Nonfiction
Barack Obama, A Promised Land: The basic theme of this book is “I did the best I could,” and I think it is further evidence for the tragic reading of his presidency: The very thing that made him electable-his sincere and unflagging faith in the ability of white Americans to come together with Black Americans in particular-made him unable, both temperamentally and to a certain extent politically, to play hardball with Republican intransigience. One appalling thing I learned from the book is that their internal polling found that the controversy over his comments on Henry Louis Gates and the cop who arrested him on his own front porch caused his support to drop substantially among whites, and that support never returned. That’s a lot of racism.
Victor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning: Frankl’s account of his experience in concentration camps, where he watched many people die-he says that the best of them did-and developed his theory of human psychology. It’s not quite that the meaning of life is that it ends, but rather that the meaning of life is what you give it; if suffering is inevitable, then living through it by valuing something outside yourself is meaningful. He’s careful to say that avoidable suffering is not itself meaningful and should be corrected.
George Chauncey, Gay New York: Really interesting preface to the reprint edition about how Chauncey would treat transgender issues differently if he were writing it 20 years later. Chauncey argues that in the 1890s and for several decades thereafter, the flourishing gay life in NYC was not defined by sexual object choice but by gender-“fairies” etc. were men who “took the woman’s part” and therefore “had a woman’s soul.” Among other things, this meant that many men who had or even preferred sex with women were willing to interact with and have sex with men we’d now call gay. Relatedly, working-class gay male life was heavily integrated with working-class heterosexual male life. Although many men saw themselves as living a double life or wearing a mask, they did not see themselves as “closeted” in the sense of isolated from other gay men. There were robust public forms of gay life, including balls, bathhouses, and bars, most of which were shut down by midcentury (the bathhouses lived until the AIDS crisis) but which before that were publicly acknowledged by newspapers, police, and others. It wasn’t that being gay was safe-arrests and attacks were real, albeit less common than they became-but that gay men nonetheless carved out lives that included public aspects.
Kurt Kohlstedt & Roman Mars, The 99% Invisible City: A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design: A bunch of nuggets about (mostly) urban design, from the boxes that let firefighters get into buildings without breaking doors to pigeon habitats; a little too sample-y for my tastes but it sounds like they go into more detail on the podcast.
Kathryn S. Olmsted, Real Enemies: One feature of the paranoid style in 20th century US politics, Olmsted argues, is that the paranoid fantasies often have recognizable cousins in real things the government did and covered up. The US did have intelligence about Japan’s intentions to attack, albeit not specific enough to predict Pearl Harbor; the government did skimp on investigations into JFK’s assassination in order to prevent a feared war with the USSR if too many Communist ties came to light; etc. Olmsted doesn’t discuss race very much, but the book is mostly about white fantasies, and so its limitation to the 20th century also limits its analysis, since white fantasies of slave insurrections are also part of the US story.
David Dayen, Monopolized: How monopolies make everything suck so much in the US, including health care, jobs, Facebook, broadband, and so on. Interludes introduce particular areas of monopoly, like big rental companies. Depressing but on the other hand if breaking up the monopolies would open up so much room for improvement, maybe that’s encouraging?
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey Into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred: Along with some Scientific American-type explanations (with more cursing) of what we know about physics right now, she talks about her life as a scientist, including how being raped affected her as a scientist, along with other aspects of being a Black, agender scientist who presents feminine. She doesn’t like the “dark matter” metaphor for Black experience because Black people are perfectly visible and made of the same stuff as white people; as she says, there’s a lot of dark matter passing through you right now but not a lot of black people. Given the choice, she would have named the stuff “invisible ether” or something like that. Also has an interesting comparison of knowledge claims in physics-white guys saying that empirical study isn’t necessary/important given their theories versus basically the same white guys constantly demanding proof acceptable to them that there is racial/gender bias in the scientific establishment.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
Victor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning: Frankl’s account of his experience in concentration camps, where he watched many people die-he says that the best of them did-and developed his theory of human psychology. It’s not quite that the meaning of life is that it ends, but rather that the meaning of life is what you give it; if suffering is inevitable, then living through it by valuing something outside yourself is meaningful. He’s careful to say that avoidable suffering is not itself meaningful and should be corrected.
George Chauncey, Gay New York: Really interesting preface to the reprint edition about how Chauncey would treat transgender issues differently if he were writing it 20 years later. Chauncey argues that in the 1890s and for several decades thereafter, the flourishing gay life in NYC was not defined by sexual object choice but by gender-“fairies” etc. were men who “took the woman’s part” and therefore “had a woman’s soul.” Among other things, this meant that many men who had or even preferred sex with women were willing to interact with and have sex with men we’d now call gay. Relatedly, working-class gay male life was heavily integrated with working-class heterosexual male life. Although many men saw themselves as living a double life or wearing a mask, they did not see themselves as “closeted” in the sense of isolated from other gay men. There were robust public forms of gay life, including balls, bathhouses, and bars, most of which were shut down by midcentury (the bathhouses lived until the AIDS crisis) but which before that were publicly acknowledged by newspapers, police, and others. It wasn’t that being gay was safe-arrests and attacks were real, albeit less common than they became-but that gay men nonetheless carved out lives that included public aspects.
Kurt Kohlstedt & Roman Mars, The 99% Invisible City: A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design: A bunch of nuggets about (mostly) urban design, from the boxes that let firefighters get into buildings without breaking doors to pigeon habitats; a little too sample-y for my tastes but it sounds like they go into more detail on the podcast.
Kathryn S. Olmsted, Real Enemies: One feature of the paranoid style in 20th century US politics, Olmsted argues, is that the paranoid fantasies often have recognizable cousins in real things the government did and covered up. The US did have intelligence about Japan’s intentions to attack, albeit not specific enough to predict Pearl Harbor; the government did skimp on investigations into JFK’s assassination in order to prevent a feared war with the USSR if too many Communist ties came to light; etc. Olmsted doesn’t discuss race very much, but the book is mostly about white fantasies, and so its limitation to the 20th century also limits its analysis, since white fantasies of slave insurrections are also part of the US story.
David Dayen, Monopolized: How monopolies make everything suck so much in the US, including health care, jobs, Facebook, broadband, and so on. Interludes introduce particular areas of monopoly, like big rental companies. Depressing but on the other hand if breaking up the monopolies would open up so much room for improvement, maybe that’s encouraging?
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey Into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred: Along with some Scientific American-type explanations (with more cursing) of what we know about physics right now, she talks about her life as a scientist, including how being raped affected her as a scientist, along with other aspects of being a Black, agender scientist who presents feminine. She doesn’t like the “dark matter” metaphor for Black experience because Black people are perfectly visible and made of the same stuff as white people; as she says, there’s a lot of dark matter passing through you right now but not a lot of black people. Given the choice, she would have named the stuff “invisible ether” or something like that. Also has an interesting comparison of knowledge claims in physics-white guys saying that empirical study isn’t necessary/important given their theories versus basically the same white guys constantly demanding proof acceptable to them that there is racial/gender bias in the scientific establishment.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.