Nonfiction
Mallory Ortberg, Texts from Jane Eyre: And Other Conversations with Your Favorite Literary Characters: Ortberg is a founder of and writes a lot of the content on the Toast. These short pieces are Toast-like versions: what if Cathy and Heathcliff and the second Mrs. DeWinter and Hamlet all texted the other people in their stories? What if Medea kept pestering Glauce via text to urge her to put on her gift dress? If you like the Toast, then this might be a cute little book to have in your bathroom; it’s not really the kind of thing you want to sit down and read straight through.
Diego Gambetta, Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate: With costly signals: signals that are expensive to produce and fake, and that therefore indicate commitment to a criminal lifestyle-and often at the same time indicate an inability to leave criminal worlds. This can include producing child porn to gain entrance to a circle of child pornographers; killing or beating someone to show loyalty/give the other criminals leverage in case of betrayal; and sporting visible scars or tattoos; self-harm to indicate a willingness to cause any possible damage and thus make attacks unduly risky; demonstrating incompetence at non-criminal endeavors. It’s a fundamentally economic explanation, and leads to a lot of interesting anecdotes, along with Gambetta’s claim that women are relatively more violent when imprisoned because they have fewer credible signals of willingness to do harm when they come in-in terms of size, expectations about their dangerousness, and being in for violent crimes. Thus, they have to go further in showing that they will in fact resist exploitation by other prisoners, and may be more likely to need to fight to figure out the heirarchy of strength. Warning for rape myths (Gambetta discusses prison violence and says X percent of inmates “reported” physical violence, while Y percent “claimed” to have been sexually assaulted; and uncritically repeats another’s judgment that many men who had homosexual encounters in prison weren’t actually raped because they submitted after being threatened with violence).
There was also an interesting discussion of the use of “trademarks” in criminal enterprises; they can’t be enforced against infringers in court, but they were still used to sell certain drugs, because-Gambetta contends-the alternative of anonymous drugs was even worse; though there could be counterfeiting, addicts would also be willing to try the newest stamped version in the hopes that it would be different. Gambetta also proposes that mobsters love The Godfather so much not just because it glamorizes them but because it provides a series of codes that are readily understood, which is a difficult coordination problem when your organization is illegal.
Kate Harding, Asking for It: The Alarming Rise of Rape Culture-and What We Can Do About It: Free review copy. Most of the people who will read this probably don’t need to. Tidbits that struck me: the discourse about when non-“no” statements and behaviors signals lack of consent to sex contrasts very sharply with the rest of our social understanding-everywhere else, most men have no trouble deciphering indirect communication, including a “no” that is not said in so many words; rape culture teaches that they just don’t have to pay any attention when it comes to sex. Rape prevention is not a matter of explaining to men what they already know, and it’s definitely not a matter of telling women to be constantly on guard and to use “a degree of assertiveness that we know will instantly mark us as arrogant bitches.” The Catch-22 is that women are blamed for “putting themselves” in a position to be sexually assaulted-we drink, we walk alone, we go off with guys-but “if we’re honest about the amount of mental real estate we devote to anticipating danger,” we get lectures about how we’re paranoid and #notallmen. As Harding concludes, “[n]o one will ever specify exactly how much worry is the right amount.”
Harding discusses a victim-centered approach to investigating rape as a crime, which includes “being mindful of how often a victim is asked to repeat her story and by how many people.” There are other parts, but they’re mostly sensible (if we got out of the haze of rape myths, including treating victims’ self-blame as a mitigating factor).
On listening to women: Harding reminds us that “[a]s soon as someone says, ‘I was raped,’ we cannot say, ‘There is no evidence that it happened.’” Her testimony is evidence, even if it’s not conclusive evidence. Relatedly, the infamous Todd Akin/women don’t get pregnant from real rape myth is so seductive because, “[i]f every vagina could intuit the difference between consensual and nonconsensual sex, then we might have more ways of distinguishing rape from nonrape that don’t require listening to a woman’s own account of what happened.”
Chuck Klosterman, I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling with Villains (Real and Imagined): Quirky meditations on the nature of villainy/rock and roll authenticity/other stuff. Klosterman’s basic argument, though he doesn’t endorse it all the way, is that the villain is the person in a story who knows the most and cares the least. Moments of interest, but fairly light.
Clay Risen, The Bill of the Century: Detailed legislative history of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, both before and after Kennedy’s death. It was another reminder that powerful racist white Southerners preferred to avoid benefiting their states as a whole if that meant African-American citizens would benefit-see also the current refusal to expand Medicaid in most of those states. Risen argues that Johnson wasn’t as important as some accounts suggest he was; he held back out of fear of being blamed if the bill failed, as it still might have at many points, and his advice about how to get the bill through Congress was either already known or ignored. However, Risen does consider the moral force of the President’s endorsement, at a time when reverence for the presidency was at its height, to have been important. I was also unaware that the Southerner who introduced “sex” into the law’s bans on discrimination, though he was trying to mock and stymie the bill, also had a long history of supporting women’s rights, and arguably was serious about barring sex discrimination if the law was going to be forced on the South anyway.
Bernard B. Fall, Street Without Joy: Military history of the French defeat in Indochina, written when American involvement was just beginning to ramp up. If you want to learn about a pointless, painful, and slow defeat, driven by French imperialist assumptions and indifference to the question of whether anybody actually wanted the French in control, this book tells that story, with plenty of grim details as the deaths mount in fives and tens, day in and day out. The seeds of the subsequent American defeat were also there, and as apparent to Fall in prospect as they are in restrospect.
Robert M. Sapolsky, A Primate’s Memoir: Sapolsky studied baboons in Kenya for decades. This well-written, occasionally profane memoir is only partly about baboon behavior, and largely about Sapolsky’s experiences as an initially sheltered New York Jew traveling through a number of African countries, written with wry awareness of his outsider status. He and similarly situated white animal researchers in some ways replaced and in some ways displaced the previous white hunters, and his interactions with Africans are always shaped by that history. When it serves his interests (or those of his baboons), he either participates in or fights against Kenya’s pervasive corruption; the end, in which he tries to save the troop he’s studying from a TB outbreak, is heartbreaking and infuriating.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
Diego Gambetta, Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate: With costly signals: signals that are expensive to produce and fake, and that therefore indicate commitment to a criminal lifestyle-and often at the same time indicate an inability to leave criminal worlds. This can include producing child porn to gain entrance to a circle of child pornographers; killing or beating someone to show loyalty/give the other criminals leverage in case of betrayal; and sporting visible scars or tattoos; self-harm to indicate a willingness to cause any possible damage and thus make attacks unduly risky; demonstrating incompetence at non-criminal endeavors. It’s a fundamentally economic explanation, and leads to a lot of interesting anecdotes, along with Gambetta’s claim that women are relatively more violent when imprisoned because they have fewer credible signals of willingness to do harm when they come in-in terms of size, expectations about their dangerousness, and being in for violent crimes. Thus, they have to go further in showing that they will in fact resist exploitation by other prisoners, and may be more likely to need to fight to figure out the heirarchy of strength. Warning for rape myths (Gambetta discusses prison violence and says X percent of inmates “reported” physical violence, while Y percent “claimed” to have been sexually assaulted; and uncritically repeats another’s judgment that many men who had homosexual encounters in prison weren’t actually raped because they submitted after being threatened with violence).
There was also an interesting discussion of the use of “trademarks” in criminal enterprises; they can’t be enforced against infringers in court, but they were still used to sell certain drugs, because-Gambetta contends-the alternative of anonymous drugs was even worse; though there could be counterfeiting, addicts would also be willing to try the newest stamped version in the hopes that it would be different. Gambetta also proposes that mobsters love The Godfather so much not just because it glamorizes them but because it provides a series of codes that are readily understood, which is a difficult coordination problem when your organization is illegal.
Kate Harding, Asking for It: The Alarming Rise of Rape Culture-and What We Can Do About It: Free review copy. Most of the people who will read this probably don’t need to. Tidbits that struck me: the discourse about when non-“no” statements and behaviors signals lack of consent to sex contrasts very sharply with the rest of our social understanding-everywhere else, most men have no trouble deciphering indirect communication, including a “no” that is not said in so many words; rape culture teaches that they just don’t have to pay any attention when it comes to sex. Rape prevention is not a matter of explaining to men what they already know, and it’s definitely not a matter of telling women to be constantly on guard and to use “a degree of assertiveness that we know will instantly mark us as arrogant bitches.” The Catch-22 is that women are blamed for “putting themselves” in a position to be sexually assaulted-we drink, we walk alone, we go off with guys-but “if we’re honest about the amount of mental real estate we devote to anticipating danger,” we get lectures about how we’re paranoid and #notallmen. As Harding concludes, “[n]o one will ever specify exactly how much worry is the right amount.”
Harding discusses a victim-centered approach to investigating rape as a crime, which includes “being mindful of how often a victim is asked to repeat her story and by how many people.” There are other parts, but they’re mostly sensible (if we got out of the haze of rape myths, including treating victims’ self-blame as a mitigating factor).
On listening to women: Harding reminds us that “[a]s soon as someone says, ‘I was raped,’ we cannot say, ‘There is no evidence that it happened.’” Her testimony is evidence, even if it’s not conclusive evidence. Relatedly, the infamous Todd Akin/women don’t get pregnant from real rape myth is so seductive because, “[i]f every vagina could intuit the difference between consensual and nonconsensual sex, then we might have more ways of distinguishing rape from nonrape that don’t require listening to a woman’s own account of what happened.”
Chuck Klosterman, I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling with Villains (Real and Imagined): Quirky meditations on the nature of villainy/rock and roll authenticity/other stuff. Klosterman’s basic argument, though he doesn’t endorse it all the way, is that the villain is the person in a story who knows the most and cares the least. Moments of interest, but fairly light.
Clay Risen, The Bill of the Century: Detailed legislative history of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, both before and after Kennedy’s death. It was another reminder that powerful racist white Southerners preferred to avoid benefiting their states as a whole if that meant African-American citizens would benefit-see also the current refusal to expand Medicaid in most of those states. Risen argues that Johnson wasn’t as important as some accounts suggest he was; he held back out of fear of being blamed if the bill failed, as it still might have at many points, and his advice about how to get the bill through Congress was either already known or ignored. However, Risen does consider the moral force of the President’s endorsement, at a time when reverence for the presidency was at its height, to have been important. I was also unaware that the Southerner who introduced “sex” into the law’s bans on discrimination, though he was trying to mock and stymie the bill, also had a long history of supporting women’s rights, and arguably was serious about barring sex discrimination if the law was going to be forced on the South anyway.
Bernard B. Fall, Street Without Joy: Military history of the French defeat in Indochina, written when American involvement was just beginning to ramp up. If you want to learn about a pointless, painful, and slow defeat, driven by French imperialist assumptions and indifference to the question of whether anybody actually wanted the French in control, this book tells that story, with plenty of grim details as the deaths mount in fives and tens, day in and day out. The seeds of the subsequent American defeat were also there, and as apparent to Fall in prospect as they are in restrospect.
Robert M. Sapolsky, A Primate’s Memoir: Sapolsky studied baboons in Kenya for decades. This well-written, occasionally profane memoir is only partly about baboon behavior, and largely about Sapolsky’s experiences as an initially sheltered New York Jew traveling through a number of African countries, written with wry awareness of his outsider status. He and similarly situated white animal researchers in some ways replaced and in some ways displaced the previous white hunters, and his interactions with Africans are always shaped by that history. When it serves his interests (or those of his baboons), he either participates in or fights against Kenya’s pervasive corruption; the end, in which he tries to save the troop he’s studying from a TB outbreak, is heartbreaking and infuriating.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.