature of consciousness.

Eliot Schrefer, The Darkness Outside Us: Two teens on a mission to Titan to save one’s sister start to wonder if something else is going on, since the ship’s AI won’t tell them certain things and there are certain oddities in the setup. What is actually happening is disclosed midway through and the rest is working out what to do with it—this is a book largely about how to accept unmoveable constraints and plainly-seen-in-front-of-you losses. Also a teen romance, though how romantic it is to connect with the only other person in your world is perhaps debatable; the protagonists are from two contending cultures and have both mistrust and a bit of misperception to get past.

Steven Brust, The Baron of Magister Valley: On further thought, I still find the mocking-old-fashioned style of “I want to know X,” “Oh, you want to know X?” “I have hardly wanted anything else for a week now” more unpleasant to read than not. The basic story is of a young man betrayed and imprisoned in a secret jail for hundreds of years, while he learns all the skills and his fiancee and her brother, orphaned in the same course of shenanigans, struggle to survive. You may recognize the outlines from the Count of Monte Cristo, but it is very integrated into Dragaeran lingo.

Charles Stross, Halting State: In a sort-of-independent Scotland, a bank robbery in a gameworld draws the police into something far stranger, with spies, people pretending to be spies in a game, and the occasional murder. Packed with Stross’s love of tech and bureaucracy, but not really him at his best.

The Devil and the Deep: Horror Stories of the Sea ed. Ellen Datlow, authors include Michael Marshall Smith (zombie-ish horror), Seanan McGuire (not super interesting family revenge story), and Stephen Graham Jones (deserted island variant). Alyssa Wong’s What My Mother Left Me is a great variation on an old story, and Bradley Denton’s A Ship of the South Wind seems a bit of a stretch—there’s no sea, only a former sailor on the plains—but it’s a pretty good horror story nonetheless.

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Nonfiction

rivkat — Fri, 19 Nov 2021 17:43:30 GMT

Milena Popova, Dubcon: Fanfiction, Power, and Sexual Consent:I’d previously read a version of one chapter in Porn Cultures on Omegaverse, aka “dogfucker rapeworld.” Another interesting chapter is on arranged marriage plots in fanfic and what they suggest about how social and legal power structure sex (and pleasure and love); another is about hockey RPF dealing with a rape allegation against the celebrity corresponding to a popular character. A lot of interesting stuff here. One passage that really struck me: “There is a dominant view in our society that the only act that ‘counts’ as sex is penile-vaginal intercourse. This is so pervasive that even feminist researchers and activists working on consent negotiation define intercourse as the only act that requires consent. They conceptualize actions such as kissing, touching, and undressing as expressions of consent instead.” I didn’t find the treatment of consented-to-but-unwanted sex as coercive all that convincing—it conflated sex pressured by social conventions with sex to please a partner who might just have a higher desire for sex—but then again fanfic is not known for presenting some of these scenarios that are common in the real world (I love my partner but am not sexually attracted to them anymore is the one I read in a lot of the advice columns) which is indeed part of its charm. I think a more productive approach would be to acknowledge how consensual sex can also be bad sex in various ways, and how consent is not the same thing as pleasure.

Barbara Mertz, Temples, Tombs and Hieroglyphs: Charmingly written history of Egypt’s ancient rulers from what we can and can’t know from their artifacts. Not very much about ordinary life or details of how pyramids were built, but gossipy discussion of various rulers and of the nature of knowledge of/speculation about the distant past.

Angie Maxwell, The Indicted South: History of the reaction-formations induced in white Southerners as a result of criticisms of the South (or really of its whites). Maxwell argues that “southern white identity has allied itself with the unifying sense of inferiority,” leading to positions that go beyond explicit racial and gender commitments to rigidity on religion (conservative Christianity/creationism), education, science, and government’s role. Intriguingly links the New Criticism to other reaction-formations (the Scopes monkey trial and its aftermath including hardening of fundamentalism, as well as Massive Resistance after Brown), deeming New Criticism fundamentalist in its insistence on the primacy of the text over the text’s history and context and in its elevation of the feelings of critics over other forms of knowledge.

The book seemed to attribute responsibility to the South’s critics for making the things they criticized worse, which I don't think is either fair or a pointer to useful alternatives. E.g., “Public criticism of southern racial practices had sparked the fire [of Massive Resistance to desegregation].” Or maybe it was … being ordered to stop segregating? Like, I’ll accept that scorn doesn’t work on many racists, but I do note that the least contemptuous person in public life, MLK Jr., was assassinated for asking for justice without H.L. Mencken’s vitriol. Maxwell identifies him as one of the critics who spurred backlash by pointing out that the civil rights movement was in favor of justice, thus (shockingly/insultingly) implying that its opponents were against justice, which of course they in fact were. Also, Maxwell notes the existence of Southern white self-criticism, but doesn’t blame them for sparking backlash or investigate what gave those whites more self-doubt/moral clarity. She spends no time on unpacking the “no true Scotsman” denunciations of white Southerners who supported at least some reforms. As she notes, Roy Carter Jr. found that, though segregationists constantly denounced the biased media as never presenting the “Southern” [white] perspective, in 12 Southern papers, 27% of the coverage was of pro-integration stories, 12% was “progradualism,” 30% prosegregation, and 31% neutral. The “[p]erception [of lack of media support] mattered,” she says, despite the reality. But Maxwell doesn’t address the fundamental issue surfaced by this mismatch: to this group of whites, any criticism was too much criticism.

Her project is very much to understand people who wrote things in 1928 like “There were people in New England who wanted to destroy democracy and civil liberties in America by freeing the slaves. They were not very intelligent people; so they didn’t know precisely what they wanted to destroy. … These privy-to-God people were sending little pamphlets down South telling the Negroes, whom they had never seen, that they were abused.” I would like to spend just enough time learning about them to know how best to fight them politically and rhetorically, and yeah, contempt probably won’t convince them (though it seems to be working fine for Trumpists’ attitudes towards us). But the fact that segregationists have lifeworlds too does not to me provide a justification for blaming their radicalization on people who disparaged the South (truthfully) as having more lynchings than universities, even if those condemnations were often issued by whites with racism problems of their own (looking at you, Mencken). And I wonder why it’s important to understand these guys without contrasting them to the people engaged in the violence that they only tacitly approved—formally disavowing violence but blaming Emmett Till’s murder on civil rights activists. Without comparison to their more integrationist or more violent white counterparts, Maxwell gives us no understanding of what the alternatives were for these semi-polite racists.

Maybe the most sympathetic reading is that she’s showing how backlash worked in practice: Hardened views meant a consolidation of antigovernment, fundamentalist, antieducation, antiscience, antiprogress views in a white Southern identity that admitted no nuance in things like constitutional interpretation. Despite being released before this round of white moral panic, the book definitely makes clear that the current hysteria over “critical race theory” is the same renamed racial anxiety that has stalked the US—including the white Michiganders who now embrace the Confederate traitor flag their forbears died to fight—for a long time, both as an undercurrent in the Scopes trial/bans on teaching evolution and in Civil War apologism taught in schools. And the historical links with the New Criticism reinforce my conviction that anti-“CRT” legislation embraces the idea of the objective correlative—that simply teaching particular things will create shame and guilt in white students—in excitingly racist ways. (One of the Virginia segregationists she writes about said that the worst thing about the fight over desegregation was how it generated guilt in whites. Also, today’s right-wingers are furious over any attempt to show that racism was integral to American history, whereas yesterday’s were furious that liberals portrayed racists as un-American in their racism and that liberals also portrayed Brown as the realization of the authentic American ideal, so there’s that bit of irony as well.)

Alec MacGillis, Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America: How Amazon shaped local, regional, and national policy; it’s a book of contrasts. Amazon’s direct employees in Seattle have access to specially constructed orbs full of carefully curated greenery to help them “find their inner biophiliac that really responds to nature.” Meanwhile, Amazon negotiates secretive deals to locate warehouses that provide huge tax incentives—making it more likely that the surrounding areas will deteriorate and making Amazon warehouse jobs look like better alternatives. Time and again, Amazon gets sweetheart deals and isn’t asked to provide anything in return, like bulk discounts for schools and public agencies (anyway, those would all have to come from Amazon’s already-squeezed suppliers). Virginia built a new power system for Amazon with a monthly fee on all ratepayers, not just Amazon, which sought a special discounted rate for power at its data ceSnters. Meanwhile, its dominance in data storage let it subsidize low prices for retail, undercutting retail competitors. “Amazon employees scattered around the country often carried misleading business cards, so that the company couldn’t be accused of operating in a given state and thus forced to pay taxes there.” But they also had a goal of “securing $ 1 billion per year in local tax subsidies.”

One excellent chapter examines how Amazon contributes both to homelessness in Seattle and to the backlash to it in an ostensibly liberal city. “Seattle had become proof that extreme regional inequality was unhealthy not only for places that were losing out in the winner-take-all economy, but also for those who were the runaway victors. Hyper-prosperity was not only creating the side effects of unaffordability, congestion, and homelessness, but injecting a political poison into the winner cities.”

This has toxic effects on mobility as well—moving to a big city without a college degree means a job that doesn’t pay much more than a job in the rest of America, but lots more housing costs; this chokes off sustainable growth even in the big cities. The book makes the case for having a lot of small capitalist “greedy fucks” rather than a few giant corporations with no interest in investing in areas outside the really big cities.

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nonfiction

rivkat — Wed, 17 Nov 2021 20:18:34 GMT

Kathryn Paige Harden, The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality: Interesting though perhaps not fully convincing argument for liberals caring about DNA. Key point: existing research, largely carried out on white people, shows that genetic inheritance can explain about as much divergence in educational outcomes and perhaps even economic mobility as class can among otherwise similarly situated white people. What we don’t know, and what Harden argues we should study, is how this works for humanity in general, so that we can identify measures that can improve things for the worst-off in the genetic lottery, in Rawlsian fashion. Important sub-arguments: explaining individual variance within a population may often have nothing to do with explaining variance among populations; for example, in the US, being foreign-born is highly correlated with not being literate in English, but the states with the highest percentages of foreign-born residents also have the highest rates of English literacy, because immigrants tend to settle in states with high literacy, so knowing that there are a lot of foreign-born people in a state has the opposite relation to state literacy levels that you’d expect if you thought that individual stats predicted population-level stats. And discrimination can account for a lot of variation—when people with dark skin are denied educational and employment opportunities, the genes for dark skin will be correlated with bad outcomes, but not because they’re “genetic.” (Apparently research suggests that, until recently, genetic variation accounted for a lot less of the variation in white women’s educational attainment than white men’s, because opportunities were too limited for genetics to play much of a role.) So even if we explain a fair amount of variation among American whites (who, because of US racial categorizations, generally do have almost all European ancestry) with genetic variation, that doesn’t mean that it will explain variation among groups.

Likewise, causes can be genetic but solutions can be non-genetic: My myopia is largely genetic, even if aggravated by years of indoor reading, but my glasses correct both the genetic and behavioral parts of that. A specific genetic error causes PKU, which can permanently harm people who have it, but the treatment is not gene therapy but careful dietary management. Thus, Harden argues, a just society is one that gives to each person what they need to succeed under the conditions in which they find themselves, including whatever genes they inherited. Harden doesn’t really address what happens when the dominant group finds that project too difficult and prefers subordination instead, but I don’t think a geneticist could solve that one. The ultimate question is whether we'd do anything differently if we thought that genetic variation "explained" some part of intergroup differences, but since I agree that justice requires the answer "no," the real point of work like this is explaining to racists that they misunderstand science.

Vincent Bevins, The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World: America’s foreign policy supported dictators and mass repression, but what did that really mean? Bevins recounts how it worked in Indonesia, including funding military coups, supplying right-wing rebels with weapons, and cutting off trade and aid to governments deemed insufficiently anticommunist. And he traces how the Indonesian model of mass executions of Communists, or those considered Communist (one telling quote from an American involved in these programs explains that people could be Communist without believing that they were), spread through Asia, Latin America, and South America, mutating from political extermination to ethnic genocide in some cases. The spread was encouraged by right-wing groups within the affected countries as well as by American funders; it was deliberate; and its effects are far from over.

Amia Srinivasan, The Right to Sex: Fascinating, challenging work of feminist philosophy. On intersectionality: a movement “that focuses only on what all members of the relevant group (women, people of colour, the working class) have in common is a movement that will best serve those members of the group who are least oppressed.” In her discussion of sex under patriarchy, she posits that law might just be the wrong tool to deal with many kinds of bad sex produced under patriarchy (e.g., sex that men get women to affirmatively consent to but that they don’t actually want).

She discusses her students’ openness to earlier feminist critiques of pornography, since they grew up with the awful misogynistic stuff readily available. “Almost every man in that class would have had his first sexual experience the moment he first wanted it, or didn’t want it, in front of a screen. And almost every woman in the class would have had her first sexual experience, if not in front of a screen, then with a boy whose first sexual experience had been.” But law is not a good tool for dealing with the consequences; the UK prohibits porn from featuring spanking, watersports, ageplay, physical restraint, humiliation, female ejaculation, facesitting, and fisting as well as several other things, including “penetration by any object ‘associated with violence.’” As she asks: “Does a man’s penis count? Presumably not.” The UK prohibits depicting female ejaculation, “an act that is emblematic of women’s pleasure,” as well as things like facesitting associated with femdom porn, but leaves unregulated basic male-focused porn. “But the whole point of the feminist critiques of porn was to disrupt the logic of the mainstream: to suggest that what turns most people on is not thereby OK.” Her students don’t want further legal regulation of porn, but not because they were free speech absolutists; rather they recognized that laws would be used against the marginalized (what she calls a “sex positivity of fear,” motivated by fear of authoritarian alternatives). Relatedly, she asks, “is the fact that there is relatively little porn fetishising Native American, Aboriginal or Dalit women evidence that they are not oppressed? … Anti-porn feminists are too confident in their assumption that images of sexual and racial domination on screen can do nothing but exacerbate sexual and racial domination off the screen.”

She also discusses the extent to which it is possible to critique individual sexual desires without suppressing sexual minorities—“no fats no fems no Asians” is individual, but also political and cultural. There are no easy answers in her discussion; when she talks about Asian women who prefer to date non-Asian men, she notes, “[s]ometimes when we say that Asian men remind us of our cousins, we are saying: we know too much about how these boys and men are raised.”

There’s also an interesting essay about prohibitions on student-teacher sex as implementing not primarily feminist principles but pedagogical ones: If the very real erotics of education are diverted to physical sex, then students—primarily women—lose important educational opportunities. The proper object of students’ erotic energies is not the professor, but what he represents: “knowledge, truth, understanding.” Students want to have the professor’s capacity to understand, “not just the pleasure of watching him exercise that capacity,” or maybe they aren’t sure whether they want to be like him or have him; in that case, it’s very easy for the teacher to steer inchoate desire in the anti-pedagogical direction, especially given “the way that women are socialised to interpret their feelings about men they admire.” Not having sex with students isn’t the same thing as treating them like children.

There’s also a great essay about anti-prostitution campaigns. She’s against abolitionism because she’s most interested in improving conditions for women. Criminalization leads to unchecked violence against sex workers by johns and the police; legalization/regulation benefits men but still excludes women from being primary beneficiaries and leaves a subset of sex workers who can’t meet the legal requirements criminalized. And making buying but not selling sex illegal leads johns to demand greater privacy and thus impose greater risks. Thus, none of these regimes make sex workers, as a class, better off. She argues that abolitionists want to punish men who buy sex “as individuals, but also as stand-ins for all violent men,” and that this isn’t worth making life worse for sex workers. Abolitionists conceive of this as a necessary step, but she doesn’t believe that criminalization of any kind genuinely gets us closer to a world without sex work, any more than banning abortion decreases abortions.

Feminist policymaking has many of these wicked problems: mandatory arrest policies for domestic violence “reduced the amount of violence perpetrated by employed white men while increasing the amount of violence perpetrated by unemployed black men,” but poor abused women are not given the option of having the state provide employment to their male partners, only of having them locked up. She’s generally anti-punishment because “once you have started up the carceral machine, you cannot pick and choose whom it will mow down.” I’m personally skeptical that it’s truly impossible to make distinctions, but I take the point that feminists should be realists about who’s going to jail. More generally, she argues, there “is no settling in advance on a political programme that is immune to co-option …. You can only see what happens, then plot your next move.”

The Darker Angels of Our Nature: Refuting the Pinker Theory of History & Violence, eds. Philip Dwyer & Mark Micale:Lots of essays critiquing Steven Pinker’s argument that things are generally getting better in terms of human violence, some more successful than others. (If you count violence against the environment, for example, matters look different, or emotional violence—but I might actually not want to count the latter.) Still, interesting points about how violence varies across cultures; how Pinker way overstates the physical violence of prehistorical and medieval periods; and other relevant considerations. For example, comparing homicide rates to those in the medieval era in which there were no antibiotics and no understanding of things like sudden infant death syndrome, for which mothers were often blamed, does not make a lot of sense as a measure of relative rates of violence.

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Nonfiction

rivkat — Tue, 16 Nov 2021 19:58:00 GMT

Margaret Drabble, The Pattern in the Carpet: Memoir-ish account of the author’s relationship to jigsaw puzzles and other games as well as to her aunt, a schoolteacher with whom she did many puzzles; there are also extended accounts of the history of puzzles and games focusing on roughly 17th-19th century England with some excursions onto the Continent and occasional mention of the US. Wasn’t for me despite my interest in jigsaw puzzles.

Jessica Nordell, The End of Bias, a Beginning: The Science and Practice of Overcoming Unconscious Bias: I really enjoyed the book, though the first half is a fairly depressing overview of how cheap DEI interventions don’t work. Research on group distinctions suggests that children only learn to value them if they correlate with status/treatment (so if you give half of the kids blue shirts and half yellow, they ignore the shirts unless the teacher repeatedly emphasizes shirt color as a correlate of value; unfortunately, existing differences do plainly correlate with outcomes right now, so kids easily learn to care about them). Stereotypes are very persistent and easy to reinforce—and having them reinforced may even be pleasurable, like other types of intermittent rewards. Our brains also seem to interpret absence of evidence as evidence that the stereotypes are true, so, unless we get consistent feedback that we erred, we grow more willing to stereotype. “Our brain treats itself like a wise elder and learns from itself.” This is particularly bad news in medicine, where doctors often ignore problems in patients who aren’t white men, and rarely learn what they’ve overlooked even if the patients eventually find someone else who takes them seriously.
Moreover, and depressingly, learning about our errors doesn’t decrease stereotyping, it just keeps it constant. Meanwhile, direct diversity training doesn’t seem to work and may even backfire, perhaps by making white men feel like their autonomy is being threatened. Instructing people to make decisions “objectively” may likewise spur them to favor men over women. “[P]eople who believed that gender discrimination was no longer a problem in their field rated a male employee as more competent than an identical female employee, and also recommended an 8 percent higher salary.” We can challenge our own fundamental attribution error—attributing outcomes to personal characteristics—but trying to imagine what it’s like to be in a different position is very difficult.
Anti-bias-specific interventions have to focus on treating bias as a habit that can be changed, not an orientation; there have to be specific new skills and behaviors, like deliberately seeking out women working in a scientific field. But even those have limited impact.
What does seem to work a bit better are blanket best practices. Checklists for evaluating symptoms and treatments in medicine can reduce bias. Screening all students, not just students identified by teachers, for gifted services leads to lots more nonwhite students (and more girls) being identified for more advanced coursework. (Apparently parents ask Google “Is my son gifted?” twice as much as they Google “Is my daughter gifted?”) And training teachers to focus on “empathic discipline”—different reasons students misbehave; “how good relationships help students grow and succeed”; the value of avoiding labels and helping students feel understood by teachers—decreased the rate of suspensions by half, which was particularly beneficial to Black and Latino students. Making students of different backgrounds work together doesn’t itself do much, but if each has expertise to provide (for example, members of different groups read different background materials), that can reduce prejudice. Nordell cites research on caste-integrated cricket teams in India and Christian-Muslim soccer teams in Iraq indicating that prejudice decreased in both situations, though that didn’t always translate into behavior. And benefit to the members of the dominant group may come at the cost of increased stress for members of the subordinated group.
Likewise, mindfulness training that helps police officers calm down and control their fear and stress seems to be effective at decreasing the amount of violence they inflict.
All of these interventions are fragile and can easily disappear if leaders don’t commit to them. Nordell thus makes the case that leaders have to be committed to valuing differences among people as a core way to achieve an institution’s goals, whether they are profit or otherwise. Homogenous organizations “artificially shrink the pool of candidates from underrepresented backgrounds,” depriving them of the robustness and insight that can come from diversity. But commitments have to be thick and real, not merely voiced. It is not enough for leaders to feel an generic ethical commitment, or to believe that having diverse members will open new markets and attract new customers (without changing anything about how the organization works). Only policies that actually insist on measuring new metrics have a chance—e.g., is the organization providing promotion opportunities for people who work part time? Are open positions advertised to everyone and are hiring criteria decided on in advance instead of adapted to match the person who “feels” like the best candidate? Is success at encouraging diversity one of the metrics on which a higher-up’s achievement is actually measured? She frames this as seeing “diversity as a source of wealth,” though that’s pretty business-oriented. Where organizations actually value diversity in experience and perspective, people see each other as resources, rather than worrying about being colorblind.
In terms of shallower stuff that holds some promise, Nordell discusses campaigns that introduce individual members of a subordinated group and attribute specific characteristics to them, both good and bad: Z is creative and stingy, Y is bubbly and always late. The idea is that “the more we perceive that a group is composed of people who are wildly different from one another, the less we tend to stereotype”—but it’s important to include negative attributes as well as positive to make this type of campaign effective, probably so it doesn’t incite backlash/counter-arguing. As she points out, emphasizing intragroup differences “runs counter to common multicultural awareness campaigns, which typically emphasize what sets a group apart from other groups.”

Matthew Crain, Profit Over Privacy: How Surveillance Advertising Conquered the Internet: Short political history of how behavioral advertising (collecting data about people and using that to target ads across searches and sessions, instead of basing ads on their immediate searches or what they were reading at the moment, aka contextual advertising) escaped regulation in the US. The Clinton administration was really business-friendly and accepted arguments that it should avoid regulating to favor privacy, leaving DoubleClick to grow huge and then, after the dot-com bust, to be grabbed up by Google as key infrastructure. Even if behavioral advertising doesn’t perform better at selling commercial products than contextual advertising, it has enabled a lot of surveillance and political segmentation. The book does not really help answer the question “did it have to be this way to get the good parts of the internet?” But it does help make the case that the giant piles of money sloshing around in the 1990s, looking for yield, encouraged investors to bet that surveillance/behavioral advertising would ultimately pay off—which suggests that deregulation and the collapse of higher tax brackets may have significant explanatory power beyond internet-specific policies.

Lizabeth Cohen, Saving America's Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age: Some of what you know about urban renewal is wrong. Although its primary movers were white men (and later more white women), some of them were committed progressives and desegregators. Although they made mistakes in terms of separating housing from business and not involving communities enough, Ed Logue—a planner responsible for lots of things in New Haven, Boston, and New York—learned from those mistakes, insisted on hiring Black architects and workers (so much so that other NY planners complained that he’d used up the available supply making it difficult for them to meet their own inclusion requirements), and remained committed to affordable and integrated housing. The problem was that structures were bigger than individual planners and individual cities—so when Logue was gone, for example, banks’ discriminatory conduct made his projects instruments of segregation.

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fiction

rivkat — Mon, 15 Nov 2021 17:51:10 GMT

Max Barry, Discordia:I think this is an expansion of a short story in which humanoid aliens start arriving on earth except they are terrible, want each other dead, and quickly start to encourage our humans to destroy it/ourselves, which we are all too eager to do. The aliens are different varieties of terrible—a white supremacist, an “equalist” who wants to kill most men, a libertarian capitalist exploiter, a religious fundamentalist who blows up an abortion clinic on the way to completing her mission of killing the libertarian capitalist, a guy who is really invested in the metric system (? Seemed like Barry was running out of homicidal/genocidal groups), etc. The POV character is Diego, who just happens to be at the right/wrong place at the right/wrong time and is carried through the various horrors constantly letting himself be convinced by whoever is in front of him. Not sure Barry really knew himself what he was trying to satirize.

Sarah Kuhn, Hollywood Heroine: There’s going to be a TV show based on Aveda and Evie’s adventures, but when the two go to LA to see it, there is weird white-guy bullshit going on (or is it also supernatural? Turns out to be hard to tell, at least for a while). As they investigate, Aveda/Annie has to figure out what role she’ll have in the new team dynamic and how to support her husband’s dreams now that she’s no longer the diva she was. It’s satisfying and found-family-all-the-way, though the big human villain is pretty obvious long before the characters twig to it.

Charles Stross, The Bloodline Feud: A Merchant Princes Omnibus: The Family Trade & The Hidden Family: Miriam is a journalist who’s just been fired for investigating the wrong tech bubble story. She discovers, in the belongings of her murdered birth mother, a mysterious locket that has the power to take her into another world, where the economics and culture are still basically medieval, and it turns out her family uses worldwalking to smuggle goods/get power. Because her talent is too valuable to the family, but also internal quarrels mean that there are people out to kill her no matter what, she decides that her best strategy is to use her knowledge of economics to change the business model from mercantilist to industrialist. It’s fun to see economics and patent law in fantasy, though Miriam is a bit of a nice white lady (pace her thoughts on the absence of police states in the modern US, which are period-appropriate for the character but probably not what Stross would say now).

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Fiction

rivkat — Mon, 01 Nov 2021 15:58:58 GMT

K.J. Charles, Subtle Blood: Third Will Darling adventure—Kim’s brother is arrested for murder and sure looks guilty, but Kim definitely doesn’t want to take his place, so they investigate and find more shenanigans going on. Good fun with some sexytimes-with-meaning attached.

Shawn Inmon, The Redemption of Michael Hollister:Second in a series about linked people who relive their lives until they get them right. Hollister was the evil villain of the first book (which I didn’t read) and when he wakes up as a little kid he spends a while killing his abusive dad before he gets bored with that and tries to forge a different path. Meanwhile one of his prior victims is on her own journey. If you enjoy redemption arcs and like “cranky adult in kid body, but no sexualization of that kid or his relations with other kids” (but note the past sexual abuse) then it might be something you’d enjoy.

Samit Basu, The Simoqin Prophecies: Packed with references both to Western texts I recognized (Robin Hood, Arthurian legend, even some Harry Potter) and to Asian ones I largely didn’t, this book tells the story of the chosen one destined to stop the rise of the Dark One, who is going to return to life after his previous defeat. Or are there two chosen ones? It’s all a bit unclear and knowing. It wasn’t the right tone for me but if you like send-ups of chosen one narratives it might be pleasant.

Garth Nix, Terciel and Elinor: This is apparently a prequel for other books about (spoiler) Terciel and Elinor’s kid/s. They are magic users—Terciel the heir to the Abhorsen, which is a job fighting evil magic/Free Magic using marks, which are a language of thousands of symbols that are hard to learn. Elinor was kept ignorant of magic until the day it tried to kill her, in the form of an evil magician who wanted her death for a working. They meet early on but then part to have separate adventures, then meet up again. I think if you already liked the world, this would be more fun.

Charles Stross, Accelerando: This is Stross on the transition to post-humanity as waves/generations increasingly augment themselves with computer assistance to memory and personality, including running different versions of themselves or their children. I found it weird and unaffecting, which may be in part because it’s really nine shorter stories stapled together, though it’s nice to see someone care about economics in future sf.

Charles Stross, Singularity Sky: Rachel Mansour, UN rep, is traveling with a backwards planet’s military to try to stop them from violating causality, which will cause the AI intelligence that caused/is the Eschaton to destroy them and perhaps the systems around them; they’re worryingly close to Earth. OK but now I’m looking to see whether Stross’s obsessions (bureaucracy, artificial intelligence, Cherenkov radiation and glowing-green eyes) will show up the same way in the Merchant Princes series, which is next on my list.

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Fiction

rivkat — Thu, 14 Oct 2021 14:36:19 GMT

Garth Nix, Newt’s Emerald: Regency-ish fantasy about a young woman who masquerades as a man so that she can join the hunt for her family’s stolen emerald, which apparently has powers great enough that they might even be able to help Napoleon out of the stone in which he’s been immured. Experience diminished by bad recording quality; seemed slight overall.

Amanda Foody & Christine Lynn Herman, All of Us Villains: A lot of worldbuilding, maybe a bit too much: high magic has disappeared from most of the world, but in one town, seven families fight to control it every twenty years in a duel to the death among their teen champions. But someone revealed the secret of the contest, and now the government has sent overseers, though the curse itself can’t be interfered with. This year’s teens include an assortment of types, including at least one who’d like to destroy the whole thing if possible. It was brisk enough once you got all the data dumping out of the way; the contest starts in this book but does not finish.

Andrea Stewart, The Bone Shard Daughter: Lin is the Emperor’s daughter, but he won’t name her heir until she recovers her memories, lost in some mysterious way, and learns to use bone shard magic, which is what the Emperor uses to control the constructs that help him rule. Bone shards are extracted from the empire’s citizens as children, except for the ones it kills and the ones who are sent to join the Shardless rebels; using them in the constructs slowly drains the survivors’ lives. Jovin is a smuggler looking for his lost wife who rescues a strange creature and starts to experience stranger events. Phalue is the daughter of the governor of one of the Empire’s islands whose lover is trying to convince her of the problems with the current system. And then there’s the memoryless woman on the isolated island who starts to wonder what’s going on. So: palace intrigue plus magic on floating islands some of which are starting to sink, and I haven’t even mentioned the dangerous Alanga who the constructs were created to fight. It’s stuffed but fun.

Andrea Stewart, The Bone Shard Emperor: Lin has become Emperor but can’t necessarily keep the role. There is even more palace intrigue and backstabbing than in the first book, enough to seem almost over the top, and then I think about the backstabbing in our own failing government and think: well, sure. It was an engaging read.

Grady Hendrix, The Final Girl Support Group: What if hand-massacring groups of teenagers had become just as popular as school shootings? The most well-known survivors of two rounds of attacks have a support group in LA, until things start going bad—one killed, others endangered and also accused of participating in/organizing the murder sprees they survived. Like other Hendrix books, it’s both about the harm that women do to each other and the patriarchal system in which they do it. Nothing supernatural and ultimately I didn’t find it to be a workable alternate world precisely for the reasons explained by one of the many “nonfiction inserts” in the book: School shootings became widespread because guns are different.

Naomi Novik, The Last Graduate: Senior year in the Scholomance. This book goes straight for “reluctant hero who’s supposed to be the bad guy discovers with annoyance that what they really want is to save people, ungrateful or no,” and it’s propulsive fun as El recruits more and more people to try to fix the Scholomance and save as many of the students as she can. Warning for immense cliffhanger (almost literally) at the end.

Jonathan Strahan, ed., The Year’s Best Science Fiction, vol. 2 (2020): Max Barry, Pat Cadigan, Yoon Ha Lee, Ken Liu, Tochi Onyebuchi, and others, with a lot of climate change and posthumanism. A good overview of what’s going on.

Charles Stross, Iron Sunrise: After the Singularity scattered humanity across thousands of worlds, one of them has its sun blown up. Only scattered survivors are left, including a young girl whose imaginary friend knows a lot more than he should, and may be connected with the Singularity’s continued interest in humans. The victim world’s automated defense systems send retaliatory gunships at sublight speed, and only the surviving ambassadors can stop them—but someone is killing the ambassadors. And there’s an autocracy rising based on erasing humans and turning them into puppets, though even in the autocracy there are factions. Stross is much more willing to include sexual coercion in his sf than in the Laundry Files, which I find abstractly interesting but is worth pointing out in case that’s not what you want to read.

Charles Stross, Neptune’s Brood: Posthumanity, thousands of years in the future, has colonized many worlds at sublight speeds, financing it through a variation of blockchain lending and debt that is paid off by launching new colonies (that is, a Ponzi scheme of sorts). Our hero is the clone of a prominent financier whose hobby of investigating lightspeed frauds ends up threatening to expose a dangerous secret. A lot of shenanigans, financial and otherwise, ensue; one funny note is that Stross likes “abyssal” and “Cherenkov radiation” as much in his sf as in his Bob Howard fantasy.

Charles Stross, Saturn’s Children: Another posthuman story, this one closer to the time of humanity’s extinction, featuring a protagonist designed as a sexbot with inherent submissiveness to the extinct species, which makes her very sad. (All desire here is heterosexual because apparently humans only designed hetero robots.) Her programming means she’s aroused by partners’ arousal, so there’s a fair amount of casual sex and also rape, especially in the backstory explaining why one of the bad robots is bad but also some fairly coercive conduct towards the protagonist—whose personality changes a bunch when different chips are in her head, including one known as a slave chip. Anyway, she’s just trying to survive in an increasingly hostile universe—people who look like her are out of fashion—and gets swept up in a chase to acquire a real human who would be able to command all the powerful people because their programming was never changed. Not nearly as fun as Neptune’s Brood; I like Stross better focusing on accounting than sex.

Shelley Parker-Chan, She Who Became the Sun:In feudal China, a young girl takes her brother’s place and fate, escaping starvation to become first a monk and then a general in the rebellion against the Mongol rulers. Her destiny entwines with that of the prized eunuch general of the Mongols. (Her pronouns never change internally, but that doesn’t stop her from thinking of herself as a man in order to fool Heaven that she’s entitled to her brother’s destiny.) The fantasy elements are that she and some others can see hungry ghosts, and that those with the Mandate of Heaven can manifest it as heatless flame. I didn’t connect with the story very much emotionally—there was a lot of killing over which people would hold power but they were all going to wield it in similar ways—but it was very interesting to read a story with different background assumptions about fate and with primarily Buddhist characters.

Susan R. Matthews, Blood Enemies: At last, back in the universe of Jurisdiction, or what it has become after the single dominating government fell apart. Raiders are slaughtering outposts in the name of the Angel of Destruction, while representatives of the Malcontent are trying to stop them, and in wanders Andrej Koscuisko, trying to fix his past mistakes and screwing up his cousin’s plan in the process. A lot of maneuvering ensues, but somewhat less death after the initial pages.

Susan R. Matthews, Fleet Insurgent: Story collection: “novelettes, stories, and vignettes from The Life and Hard Times of ‘Uncle’ Andrej Koscuisko, who is Not a Nice Man.”

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Nonfiction

rivkat — Tue, 21 Sep 2021 17:32:55 GMT

Bathsheba Demuth, Floating Coast: History of the peoples and animals in the Arctic area claimed by Russia and the US via Alaska. There’s a lot of slaughter as both Soviet and capitalist ideas about what whales etc. were for left very little room for relations that were reciprocal and extending indefinitely.

Jared Farmer, Trees in Paradise: A California History: Equally mocking of liberal pretensions and conservative indifference to the environment, Farmer traces the history of California via trees—eucalyptus, palm, oranges, redwoods. They’re interesting stories, and some of the sharpest moments come when people import the language of “immigration” to defend or attack certain trees. As he points out, though, the great exclusionist racists of the 19th and 20th centuries were often the most excited to import trees they thought would be good for the economy, so the analogy was never coherent.

Eric L. Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity: Interesting history of post-Civil-War-to-present American Jewish ideas about race, and alternatives to racial categorizations, as applied to Jews themselves. Understandably focuses more on Jews who fought against racism generally, but does discuss the racism that many endorsed in order to distinguish themselves from Blacks. Jews were both drawn to the benefits of whiteness and pushed towards it by the larger white society: “In many ways it was native-born whites, bent on preserving a stable and optimistic vision of their national culture, who had the greatest stake in seeing Jews take on the role of white Americans.”

The book traces the fraught ideas of a Jewish “nation” which came to sound disloyal; by the 1870s “religion” appeared as a more acceptable substitute, but then came to be problematic too, so more Jews adopted the idea of a Jewish “race” to allow them to express the desire for a distinct identity without unwanted political connotations. Obviously that also didn’t work out so well. Perhaps less obviously to us now, race language expressed something about the social dimension of Jewishness just as Jewish social distinctiveness from other non-Blacks was decreasing, although such language did allow Jews to maintain a connection to persecution even as their economic and social power increased.

Meanwhile, post-Reconstruction hardening of racial lines made Jews increasingly troubling as liminal whites. Many Jews tried to manage this by claiming unqualified whiteness, often by distinguishing themselves from Blacks, with the lynching of Leo Frank a stark reminder of what could happen to racially compromised Jews.

Eastern European Jewish immigrants may have resisted whiteness more, in part because they had more urban experience/skills when they arrived, and rarely competed for jobs with Blacks in ways that other immigrants did. With their status in doubt, early 20th-century Jews hotly debated whether Jews were a race or a religious denomination. “[R]ace ceased to serve as a successful vehicle to set limits on assimilation and to assert Jewish contributions to American life…. Instead, due to white America’s emergent obsession with shoring up its racial boundaries, Jewish racial particularity had become either the basis for anti-Jewish prejudice or a rationale for urging the ‘fusion’ of Jews with non-Jewish society. Zionists “saw race as an essential building block of Jewish nationhood,” but were wary of “casting Jews in the role of racial outsiders and, as a result, often tried to downplay the physical dimensions of race while stressing its spiritual and psychological aspects.” That didn’t work so well. One result: a new focus on intermarriage, including in popular culture, which often framed exogamy as “indispesable to the building of the American nation.” Focusing on religion instead of race offered the prospect of opposing intermarriage without resisting assimilation.

At the same time, calcifying racial hierarchies in immigration laws made a Jewish “race” politically dangerous, so Jewish leaders attacked the government’s efforts to classify Jews as a “race,” successfully lobbying Congress and the Census Bureau to remove “Jewish” as a racial category from census forms and to prevent exclusion of Jews from eligibility from naturalization. They also fought attempts to link Jews, ancient Israelites, and Semites to Africa.

Between the world wars, antisemites focused on the relationship between Jewishness and whiteness. “If they could no longer defuse the danger they saw in the Jews by likening them to African Americans, they aimed instead to study, clarify, and expose their role as an unstable element in white society.” Henry Ford, for example, “aimed at unmasking aspects of Jewish racial difference that were thought to be dangerously masquerading as sameness.” Still, the association of Jews with modernity and of Americans with modernity meant that many other American whites were unwilling to turn away from them entirely, and even many American antisemites held out the possibility of assimilation. Harvard’s Jewish quotas were supposedly designed to end the practice of “Jewish segregation” by keeping their numbers down, not excluding them entirely. President Lowell wanted to segregate Black students on campus, but wanted to make Jewish students assimilate by surrounding them with non-Jewish whites.

What about Jewish interwar attitudes and behaviors towards Blacks? Goldstein characterizes them as mostly better than other whites’, often due to empathy, but deeply inconsistent and partial, often out of fear of losing their own place in white America. One of the best things I learned: Jewish communists staged “white chauvinism trials” in which they convicted their own Jewish members for saying racist things or refusing to participate in Party work in Black neighborhoods.

Some Jews tried to switch from “race” to “ethnicity” to draw some of the sharper stings of race language. But race still had a powerful pull in providing community and connection to other Jews. Gender also showed up as male Jews “sometimes tried to deflect unflattering racial images onto their female counterparts” (never you say!) and Goldstein argues that Jews internalized appearance-based anti-Jewish stereotypes more thoroughly than other anti-Jewish stereotypes. As the interwar period wore on, scholars focusing on pluralism pushed Jews towards more cultural and ethnic categorizations and away from biological “race,” a reformulation that gained much more power after WWII. And whiteness had finally consolidated: the INS introduced new naturalization forms in 1940 that designated European immigrants as “white” instead of using the traditional, narrower designations. During the war, likewise, Black and Asian soldiers were segregated into their own units while Jews, Italians, and Irish were assigned to “white” units along with the descendants of Britons, Swedes, etc.

Postwar optimism (and of course the example of the Holocaust) made the US “more hopeful” and less exclusionary of Jews, which then empowered Jews to voice more empathy and support for Blacks “without fear that it would bring their whiteness into question.” But “ethnicity” didn’t work as a long-term frame for Jewishness because it didn’t meet the “emotional needs” of Jews or the expectations of non-Jews who hoped that Jews would fade into a denomination. “Jews often defined themselves publicly as a religious group while privately pursuing Jewishness as a tribal phenomenon.”

Goldstein takes Adam Sandler’s Hanukkah Song as emblematic of current tensions in Jewish whiteness: Sandler “takes pride in his cast of characters precisely because they have achieved such success in entering the inner circle of white American society. The song clearly celebrates Jews’ status as racial insiders in America, holding them up as the antithesis of notorious racial villains like O.J. Simpson (and in a subsequent version, Osama bin Laden), even as it undermines the Hollywood illusion that makes Jews into undifferentiated whites.” (I was also interested in the statistic that, while about 50% of Jews marry non-Jews, in Hollywood portrayals the intermarriage rate is essentially 100%, Dirty Dancing notwithstanding.)

I was especially interested in the point that Jewish embrace of racial liberalism “allowed them to identify as part of the white mainstream culture without making them feel as if they had abandoned their legacy as a persecuted minority group,” because Jews can ground racial liberalism in the legacy of our own slavery in Israel. But also, “[w]ith their own sense of ethnic difference affirmed or perhaps even augmented, Jews could continue on the path of integration with little fear that they were complicit in the misdeeds of an exclusionary society.” Tensions became more evident, however, as Blacks gained more control over the relations between the groups and didn’t always see Jews as allies; the Jewish narrative of Black-Jewish links undermined claims for Black distinctiveness.

Ultimately, Goldstein argues, growing ethnic consciousness and declining ethnic cohesiveness are “two sides of the same coin.” What is Jewish identity? The very difficulty of the question increases its salience. Some Jews now protest the absence of the category from the census. And a plurality—40%--of Jews said in 2001 that “being a part of the Jewish people” was the most important aspect of their identity, while only 14% said that religious observance was. In the end, Goldstein suggests, only the “dissolution of the dominant culture” can solve the tension that Jews experience between acceptance and group identity.

Guy Lawson, Octopus: Sam Israel, the Secret Market, and Wall Street’s Wildest Con: Israel was a child of privilege who loved trading, watched traders up close during the 80s as they bribed and traded inside information, and decided he was successful enough to start his own hedge fund. When he immediately started losing, he immediately started cooking the books, and as things got bad, he looked desperately for rescue. He thought he found it in the bigger fraudsters who promised him access to secret bond auctions only available to the richest of the rich; though they kept failing to deliver, and though antifraud controls prevented them from stealing most of the money he had already stolen from clients, he believed them for a long time—after all, they were only revealing further depths to an economy he already knew was crooked. Born on third base and convinced he hit a triple, unable to build a real hedge fund, Israel believed that “shortcuts” were available; only fools played by the rules. And why would he believe otherwise?

Jen Manion, Female Husbands: A history of “female husbands” in the 18th/19th century US and England: people assigned female at birth who lived as men and married women, until the category fell apart with the rise of discourses about lesbians. Manion uses “they/them” as the pronouns throughout, which highlights the ways in which we cannot know how they really thought about their genders given that even their own words, if we really believe they spoke those words, were produced in response to legal and social threats. Other interesting points: the consideration of the female husbands’ wives, often mocked by contemporaries for not knowing (a position they may have been forced to take to protect their own interests after their husbands’ exposure)—Manion points out that many may have been perfectly content to have a female husband. And Manion suggests that, during this period, female husbands were judged not for being failed women but for being failed men—often effeminate—which in a way accepts their own gender characterization.

Wes Moore, Five Days: Stories from the protests in Baltimore surrounding Freddy Gray’s death. No pat answers but some fascinating perspectives from police officers, ordinary citizens including the guy who cut a fire hose to interfere with an attempt to put out a burning CVS, and a juvenile justice lawyer who gives a powerful defense of acts of violence that come from despair.

Gordon H. Chang, Ghosts of Gold Mountain: A history of the Chinese workers who built the Western railway, told by reconstructing their world from existing evidence. Of the tens of thousands of letters they sent home, none have been found by historians, but Chang consults other contemporaneous accounts from Chinese workers in the US, stories passed down in families, and even what can be gleaned from records left by suspicious and often confused white people. Among other things, he argues (somewhat optimistically) that the workers’ strike often considered to have been a total failure was actually a success, given that wages began to rise pretty substantially thereafter.

Eula Biss, Having and Being Had: Poetic meditations on ownership, property, capitalism, whiteness, and their interrelations. Hard for me to say much more about the essays, but they could be useful for spurring further thought.

Tracy Campbell, The Year of Peril: 1942 in the US—a year that began with significant fear over whether further attacks on the mainland were coming, and continued with a lot less unity than we remember in retrospect. Racial terrorism continued despite Black leaders’ attempts to win democracy at home; Republicans prepared for a significant midterm that might let them take back leverage; and war production was nowhere near what FDR wanted even as price controls and rationing of gas and even coffee frustrated the public. One of the standard patterns of US politics emerged: in a low-turnout year spurred by vote suppression (the millions of men away from home in the military usually couldn’t vote; people who’d moved recently—and with mobilization there were a lot of them—usually couldn’t vote; and of course millions in the South both Black and white couldn’t vote because of poll taxes and other racial suppression measures), Republican gains convinced the conventional wisdom that the US was too conservative for progressive policies.
Tim Harford, The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics: Harford starts out by noting that, while Darrell Huff’s How To Lie with Statistics was important, it also can be used to undersell the importance of the right statistics. Darrell Huff, in later years, wrote a sequel (never published) called How to Lie with Smoking Statistics, as he was paid to do. “Yes, it’s easy to lie with statistics—but it’s even easier to lie without them.”

But how do you know whether you have the right statistics, correctly measured? Harford advocates both reflection on your own experience and on what else might be known—being willing to update your priors, as it were. Pay careful attention to what is being counted. For example, Harford explains that some—but by no means all—of the high infant mortality in the US seems to be “the result of recording births before twenty-four weeks as live when in other countries they would be recorded as miscarried pregnancies.” Doctors in different places, that is, are different in the likelihood that they will record a pregnancy that ends at twenty-two weeks as a live birth, followed by an early death, rather than as a late miscarriage. Now we need more information, such as late miscarriage rates in various countries, to get a fuller picture. But: “For babies born after twenty-four weeks, the US infant mortality rate falls from 6.1 to 4.2 deaths per thousand live births. The rate in Finland barely shifts, from 2.3 to 2.1.” So there is something going on with how deaths are counted.

Harford also discusses the replication crisis in psychology and the effects of publication bias. As he points out, data are themselves subject to survivor bias; he notes that the blockbuster book “In Search of Excellence” offered management lessons from studying forty-three of the most outstanding corporations of that time, but within two years, a third of them were at least financially unstable.

His contrarianism also takes him down less fruitful paths. For example, he says, “Very few people have enough wealth to fund their lifestyle purely out of interest payments, and so if we want to understand how inequality manifests itself in everyday life, it makes sense to look at income rather than wealth.” Um, no; doing that makes it harder to understand why Black families get worse mortgages and live in worse neighborhoods than white families with the same income. Likewise, his generic endorsement of curiosity doesn’t account for the way that “do your own research” misinformation (Qanon, vaccine denial) works. But I was interested in the research he reported in which people were asked to rate their understanding of various political issues on which they had opinions on a scale of one to seven and then asked to elaborate on what they understood. Apparently, after doing this, “people became less likely to give money to lobby groups or other organizations that supported the positions they had once favored.”

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Fiction

rivkat — Mon, 20 Sep 2021 18:40:25 GMT

Laura Sebastian, Castles in Their Bones: It had me from the title. Three princesses raised to destroy three kingdoms and recreate the empire that their Empress mother rules now only in name. Lots of palace intrigue—in three palaces!—and really pretty dark for YA, including some major character death.

Tade Thompson, Far from the Light of Heaven: Murder on a spaceship! Only the pilot is supposed to be awake, but there are over thirty bodies … or missing bodies or parts thereof. With a mix of artificial life, heavily manipulated humans, and the occasional maybe-alien, Thompson mixes stay-alive adventure with the unraveling of the reasons for all the deaths. I didn’t find it as compelling as the Rosewater books, but if you want Afro-futurism that mixes spirituality and visions of civilizational variance in space, this might deliver for you.

Tochi Onyebuchi, Riot Baby: Ella and Kev are poor and Black and well-loved by their mother, but Ella has fits in which she can destroy things around her—or levitate, or see into others’ minds. When she flees to learn to control her powers, Kev falls into one of the many traps for young Black men and is imprisoned in a ten-years-from-now carceral state with implants and drone monitors that has learned even better how to extract value from Black bodies. This short book is about the anger of the oppressed and how it can make destruction seem like the only reasonable option.

T. Kingfisher, Paladin's Strength (The Saint of Steel Book 2): A paladin whose god died is making a new life, chasing down some seriously creepy murderers, when he encounters a lay sister of an order that was attacked and nearly destroyed. The attackers discarded her because she was sick, but now she’s better and looking to rescue her sisters. Did I mention she’s a bear shifter? The best thing about that is that her bear is conflict-averse and tends to respond to danger by (1) manifesting and (2) running away if possible. Anyway, banter and romance ensue, as well as danger when they arrive at the lawless city that is the source of both of their problems.

Alex Lubertozzi, Any Other World Will Do: In eighties Spain, Vikram meets Miles and Anna, two young people desultorily getting ready for full adulthood, and recruits them for his mission. His mission is that he’s from a planet that has already had its anthropogenic-equivalent disaster of global warming and destroying the nearest habitable planet, and is now searching for other solutions. Our World has religious and linguistic divisions and multiple cultures, and Miles and Anna encounter them with openness and wonder. I dunno, it had a very “literary” feel to it, with a very slow start changing to wars among city-states in which thousands died.

Olivia Atwater, Half a Soul: Regency Faerie Tales, #1: A childhood encounter with a faery lord leaves the protagonist with half a soul, which manifests as neuroatypicality—limited affect, very little sense of what is socially appropriate to say; this is a significant problem for a genteel young lady. When she goes with her beautiful cousin to London, they meet the Lord Sorcier, who may be able to help, but he has trauma and secrets of his own. I thought it was fine but am not moved to read the rest of the series.

Harlan Ellison, Ellison Wonderland: Collection with interminable introductions (I began at one point to wonder if this was a Nabokovian joke with only introductions); Christ, what an asshole. Shockingly, his assholery targets a lot of women, especially in publishing where he obsesses a lot about the Jimmy Choo obsession that he expects female editors to have in lieu of (his) good taste. Among other things, he recounts an incredibly “just asking questions” trolling memo he sent challenging (mostly women’s) editorial decisions, and the time he made an editorial assistant cry, both times like he’s the hero, claiming he was being totally respectful when he was obviously being incredibly disrespectful. It’s like if Holden Caulfield were writing at 80, having gotten nothing but crankier. Mostly it made me wonder how many people of equal or greater talent didn’t get multiple chances in publishing, or Hollywood, because they didn’t have the right race or gender presentation.

Waubgeshig Rice, Moon of the Crusted Snow: When the apocalypse hits, a small Anishinaabe community doesn’t notice at first, because losing power and cellphone service isn’t that uncommon. But as the days stretch out, it becomes increasingly clear that something has gone very wrong outside. And then the white refugees start to turn up. A low-key apocalypse, where the whole point is that the world has ended a number of times, and yet some people survive.

Stephen King, Billy Summers:Another writer protagonist, this one a killer for hire doing the cliched one last job. It goes south and then he rescues a young woman who’s just been gang-raped, who seems mostly a vehicle for Billy to try to do something good with his violence and ill-gotten gains rather than a character in her own right. Also repeated mention of the rape of a child. It wasn’t awful but it definitely wasn’t King’s best.

Rachel Neumeier, The Year’s Midnight: Novelette (I think) about a psychiatric patient whose delusions of being an immortal warrior—Death’s Lady—are very coherent, up through her being initially arrested because she was waving a sword around and unable to speak English or any other recognizable language. But her psychiatrist wins her trust and provides her with therapy to acknowledge her grief and anger about all the things she did in order to get revenge on the immortal king who killed her husband and son (which her doctor of course believes stand for something else). It’s an intriguing setup but it’s clear that the rest of the story will take place back in her world, with the doctor and his daughter along for the ride, and I wonder if I want to go there.

Rachel Neumeier, Of Absence, Darkness: I tried it! The second book in the series is set in Tenai’s world and there are a lot of politics that the doctor and his daughter have to guess at. If anything the palace intrigue was flattened by the two outsiders just trying to figure stuff out or being told capsule summaries of the relationships among the people who’d known each other for years. Unusual in its focus on not starting a war, and perhaps in the doctor’s desire to put modern psychological concepts to work on these magic-using feudalists.

Rachel Neumeier, As Shadow, A Light: Matters come to a head in Tenai’s world as both the doctor and his daughter have to fight for their own places and survival. I confess that by the end I was a bit squicked by their happy acceptance of all the feudalism and honor culture, which was helped by their immediately achieving incredibly high status and favor. In some sense, it’s not all that different from Ankh-Morpork being governed by Vetinari … but at least there you had the sense that they might be heading for democratic representation, which is not the case here.

Adrian Tchaikovsky, Shards of Earth: Forty years after the Architects destroyed Earth and a bunch of other inhabited planets, humans have started squabbling again. A group of cloned/parthogenesis-reproducing warriors are either interested in getting rid of anyone else or determined to be humanity’s protectors, depending on who you listen to; a bunch of planets have become clients of alien overlords whose tech is capable of keeping Architects away, and they’re proselytizing, and the remainder of humanity is semi-united under the name Hugh, continuing the process that produced the one successful anti-Architect tool by enslaving and killing hundreds of criminals for every one who emerges able to navigate unspace. That’s when things go south. Look, there’s a lot going on, and species I haven’t mentioned, and it’s a wild ride; the characters have different voices and senses of humor, and I think it’s my favorite of his I’ve read.

C.S. Pacat, Dark Rise: Will is on the run from Simon, a magician of some kind who killed his mother and wants to kill him. Will is the descendant of the Lady, who defeated the Dark King, and he’s supposed to fight the reborn/resurrected Dark King, but can’t figure out how to do it. Violet is the illegitimate daughter of a merchant who works for Simon; she shares her half brother’s unnatural strength and wants to follow in his footsteps, but a chance encounter with Will changes her course. It starts as a fairly standard “chosen one” narrative, but takes some interesting turns along the way. Decent YA; violence but not sexualized (there is a bit of close-to-chaste consensual kissing).

Charles Stross, Glasshouse: A historian-turned-tank-turned some kind of memory-wiped criminal and/or victim, in a posthuman world where body modification and memory modification are standard responses to trauma and extended lifespans, signs up for an experimental emulation of the Dark Ages (1950s-1990s) and gets way more than he/she bargained for. There’s a lot of ideas going on here, and I appreciate the way Stross has the protagonist encounter today’s ordinary things, think they’re weird, and then use the period-appropriate names for them for ease of narrative understanding, but it’s so busy that it’s a bit chilly, even when it’s about horrific trauma or nonconsensual personality modification. Warning for rape, including rape committed by a sympathetic character back when he/she was brain-colonized by a fascist meme.

Rainbow Rowell, Any Way the Wind Blows: I don’t think the constant switching of first person narrators served this Simon Snow novel as well as another strategy might have. The core four return to England, struggle against various smaller monsters and challenges including Simon’s own terrific insecurities, and find some new paths. I wasn’t very invested in Simon’s angst, or Baz’s constant attention to it, but I did like how Penelope and Agatha got chances to figure themselves out.
Claire O’Dell, A Study in Honor: A Novel (The Janet Watson Chronicles): Holmes/Watson retelling-ish set after the second American Civil War, with Watson a Black surgeon with a bum cyborg arm that keeps her from doing the work she’s trained to do. Holmes is annoying and cold in the standard way. Not really my thing.

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Nonfiction

rivkat — Fri, 17 Sep 2021 17:26:01 GMT

Ben Davis, 9.5 Theses on Art and Class: Really interesting essays on the relationship between the visual art world, artists, labor, and class. Argues that authority over one’s conditions of work is the key dividing line between working and middle class, making most visual artists middle-class. Artists lack collective institutions that can exercise economic power—going “on strike” wouldn’t deny art to anyone in particular. But the emphasis on creative/intellectual labor and control means that visual artists are constantly faced with the contradiction between ruling-class values and middle-class situations. This emphasis on individual creativity keeps artists thinking about political efficacy in individualistic terms, which is self-defeating. These contradictions also explain why, as the definition of “art” has expanded, it’s harder and harder to get anywhere in the art world without a fancy degree; “you’d have to be a fool to think that any old person could declare any old thing ‘art’ and be taken seriously. The lack of clear formal guidelines demarcating what is or is not art makes institutional approbation and a command of aesthetic discourse all the more important, and these things don’t come naturally or cheaply.” As for political change, I liked the point that “[w]hether a characteristically ironic sense of self gets articulated in a political direction or turns into a kind of consumerist nihilism depends on what kind of social movements there are for it to intersect.”
Visual artists “ceded the field of depicting reality as photographic entrepreneurs and film moguls outflanked the masters of pigments and modeling clay; eventually, they were trumped in sheer imaginative might as the ‘culture industries’ refined their special effects and absorbed increasingly impressive quantities of creative talent,” leaving “a predominantly middle-class tradition in a largely defensive struggle as capitalism progressively undercuts its status.” This uniquely middle-class status, he argues, can explain visual art’s focus on the individual producer and small production. One implication: “art’s need to justify itself as intellectually superior to mass culture … would clearly be as much about raw commerical interst as it is contingent intellectual posturing. It is … a way of justifying its superior cachet to a class of potential consumers.” But unlike the situation in Pierre Bordieu’s day, pop culture is now often more technically sophisticated than modern fine art. The result: aesthetic distance, not mastery, is the aesthetic virtue to which artists appeal. Visual art is more like fashion, “where designers make esoteric prototypes that are then reprocessed for mass consumption, where they find their true home.” Another consequence: production becomes more like architecture or film, with the artist directing others to achieve the artist’s vision. But different works are differently suited to this treatment—they have to be both “suitably iconic and suitably abstract,” so they tend to “deemphasize personal vision and nuance and center more around the familiar values of mass entertainment and consumption,” as Damien Hirst does. But whether art is “traditional” or “conceptual,” its supposed problems compared to the other type are “just the displaced face of the market itself, with its tendency to transmogrify and vulgarize everything.” The lesson: “there are no formal or aesthetic solutions to the political and economic dilemmas that art faces—only political and economic solutions.” Ultimately, he hopes for a socialism that will allow future theorists to look at art under capitalism the way we now look at older religious art: “We can appreciate how for thousands of years the drama of religion was a primary vehicle for expressing compassion, suffering, and the aspiration for a redeemed world, and still feel that this art is confined to a framework that is narrower than the one from which we now operate.”

Adam Zmith, Deep Sniff: A short book about the cultural meaning of poppers and their relationship to pleasure and gayness. They’re apparently still widely available in the UK and the USA, “thanks to a pact between authorities and sellers. Everyone agrees to say that these products are not for human consumption, which means they are labelled with fake uses like ‘room odouriser’ and ‘boot cleaner.’” Interestingly, unlike with opiates, pharmacos apparently were actually worried that people—that is to say, young gay men—were using the product for pleasure and reported that to the FDA. I guess pleasure that makes you want to have sex (Zmith repeatedly emphasizes how poppers can be used to relax physically for anal sex) is more morally concerning than pleasure that just makes you happy. Zmith also argues that popper marketing participated in the promotion of a muscular, aggressive gay masculinity, e.g., an ad for Locker Room poppers “showed a butch superhero with a six-pack, cape and battering-ram thighs leaning against a locker door beside the words ‘Purity power potency.’” Thus poppers “were both countercultural, simply by being gay, and also deeply conventional in how they were marketed.” Zmith also discusses how moral panics over poppers were intertwined with moral panic over AIDS—indeed, one contrarian insisted for many years that it was poppers, and not HIV, that caused AIDS. I loved the bit about disputes at a gay hotline over what to say about poppers—one volunteer wrote, “People who sniff poppers need an extra physical kick from sex as they get no emotional satisfaction,” while another responded, “You sanctimonious tie-wearer.” The bit on popper vids—clips from multiple porn videos edited together with a soundtrack and instructions about when exactly to sniff—was also very “through a glass darkly” from my own fannishness.

Michael Heller & James Salzman, Mine! How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives: A really good popular book about property law; I’d recommend it for law students and for people who are just interested in learning more about property. It sets out various frameworks for establishing property rights (such as attachment to an existing right, first-in-time, and possession) and shows how they’re always contested and partial. The opening example, about the Knee Defender (a device that an airplane passenger can deploy to prevent the seat in front of them from reclining) depends on competing accounts of “whose” space that is, and on the airlines’ own strategic silence on this—they could make explicit rules, but they’d rather have passengers mad at each other. Other topics in this far-ranging book include water rights, kidney sales, Black land loss, South Dakota’s special role in protecting the assets of wealthy people against legitimate creditors, the “sharing” economy that might just be the oligopoly economy, and more.
Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling, A Libertarian Walks into a Bear: Framed in human-bear relation terms, this entertaining book offers the story of a libertarian attempt to take over a small New Hampshire town. The anti-government longtime residents were further away from the libertarians ideologically than they thought, but their anti-government ideology left them largely powerless to protect themselves or their environment, which is now deteriorating even further (including bears). Libertarians gutted town budgets, destroying roads and relying on a volunteer fire department that didn’t succeed in fighting fires. Instead of personal responsibility, the town got camps of men living in the woods and not dealing with their sewage; crime reports went up and they tried to defund the schools—all for a couple of hundred dollars’ difference in tax rates.

Carl Zimmer, Life’s Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive:Interesting tour of scientific theories of life and what the boundary conditions are. Crystals “grow” but we’re pretty sure they’re not alive, but what are the actual requirements for life? For example, a dried-out human being can’t be revived with water, but a dried-out tardigrade can be—it exists in a state of cryptobiosis, between life and death. What about reproduction? Well, Amazon mollies are a species that can only reproduce by interacting with other fish—two Amazon mollies can’t reproduce!

Robert Darnton, Pirating and Publishing: The Book Trade in the Age of Enlightenment: Darnton looks mainly at the publishers surrounding France and how they carved out a living without copyright and often under threat of censorship (sometimes for the political works they published, sometimes for the sexy books). They also lived without much money—there were lots of debts and promises, but very little specie and no government-backed paper, which complicated matters a lot as they tried to make a living in trade. Their interactions and unauthorized dissemination of works, he suggests, were significant in spreading the Enlightenment: with some notable exceptions, nearly all the works of the French Enlightenment were published outside France and smuggled back in. (Hostility to legally enforced “privilege” thus permeated the books both in content and in practice.) He estimates that half the standard books in the crucial period leading up to the French Revolution were pirated in this way, making piracy crucial to the history of ideas. It was a hard life—lots of bankruptcies (which meant flight or debtor’s prison in those days), occasional arrests, lots of authors commissioning print runs and then failing to pay the bills. But by making books available to the literate middling classes—lawyers, doctors, state officials—they contributed to fundamental changes in French society. Since they competed with each other to sell whatever would sell, they had to try to stay ahead of demand and sometimes engaged in false advertising about their own plans to warn others off.

One of the most fascinating tidbits: As the system creaked under strain, censors began giving private approval to printing, until privately approved texts represented 30% of printed books. The approval remained secret and the books would usually indicate they’d been printed outside of France even if they’d been printed in Paris; if they became controversial, they could be withdrawn without a fuss. Also, booksellers who trafficked in unapproved texts were known as marrons, a term also applied to fugitive slaves in the colonies. And people saved a perhaps surprising number of letters discussing their shenanigans, even ones marked “tear this up right away.”

Daniel J. Patinkin, The Trigger: Narratives of the American Shooter: Accounts of the lives of six people who killed someone else with a gun, with varying levels of moral and legal accountability (there’s one cop who faces no legal scrutiny at all; the others go to jail). It’s a tour of American heartbreak.

Hakeem Oluseyi with Joshua Horwitz, A Quantum Life: Engaging if sometimes hard to read story about a Black boy from Mississippi whose greatest period of stability as a kid came from living on his father’s pot farm. His path to astrophysics was wandering and full of setbacks as well as aggressions from white people, especially at Stanford where he got his PhD even after the committee changed the standard so he’d fail his qualifying exam. Twice, he struggles with crack addiction and comes back, with support from a few professors and fellow students who believe in him. His ultimate professional accomplishments, which are many, are listed at the end; he doesn’t share much about his relationship with his kids or his wife, compared to his relationship with his family of birth, and though I don’t blame him for protecting that it highlights how this is a curated story—brutally honest about some things but with a narrative arc.

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nonfiction

rivkat — Fri, 23 Jul 2021 20:27:30 GMT

Zara Stone, Killer Looks: The Forgotten History of Plastic Surgery in Prisons: I did not know about the practice, through most of the 20th century, of offering plastic surgery to over half a million (mostly male) inmates in order to rehabilitate them/make it easier for them to reintegrate after release. That’s about what I can say for this book, which is roughly chronological, occasionally anachronistic (there were no “red states” and “blue states” in the 1950s), and somewhat digressive though understandably so in its discussion of the evidence of how physical attractiveness—both racialized and within racial categories—affects how a person is treated. Stone attributes the elimination of most programs to a combination of punitiveness/anti-“free stuff” for prisoners attitudes; unwarranted denigration of rehabilitation as a concept; and concerns about experimentation on prisoners, since many surgeons practiced on inmates. I did learn that prisoners have almost five times as many head injuries as nonprisoners, and that facial trauma accounts for 1/3 of inmate ER visits, compared to 0.7% for the general population.

Emmanuel Probst, Brand Hacks: How to Build Brands by Fulfilling the Human Quest for Meaning (rev. ed.): Bog-standard business book with random anecdotes and a real survivor bias, focusing on tactics that were successful for particular businesses without discussing whether they are often successful (though in fairness the book occasionally mentions that the specific tactics discussed won’t work for everyone, e.g. you have to be authentic, but “authenticity is not for everyone,” which is not very helpful). Does suggest that the power of social media is overblown since marketers are of the class most likely to be on social media. Advice includes having your brand “help make people feel less lonely” by giving it a face and enabling customers to “take Instagram-worthy pictures in your store.” Or you could “[b]uy an old brand and revive its heritage,” though “nostalgia is not for every brand. In some cases, nostalgia can marginalize your brand by emphasizing that it is out of touch and is no longer relevant to consumers.” Long-form content is apparently 90 seconds long (“ ‘Really good content entices people to watch through the end,’ says Abraham, quoting the example of a 90-second video that performed better than a 30-second video.”). Denigrates giving product specifics as “pointless,” because marketing is all about emotion—Always pads shouldn’t compete on absorption but rather build its brand around “confidence.” This may indeed be a useful tool, but it’s depressing. Best quote, most representative of how helpful this book would actually be: “Marketing columnist and former marketing professor Mark Ritson sums it all up: ‘Do customers want purpose-filled brands? Sometimes. In some categories. Depending on how it is done. A lot of time they don’t give a fuck. And usually most segments will not pay more.’”

Eric Cervini, The Deviant’s War: A stubborn cis white gay man, fired from his defense job because he was gay, waged a decades-long war against anti-homosexual discrimination starting in the 1950s and was a major figure in the homophile movement/Mattachine Society. Early on he developed the position that being homosexual was a positive good, which he insisted on while suffering the jeers of those who pointed to the Bible, the positive law, the official position of psychiatry, and the consensus of polite society. He filed legal briefs (pro se) making this argument along with, or sometimes instead of, legal ones. He persisted long past the point of diminishing returns, couldn’t pay his bills, annoyed people around him including his allies, insisted on a politics of respectability that eventually became very outdated, and lived long enough to see himself vindicated and his security clearance retroactively reinstated.

Ken Ellingwood, First to Fall: Elijah Lovejoy and the Fight for a Free Press in the Age of Slavery: Lovejoy, a white evangelical who insisted on his right to publish against slavery even in pro-slavery towns, was unbending and was eventually the first publisher killed by a pro-slavery mob, though not the last. An important reminder—his white murderers were, as far as the facts indicate, not themselves enslavers (he was killed in a theoretically free state), but felt their interests challenged by his opposition to it, since their town was economically sustained by trade with enslavers and they shared white fear of “servile insurrection” spurred by abolition talk.

Davarian L. Baldwin, In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: The "univer-city" as neoliberal colonizer, supporting gentrification and policing of the urban, mostly Black/Latinx communities it purports to uplift. Almost nothing a university does to interact with a community receives favor; the thing that made me most skeptical was Baldwin’s agreement with critics that NYU shouldn’t build bigger apartment towers on land that it already owned and already used for apartment housing, because … it was already too big and construction would take some time, as far as I could tell. I mean, dunk on John Sexton all you want, it’s fun and usually correct, but I didn’t really see the problem with increasing density and not displacing other institutions or people. Baldwin’s model of doing ok—the best that can be done under capitalism—is a regional Canadian university that gets most of its students from the area and, among other things, declined to hire Aramark to provide food, instead contracting with local providers, which sounds like I’m making fun but in fact I think is one of the simplest things a university could do to make a noticeable positive community impact.

Walter Johnson, The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States: Thorough and depressing book linking the continued expropriation of Native and Black people’s wealth and lives to the prosperity of white America through the story of St. Louis. “The red thread that runs through this entire book is the historical relationship between imperialism and anti-Blackness.” Johnson argues, among other things, that whites used Indian removal as a model for how they treated Blacks—white flight was important, but so was kicking Black people out of whatever land they were on when whites decided they had better uses for it. St. Louis began American life as an outpost of empire and beneficiary of the defense industry when that mostly meant defense against Indians, and in 1836 became the site of “arguably the first lynching in the history of the United States,” of a Black steward who thought he could move as freely as any white man in the imperial trade system of which St. Louis was a part.

In St. Louis after the Civil War, federal troops whose commander already used to killing Indians in California fired on Black and white striking workers, who were engaging in a general strike whose unprecedented interracial solidarity made its threat potential incredibly clear to the powerful men of the day. After the strike was crushed, city leaders began the Veiled Prophet parade, which continues to the present day; the image of the Veiled Prophet in the book bears a striking resemblance to a KKK cloak and hood. Meanwhile, St. Louis was the launching point for US troops who redeployed from the South at the end of Reconstruction to drive Indians onto reservations or into death.

The 1917 East St. Louis Massacre prefigured Tulsa, but was deadlier. Predatory national corporations founded their own municipalities on the margins, where they could pollute, evade taxes, and buy politicians on the cheap. Because valuable industrial property was hardly taxed, the government relied on fees and fines that fell most heavily on the poor, which would still be a feature of injustice a century later. But at least the white workers got the satisfaction of knowing that East St. Louis and similar environs were hostile to Blacks. As Blacks migrated North for opportunities, white politicians and newspapers stoked fears of black “colonization” and connected that to claims of voter fraud, representing what Johnson calls “the impulse toward ethnic cleansing that lies latent at the heart of our democracy.” Fear of replacement by Black workers stoked white racism; this fear of replacement no longer centers on work, but remains potent.

In the 20th century, racial restrictions slowly moved from explicit to implicit, but were powerful forms of wealth expropriation and suppression either way. Landlords could charge higher rents and do less maintenance when Black tenants lacked alternatives; the deterioration of their buildings would then be blamed on Black residence and used to justify moving them off the land and redeveloping it. A brief resurgence of working-class Black activism in the 1930s was again ruthlessly suppressed by wealthy whites; the Communists who came in to organize didn’t make common cause with non-Communist Blacks who otherwise might have supported collective action, and then the postwar settlement between capital and labor privileged unions from which Black workers had long been excluded. Discussing “anaphylactic” white violence in response to the brief integration of a public swimming pool, Johnson writes that “racism and capitalism were not identical …. They were always in excess of one another—capitalism mobilizing and exploiting whites as well as Blacks, and white supremacy providng pleasure, even the filthy pleasures of racial disgust and collective violence, as well as profit.” (When the pool was reopened, whites boycotted, so the parks department closed the pool and filled it with concrete.)

I’ve read more about the later parts of this story—urban renewal aka “Negro removal,” construction of highways that destroyed Black neighborhoods in order to allow white suburbanites to have easier commutes into the city whose taxes they would not pay, public housing that was immediately underfunded and left to deteriorate (the elevators of Pruitt-Igoe stopped on every other floor to save money), and so on. Here’s a shocking fact: “By the late 1960s, there were more sociologists working in Pruitt-Igoe than dedicated maintenance workers.” And another: You probably know that police militarization has a lot of links with the actual US military, but did you know that the Army conducted secret radiological weapons experiments in 1953-4 in St. Louis, a total of 163 chemical releases in neighborhoods that researchers had identified as “densely populated slum districts” and “poorer sections” that were useful because they were subject to greater “police surveillance”? (The NIH says the doses weren’t high enough to be dangerous.)

Still later, city officials used redevelopment initiatives and block grants to drive Blacks out and increase the value of the downtown district. Restrictions on property taxes for high-value property, which benefit wealthy owners, contribute to St. Louis’s self-defeating use of the one survival tactic that appears to remain: giving tax subsidies to businesses. So St. Louis ended up paying $70 million directly to the owner of the Rams because of a stadium deal, only for the billionaire owner to move the team back to LA, leaving St. Louis “the owner of a 67,000-seat stadium in which to host horse shows and church conventions, as well as $144 million of debt still to be paid on the bonds that it had issued to pay for the stadium in the first place.” Meanwhile, poor Black homeowners were losing their houses for unpaid property taxes, and then the city is too broke to keep the seized houses up to code.

Even when the state receives payroll tax revenue for its sweetheart deals, it’s notable that the money goes to the legislature and not to the local schools (as property taxes would). Given gerrymandering, this represents a transfer to white rural Republicans from predominantly Black schools. And disadvantage piles on disadvantage: the cash-starved Normandy school district lost its accreditation; state law thus allows students to transfer to nearby districts, but only for $20,000 per student—more than Normandy has per student. So, for five years at the time of writing, this struggling district has been subsidizing the schools in wealthy counties—including Ladue, one of the wealthiest counties in the US. And that’s before we get to the expropriation of Black wealth in the mortgage crisis and the imprisonment of Black Missourians in predominantly white rural areas.

This book should be read by anyone who wants to see how different aspects of structural racism interlock.

Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil: Starts with a powerful idea borrowed from Tzvetan Todorov: “Germans should talk about the singularity of the Holocaust, Jews should talk about its universality.” The former is taking responsibility, but a German who discusses genocide as a universal phenomenon is “seeking exoneration; if everyone commits mass murder one way or another, how could they help doing it too?” Neiman argues that, as a Jewish author, she need not argue for exact equivalence between the Holocaust and the crimes of other nations: “it’s a matter of taking responsibility for the latter,” and she is an American Jew. She investigates how Germans have confronted their pasts and compares that to the American experience. The Germans of course have several long compound words, one of which roughly translates to working-off-the-past. “The German word for debt is the same as the word for guilt; both, it seems, can be worked off with sufficient effort.” She argues that East Germany did a better job confronting and overcoming the Nazi past than West Germany, because anti-Communism was an acceptable thing for an ex-Nazi to emphasize in the West. If Germans (who might be fathers and grandfathers of the Germans confronting these questions) were after Bolsheviks, then Jews were just in the way; if fascism and communism were equal, then their fathers/grandfathers were fighting evil too. Though Westerners thought of antifascism as imposed on the East from above, by Communist rulers, Neiman suggests that’s too simple. An amazing paragraph:

Between Nazi propaganda about barbaric Bolshevik ordes and their own fear of retaliation for what the Wehrmacht had done in the Soviet Union, most Nazis preferred to await defeat in the American zone. This meant that East Germany had fewer big fish on their hands from the start, but they tried far more of those Nazis who were left than West Germany did. Most important, although the majority of the population in both East and West had been equally entwined with the Nazi cause, this was not the case with the leadership. East German leaders—in politics, civil service, media, and the arts—were antifascists in their bones, and some of those who survived had paid for it with their blood. West German leaders had been, at the least, complicit …. West Berlin refused to allow resistance heroes to speak of their wartime experiences in public schools because most of those who survived had been communists. In West Germany, serving communism was always worse than serving fascism. This became clear in monetary terms when a new pension law was passed after reunification. The years you may have spent as an SS officer or driving a cattle car to Auschwitz were counted toward your pension. The years you may have spent doing obligatory military service in the GDR or driving an ordinary train there were not.

(In 1953, sufficiently documented Auschwitz survivors could receive $450 for each year spent there, less than the pensions paid to former SS guards and their widows.) That isn’t to say that East Germany didn’t use antifascism “as an excuse to conceal its own injustice and repression”; she agrees that it did. But even if it was in part a foreign policy tool, antifascism was itself a good thing, just like civil rights legislation in the US that was in part anticommunist propaganda to rebut Soviet critiques of US segregation.

Neiman suggests that the recent rise of right-wing sentiment in the East comes from resentment at longstanding Western scorn for East Germans. This contempt became economic policy: since pensions were calculated on the basis of lifetime salaries, and since East Germans had most basics like rent and food subsidized and correspondingly low salaries, they now get less in retirement, and can be furious at refugees getting state support.

Neiman also compares US memory and forgetting, including how James Meredith objects to the monument to him at the University of Mississippi that includes a “butchered, out-of-context quotation from my 1966 book … expressing my love for the land of Mississippi but making no mention of my hatred of its ruling system of white supremacy.” But I learned less simply because I already know much more about our history of reckoning with atrocity, or mostly of failing to do so. (I read this months ago, before the news cycle became full of too many whites’ demand that we forget most of our racist history.)

Elizabeth Kolbert, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future: Kolbert explores aspects of what the natural world will look like as we enter fully into the anthropocene. You know about carbon, but did you know that human fertilizer plants and legume crops fix more nitrogen than the rest of the terrestrial ecosystem, or that we routinely cause earthquakes? People outweigh wild animals by eight to one, and it’s 22 to one if you add in domestic animals. The consequences of our changes are well underway. Louisiana has shrunk by over 2000 square miles since the 1930s, more than Delaware or Rhode Island. Debates over gene editing now must include that the alternative for animals is likely extinction, as well as that our previous attempts at moving genomes around the world in animals or plants have often been disastrous. She talks to a researcher who thinks we need to think about carbon dioxide like sewage: we understand that it wouldn’t help to punish people if they went to the bathroom too often, but we also don’t let them shit on the sidewalk. So she also talks to people who propose geoengineering mitigation solutions, though she characterizes at least some as being like “treating a heroin habit with amphetamines.” But most of her interviewees say some version of: geoengineering is like chemotherapy; you don’t use it because you have better options. One says: “We live in a world where deliberately dimming the fucking sun might be less risky than not doing it.” But only might be.

Jennifer Taub, Big Dirty Money: The Shocking Injustice and Unseen Cost of White Collar Crime: There’s a lot of corruption, wage theft, and fraud in the US, and we don’t even track it (so when you hear crime has spiked, think about the things we don’t try to count). I don’t think I’d seen this about the GM ignitition switch scandal, where they killed a bunch of people to save money on a part costing less than a dollar and then covered it up: One driver pleaded guilty to manslaughter after she lost control of her car and her boyfriend was killed. For years, the woman believed she was responsible for his death and her own severe injuries, but five months before she pled guilty, GM’s internal review found that the ignition switch was at fault in her accident. GM didn’t tell her; instead, it wrote a letter to NHTSA falsely saying it hadn’t looked at the crash. Seven years after the accident, she was finally cleared. And the lack of prosecution has gotten worse even in the past ten years—even as late as 2006, the DOJ was convicting CEOs, presidents, CFOs, and COOs more regularly. But court decisions and prosecutor timidity have made that far less common. We also help launder money from thieves and corrupt politicians around the world. Our elected officials and administrators could choose differently, if we had the votes and the will.

Tim Hwang, Subprime Attention Crisis: Advertising and the Time Bomb at the Heart of the Internet: Argues that the internet is built on a fundamentally flawed model of ad-supported content with too many intermediaries to allow any certainty that real people, much less the right people, are seeing ads supposedly targeted to them, even before the ever-increasing presence of ad-blockers is taken into account. Rather than publishers being ad-supported, mostly it’s intermediaries sucking out as much as 70 percent of the revenues from an ad. I think the book is basically right except that a bubble can last a lot longer than it should when there don’t seem to be other, better alternatives, which I think is the case here—advertisers have budgets and want to use them. But the critique of targeted advertising—it’s way more expensive than nontargeted ads and often quite inaccurate and permeated with fraud—is persuasive for anyone looking for how they should allocate their ad budgets.

Martha S. Jones, Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America: Uses stories of Baltimore’s free Blacks to explore the complicated ways in which they used citizenship claims and rights claims to reinforce each other, before and even sometimes after Chief Justice Taney declared in the Dred Scott case that Blacks could not be citizens. For example, they pointed out that white women were citizens even though white women couldn’t vote or hold property (in many places) by themselves. Black people filed petitions; they litigated; they made claims in the papers and in the streets. Those tactics didn’t always succeed, and there wasn’t always agreement about the best course of action (including leaving Maryland for the North, or Canada, or even Liberia), but they did claim the status of rights-bearing people.

Ashley Mears, Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit: Fascinating book. Mears spent several years with party promoters—almost all men, often Black men—who made money by bringing models or attractive “civilians” to high-end clubs so that the clubs would be attractive to big-spending men (usually white US, European, Arab, or Asian men). Acceptable “girls” have to look under thirty, be five foot seven or over and wear heels, and thin—and they are mostly white though a real model is always welcome whatever her race; being “hot” isn’t enough because the clubs want a specific “model” look. The big spenders, the promoters say, want “the real thing” if they’re spending $15,000 a night. The girls are there to dance, mingle, or just be there and look beautiful. “[G]irls are valuable; women are not.”

Mears emphasizes all the work that is required to create these experiences of pleasure and lack of inhibition, where—most visibly—hundreds of bottles of champagne can be wasted in displays of excess that no one seems willing to fully endorse while they’re not experiencing it. Almost every client Mears interviewed criticized staged displays of waste, but defended their own large bills. Because of the biggest “whales,” “even the biggest spenders could see their purchases as relatively modest.” Some also attributed the worst excesses to ethnic others: Russians and Saudis. Or they attributed them to people who didn’t work to earn their money, the way they themselves did. One line: “Despite securing his enviable hedge fund job at his family’s firm after having just graduated from an unexceptional college, Ricardo insisted and seemed to genuinely believe that his income reflected his hard work.” It was common for male clients to say that they deserved occasional indulgences because they worked so hard, and also that it was an important way to network with potential business partners.

The distinctions get even more complicated, because the richest men are often comped drinks because of the expectation that they’ll bring even more business, like holding a party at the club or investing in the owner’s next venture. So most clubs make the bulk of their profits from $1500 to $3000 tables populated by “affluent tourists and businessmen” who “regularly run up high-volume tabs because they, too, want to be close to power and beauty,” but who aren’t comped. (They might avoid having to pay a high table minimum if they come in with three or four models, though.)

Conspicuous consumption doesn’t just happen; people around rich people have to work very hard “to mobilize people into what looks like the spontaneous waste of money.” She focuses on “the backstage work of vulnerable women and marginalized men,” in which girls are “a form of capital. Their beauty generates enormous symbolic and economic resources for the men in their presence, but that capital is worth far more to men than to the girls who embody it.” Clubs let clients “act out domination over each other and over girls’ bodies, without the taboo that comes with hiring women directly …. In paying for wildly inflated prices on alcohol, clients buy the invisibility of the labor it took to bring girls to them; they pay to not have to bring girls themselves, or to pay a broker outright to procure girls. They are buying, in part, the illusion of spontaneity.”

And of course the clients and business owners don’t think of the girls as people who might have interesting minds or careers; there is a constant risk of stigmatization as a sex worker, which also usefully functions to limit what girls might ask for. While men used girls to make friends and deals, girls “who demanded a share of profits, in the form of financial support or gifts, were deemed users, schemers, and whores.” This is what Mears means when she says that female beauty was worth more to the men who traded in it than to the women who theoretically had it. Relatedly, the labor required for the girls to be present in the clubs is invisible, assumed to be leisure. Club owners pay promoters thousands of dollars to bring a group of high-quality models in, but owners or promoters would never pay the women themselves to attend, because that wouldn’t be authentic (and many girls would have found that unpleasant, feeling too much like work). Most girls didn’t know how much promoters made, and generally estimated that promoters earned a lot less than they actually did.

Mears also emphasizes that these are complicated mixtures of pleasure, work, and exploitation for both the “girls” and the promoters, who act as friends and often errand runners, housing providers and/or sexual partners for the girls. (Girls rarely have sex with actual clients; the main point is to show off an excess of female beauty, just like the empty champagne bottles that were sprayed around show off the ability to waste alcohol.) The girls get to go exclusive places they couldn’t afford on their own, including foreign locales, but they have to go out and hang out in the clubs in return. The relational work the promoters did highlights that “exploitation works best when it feels good.” The promoters, who are rarely from higher class backgrounds, often think that they’ll be able to join the big spenders who will eventually back their own business ventures—and this has even happened to a few promoters turned club owners—but mostly they too are providing a service and are ultimately replaceable.

Brad Stone, Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire: Updates Stone’s previous book from the last ten years or so, including a bit on the acceleration of Amazon’s dominance wrought by the pandemic. Some interesting tidbits, including about Bezos’s apparently genuine commitment to the independence of the Washington Post. He did have some ideas: he wondered whether the paper would need so many editors if it hired great writers. In order to get him off this tack, some editors took to sending them their highest-profile reporters’ unedited copy, and eventually he stopped pushing the idea, though Amazon denied that Bezos read the emails. Consistent with his hostility to unions, Bezos did ditch the perfectly stable pension fund for new employees, replacing it with 401(k)s. Stone also reports on Amazon’s struggles with video as it made deals with Woody Allen and Harvey Weinstein, while the video business was headed by a guy who also allegedly mistreated women.

Stone provides further confirmation that Amazon employees did peek at third-party sellers’ data to give their house brands competitive advantages, despite Amazon’s official denials that this occurred. Some of this seems like a good idea. “For example, customer reviews in the all-important category of dog poop bags indicated regular confusion about which end of the bag opened. So the Amazon Basics version included a blue arrow and the words ‘open this end.’” Amazon defends this kind of data analysis as being open to anyone who cared to do it, and many of the house brands don’t seem to be harming established brands, but several house brand managers admitted to exploiting something a lot harder to compete with: access to prominence in Amazon search results. When they introduced a new brand, Amazon brand managers could give it an initial “relevancy score” matched to that of an established product, making it appear at the top of search results instead of “starting on the unseen last page with other new brands.” Amazon officially denies this, but I have no doubt that Stone’s anonymous informants told the truth.

Amazon’s reputation for predation certainly doesn’t get better from this book overall. One telling story involves a high level employee departing for Target. “Here was one of the more naked hypocrisies at Amazon, which aggressively poached employees from competitors but considered it an act of absolute treachery when an executive left for a rival.” Only expensive lawyers eventually eased the executive’s slowed-down transition.

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Fiction

rivkat — Tue, 20 Jul 2021 14:28:00 GMT

Stephanie Grey, Zombie Response Team ZRT: Division Tennessee: I was interested in a post-pandemic zombie apocalypse book, but this wasn’t it. Cardboard characters who react to trauma with mean quips and misogyny; tough women contemptuous of “other girls” who are useless bitches braying complaints; bad expository dialogue. DNF.

Chuck Wendig, Zeroes: Hackers (including a troll, a political activist, and a script kiddie with real strength in social engineering) are scooped up for a secret government project, but it’s not what they think and they are soon in mortal danger. OK cyberthriller.

Chuck Wendig, Invasive: Genetically engineered killer ants freak out an FBI futurist sent to investigate them. A fair amount of gore along with the ant science; death of innocents, including at least one child, suggested rather graphically.

Chuck Wendig, Unclean Spirits: Cayson, a former MMA fighter turned reluctant bodyguard for some kind of supernatural being, thinks he’s been released from bondage when his boss is killed. But his wife and son are still trying to kill him, and another supernatural being blames him for the death of her husband. Instead, he joins forces with the murderer to figure out what’s going on, which turns out to be a lot of shenanigans and blasphemy. OK.

Chuck Wendig, The Complete Double Dead: Vampire wakes up after being entombed for decades to find there’s been a zombie apocalypse, which really cuts down on the food supply. He hooks up with a small party of humans who he agrees to protect in return for help finding more humans (but only the bad ones, the cannibals); fortuitously, one of the party has blood that might hold protection against zombification. The concept is the best thing about it; the characters are pretty much stereotypes.

Natalie Zina Walschots, Hench: A Novel: A temp for bad guys has her leg crushed by a superhero during a kidnapping (her bad guy is holding the mayor’s son hostage and about to get him to cut off his own finger via mind control), and decides to total up the damage caused by superheroes. Then she starts working with a supervillain who wants to destroy the hero who caused her injury. It was interesting, especially in light of the current debate over whether cops do more harm than good, but not entirely successful; I found the claim that the heroes created the villains and were therefore responsible for their evil as well to be facile. Lots of body horror.

Diane Duane, Omnitopia Dawn: A MMORPG is about to undergo a major expansion if corporate espionage and cyberattacks don’t stop it, and also something weird is going on with the code. Duane often leans in to the cozy side of her topics, which is often good, but here (1) I didn’t really like the class stuff—seventh richest man in the world (apparently riches not shared with his wife?) with “hot & cold running nannies” for his child, but no one at all was ever exploited by his company? Pull the other one, it’s got bells on. And (2) relatedly, a key plot point is whether he’ll lose control of the company when the stock price falls, and I don’t care how nice a guy he is, his canonically devoted lawyer would never have allowed that structure.

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nonfiction

rivkat — Mon, 19 Jul 2021 22:31:34 GMT

What's the difference between a bag of cat food and a bag of basmati rice in similar shiny packaging? Turns out, our cats didn't sense any, leading to some early morning guerilla bag opening and a need for new rice storage.

Erin Austin Dwyer, Mastering Emotions: Feelings, Power, and Slavery in the United States: 19th-century US slavery with a focus on emotional meanings: ways in which enslaved people were punished for having negative emotions and slavery was justified by claiming that Black people didn’t feel pain the same way white people did; ways in which enslavers were supposed to be in control and ways in which they used their emotions to dominate, or attempted to dominate; etc. Because emotion is so central to all human behavior, this is another lens rather than an account that really introduces new material.

Jordan Ellenberg, Shape: The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Strategy, Democracy, and Everything Else: Ellenberg’s paean to geometry. Sadly, I didn’t like it as much as his first popular book; he tells you that eigenvalues can do important things, but doesn’t quite explain what they are. Still, it’s amusingly written: “If you’re finding it hard to imagine what a fourteen-dimensional landscape looks like, I recommend following the advice of Geoffrey Hinton, one of the founders of the modern theory of neural nets: ‘Visualize a 3-space and say “fourteen” to yourself very loudly. Everyone does it.’” Ellenberg loves geometry because it offers real answers—not necessarily important ones, but indisputable ones. Geometry can also offer insights for things like gerrymandering; he excoriates the Supreme Court’s willful misunderstanding of what anti-gerrymandering advocates seek (not equal representation—that would actually be weird—but representation that doesn’t reflect extreme partisan bias in drawing boundaries). As he explains about states like Wisconsin, “where Republicans get a majority of the statewide vote, the gerrymander doesn’t have much effect; those are elections where the GOP would get an assembly majority anyway. It’s only in Democratic-leaning environments that the gerrymander really kicks in, acting as a firewall.”

Daniel Greene, The Promise of Access: Technology, Inequality, and the Political Economy of Hope: Really interesting study of how public institutions have adopted “startup” models of innovation, trying to turn the citizens they serve into well-trained entrepreneurs who can fend for themselves in the new economy, and the severe limits baked into that model. While the startup model provides real benefits—it seems to be one of the few ways to get some investment out of legislatures; it reframes poverty as a manageable problem of skill mismatch; and it provides the professionals who staff libraries and schools with a coherent framework for understanding their jobs and thinking they’re doing good—it also has fundamental flaws for institutions that can’t and shouldn’t pivot to new customers if the current ones aren’t good enough, or go bankrupt without harming the citizenry at large. His informants include homeless people queueing to use the public computers at the main DC library, who are generally relatively smartphone-savvy; they don’t lack digital skills but safe places to sleep. (They have to wait to use the public computers in part because only entrepreneurs are allowed into the special incubator area for startups with more tech.)

There’s a great example of the conflicts here where the official ideology was that using the computers for porn was “doing the library wrong,” as opposed to submitting job applications. But it was also “clear that porn was a positive example of the sort of service librarians believed they should provide: giving people the space and the materials they could not get elsewhere.” So the librarians felt conflicted because the institution was supposed to be, but also could not be, both “a public service library that welcomed all comers and a bootstrapping library that trained digital professionals.” He tells similar stories about teachers at charter schools who struggled with students’ use of technology in unapproved ways; if the students didn’t perform, the school might not survive, not to mention that the consequences for students of not getting an educational credential could be dire, so the administration shifted to more test-driven and directive measures over time despite their ideological resistance to punishment. Ultimately, “places like schools and libraries cannot help but fail in their duties, but, “because those duties are so important to their survival and that of the people they serve, they will inevitably keep trying. Even if the people served are further marginalized in the process.”

Adam Alter, Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked: Pre-pandemic attack on the designers of addictive tech, especially our phones. Makes much of the fact that many Silicon Valley parents don’t let their kids use devices: “Can you imagine the outcry if religious leaders refused to let their children practice religion?” The core point is that individual willpower isn’t very helpful when there are thousands of entities whose success depends on breaking down individual willpower; the deck is very much stacked against the individual.

The particular behavioral addiction of being glued to our devices may be harming our—and our kids’—attention spans and empathy. (Although as someone who has never liked eye contact, I found the attack on not making consistent eye contact/criticism of how webcams deter direct gaze a bit ableist.) Alter considers online social interaction to be not “the real thing” (e.g., gamers “build simulated friendships that almost look and feel like the real thing”), which my experience of fandom suggests is far from the whole story, but he is not very interested in whether you can have the good of online connection without having the bad. I don’t disagree that there are a lot of ills that online interactions can make worse, but consider the contradictions in this account: He discusses a center that treats so-called gaming/online-induced “intimacy disorders,” the result of which is that men “don’t have the skills to bring sexuality and intimacy together.” But: The center no longer admits women because “we had to revise our policy after a number of patients ignored the ‘no physical intimacy’ rule.” So, you know, it was intimacy but not real intimacy, not the right kind of intimacy.

And for real get off my lawn energy: “Kids of the 1990s and earlier stored dozens of phone numbers in their heads; they interacted with each other rather than with devices; and they made their own fun instead of extracting manufactured fun from ninety-nine cent apps.” I have my issues with Clay Shirky, but I remember growing up in the 1980s and his response to this argument is perfect: “Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan’s Island where they almost get off the island and then Gilligan messes up and they don’t? I saw that one a lot when I was growing up.” Our current situation seems to me genuinely catastrophic, but Fox News has at least as much if not more to do with that in the US, and Alter seems uninterested in making distinctions in evidence. For example, he treats one expert’s recommendation that kids “should be allowed to watch passive TV till they reach elementary school—around age seven—when they should be introduced to interactive media, like iPads” as “agree[ing]” with the American Academy of Pediatrics that “Television and other entertainment media should be avoided for infants and children under age 2,” which is not the same thing. Interestingly, Alter is much more ambivalent about gamification (making tasks more like games), which he concludes is not inherently good or bad, but depends on what else is going on.

But if you really want to change your online habits, he does collate what seems like useful information for making a behavior change into a real habit.
Thomas J. Tobin & Kirsten T. Behling, Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone: Presents the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework as particularly useful for mobile learners. Students who need to keep the noise down so the kids won’t wake up can benefit from captions, for example, or listen to audio versions of study guides as they drive. But it’s relatively easy to present material in different modalities; they argue that it’s both harder and more important to give students opportunities to show their understanding in different modalities, not just written—a video or audio submission should also satisfy requirements in many cases. I’m sympathetic, but the point that testing biology in a written, closed-book exam is also testing “short-term and working memory, organization and time management, attention, and the ability to work under pressure,” and that it should be reconfigured to focus on testing biology principles, only makes sense if you really do just want to test biology understanding. But I think I am testing organization and time management/ability to work under pressure in my open-book midterms and exams; those are things that clients and employers value and that are in fact integrated with substantive knowledge in practice. Even so, I thought the emphasis on defining what success looked like as specifically as possible was helpful, and they do acknowledge that format can be part of what you’re trying to teach.

Cyndi Kernahan, Teaching about Race and Racism in the College Classroom: Hard to believe, but I read this a couple of months ago, before “critical race theory” was the latest scareword for conservatives. Makes a fascinating distinction between teaching (which strives to enable students to be able to understand and apply concepts) and behavior change (which teaching often can’t produce and arguably shouldn’t try for). Because of their different goals, employee diversity training and teaching about race may need to do different things, even if they rely on the same knowledge base about racism. Argues against spending time debunking myths like colorblindness in favor of emphasizing a counterstory about structural racism, since debunking can often just reinforce myths. Also suggests affirming students’ own identities (while not accepting views that contradict reality) as a way of making them more willing to think about structural bias, including by having them think about an axis on which they are disadvantaged. A “growth mindset” also helps counter the shame and guilt that white students often feel, which can, if not overcome, induce them to stop learning to protect their self-concepts.

Stephen D. Brookfield and Associates, Teaching Race: How to Help Students Unmask and Challenge Racism: Focuses on the college classroom. Some of the chapters have specific suggestions about getting students to open up, focusing on creating productive tension and discomfort rather than meaningless “safety.” (So weird to revisit these notes in the context of the current conservative moral panic.) Journaling and other reflective writing exercises are popular. Most chapters emphasize the importance of the instructor’s own vulnerability/acknowledgement of internalized racism and error, while still setting expectations about learning and conversations. Many suggested that getting white students to think about ways in which they have a disfavored characteristic (including gender, sexuality, and disability) could transition them into acknowledging racism and intersectionality.

Stacey Abrams, Lead from the Outside: How to Build Your Future and Make Real Change: Fairly self-help-y about owning your power etc., which means I have to update my opinion about the advice because clearly she knows what she’s talking about. One pull quote: “I have never heard of a student refusing admission to an Ivy League college because her father is why she got into the top-rated school. Likewise, we ‘others’ must be bold in our acceptance of quotas as a way to advance.” Abrams also breaks down the different types of people who can serve mentor-like roles, including peers, and suggests strategies for maximizing their assistance to you, including being clear about what you want from them because most people who want to help you want you to help them help you.

Pankaj Mishra, From the Ruins of Empire: How anticolonial consciousness grew in China, Japan, Iran, Afghanistan, and other Asian/Middle Eastern areas both before and after WWI.

Camila Townsend, Fifth Sun: A history of the people now commonly known as the Aztec Empire, with the arrival of Cortez treated as a big shock but not as the end or beginning of the story, using whenever possible the records they left of themselves—which are relatively extensive given that they had written pictograph records before Cortez and quickly adopted an alphabetical system.

Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth: How the Tax System Impoverishes Black Americans--And How We Can Fix It: American tax law’s marriage bonus for couples filing jointly always helped single-income households more than dual-income households, which meant that it disproportionately helped whites (and, Brown says, was adopted into federal tax law in order to discourage more states from converting to community property states for all marital purposes, which would have benefited women). As marital income rises, more white wives don’t work and more Black ones do, so the divergence persists and even increases. And, she incisively points out, one $100,000/year job is likely to have better health and retirement benefits than two $50,000/year jobs, along with freeing up one person’s labor for the home/raising children, so the single-income, more-likely-to-be-white family is even more relatively advantaged. Mathematically there’s either a marriage penalty or a marriage bonus, but which it is is unequally racially distributed (and the penalty is large if you’re eligible for the EITC, to add injury to injury). This is a key reason that getting married increases white wealth by $75,000 but Black wealth by nothing. And that’s just chapter one; real estate taxes/deductions, student loan debt/nonprofit schools versus for-profit higher ed that is more likely to enroll Black students and leave them with debt even if without a degree, employment, retirement plans, stock ownership, and inherited wealth all come in for their contributions to inequality via the tax system in particular. These advantages reinforce each other, so that, for example, whites whose grandparents weren’t homeowners are now more likely to own their homes than Black people whose grandparents were homeowners. Brown has some proposed changes, including ending joint filing, which is apparently unusual internationally. Her key point: “Increasing access to a system designed to build white wealth will ultimately not work to build black wealth.”

Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, & Sheila Heen, Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most: Conflict management advice: Working out how to listen with curiosity to others’ perspectives by finding their story of how and why the conflict occurred; how to disentangle character/intent from impact (yours and theirs); how to recognize the importance of the parties’ feelings while not treating them as attributions of “who is really to blame”; and so on. Seems quite useful and quite difficult to commit to. Key principles: In a conflict, everyone makes a contribution, which is not the same as everyone being to blame, equally or otherwise. Resolving a conflict requires understanding the parties’ contribution, but does not require judging, especially by the parties themselves. But the key thing here is that avoiding blame does not mean avoiding your feelings about the conflict. There are example conversations of how to reframe away from blame to understanding, even in the face of a partner who wants to win instead.

Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous: WEIRD stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. This is a long and fascinating book with tons of references to interesting research that I could only gesture vaguely at even in a long review. Basically, Henrich argues that a society’s organization can change individual brains, which then can change the society further. These changes mean that memory works differently for different groups, as does visual processing and facial recognition, and he argues that they can also explain big differences in moral reasoning, such as the relative importance of guilt v. shame in controlling behavior. Westerners are more likely than non-Westerners to participate in punishing someone who has broken norms but not personally harmed them, and less likely to seek revenge against someone who has personally harmed them. Also, fundamental attribution error—attributing behavior to character rather than circumstance—turns out to be fundamental only to the WEIRD; non-Westerners are more likely to explain behavior by pointing to an individual’s circumstances. We are more subject to the endowment effect (valuing things more because we deem them ours), we value having choices more, and we overestimate our own talents more.

Why? The book argues that the West, for whatever reason (Henrich doesn’t speculate), largely adopted a particular kind of monotheism that promoted monogamy; discouraged concentration of power in kin groups because they stood as counterweights to Church power; enforced monogamy so that powerful men couldn’t have multiple wives; and ultimately promoted individualism, which led to things like literacy and non-kin affinity networks such as coreligionists and political parties. “How many people do you personally know who married their cousins? If you know none, that’s WEIRD, since 1 in 10 marriages around the world today is to a cousin or other relative.” (A country’s rate of cousin marriage turns out to correlate with a lot of these other things, like generalized trust, rate of blood donations, and even how many parking tickets a UN delegation gets.) Less kin-based societies developed other mechanisms of social control, focusing on individual behavior and punishing defectors without getting into revenge cycles.

As a result, Westerners became psychologically distinct from other groups. Among other things, we are more likely than non-Westerners to be trusting of strangers, to favor testifying truthfully that our friends committed a crime over lying to protect them, and otherwise to favor large structures over close kin groups. There are similar differences within Western society, so areas that became Protestant early on are even more WEIRD in these ways than areas that were or stayed Catholic, and so too with immigrants’ children; “people in North Dakota and New Hampshire are the most trusting, with around 60 percent of people generally trusting others; meanwhile, at the other end, only about 20 percent of people are generally trusting in Alabama and Mississippi.” This dynamic isn’t unique to Christianity; Heinrich argues that similar patterns can be discerned in groups from India and China which developed in more or less kin-oriented directions.

There is a lot of fascinating stuff, including the effect of individualism on walking speed in crowded cities. What there is not is much discussion of the meaning of percentages and proportions. So, Westerners are a lot more likely than non-Westerners to trust strangers … but that means that there are a lot of untrusting Westerners and trusting non-Westerners. (Likewise: Peer pressure is powerful, and studies show that when an experimenter’s confederates give obviously wrong answers to objective questions, a number of people often go with the majority despite being unhappy and uncomfortable doing so—from 20% in highly individualistic societies to 40-50% in highly communal societies—which is a big change, but not a complete one.) This complexity also extends to the race/class/gender differences washed away in much of this discussion—Western trust is often limited to those who match the right profile, which is a very different thing from generalized trust although also a very different thing from “I only trust my close kin.” Because Henrich is interested in dynamic processes, he argues that there is an inherent pressure to trust (etc.) larger and larger groups once the process of leaving kin behind begins, so that’s how you get people who agree that all human people have valid moral claims on one another. But how we get there, and how far we are from there, matters, especially given that it seems that trust is declining in the West and that many people are willing to prey economically and politically on the (often racialized) trust that exists.

I’m not even getting into his discussions of the varying effects of testosterone depending on society/the presence of polygamy; the variances in behavior of WEIRD and non-WEIRD people competing within a group versus competing among groups; the psychological effects of war (which 18th century Europe experienced pretty constantly). He is not a genetic determinist. For creativity, for example, he argues that exposure to different sources of knowledge drives innovation far more than anything we could call “natural” intelligence. And in the key centuries, he argues, European cities were pretty much deathtraps requiring a constant inflow of rural migrants, meaning that natural selection is not a good explanation for WEIRD psychology.

Andrew L. Whitehead & Samuel L. Perry, Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States: Argues that Christian nationalism is a distinct entity from religiosity in the US. So, for example, Christian nationalists see serving in the military as important to being “a good person,” while being devoutly religious decreases the likelihood that a person endorses this view. “As Americans show greater agreement with Christian nationalism, they are more likely to view Muslim refugees as terrorist threats, agree that citizens should be made to show respect for America’s traditions, and oppose stricter gun control laws. But as Americans become more religious in terms of attendance, prayer, and Scripture reading, they move in the opposite direction on these issues.” Devotional religiousity is associated with ideas of caring for the vulnerable, while Christian nationalism is “unrelated” to taking care of the sick and needy, and Christian nationalists are less likely to believe that actively seeking social and economic justice is important to being a good person. In their view, it is fundamentally a political orientation, not a religious one.

Although the authors conclude that Christian nationalism “allows those who embrace it to express a racialized identity without resorting to racialized terms,” they hold (less persuasively) that it’s not reducible to racism. The reasoning: there is a noticeable percentage of US-minority groups that hold “certain” Christian nationalist views (like endorsing militarism, teaching the Bible in schools, the special role of the US in God’s plan, and traditional gender roles) but also have a strong racial justice orientation, “the exact opposite of what we see in white Americans.” By their data, 65% of Blacks support Christian nationalism, the largest proportion of any racial group (though support is not necessarily full endorsement).

James Dommek Jr., Midnight Son: Not-very-resolved nonfiction/podcast type thing about a Native Alaskan who went from aspiring movie star to convicted attempted murderer, who claimed to have encountered/been stalked by people out of myth. Interesting Alaskan color, but listen for the characters and not the story.

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Nonfiction

rivkat — Fri, 25 Jun 2021 18:12:41 GMT

Barack Obama, A Promised Land: The basic theme of this book is “I did the best I could,” and I think it is further evidence for the tragic reading of his presidency: The very thing that made him electable—his sincere and unflagging faith in the ability of white Americans to come together with Black Americans in particular—made him unable, both temperamentally and to a certain extent politically, to play hardball with Republican intransigience. One appalling thing I learned from the book is that their internal polling found that the controversy over his comments on Henry Louis Gates and the cop who arrested him on his own front porch caused his support to drop substantially among whites, and that support never returned. That’s a lot of racism.

Victor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning: Frankl’s account of his experience in concentration camps, where he watched many people die—he says that the best of them did—and developed his theory of human psychology. It’s not quite that the meaning of life is that it ends, but rather that the meaning of life is what you give it; if suffering is inevitable, then living through it by valuing something outside yourself is meaningful. He’s careful to say that avoidable suffering is not itself meaningful and should be corrected.

George Chauncey, Gay New York: Really interesting preface to the reprint edition about how Chauncey would treat transgender issues differently if he were writing it 20 years later. Chauncey argues that in the 1890s and for several decades thereafter, the flourishing gay life in NYC was not defined by sexual object choice but by gender—“fairies” etc. were men who “took the woman’s part” and therefore “had a woman’s soul.” Among other things, this meant that many men who had or even preferred sex with women were willing to interact with and have sex with men we’d now call gay. Relatedly, working-class gay male life was heavily integrated with working-class heterosexual male life. Although many men saw themselves as living a double life or wearing a mask, they did not see themselves as “closeted” in the sense of isolated from other gay men. There were robust public forms of gay life, including balls, bathhouses, and bars, most of which were shut down by midcentury (the bathhouses lived until the AIDS crisis) but which before that were publicly acknowledged by newspapers, police, and others. It wasn’t that being gay was safe—arrests and attacks were real, albeit less common than they became—but that gay men nonetheless carved out lives that included public aspects.

Kurt Kohlstedt & Roman Mars, The 99% Invisible City: A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design: A bunch of nuggets about (mostly) urban design, from the boxes that let firefighters get into buildings without breaking doors to pigeon habitats; a little too sample-y for my tastes but it sounds like they go into more detail on the podcast.

Kathryn S. Olmsted, Real Enemies: One feature of the paranoid style in 20th century US politics, Olmsted argues, is that the paranoid fantasies often have recognizable cousins in real things the government did and covered up. The US did have intelligence about Japan’s intentions to attack, albeit not specific enough to predict Pearl Harbor; the government did skimp on investigations into JFK’s assassination in order to prevent a feared war with the USSR if too many Communist ties came to light; etc. Olmsted doesn’t discuss race very much, but the book is mostly about white fantasies, and so its limitation to the 20th century also limits its analysis, since white fantasies of slave insurrections are also part of the US story.

David Dayen, Monopolized: How monopolies make everything suck so much in the US, including health care, jobs, Facebook, broadband, and so on. Interludes introduce particular areas of monopoly, like big rental companies. Depressing but on the other hand if breaking up the monopolies would open up so much room for improvement, maybe that’s encouraging?

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey Into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred: Along with some Scientific American-type explanations (with more cursing) of what we know about physics right now, she talks about her life as a scientist, including how being raped affected her as a scientist, along with other aspects of being a Black, agender scientist who presents feminine. She doesn’t like the “dark matter” metaphor for Black experience because Black people are perfectly visible and made of the same stuff as white people; as she says, there’s a lot of dark matter passing through you right now but not a lot of black people. Given the choice, she would have named the stuff “invisible ether” or something like that. Also has an interesting comparison of knowledge claims in physics—white guys saying that empirical study isn’t necessary/important given their theories versus basically the same white guys constantly demanding proof acceptable to them that there is racial/gender bias in the scientific establishment.

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Fiction and Star Trek

rivkat — Thu, 24 Jun 2021 18:27:00 GMT

Big backlog on reviews, but will work on it.

My daughter has consented to watch ST:TOS and I am constantly dumbfounded by Shatner's luminous beauty, always sweating/glowing under the studio lights, giving him a dewy masculinity that's such a huge contrast to the other, craggier male castmembers. He's even regularly lit like a femme fatale, a band of light across his eyes, though they don't blur the lens for him the way they do when a young woman is the only one in frame. (Uhura gets the blur, I was deeply relieved to see; she and Spock are already my daughter's favorites.)

Foz Meadows, A Tyranny of Queens: Didn’t realize this was a sequel until I started; a young Australian girl has returned from a magical land that transformed her—she spoke with dragons and became a queen—and her family thinks she’s traumatized from abduction and perhaps assault. As she becomes more convinced that her home is no longer safe for her, the world she left is still in trouble because of a rogue queen seeking to expose the secrets that keep the worlds linked but separate from one another. That part was less interesting to me, which might have been because I missed the first book; the matriarchal culture with lots of multiple-person political marriages that didn’t have to involve sex was interesting, but I never quite got into it.

Jane Austen, Emma: Never read it before, but glad I did at last.

Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey: Ok, yes, it’s cruder than her later works, but I loved it. Austen the narrator is so archly present, so willing to bring us in on the joke but so fond of her subject—she begins with a defense of reading novels!—that I had a rollicking good time with a gothic romance with no actual threat in it at all.

Jane Austen, Persuasion: Another one where it’s obvious why it’s not the most famous or beloved, but takes domestic struggles (of the rich) quite seriously while also making room for the things their class position enables them not to see.

C.L. Polk, The Midnight Bargain: In a patriarchal society that collars female mages to prevent their unborn children from being possessed by spirits, a young woman studies magic and hopes to avoid collaring with the help of the secretly printed grimoires for women. There’s love and loyalty and, possibly my favorite, dedication to helping people put above personal romance. It’s generally good fun though perhaps a bit sanguine about the easiness of big social change.

Chuck Wendig, Blackbirds: Miriam’s talent allows her to see how people will die, but not to do anything about it. She survives on the road mainly by robbing the newly dead. When a grifter figures out her ability, he plunges her into deadly danger; meanwhile, the nice trucker she met is going to die shortly, saying her name. Gritty noir horror-ish story, edging towards crapsack world without going all the way over.

David Brin, The Best of David Brin: Short story collection (ranging from a few pages to the novella that became the first part of The Postman). Speculative fiction in the classic sense; my favorite was the story about the geneticist who worked to reawaken now-useless DNA, first to help us regrow organs and later for a much more complex purpose, ignoring what the biologists would have told him.

Chuck Wendig, The Book of Accidents: Stephen King-esque story of Olly, a boy who can sense others’ pain, and his parents, an artist and a cop turned park ranger, who move into the father’s old house. Olly’s new friend Jake is pretty dangerous, and there’s a serial killer who is convinced that killing 99 girls is the way to end/save the world mixed in. If you are feeling King thirst, this might do it for you.

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Fiction

rivkat — Fri, 21 May 2021 17:30:38 GMT

Saad Z Hossain, Djinn City: Centered on Bangladesh, the story follows members of a family of emissaries to the djinn—humans who know about and negotiate with the djinn, who look down on humans and some of whom plan to exterminate a substantial portion of humanity. One child is kidnapped, believing himself betrayed by the rest of his family, and becomes an apprentice to a very dangerous djinn, while his older cousin finds a new purpose in trying to fight the extermination plot. The ending involved a lot of betrayal and unfinished business; there is as yet no sequel, so it was kind of a downer.

Seanan McGuire, Dying with Her Cheer Pants On:Stories of the Fighting Pumpkins, a California cheerleading team responsible for saving the world from the myriad dark things that want to eat it, or at least its people. McGuire’s signature style is on display aimed at a group of Buffys, including a vampire, a zombie, and a number of other superpowered cheerleaders who could probably win national titles if they weren’t busy fighting evil.

Charles Stross, Escape from Puroland: Laundry Files novella from when Bob was still just the replacement Eater of Souls and the stars hadn’t yet come right. He’s sent to Japan to help out his counterparts there, which causes a bunch of tension especially since his predecessor was a racist ass, and he fights Hello Kitty.

Tasha Suri, The Jasmine Throne: Excellent new series starter about a fantasy world in which a conquered nation suffers under both the conquerors and the rot destroying people and crops, without the temple children who used to use magic to protect them. But there are a few survivors, and when the emperor’s disgraced sister is exiled to the former temple, there to die of poison or to submit to being burned alive, one of the former temple children finds herself increasingly torn between her own wants and duties and her attraction to the princess. They are not good, but they may be great. I look forward to the next book!

Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This: Unsurprisingly poetic, stream-of-consciousness novel about a woman who is embedded in the “portal” (social media) to the exclusion of other parts of life, and whose consciousness starts to stream off into nothingness while she is filled with rage and love; then, a family tragedy rips her from the portal and back into a different kind of time than internet time. Beautifully done if the constant paragraphs and half-paragraphs and quotes of real and made-up memes won’t annoy you exceedingly.

C.L. Polk, Soulstar: Conclusion of Polk’s trilogy about a fantasy England where the aether got shut off because the lives powering it were freed, and how the revolutionary democrats struggle with freeing the witches, securing broader democratic representation, and navigating both political peril and personal drama with estranged family and long-lost spouses. It’s got a lot of happy ending but there’s clearly been a lot of work to get there, so if you enjoyed the rest of the series, this will probably satisfy.

Danez Smith, Homie: This book of poems has another name, but Smith doesn’t want white people to say it. It’s a modern Whitman in stream of consciousness and investment in the body and the body’s selfhood—here the Black body very specifically, often a male body. Smith is seropositive and writes about the drug regimen keeping him healthy when so many have not been, and about the friends he’s lost as well as about the joys of staying alive.

Linden A. Lewis, The First Sister: This was pitched as space opera with The Handmaid’s Tale, and that’s not inaccurate though it is aspirational. One main character is a silent Sister (they are silenced so that they can just listen to and support the soldiers who use them for confession and sexual access), while another is a fighter on the opposing side, whose own regime turns out to have its share of horrific tortures and injustices. It was a bit too crapsack world for me even though there is clearly some hope at the end.

C.S. Friedman, This Virtual Night: A sf book about farflung humanity with very of-the-moment concerns: a hacked game convinces people that they’re seeing unreal things, manipulating them in order to destroy human space stations. A scrappy bounty hunter type and a game designer who’s been scapegoated join forces to figure out what’s going on. It’s fun.

Andy Weir, Project Hail Mary: A man wakes up, alone with two corpses, in what he quickly discovers is a spaceship on a last-ditch mission to try to save the entire planet from sun-energy-devouring lifeforms. His goal: Tau Ceti, whose star somehow has fought off the infestation. Much science—and then engineering—follows. Even as he gets his memories back, there’s not much in the way of characterization, but if you like Boy Scouts in Space (in pretty much every sense you can imagine), you will probably like this.

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Nonfiction

rivkat — Wed, 12 May 2021 20:53:02 GMT

Kio Stark, When Strangers Meet: Advocates for talking to strangers as a way of reinforcing, and surprising ourselves (and our interlocutors) with, the humanity of other people. Suggests that voluntary encounters with strangers can be deeply intimate and rewarding in ways that encounters with people we already “know” often aren’t because of the surprise of the encounter. Has a bunch of cautionary language about unwantedness and differential access to public space; says that the virtue of encounters with strangers is cross-cultural but I wondered to what extent that was true.

George E. Vaillant, Triumphs of Experience: Stories from the retrospective study of the lives of a cohort of Harvard men who were there just before WWII broke out. Among the big lessons: we keep changing a lot over a lifetime; having a good childhood is protective but having a bad childhood does not guarantee a bad outcome; alcoholism is the cause of a lot of problems that are attributed to other things.

Hana Schank and Tara Dawson McGuinness, Power to the Public: The Promise of Public Interest Technology: My spouse thought that this book disingenuously ignored that often powerful government officials don’t want government to work better, but I didn’t think so; as it said, every system is really good at doing what it was actually designed to do, and often enough that is to suppress complaint and enrich consultants. What should people do if they in good faith want government to deliver services that people need with the help of technology? Perhaps surprisingly, their answer is first to spend a lot of time asking the recipients and the ground-level workers delivering the services what they need, and then use the technology available to make that as simple as possible. The most powerful anecdote involves having lawmakers try to fill out the complicated forms for getting public assistance in Michigan while sitting in a hallway filled with recorded noise from an actual public assistance office. When they couldn’t come close to doing it, they had to admit that there was a problem.

Patrick Radden Keefe, Empire of Pain: The story of the Sackler family, from the patriarch who invented modern pharma marketing (including for Librium)—with a big order of lies and corruption of FDA officials—to the children who oversaw the rise of the opioid crisis in the US and then pivoted to exporting it elsewhere once they’d done so much damage here as to be undeniable. And then Trump’s DOJ mostly let the family off the hook, though the story isn’t quite over. Massachusetts AG Maura Healey is one of the book’s heroes. In the earlier parts, with Arthur/his brothers’ story, I kept thinking how they probably at least knew people who knew my doctor grandfather—also raised in the NY area by working-class immigrants, also excluded from most med schools because he was Jewish (Arthur dodged this by being just old enough to go through before the policies were firmly in place, but his brothers didn’t), also even worked as a soda jerk in a pharmacy to earn the cash to go to med school, but he chose radical politics and seeing patients instead of advertising drugs and now my name is not synonymous with callous greed.

Leidy Klotz, Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less: People often overlook the benefits of removing things, choosing instead to add and make them more complex. Lots of examples here and some useful advice about framing subtractive changes in ways that don’t trigger loss aversion as easily, though I didn’t need the end lecture about climate change.

James Shapiro, Shakespeare in a Divided America: Close readings of specific productions/films, including Shakespeare in Love and the Trump-evoking Julius Caesar that triggered right-wing outrage in recent years.

Mehrsa Baradaran, How the Other Half Banks: Although banking has always been entwined with government objectives, in the current US system the government supports bank profits while not requiring much from banks in return: Nearly half of the population is unwanted by traditional banks, and thus forced to turn to high-fee check cashing and lending services. Baradaran gives a capsule history of banking in the US and argues for a resurrection of postal banks, which could help the unbanked and provide modest amounts of credit without the life-destroying interest rates that current lenders to the poor charge.

Martin J. Sherwin, Gambling with Armageddon: Sherwin says that when he set out to write this history of nuclear confrontation from WWII to the Cuban Missile Crisis, he thought he was going to disprove the claim that nuclear war was avoided only by luck; by the end, though, he was absolutely convinced that luck was the only explanation. With a kind of literary rack focus, he starts with some details of the crisis itself—orders to launch missiles on both sides, given by low-level officials, that were only overridden due to the luck of the draw of who was listening to them—and then pulls back to give a history of nuclear doctrine after WWII and then a policy history of the crisis, in which Kennedy plays the role of pushing for a political solution over the desires of most of his Cabinet to go to war. Adlai Stevenson shows up as a disliked but valued counselor who also doesn’t want a war. I really enjoyed the book, though I can see where someone wouldn’t like the organization; the connections between the policy and the near disasters on the ground could have been explored in greater detail.

Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning: Essays on racism, the author’s Korean-American identity, friendships, artistic development, and Richard Pryor (among other things). Striking: “One characteristic of racism is that children are treated like adults and adults are treated like children. Watching a parent being debased like a child is the deepest shame.”

Anne Harrington, The Mind Fixers: History of how psychiatrists and other doctors kept returning to a search for physical sources of mental illness, even during the age of Freud; the brain keeps being rediscovered as the problem instead of the mind, even as particular theories of why tend to fail in various ways and have historically supported various forms of discrimination.

Andrés Reséndez, The Other Slavery: History of Indian slavery in North America, focusing mainly on the Spanish but in the later chapters discussing the US adaptation to this other slavery. Women and children were apparently preferred as slaves and different groups became sources of enslaved people or enslavers as political alliances changed. Spain’s rulers tried to ban slavery relatively early on, but it was nonetheless reinstated as peonage, which the author argues provides some lessons in the flexibility and relentlessness of exploitation today.

Gerda Lerner, Living With History: Lerner became a PhD historian in her forties and fought for the recognition of women’s history as an important field. These essays detail her accomplishments and some rules of thumb for how to think about recognizing women’s lives and contributions in historical contexts.

David Kaiser, How the Hippies Saved Physics: After the Cold War/post-Sputnik boom, physics programs got so many people that they stopped trying to teach and ask the big philosophical questions in favor of problem sets that could be graded quickly. Then, the bottom fell out of physics programs in the late 70s/80s as the government stopped funding basic research. The people who were asking big questions about things like whether time travel was possible, or whether instantaneous communication was possible, got shoved to the side and spent a bunch of time interacting with people who believed that psychic powers were real or possibly real. Although they were generally wrong, Kaiser argues that they posed the questions whose answers—or rebuttals—paved the way for modern physics and things like truly secure encryption.

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Fiction/Julie and the Phantoms

rivkat — Tue, 13 Apr 2021 16:23:58 GMT

Just finished watching Julie and the Phantoms on Netflix, a show that has no business being as good as it ended up being. Julie is a teen who lost her mom, and also lost the ability to play the music that she used to make with her mom. When she accidentally brings three ghosts—three members of a boy band that was on the verge of breaking out when they died—back, they discover that they can be heard when they’re making music. The actors commit to roles that require extreme suspension of disbelief, and they’re very wholesome and charming. The songs are generic but the lead is a great singer, and I ended up sobbing twice in later episodes because it skillfully played on my heartstrings. Obviously, premised on death of a parent, death of a teenaged child. Mild romance, no sex.

Leigh Bardugo, Rule of Wolves: Conclusion of the King of Scars duology in which the war between Ravka and Fierda is resolved, at least for now. Mostly the guilty are punished and the just rewarded, including a fascinating solution to the problem of who the king will be, and in general it was satisfying.

Adrian Tchaikovsky, Guns of the Dawn: Fantasy war novel: the protagonist is a minor noblewoman who, when her country starts drafting women to serve in its ongoing war against its revolutionary neighbor, becomes a soldier in the hated swamp country. There is sorcery, conferred on men of breeding by anointing them with the king’s blood, but it is overmatched by the enemy’s guns. Ultimately, she has to decide what honor means in a corrupt and corrupting system.

Adrian Tchaikovsky, The Tiger and the Wolf: Shapeshifters without fandom tropes. The protagonist is the child of the tiger queen (by rape) and a would-be wolf king, headman of one of the wolf bands. Raised by the wolf shifters, she has two animal souls/forms but will have to choose one to survive. Her father’s grim plans for her lead her to flee as he chases; her story interacts with a snake priest come from the South for mysterious reasons and a Southern champion with a monstrous crocodile form.

Aiden Thomas, Cemetery Boys: A trans boy who wants to be a brujo accidentally summons the wrong dead spirit, a young cis man who is definitely not reconciled to being dead; he and his vegan best friend—who refuses to perform bruja magic because it requires animal blood—have to figure out how to deal with a mysterious death and also with the hot ghost while navigating magical family/community that isn’t really sure how to treat their children who aren’t doing things the usual way. The villain is pretty obvious. No transphobic violence (but a few references to harassment and a couple of family members misgender the protagonist, albeit not as a matter of policy/consistently).

Susanna Clarke, Piranesi: Piranesi (though he doesn’t think that’s his name, it’s what the Other calls him) lives in a great House full of infinite rooms themselves full of statues, and sometimes the sea. Through his journal, we start to see that the mystery here is not what Piranesi thinks it is. It’s an eerie, mournful story with striking descriptions of the statues that make up Piranesi’s mostly lonely world.

Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future: Robinson’s usual great ecological detail/political theories and musings applied to climate change in the near future. Things aren’t great but he argues that there’s a path forward, essentially via socialism. Seems to me to understate the chances that the US will fuck it up for everyone, but if you want to read something that is moderately hopeful (despite depicting tens of millions of deaths in already-unavoidable disasters) about fixing the climate, this could do it.

Everina Maxwell, Winter’s Orbit: Forced into marriage with his cousin’s widower in order to secure a galactic peace treaty, a prince known for being irresponsible and happy-go-lucky falls hard for the tightly controlled man he’s married nearly as soon as they met. But mutual incomprehension and political conspiracy stand in the way. Mutual pining, very strong clam/not-clam dynamics.

Seanan McGuire, Across the Green Grass Fields:This Wayward Children book is different from most of the others because it’s almost entirely about the protagonist’s adventures in the Otherlands—in her case, a world of unicorns and centaurs and other hooved beings. Regan misses her parents and doesn’t want to fulfill the destiny that everyone assumes a human there must have, and it’s another version of the sadness and necessity of growing up.

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ISO fan artist to commission

rivkat — Sat, 10 Apr 2021 04:47:14 GMT

I would like to commission some Leverage (Parker) fan art for my daughter's birthday. All suggestions welcome.

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rivkat — Mon, 29 Mar 2021 22:58:27 GMT

Anne Appelbaum, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism: Center-right, Jewish, US-born wife of Polish politician writes about the new elites who promote and support authoritarian leaders, some of whom used to be her friends. She diagnoses them as people who resent meritocracy, and who generally didn’t do as well as some of the people they grew up with but aren’t poor, rural, or losing jobs to immigrants. Chapters on Poland, Hungary, Britain, and the US; in each, authoritarians use nationalism to cover up corruption. One set of elites offers a vision of ethnic community instead of competition (meritocratic or otherwise). Argues that authoritarian personalities, bothered by complexity, exist on both sides but acknowledges that the authoritarians with political power are right-wing. Social media comes in for its share too; she argues that things didn’t get really bad, despite immigration and economic decline, until the relentless firehose of modern communication got and kept us (us?) angry. As she points out, what really unites these so-called nationalists on the right is their dislike of the actual countries they live in and their fear of their fellow citizens.

Heather McGhee, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together: Similar ground to Dying of Whiteness—ways in which racism divides whites from people of color, especially Black people, and thus leads to worse outcomes for everyone. The public pools that were closed around the country to avoid integration, denying everyone but people who could afford private pools the ability to swim so that they wouldn’t be swimming together, are both metaphor and very concrete example of this general worsening. With pools, “[a] once-public resource became a luxury amenity, and entire communities lost out on the benefits of public life and civic engagement once understood to be the key to making American democracy real. Today, we don’t even notice the absence of the grand resort pools in our communities ….” Appeals to white racism allowed Republicans to switch from high marginal taxes and investment in the middle class to low taxes and disinvestment. In 1980, five out of six students at public colleges were white; now it’s under six in ten; and it is no accident that public funding for higher education was gutted during this transition, and student debt skyrocketed—including for the whites who are still the majority of those borrowers (though they carry lower debt loads). McGhee wrote before the most recent round of voter suppression measures, but those too will disenfranchise a lot of white people in order to disproportionately harm Black voters. And pollution in minority communities hurts and kills those communities, but also contaminates nearby white communities: more segregation means worse air quality in a city, even controlling for poverty.

Thus, McGhee argues, progressive politics should focus on rejecting the zero-sum framing which is right now the automatic way in which many whites perceive progressive policies, even ones presented in race-neutral terms. For example, she emphasizes the benefits of diversity, not for white people but for decisionmaking, citing research suggesting that groups with less demographic similarity produce better solutions and do better at discovering the different information held by different members. It’s more cognitive effort, which means it’s less comfortable even without racism, but it works better.

Virginia DeJohn Anderson, Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America: Interesting book on how livestock were central to the encounter between English colonists and Indians in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The English assumed that livestock cultivation would both allow the English settlers to control the new lands, transforming them into private property, and “civilize” Indians. But that’s not what happened for a very long time—instead, because of limited labor resources, the colonists regularly let their livestock run wild, which led to more conflict with Indians since the colonists wouldn’t stick to the land they said they wanted. Indians tried to integrate the new animals into their existing worldviews, but colonists often had the raw military power to insist both on their special status as property—even if wandering free in the woods—and on their subordinate status as nonhumans, contrary to many Indian understandings of the natural world. “As agents of empire, livestock occupied land in advance of English settlers, forcing native peoples who stood in their way either to fend the animals off as best they could or else to move on.” Anderson suggests that the intrusions of livestock can explain why Indian violence was primarily directed against settler property, not settler persons, including why they would sometimes mutilate animals instead of carrying them off to eat. Indians knew how much livestock mattered to the English, and the animals had “amply earned the Indians’ enmity in their own right” by destroying Indians’ cultivated crops and eating the plants that deer had previously consumed.

Michael W. Twitty, The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South: An awful lot of lists of places, ethnic groups, and foods, but also a narrative of the meaning of food, heritage, and place to a Black man whose conversion to Judaism and his gayness make him often unusual in any group in which he finds himself. Twitty navigates the fact that there are white rapists in his family tree, and that tracing Black genealogy has been difficult because of the erasures of slavery; he uses genetic testing to identify his various lineages and emphasizes its contingent and probabalistic, but still helpful, results.

Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents: If you’ve read a lot about US racism, there might not be much new here—Wilkerson compares it to Indian caste systems because of caste’s requirements of hierarchy and degradation, but I think I might have gotten more from a book about Indian caste systems. Most shocking-but-not-shocking fact: “In hiring black teachers for segregated schools during Jim Crow, a leading southern official, Hoke Smith, made a deliberate decision: ‘When two Negro teachers applied to a school, to “take the less competent.”’ ” I also appreciated Wilkerson’s point that caste is at work “in how the parties respond to their respective bases. The Republican reverence for its base of white evangelicals stands in stark contrast to the indifference often shown the Democratic base of African-Americans ….”

Maria Konnikova, The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win:Konnikova became a pro poker player by apprenticing to a master and listening to his advice, eventually, about how to move past emotional reactions and learn to think about the whole context of a poker game. She wanted to understand risk and chance and assert whatever control she could over an unpredictable world; although she rejects the ten-thousand-hours-of-practice rule, it’s also clear that practice is required, though not sufficient, so that evaluations of situations can become fast and frugal.

Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: How the feds were involved in the creation of the largest carceral state in the world, starting with antipoverty programs that were funneled at least in part through police/law enforcement structures because that was politically simple. The antipoverty focus faded but the crime control remained. Hinton argues that things like after-school programs overseen by police exposed poor kids, especially poor Black kids, to enhanced surveillance, though she doesn’t actually seem to provide evidence that the recordkeeping was such that this really worsened the situation for them. Funding for greater incarceration and moves to longer sentences, by contrast, clearly did.

Sarah Kendzior, Hiding in Plain Sight: A lot of (good) rhetoric but not a lot of facts per page about American corruption and its (I hope) apotheosis in Donald Trump. Her editorials and her earlier book, The View from Flyover Country, would be better reads in terms of forcing us to confront harsh truths about the criminals who have flourished over the past few decades.

Martin Senftleben, The Copyright / Trademark Interface: How the Expansion of Trademark Protection Is Stifling Cultural Creativity: An extensive exploration of copyright/trademark conflicts, where trademark rights are asserted to prevent the free use of cultural symbols that were never in copyright or whose copyright has been expired. He makes a great point that both the US and EU legal systems are much more aggressive about preventing trademark from duplicating or extending patent rights than they are about preventing copyright overlap, suggesting that “we care more about freedom to build upon Lego brick functionality than we care about freedom to remix Mickey Mouse and the Mona Lisa.” Senftleben, understandably, thinks that’s a bad choice.

Allie Brosh, Solutions and Other Problems: More disjointed and rambling than her first book, which she acknowledges and says is a reflection of the disjointedness and meaninglessness of life. Although she’s an engaging writer, and although what happened to her after her first book (serious health crises, both physical and mental) is affecting, I would probably stick with the first book.

Jen Gunter, The Menopause Manifesto: After a few chapters of history/rumination on misogyny in medicine, a very comprehensive overview of what we know about menopause’s physical—including cognitive/emotional—effects and variations, as well as potential treatments for different symptoms that are causing distress. I definitely agree that we need more information about and discussion of menopause: I had no idea that much, much heavier periods—enough so that I became anemic—were reasonably common in the menopause transition, until I started researching. She’s a fan of properly prescribed hormone therapy, and down on compounded medications, whose quality control/dose regularity is worse than Big Pharma’s even though their chemical composition is no more “natural” or better in any other way: “Compounded hormones aren’t helping women avoid the gaps in medicine; they’re exploiting them.”

Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America: Kendi has a very specific, deliberately ahistorical idea of what constitutes racism, or more specifically antiracism, which I don’t think works as well as he does. But the idea of tracing American theories of race from Cotton Mather to Angela Davis is interesting, and I did learn some things.

Sarah Chayes, On Corruption in America: And What Is at Stake: While others diagnose our key political problem as monopoly, Chayes thinks that it’s corruption—which both aids and is aided by monopoly. With fewer specifics than I might have hoped for, Chayes draws connections between the US past, the US present, and the present of other countries. For example, in comparing the US Gilded Age and Afghanistan: “Beneath what is usually framed in economic terms as corporate consolidation, I saw clusters of people sorting themselves out into relatively stable, rival—yet often allied—corruption networks.” And she finds continuities among the corrupt. “Every kleptocratic network that I have investigated, from Afghanistan to Honduras to Central Asian or African countries, has included a skein of outright criminals.” Personal relationships through marriage and kinship might not be as vital in the US as in other places [though see Trump] because other US institutions are stronger—colleges, the Koch network, and money, “that leveler.”

The most common and most effective tactic to deploy against anticorruption is to exploit and inflame ethnic or similar identity divisions. The solutions or natural reactions to corruption come from the labor movement or, if alternatives seem useless, violent extremism; widespread disasters like WWII offer the opportunity for reform. Chayes suggests redefined and expanded criminal prohibitions on bribery and enforcement thereof; also there is no alternative to civic education and continued activism.

E. Charlotte Stevens, Fanvids: Television, Women, and Home Media Re-Use: An overview of where vidding has been and its place in the “archive” of our relations to TV. I didn’t learn a lot but it was a useful collection of scholarship and also has some nice close readings, including of vids by giandujakiss and dualbunny .

Anjali Vats, The Color of Creatorship: Intellectual Property, Race, and the Making of Americans: A provocative book more compelling in its arguments about the racialization of copyright and patent law than about trademark. Makes an excellent case, with really awful examples, that creativity and invention were constructed as things for white people, which led to rights for white people and expropriation for nonwhites, as with much popular music. Also: Black victories in fair use cases “ghettoized Black creatorship by protecting only the most exceptional artists and relegating all others to the category of copyright thugs.” And: black innovators in music who sampled were dangerous, but white innovators in internet services whose services led to widescale copying were geniuses; who gets to “move fast and break things” without going to jail is heavily racialized. But the evidence for racialization in trademark law was much less persuasive; trademark disadvantage seems to stem from lack of access to capital and courts rather than biases within the doctrine itself. I also found some tension in her discussion of Simon Tam (who took a case to the Supreme Court to gain the right to register The Slants as a trademark for his band) as essentially an unwitting tool of white capitalism versus Prince and Marshawn Lynch as problematic but still powerful examples of resistance even if they couldn’t overcome larger structures of racial capitalism.

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Fiction

rivkat — Mon, 22 Mar 2021 21:49:48 GMT

John Scalzi, The Dispatcher: Murder by Other Means:Short novel in Scalzi’s universe where almost anyone who is murdered immediately revives, safe and whole at home, except for the one in a thousand who don’t. The protagonist is a Dispatcher—licensed to kill people in certain very specific circumstances, where it will increase their chances of survival (e.g., they were severely injured in an accident, which doesn’t trigger resurrection). He has a noir adventure when someone asks him to kill a person outside those very specific circumstances; you will like it if you like this sort of thing.

Stephen King, Later: Despite being in the Hard Case imprint, this is standard King (as the protagonist says several times, this is a horror story). He’s a kid who can see ghosts, and his literary agent mom wants him to keep it a secret. But after she recruits him to get a final story out of her most important client in order to save their financial futures, he’s vulnerable to exploitation by her cop lover. Brisk and King-y, with appearances of various King evils (hi, deadlights!).

Katherine Addison, The Witness for the Dead: Sequel to The Goblin Emperor, but this time following the cleric who speaks to the dead as he navigates a hostile ecclesiastical environment, investigates several different deaths, and (much against his inclination) makes a few friends. Like the first book, the goodheartedness of the narrator, despite his learned mistrust, makes this a relatively gentle story even when murder and other nastiness is involved.

Ben Aaronovitch, What Abigail Did That Summer: Barely teen Abigail has a precocious interest in magic, but the Folly won’t yet take her on. So she makes her own trouble/fun, and—with a new friend in tow, plus a fox spy/minder—goes off in search of whatever it is that’s pulling a Pied Piper on local children. Aaronovitch’s mouthy teen was not the best of his voices, but it’s still interesting to see other takes on the magic of his world.

Martha Wells, Fugitive Telemetry: There’s a murder on Preservation Station where no murder should be, and Murderbot gets sucked into the investigation, especially since it suspects that GreyCris might be involved. Much frustration with humans ensues.

C.L. Polk, Stormsong: The second book in a series—the first book involved a lot of politics and magic; at the beginning of this one, alt-England’s magic power system has been destroyed just as winter storms come with even greater force, threatening the crops and lives of many citizens. Grace, now appointed the Queen’s chancellor, has to navigate palace intrigue, intrigue among the storm-fighting magicians, pressures for democratic reform, captives from the foreign power that tried to use necromancy against them, and an intriguingly sexy reporter who is about to reveal Grace’s secrets and the secrets of the realm—among other things. If you like whirlwind political fantasy, you might like this.

KJ Charles, The Gentle Art of Fortune Hunting: Two siblings come to town to snag wealthy mates from the ton; they pretend to be well-bred but are merely well-trained. It’s all going well except for the suspicions of the man’s target’s uncle. It will not surprise you to learn that the two men fall into bed, and then into love. Best line: “Robin sat and listened to music for several hours, and was disappointed to learn that only forty minutes had passed on the clock.”

David Wong, Zoey Punches the Future in the Dick: Zoey Ashe, heiress to her estranged father’s criminal empire, is also extremely hated online because alienated young men. And one of the city’s warlords is apparently inciting that hatred, which becomes very personal, involving her mom and her cat. Wong is good at ridiculous extremes and making fun of his characters’, and by extension our, complicity in systems that are too big to change individually.

Naomi Novik, A Deadly Education: Very strong In Other Lands vibes: magic exists; here it’s much nastier than you think, not much more prosaic. The snarky, smart, secretly powerful outsider ends up hanging out with the super-powerful, super-competent, secretly miserable popular guy (actually, he suspects her of using dark magic, which she doesn’t). She’s trying to make alliances that will get her through graduation alive, since monsters prey on isolated magic-users, while he’s killing anything that threatens anyone, which turns out to have a bad effect on the magic ecosystem. It moves well and has a great cliffhanger.

Genevieve Cogman, The Dark Archive:Well, the plot point that was obviously coming finally came, though it was only discovered and not resolved. Also, our heroine spends more time with her new Fae apprentice than with Kai as old enemies reappear and threaten them. The end is an epilogue that suggests that the shenanigans are only beginning (and that I read as a nod to readers who had been waiting for the penny to drop for a while now).

Stephen Graham Jones, The Only Good Indians: After a group of young male friends slaughters elk where they shouldn’t have, the spirit of Elk Head Woman comes after them. While racism and poverty structure their lives and explain something about why they did it, Elk Head Woman doesn’t care. Warning for gore.

Stephen King & Joe Hill, In the Tall Grass: Short story (audiobook checked out via my library) with a classic King horror vibe: A brother and sister are traveling across the country when they hear a child calling out for help just off of the road. Bad things happen, including child death.

N.K. Jemisin, The City We Became: The boroughs start to achieve sentience/manifestation in a person, and an extradimensional white entity tries to kill them. There are some nice subtle things, like the way Manhattan didn’t remember his previous life and connections while Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island (all women) did. The extradimensional evil’s human allies are setting up to literally die of whiteness, though most seem unconscious of this.

Cherie Priest, I Am Princess X: After her best friend dies, the protagonist moves to Georgia, but returns to San Francisco to spend the summer with her father (from whom her mother is now divorced). There, she spies stickers using the identity of Princess X—the superhero she created with her friend. As she investigates, she starts to wonder if her friend is dead after all. Combination YA and implausible thriller.

Grady Hendrix, The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires: Salem’s Lot meets The Stepford Wives, sort of. A white housewife and her friends begin to think that a new white guy in town is a danger, but sexist gaslighting and white indifference to Black suffering mean that authority is asserted against them instead. I found it really hard to get through because through most of the book the protagonist is so isolated—the book club members also disbelieve her, buying into the same racism and sexism as the white men. Multiple times, the protagonist would tell someone that she saw the bad guy harming a child, and the person would respond that she had no evidence of this, because her direct witness testimony did not count as evidence. If this will make you incandescent with rage and/or grief, stay away, but otherwise it is a brisk Stephen King-esque read. There is also a sexual assault whose aftermath is detailed.

Rivers Solomon, Sorrowland: Vern, a heavily pregnant teen, flees her Black separatist compound. But in the woods around them lurk fiends who hunt and taunt her. As she raises her twins, her own body seems to turn against her, hiding perhaps monstrous secrets of her own. Vern doesn’t know how, much less who, to trust, and she doesn’t know how to ask for the help she needs, though she finds people who extend it to her anyway. This is a worthy sequel to Solomon’s first novel, a story of rage and injustice that doesn’t feel hopeless despite how little faith it has in America (especially its white people).

Daryl Gregory, The Album of Dr. Moreau:In the early 2000s, a boy band made of animal-human hybrids, the WyldBoyz, is ending their tour when their awful promoter is killed. A mystery with lots of animal puns ensues. It’s a fun novella with Gregory’s usual inventiveness despite some grim backstory.

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