Lots of nonfiction
Randall Munroe, What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions: xkcd guy geeks out over questions like, what if a glass really was half empty (that is, half vacuum) and half full of water? The answers are explained charmingly and usually there is a fireball somewhere around. Recommended! (Though you can read most of it for free by following his What If? blog.)
Richard O’Connor, Rewire: Change Your Brain to Break Bad Habits, Overcome Additiction, Conquer Self-Destructive Behavior: It’s been a while since I read such a conventional source for advice (e.g., everyone has sexual desires, some people are just repressing them; engaging in BDSM as your first sexual activity is a sign that something’s wrong with you). Other than that, this contains a lot of the usual behavioral psych stuff-we’re influenced by social proof, we’re vulnerable to various cognitive errors, etc.-and advocates mindfulness and compassionate self-awareness. Those sound like good ideas for sure, though I do wonder how much reading a book can help a person in need of serious change.
Janet Staiger, Perverse Spectators: The Practices of Film Reception: I got this because of the title (and the cover featuring Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter), and was slightly disappointed. Staiger has several big points and then a number of case studies-the big points include that “classical” Hollywood film might have a structure designed to produce certain responses in viewers, as classical film theory generally posits, but that design didn’t mean that viewers cooperated. Instead, viewers regularly made their own meanings in ways that can’t be easily categorized as oppositional or accepting of dominant views. Relatedly, she argues, “classic” Hollywood can’t be opposed to modern or postmodern cinema through the idea that now there are no set genres; there were never any set genres, in part because studios deliberately made movies with multiple plot strains to appeal to different audiences. I particularly liked her evidence for this: she looked at what Variety and other significant outlets said at the time that now-classic examples of specific genres were released, and sure enough they’re never described just as that genre-and often enough that genre doesn’t appear at all or is denied, e.g., Stagecoach was not a “western.” Unfortunately for me, the reception studies here are limited to using reviews as a proxy for audience response, with all the race/gender/class limitations that entails (as Staiger acknowledges).
Sam Maggs, The Fangirl’s Guide to the Galaxy: A Handbook for Girl Geeks: Free review copy. This is such a positive, welcoming, inclusive book that I feel bad saying that I’m not sure who it’s for. Maybe it’s trying to be the Star Trek Lives! for today’s general media fandom … but I kind of feel like today’s general media fandom is its own Star Trek Lives!, though I could easily be wrong. There are a lot of specific suggestions for places to go to find fic, tumblr themes, etc., which could be useful but will date quickly. There are also broader suggestions for things like starting to write fic and going to conventions, including some basics of con and online etiquette. The book is also interspersed with interviews with awesome creative women talking about what being a fangirl means to them; the basic message is: you do you. I guess I’d give this to a 12-year-old who still read physical books and was generally interested in fandom; it does mention that sex happens and that trolls will say horrible things, but this is definitely a more controlled and cheery intro than the internet itself.
Edward Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: After I read it, I understand why the Economist gave it such a defensive, racist review. This book, more than any I can remember reading, confronts non-black Americans, and to a certain extent citizens of other countries like Britain, with exactly how much of white American wealth and industrialization, which also made many others wealthy or comfortable, depended on the systematic torture of African and African-American people. The book does so both with the horrendous facts, but also with its language, which does not allow readers to gloss over the past. There are no plantations in this book, only slave labor camps. There are no masters, only enslavers-enslavement was an active thing, a thing that kept happening, that was maintained regularly and voluntarily, including by lots and lots of people who never enslaved others themselves-and Baptist often speaks of enslaved people rather than slaves, reminding us both of their humanity and the ongoing nature of their mistreatment.
There is rape and there is fucking; Baptist, like other historians, links the violent white male culture of the South with the domination they were pleased to exercise over enslaved people and the necessity they felt of showing other whites that they were “free” and not enslaved. This freedom was freedom to steal (land, people), rape, kill, whip, and otherwise torture blacks as well as freedom to assault and even kill any white man who “insulted” them. The greed of capitalist expansion was funded by ever more efficient extraction of cotton production through the torture of enslaved people, using quantification and individualization of quotas combined with the reduction of slaves to interchangeable “hands.” This greed was connected to the other risk-taking behavior of enslavers as well as to their greed for the bodies of enslaved women, whom they were free to rape. Sexual access to those women also asserted power over white women, functioning as proof that these white men were governed only by themselves: that they did the whipping.
Baptist argues that it’s a reassuring lie to say that slavery was economically inefficient, as we are often taught today. With the mechanisms enslavers developed to break down social bonds between enslaved people; to torture them so terrifyingly that they’d work desperately to avoid the torture; and to create an efficient market for slaves, including credit and securitization, slavery was a wealth-generating machine the likes of which had never been seen before. Slaves learned to innovate and become ever more productive in order to gain some small, temporary protection from the torture. Slavery made some white men very, very wealthy, both in the North and the South, and the institutions we have today are still benefiting from the wealth extracted from enslaved people and allocated to white people.
Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: History of people who made computers and the internet what they are today. Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper get good time dedicated to them. The main message Isaacson wants you to take away is that creativity and innovation are iterative; most advances, even if they have one very smart and imaginative person at their center, spread and succeed because groups of people coalesce (or already exist) to take advantage of them and to tweak them so that they work better. Various forms of digital computing, for example, were independently invented, but several just died for want of support. Relatedly, innovation requires a time and place, and social resources, sufficient to support it-Bill Gates had the computers he played with growing up; Ada Lovelace could see the future, but she didn’t have the resources to build it.
Jessica Silbey, The Eureka Myth: Creators, Innovators, and Everyday Intellectual Property: Silbey’s work is based on extensive interviews with a number of participants in various creative and innovative fields, from visual art and novels to biotech. As she explains, intellectual property rights rarely serve as the incentives of classic IP theory. Instead, people are interested in making things for their own reasons, and then they use IP to manage relationships once they’ve created. And this is just as true in the market economy as it is elsewhere. The process rather than the product is creators’ usual focus, and the thing that is often most important to them is proper credit rather than control over every use. It’s a very useful addition to the growing literature on the way ordinary people use and don’t use intellectual property.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
Richard O’Connor, Rewire: Change Your Brain to Break Bad Habits, Overcome Additiction, Conquer Self-Destructive Behavior: It’s been a while since I read such a conventional source for advice (e.g., everyone has sexual desires, some people are just repressing them; engaging in BDSM as your first sexual activity is a sign that something’s wrong with you). Other than that, this contains a lot of the usual behavioral psych stuff-we’re influenced by social proof, we’re vulnerable to various cognitive errors, etc.-and advocates mindfulness and compassionate self-awareness. Those sound like good ideas for sure, though I do wonder how much reading a book can help a person in need of serious change.
Janet Staiger, Perverse Spectators: The Practices of Film Reception: I got this because of the title (and the cover featuring Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter), and was slightly disappointed. Staiger has several big points and then a number of case studies-the big points include that “classical” Hollywood film might have a structure designed to produce certain responses in viewers, as classical film theory generally posits, but that design didn’t mean that viewers cooperated. Instead, viewers regularly made their own meanings in ways that can’t be easily categorized as oppositional or accepting of dominant views. Relatedly, she argues, “classic” Hollywood can’t be opposed to modern or postmodern cinema through the idea that now there are no set genres; there were never any set genres, in part because studios deliberately made movies with multiple plot strains to appeal to different audiences. I particularly liked her evidence for this: she looked at what Variety and other significant outlets said at the time that now-classic examples of specific genres were released, and sure enough they’re never described just as that genre-and often enough that genre doesn’t appear at all or is denied, e.g., Stagecoach was not a “western.” Unfortunately for me, the reception studies here are limited to using reviews as a proxy for audience response, with all the race/gender/class limitations that entails (as Staiger acknowledges).
Sam Maggs, The Fangirl’s Guide to the Galaxy: A Handbook for Girl Geeks: Free review copy. This is such a positive, welcoming, inclusive book that I feel bad saying that I’m not sure who it’s for. Maybe it’s trying to be the Star Trek Lives! for today’s general media fandom … but I kind of feel like today’s general media fandom is its own Star Trek Lives!, though I could easily be wrong. There are a lot of specific suggestions for places to go to find fic, tumblr themes, etc., which could be useful but will date quickly. There are also broader suggestions for things like starting to write fic and going to conventions, including some basics of con and online etiquette. The book is also interspersed with interviews with awesome creative women talking about what being a fangirl means to them; the basic message is: you do you. I guess I’d give this to a 12-year-old who still read physical books and was generally interested in fandom; it does mention that sex happens and that trolls will say horrible things, but this is definitely a more controlled and cheery intro than the internet itself.
Edward Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: After I read it, I understand why the Economist gave it such a defensive, racist review. This book, more than any I can remember reading, confronts non-black Americans, and to a certain extent citizens of other countries like Britain, with exactly how much of white American wealth and industrialization, which also made many others wealthy or comfortable, depended on the systematic torture of African and African-American people. The book does so both with the horrendous facts, but also with its language, which does not allow readers to gloss over the past. There are no plantations in this book, only slave labor camps. There are no masters, only enslavers-enslavement was an active thing, a thing that kept happening, that was maintained regularly and voluntarily, including by lots and lots of people who never enslaved others themselves-and Baptist often speaks of enslaved people rather than slaves, reminding us both of their humanity and the ongoing nature of their mistreatment.
There is rape and there is fucking; Baptist, like other historians, links the violent white male culture of the South with the domination they were pleased to exercise over enslaved people and the necessity they felt of showing other whites that they were “free” and not enslaved. This freedom was freedom to steal (land, people), rape, kill, whip, and otherwise torture blacks as well as freedom to assault and even kill any white man who “insulted” them. The greed of capitalist expansion was funded by ever more efficient extraction of cotton production through the torture of enslaved people, using quantification and individualization of quotas combined with the reduction of slaves to interchangeable “hands.” This greed was connected to the other risk-taking behavior of enslavers as well as to their greed for the bodies of enslaved women, whom they were free to rape. Sexual access to those women also asserted power over white women, functioning as proof that these white men were governed only by themselves: that they did the whipping.
Baptist argues that it’s a reassuring lie to say that slavery was economically inefficient, as we are often taught today. With the mechanisms enslavers developed to break down social bonds between enslaved people; to torture them so terrifyingly that they’d work desperately to avoid the torture; and to create an efficient market for slaves, including credit and securitization, slavery was a wealth-generating machine the likes of which had never been seen before. Slaves learned to innovate and become ever more productive in order to gain some small, temporary protection from the torture. Slavery made some white men very, very wealthy, both in the North and the South, and the institutions we have today are still benefiting from the wealth extracted from enslaved people and allocated to white people.
Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: History of people who made computers and the internet what they are today. Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper get good time dedicated to them. The main message Isaacson wants you to take away is that creativity and innovation are iterative; most advances, even if they have one very smart and imaginative person at their center, spread and succeed because groups of people coalesce (or already exist) to take advantage of them and to tweak them so that they work better. Various forms of digital computing, for example, were independently invented, but several just died for want of support. Relatedly, innovation requires a time and place, and social resources, sufficient to support it-Bill Gates had the computers he played with growing up; Ada Lovelace could see the future, but she didn’t have the resources to build it.
Jessica Silbey, The Eureka Myth: Creators, Innovators, and Everyday Intellectual Property: Silbey’s work is based on extensive interviews with a number of participants in various creative and innovative fields, from visual art and novels to biotech. As she explains, intellectual property rights rarely serve as the incentives of classic IP theory. Instead, people are interested in making things for their own reasons, and then they use IP to manage relationships once they’ve created. And this is just as true in the market economy as it is elsewhere. The process rather than the product is creators’ usual focus, and the thing that is often most important to them is proper credit rather than control over every use. It’s a very useful addition to the growing literature on the way ordinary people use and don’t use intellectual property.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.