Nonfiction
Eric Klinenberg, Palaces for the People: A celebration of the infrastructure that makes communities healthy and strong, primarily libraries but also other spaces that citizens can and often must interact with people not like them, and figure out how to get along. Libraries are, of course, powerful engines for fighting inequality because of the access to information they provide-and increasingly they provide access to other things, including space just to be for people who don’t have other places to go, even as we defund them around the country. Other aspects of social infrastructure include public transit, public schools, and even privately owned but open to the public places like coffeehouses. There’s also the benefit of public space: not just the health benefits, but sociability and safety benefits as well when public spaces are attractive. Klinenberg builds on the missed opportunity of “fixing broken windows,” pointing out that the central concept that led to criminalizing so many mostly minority people was supposed to be about property. What if we’d taken that example/metaphor seriously, instead of policing for nuisance crimes, and focused on rehabilitating abandoned or neglected property instead of on arresting people doing potentially annoying things in public? Using evidence from the US and elsewhere, Klinenberg suggests that investment in cleaning up dangerous and unsightly pieces of property has significant benefits in reducing crime and enhancing community interactions, which then provide protective structures for people facing hard times.
Marie Hicks, Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing: A reminder that when anyone talks about women’s underrepresentation in computer science/programming as a result of choices/“natural” inclinations, that person is at best ignorant. The book is repetitive, but that’s mainly because what happened to women kept happening, decade after decade: women would look for interesting or at least remunerative work, including technology jobs, and the men in charge would insist that jobs with women in them were bad jobs deserving of low pay. Hicks tracks this process through multiple decades, economic conditions, labor conditions, and legal conditions (e.g., when Britain at long last enacted equal pay legislation as a condition of its entry into the EEC, the British government very quickly shifted to worker categories that paid female-dominated lines less and kept those lines out of the promotion track). There are specific moments of outrage, such as the woman who’s forced to train her male replacements (because her job has been reclassified as a good, promotion-eligible one and thus she can’t have it any more) and then demoted to work under them, but mostly it’s about how policies work: in the aggregate, shaping technology more than technology shapes policy.
Rebecca Traister, Good and Mad: the Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger: If you want to feel better about being angry so much of the time, to hear about women who used their anger to improve the world, and basically to hear a counternarrative about how anger isn’t actually what’s toxic when the anger is generated by abuse and unfairness, this is the book for you. I cried a couple of times, but in relief as well as in sadness.
Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them: I’m reading way too many books about fascism, which is the least bad thing that can be said about current politics. Stanley looks for continuities among fascist leaders, including creating a mythic past (in which a patriarch reigned supreme and the nation was glorious); engaging in propaganda to corrupt the language of ideals; promoting anti-intellectualism; ultimately creating a context of unreality in which truth is meaningless. Fascism also requires maintenance of hierarchy (which he calls “the displacement of reality by power”); a politics of victimhood for the dominant population; law and order policies for the subaltern; and sexual anxiety driving many specific policies and metaphors. This is unfortunately all relatively easy to accomplish, as people like to be convinced that they’re the good guys. One depressing study he cites shows that when you describe historical perpetrators of violence against Native Americans as European, modern Americans are more likely to remember negative events than if you describe the perpetrators as Americans, and “what participants did recall was phrased more dismissively when the perpetrators were in-group members.” Fascists denounce corruption while being much more corrupt than previous administrations - I was puzzled by this in the US until I realized that what Trump meant by “corrupt” was “benefiting nonwhites”; this is by definition corruption as far as he and his supporters are concerned, while benefiting his friends is just doing what’s natural. Stanley characterizes this as “corruption” meaning “corruption of purity” or challenge to traditional order rather than corruption of law. Similar dynamics allow fascists to treat an independent judiciary as corrupt.
Howard Mansfield, The Habit of Turning the World Upside Down: Essays on the American idea of property, which turns out to be as much about taking property without consent (whether that’s from Native Americans on a massive scale or from individual owners at the behest of large energy companies) as it is about the inviolability of ownership. George Washington wasn’t just a slaveowner; he was a land speculator who looked for deals in the West that he knew were in violation of British treaties with the tribes. As the promised recipient of “bounty lands” in Ohio for his service in the French and Indian Wars, he also secretly bought more land rights from cash-strapped veterans, using his brother and a distant cousin as a front. He ignored existing British laws because they restricted his ability to own. With others, he bought 40,000 acres of swamp in what is now Virginia/North Carolina. The Adventurers for Draining the Dismal Swamp (that was the actual company name) planned to turn the land into farms. The Adventurers were required to send five slaves each to work in the swamp. “Since the crown had started to limit land grants to 1,000 acres per person, Washington’s company added 138 fake names to their petition.” It worked, and the government gave the company the power of eminent domain to cut ditches and causeways through adjacent land. The slaves were treated with hideous cruelty.
But those expropriations were only the first of many in American property law. As Mansfield quotes J. Willard Hurst, American property law favors “property in motion, or at risk, rather than property secure and at rest.” If your land is just sitting there, you may have to defend it against someone who thinks they have a more productive use. In colonial times, failing to improve land quickly (within one to three years, depending on the colony) could lead to its forfeiture, and some colonies let the government seize or switch the ownership of unworked mines; Maryland in 1719 allowed any citizen to condemn any uncultivated land next to running water to develop an ironworks. We’re still seizing land for pipelines and other engines of economic prosperity and environmental alteration, it’s just that the victims are more likely to see themselves as part of the “we” these days. And we’re doing it even though, Mansfield argues, existing pipelines are only at a little over half capacity and would be cheaper and more economical to fix and modify. The story is always the same: “Why do you want to take our land? ask the homeowners. And the big corporations answer, Do you realize the damage you are causing by interfering with our property and our notions of progress?”
Land is also in motion because of climate change. Mansfield goes to Acadia in Maine, where seabird populations are collapsing, just as the NYT recently reported on the insect apocalypse, and the bee apocalypse, and the earthworm apocalypse-even without extinctions, numbers are dipping below what’s necessary for ecological relevance. Acadia’s native trees and plants are dying; the Gulf of Maine is warming faster than any other body of comparable size-from 1 degree Celsius every forty years to one degree every four years. As one of his informants says, “we’ve got two choices at this point: We can evacuate New Orleans carefully and slowly and deliberately …. Or we can evacuate them in the rain on busses with what they can carry. The one thing we don’t get, is we don’t get New Orleans. But we don’t want to think about it. That’s the next one hundred years. My students are going to live to see this.” That last sentence seems a bit optimistic, under the circumstances.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
Marie Hicks, Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing: A reminder that when anyone talks about women’s underrepresentation in computer science/programming as a result of choices/“natural” inclinations, that person is at best ignorant. The book is repetitive, but that’s mainly because what happened to women kept happening, decade after decade: women would look for interesting or at least remunerative work, including technology jobs, and the men in charge would insist that jobs with women in them were bad jobs deserving of low pay. Hicks tracks this process through multiple decades, economic conditions, labor conditions, and legal conditions (e.g., when Britain at long last enacted equal pay legislation as a condition of its entry into the EEC, the British government very quickly shifted to worker categories that paid female-dominated lines less and kept those lines out of the promotion track). There are specific moments of outrage, such as the woman who’s forced to train her male replacements (because her job has been reclassified as a good, promotion-eligible one and thus she can’t have it any more) and then demoted to work under them, but mostly it’s about how policies work: in the aggregate, shaping technology more than technology shapes policy.
Rebecca Traister, Good and Mad: the Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger: If you want to feel better about being angry so much of the time, to hear about women who used their anger to improve the world, and basically to hear a counternarrative about how anger isn’t actually what’s toxic when the anger is generated by abuse and unfairness, this is the book for you. I cried a couple of times, but in relief as well as in sadness.
Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them: I’m reading way too many books about fascism, which is the least bad thing that can be said about current politics. Stanley looks for continuities among fascist leaders, including creating a mythic past (in which a patriarch reigned supreme and the nation was glorious); engaging in propaganda to corrupt the language of ideals; promoting anti-intellectualism; ultimately creating a context of unreality in which truth is meaningless. Fascism also requires maintenance of hierarchy (which he calls “the displacement of reality by power”); a politics of victimhood for the dominant population; law and order policies for the subaltern; and sexual anxiety driving many specific policies and metaphors. This is unfortunately all relatively easy to accomplish, as people like to be convinced that they’re the good guys. One depressing study he cites shows that when you describe historical perpetrators of violence against Native Americans as European, modern Americans are more likely to remember negative events than if you describe the perpetrators as Americans, and “what participants did recall was phrased more dismissively when the perpetrators were in-group members.” Fascists denounce corruption while being much more corrupt than previous administrations - I was puzzled by this in the US until I realized that what Trump meant by “corrupt” was “benefiting nonwhites”; this is by definition corruption as far as he and his supporters are concerned, while benefiting his friends is just doing what’s natural. Stanley characterizes this as “corruption” meaning “corruption of purity” or challenge to traditional order rather than corruption of law. Similar dynamics allow fascists to treat an independent judiciary as corrupt.
Howard Mansfield, The Habit of Turning the World Upside Down: Essays on the American idea of property, which turns out to be as much about taking property without consent (whether that’s from Native Americans on a massive scale or from individual owners at the behest of large energy companies) as it is about the inviolability of ownership. George Washington wasn’t just a slaveowner; he was a land speculator who looked for deals in the West that he knew were in violation of British treaties with the tribes. As the promised recipient of “bounty lands” in Ohio for his service in the French and Indian Wars, he also secretly bought more land rights from cash-strapped veterans, using his brother and a distant cousin as a front. He ignored existing British laws because they restricted his ability to own. With others, he bought 40,000 acres of swamp in what is now Virginia/North Carolina. The Adventurers for Draining the Dismal Swamp (that was the actual company name) planned to turn the land into farms. The Adventurers were required to send five slaves each to work in the swamp. “Since the crown had started to limit land grants to 1,000 acres per person, Washington’s company added 138 fake names to their petition.” It worked, and the government gave the company the power of eminent domain to cut ditches and causeways through adjacent land. The slaves were treated with hideous cruelty.
But those expropriations were only the first of many in American property law. As Mansfield quotes J. Willard Hurst, American property law favors “property in motion, or at risk, rather than property secure and at rest.” If your land is just sitting there, you may have to defend it against someone who thinks they have a more productive use. In colonial times, failing to improve land quickly (within one to three years, depending on the colony) could lead to its forfeiture, and some colonies let the government seize or switch the ownership of unworked mines; Maryland in 1719 allowed any citizen to condemn any uncultivated land next to running water to develop an ironworks. We’re still seizing land for pipelines and other engines of economic prosperity and environmental alteration, it’s just that the victims are more likely to see themselves as part of the “we” these days. And we’re doing it even though, Mansfield argues, existing pipelines are only at a little over half capacity and would be cheaper and more economical to fix and modify. The story is always the same: “Why do you want to take our land? ask the homeowners. And the big corporations answer, Do you realize the damage you are causing by interfering with our property and our notions of progress?”
Land is also in motion because of climate change. Mansfield goes to Acadia in Maine, where seabird populations are collapsing, just as the NYT recently reported on the insect apocalypse, and the bee apocalypse, and the earthworm apocalypse-even without extinctions, numbers are dipping below what’s necessary for ecological relevance. Acadia’s native trees and plants are dying; the Gulf of Maine is warming faster than any other body of comparable size-from 1 degree Celsius every forty years to one degree every four years. As one of his informants says, “we’ve got two choices at this point: We can evacuate New Orleans carefully and slowly and deliberately …. Or we can evacuate them in the rain on busses with what they can carry. The one thing we don’t get, is we don’t get New Orleans. But we don’t want to think about it. That’s the next one hundred years. My students are going to live to see this.” That last sentence seems a bit optimistic, under the circumstances.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.