bits of culture and books
1. The new US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is seeking feedback on how to make mortgage disclosure forms more understandable. If you have a few minutes, go and vote for the alternative you find easiest to understand.
2. I am seriously amused that Patrick Stump’s song This City, now free on iTunes, includes a lyric using the word “gentrification.”
John Keegan, The American Civil War: A Military History: I love Keegan’s books, but Homer nodded. This book lacks solid organization and numerous times repeats the same facts, sometimes mere pages apart. Keegan does manage to convey the geographic facts of the war-it was so different in part because a lot of the time the combatants had no good idea of the territory they were fighting over. He also spends time on the unexpected brutality of the war, how it was a switch from the European practice of decisive battles and a foretaste of WWI in which victory went to the side that could take the most punishment over time, and how soldiers invented and reinvented entrenchment, which protected them in the short term but extended the horror of war in the long term. Sadly, I can’t recommend it.
Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: Nice overview of the properties of the form, which McCloud defines as juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence. I’m increasingly amused by how people can define any medium as “cool” or “hot” in McLuhan-esque terms depending on how they characterize it, but McCloud has an interesting argument that realistic backgrounds and more iconic characters/foregrounds allow a balance of objectivizing (this represents the world outside) and subjectivizing (I identify with this).
Yves Smith, ECONned: How Unenlightened Self Interest Undermined Democracy and Corrupted Capitalism: Its organization falters in places, and while it gives a fair amount of intellectual history it expects you to understand a lot of finance jargon, but this is a fresh take on the economic collapse: Smith traces the roots all the way through the economics profession of the twentieth century, which she argues perverted Keynesian theories and ignored fundamental principles of risk in favor of ideology and models so stripped-down that they weren’t just useless but actively dangerous. Because pay was pegged to short-term gains, individuals had every incentive to loot the overall economy and their own institutions-and the terrible thing is that they still do. You can really get almost everything here by reading Smith’s blog Naked Capitalism, but if you want the most biting criticism of mainstream economic thinking this side of Nicholas Taleb, this book is a one-stop shop.
Peter Andreas & Kelly M. Greenhill eds., Sex, Drugs, and Body Counts: The Politics of Numbers in Global Crime and Conflict: You already know that numbers are manipulated and often made up or badly sourced to suit particular purposes. This series of case studies won’t necessarily add much to that understanding, though there’s some stuff I found interesting, like how Colombia and Japan reacted to being put on US watch lists for being source and recipient countries for human trafficking, respectively, and in particular how Colombia resisted/reframed the sex trafficking issue as part of general issues surrounding labor migration. There’s also some detail on best practices for collecting mortality information in conflicts/genocides. Overall, a book for specialists.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
2. I am seriously amused that Patrick Stump’s song This City, now free on iTunes, includes a lyric using the word “gentrification.”
John Keegan, The American Civil War: A Military History: I love Keegan’s books, but Homer nodded. This book lacks solid organization and numerous times repeats the same facts, sometimes mere pages apart. Keegan does manage to convey the geographic facts of the war-it was so different in part because a lot of the time the combatants had no good idea of the territory they were fighting over. He also spends time on the unexpected brutality of the war, how it was a switch from the European practice of decisive battles and a foretaste of WWI in which victory went to the side that could take the most punishment over time, and how soldiers invented and reinvented entrenchment, which protected them in the short term but extended the horror of war in the long term. Sadly, I can’t recommend it.
Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: Nice overview of the properties of the form, which McCloud defines as juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence. I’m increasingly amused by how people can define any medium as “cool” or “hot” in McLuhan-esque terms depending on how they characterize it, but McCloud has an interesting argument that realistic backgrounds and more iconic characters/foregrounds allow a balance of objectivizing (this represents the world outside) and subjectivizing (I identify with this).
Yves Smith, ECONned: How Unenlightened Self Interest Undermined Democracy and Corrupted Capitalism: Its organization falters in places, and while it gives a fair amount of intellectual history it expects you to understand a lot of finance jargon, but this is a fresh take on the economic collapse: Smith traces the roots all the way through the economics profession of the twentieth century, which she argues perverted Keynesian theories and ignored fundamental principles of risk in favor of ideology and models so stripped-down that they weren’t just useless but actively dangerous. Because pay was pegged to short-term gains, individuals had every incentive to loot the overall economy and their own institutions-and the terrible thing is that they still do. You can really get almost everything here by reading Smith’s blog Naked Capitalism, but if you want the most biting criticism of mainstream economic thinking this side of Nicholas Taleb, this book is a one-stop shop.
Peter Andreas & Kelly M. Greenhill eds., Sex, Drugs, and Body Counts: The Politics of Numbers in Global Crime and Conflict: You already know that numbers are manipulated and often made up or badly sourced to suit particular purposes. This series of case studies won’t necessarily add much to that understanding, though there’s some stuff I found interesting, like how Colombia and Japan reacted to being put on US watch lists for being source and recipient countries for human trafficking, respectively, and in particular how Colombia resisted/reframed the sex trafficking issue as part of general issues surrounding labor migration. There’s also some detail on best practices for collecting mortality information in conflicts/genocides. Overall, a book for specialists.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.