Nonfiction reviews
Susan M. Bielstein, Permissions, a Survival Guide: Blunt Talk about Art as Intellectual Property: A useful little volume for anyone who publishes using images, though directed primarily at art scholars and publishers. It’s got lots of war stories, practical advice, and advocacy, including things that individuals can do to assert fair use rights in an increasingly propertized world.
Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Commercialization of Intimate Life: Notes from Home and Work: This is a collection of essays by a sociologist focusing on the ways gender affects our living arrangements and how we feel about them. A connecting theme is that the emotional value of the “home” has increased in American culture even as the time we devote to it has dropped. Sometimes our long hours are not by choice, but the dirty little secret is that plenty of people - maybe even especially women - are happy when they get to work and they have respect commensurate with responsibilty, which isn’t often the case at home. Hochschild focuses on emotions as work, and on social rules that produce emotion or conflict with the emotions we feel or tell us what we should feel. There was enough repetition that, if you’re interested in this kind of thing, you might just look at the two or three essays that look most relevant.
Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking: Gladwell argues that rapid cognition underlies our quick, “intuitive” reactions, at least some of the time, and that when backed by lots of experience in a specific field first reactions can be better than agonized, explicitly rationalized conclusions. He also details powerful quick reactions that aren’t nearly as reliable, like our preference for tall and handsome leaders over smart or competent ones, and reactions that can be manipulated by marketers to get us to pay more for ice cream in a round package than in a square one. I’m not sure what the big argument is, other than that first reactions are important and we ought to think more about how to make them high-quality.
James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds: Nonexperts’ assessments of factual issues - like how many jelly beans there are in a jar - are very good when averaged. Whereas a small number of experts can easily get distracted by their own beliefs and ignore the reality. Surowiecki wants to challenge the aphorism that a person is smart and nice but people are dumb and violent. He does a good job of explaining how medium-size group dynamics can go wrong (in juries, in the NASA group responsible for evaluating space shuttle safety), but he’s not as good at discussing when crowds go wrong, as with riots and lynchings. As he does point out, there is a difference between assessing facts (number of jelly beans) and values (who should be President?), and the wisdom of crowds doesn’t get you very far in the latter case.
Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Commercialization of Intimate Life: Notes from Home and Work: This is a collection of essays by a sociologist focusing on the ways gender affects our living arrangements and how we feel about them. A connecting theme is that the emotional value of the “home” has increased in American culture even as the time we devote to it has dropped. Sometimes our long hours are not by choice, but the dirty little secret is that plenty of people - maybe even especially women - are happy when they get to work and they have respect commensurate with responsibilty, which isn’t often the case at home. Hochschild focuses on emotions as work, and on social rules that produce emotion or conflict with the emotions we feel or tell us what we should feel. There was enough repetition that, if you’re interested in this kind of thing, you might just look at the two or three essays that look most relevant.
Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking: Gladwell argues that rapid cognition underlies our quick, “intuitive” reactions, at least some of the time, and that when backed by lots of experience in a specific field first reactions can be better than agonized, explicitly rationalized conclusions. He also details powerful quick reactions that aren’t nearly as reliable, like our preference for tall and handsome leaders over smart or competent ones, and reactions that can be manipulated by marketers to get us to pay more for ice cream in a round package than in a square one. I’m not sure what the big argument is, other than that first reactions are important and we ought to think more about how to make them high-quality.
James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds: Nonexperts’ assessments of factual issues - like how many jelly beans there are in a jar - are very good when averaged. Whereas a small number of experts can easily get distracted by their own beliefs and ignore the reality. Surowiecki wants to challenge the aphorism that a person is smart and nice but people are dumb and violent. He does a good job of explaining how medium-size group dynamics can go wrong (in juries, in the NASA group responsible for evaluating space shuttle safety), but he’s not as good at discussing when crowds go wrong, as with riots and lynchings. As he does point out, there is a difference between assessing facts (number of jelly beans) and values (who should be President?), and the wisdom of crowds doesn’t get you very far in the latter case.