Nonfiction
Katherine Losse, The Boy Kings: A Journey into the Heart of the Social Network: Engaging, depressing account from an early Facebook employee, with heavy emphasis on the rich white boyness of it all. She doesn’t use the word “microaggressions,” but the enterprise was designed to remind people constantly who was important. Losse’s background in Baltimore, and her love of The Wire, suggested comparisons to her that the boys she worked with didn’t make-for example, she noticed that black students tended to use Facebook “more socially and conversationally” than white students. This difference had technical implications: there was a bug that affected the inboxes of people with over five hundred messages; white people’s accounts rarely generated that bug. The system broke when the use was other than expected-just as film optimized for white skin doesn’t perform as well with dark skin. That’s external/customer-facing, but the internal operations were a good sign as well, like when the female employees were all given T-shirts with Mark Zuckerberg’s face on them (adore him!) while the males were given versions of the clothing he wore (be him!). Losse deemed the Harvard guys paradoxically clueless about “the very things they claimed to know most about: money and power…. They assumed everyone had the same chances in life, the same easy path to wealth, where knowing just a little more about gadgetry than everyone else went a very long way.” They still wanted to live in the original site Zuckerberg coded, where they got to judge girls’ hotness and codify everything-in a way that kept them on top. All in all, an infuriating read.
Ken Auletta, Googled: The End of the World as We Know It: Surprisingly unsurprising history of Google. Smart, well-connected people had a big idea and were incredibly lucky. They ruffled feathers and made fortunes, almost in equal measure. Will they survive success? Too soon to tell. Auletta, for example, touts the as-of-this-writing (2009) shift of YouTube to more longform professional content, contending that it’s obvious that only such content could ultimately make YouTube profitable. While it’s clear that working with legacy content owners was vital to the continuation of the project, it now turns out that user-generated content makes more money for copyright owners than their own official productions. This isn’t to denigrate Auletta, it’s just that no one I’ve met or read has been able to predict the shape of the digital world 5 years from now. Some people are right about some predictions some of the time … but which ones? Thus, it’s hard to take any lessons from all of Auletta’s interviews and details.
Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking: I’ve known Jordan since high school; he’s exactly as smart and unassuming as his writing makes him seem. This book is mostly about the power of statistical thinking, and the need to understand probabilities, though there are some interesting detours into geometry and bits of math history. I’m an easy sell on the need to make statistical literacy a key part of all citizens’ education; I’d recommend this book as a helpful explanation of the reasons why. The opening anecdote, about why the air force was wrong about which parts of the planes it needed to increase the armor on, is truly fantastic. (Short version: planes were coming back heavily shot up in the wings etc., but not that shot up in the engine. Should engine shielding be reduced to achieve a valuable reduction in weight? Answer: no. That conclusion reflects a misunderstanding of the observation, which was of planes that came back, not the full set of planes. Planes that came back took fewer hits to the engine than to the rest of the plane, and if you (plausibly) assume a standard distribution of bullet holes instead of some aversion of German bullets to engines, then the most likely explanation is that planes that took more hits to the engine disproportionately failed to come back. Put more shielding on the engine, and less on the wings. Math!)
Elizabeth Warren, A Fighting Chance: I love Warren. She has a common-sense forthrightness that lets her communicate powerful truths in understandable language, not an easy thing for a law professor. In her autobiography, she writes with openness about many things, including the end of her first marriage, which came about because both of them expected that she’d be an ordinary helpmeet to her husband and then it turned out that she wasn’t. And I love how she makes “fighting” a big part of what she is: fighting for people who deserve better from their government, fighting against the corrupting influence of the big banks. Basically, she’s one of my heroes, and while this book won’t win any literary awards, it has what I want from her.
Jennifer Taub, Other People’s Houses: How Decades of Bailouts, Captive Regulators, and Toxic Bankers Made Home Mortgages a Thrilling Business: Another history of the financial crisis, emphasizing the continuity of 2008 with the S&L crisis of the 1980s, which was never truly fixed: it was sweetheart bailouts and captured regulators all along, with even the details often repeating-as well as the people and institutions. Taub starts with one particular mortgage whose foreclosure eventually made it all the way to the Supreme Court, which held that banks couldn’t be forced to write down a first residential mortgage to its actual value. This prevented bankruptcy from being a way that people could save their homes when an economic shock hit; first residences receive special treatment compared to most other debts that can be reduced through bankruptcy. Like similar rules about student loan debt, this is all about helping wealthy banks and their bonus-slurping employees regardless of the consequences for ordinary Americans. As it turns out, this particular mortgage-like many mortgages-traveled through several fraud-ridden banks whose stories Taub tells along the way. She chronicles how every single entity involved received a bailout, sometimes more than once-everybody but the (former) homeowners.
Sonia Sotomayor, My Beloved World: Memoir, ending just when Sotomayor becomes a judge and deliberately not covering Supreme Court confirmation or tenure. She tells a very personal story of growing up in a Puerto Rican immigrant neighborhood with diabetes that had to be rigidly treated and an alcoholic father who died young. Constantly emphasizing compassion and seeing everyone’s perspective, Sotomayor defends negotiation-though she didn’t hesitate to raise a little hell on occasion, as when a law firm partner challenged her at a public dinner to explain why she deserved to be at Yale given that, he asserted, she was only there because of affirmative action. I read it because Sotomayor spent some time doing trademark work in private practice, but the memoir is so rich in the texture of her life through college, and a bit in the prosecutor’s office, that the private practice bits go by really quick. There’s not much more than what was part of her confirmation hearings-she once wore a bulletproof vest when rousting counterfeiters, and even zoomed off on a motorcycle to get away from angry people who’d had their merchandise seized at her behest.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
Ken Auletta, Googled: The End of the World as We Know It: Surprisingly unsurprising history of Google. Smart, well-connected people had a big idea and were incredibly lucky. They ruffled feathers and made fortunes, almost in equal measure. Will they survive success? Too soon to tell. Auletta, for example, touts the as-of-this-writing (2009) shift of YouTube to more longform professional content, contending that it’s obvious that only such content could ultimately make YouTube profitable. While it’s clear that working with legacy content owners was vital to the continuation of the project, it now turns out that user-generated content makes more money for copyright owners than their own official productions. This isn’t to denigrate Auletta, it’s just that no one I’ve met or read has been able to predict the shape of the digital world 5 years from now. Some people are right about some predictions some of the time … but which ones? Thus, it’s hard to take any lessons from all of Auletta’s interviews and details.
Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking: I’ve known Jordan since high school; he’s exactly as smart and unassuming as his writing makes him seem. This book is mostly about the power of statistical thinking, and the need to understand probabilities, though there are some interesting detours into geometry and bits of math history. I’m an easy sell on the need to make statistical literacy a key part of all citizens’ education; I’d recommend this book as a helpful explanation of the reasons why. The opening anecdote, about why the air force was wrong about which parts of the planes it needed to increase the armor on, is truly fantastic. (Short version: planes were coming back heavily shot up in the wings etc., but not that shot up in the engine. Should engine shielding be reduced to achieve a valuable reduction in weight? Answer: no. That conclusion reflects a misunderstanding of the observation, which was of planes that came back, not the full set of planes. Planes that came back took fewer hits to the engine than to the rest of the plane, and if you (plausibly) assume a standard distribution of bullet holes instead of some aversion of German bullets to engines, then the most likely explanation is that planes that took more hits to the engine disproportionately failed to come back. Put more shielding on the engine, and less on the wings. Math!)
Elizabeth Warren, A Fighting Chance: I love Warren. She has a common-sense forthrightness that lets her communicate powerful truths in understandable language, not an easy thing for a law professor. In her autobiography, she writes with openness about many things, including the end of her first marriage, which came about because both of them expected that she’d be an ordinary helpmeet to her husband and then it turned out that she wasn’t. And I love how she makes “fighting” a big part of what she is: fighting for people who deserve better from their government, fighting against the corrupting influence of the big banks. Basically, she’s one of my heroes, and while this book won’t win any literary awards, it has what I want from her.
Jennifer Taub, Other People’s Houses: How Decades of Bailouts, Captive Regulators, and Toxic Bankers Made Home Mortgages a Thrilling Business: Another history of the financial crisis, emphasizing the continuity of 2008 with the S&L crisis of the 1980s, which was never truly fixed: it was sweetheart bailouts and captured regulators all along, with even the details often repeating-as well as the people and institutions. Taub starts with one particular mortgage whose foreclosure eventually made it all the way to the Supreme Court, which held that banks couldn’t be forced to write down a first residential mortgage to its actual value. This prevented bankruptcy from being a way that people could save their homes when an economic shock hit; first residences receive special treatment compared to most other debts that can be reduced through bankruptcy. Like similar rules about student loan debt, this is all about helping wealthy banks and their bonus-slurping employees regardless of the consequences for ordinary Americans. As it turns out, this particular mortgage-like many mortgages-traveled through several fraud-ridden banks whose stories Taub tells along the way. She chronicles how every single entity involved received a bailout, sometimes more than once-everybody but the (former) homeowners.
Sonia Sotomayor, My Beloved World: Memoir, ending just when Sotomayor becomes a judge and deliberately not covering Supreme Court confirmation or tenure. She tells a very personal story of growing up in a Puerto Rican immigrant neighborhood with diabetes that had to be rigidly treated and an alcoholic father who died young. Constantly emphasizing compassion and seeing everyone’s perspective, Sotomayor defends negotiation-though she didn’t hesitate to raise a little hell on occasion, as when a law firm partner challenged her at a public dinner to explain why she deserved to be at Yale given that, he asserted, she was only there because of affirmative action. I read it because Sotomayor spent some time doing trademark work in private practice, but the memoir is so rich in the texture of her life through college, and a bit in the prosecutor’s office, that the private practice bits go by really quick. There’s not much more than what was part of her confirmation hearings-she once wore a bulletproof vest when rousting counterfeiters, and even zoomed off on a motorcycle to get away from angry people who’d had their merchandise seized at her behest.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.