![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I am participating in the Live Long & Marry auction, offering a fanfic story to order. Bidding starts July 1, and I’m here.
Casey Greenfield and Rebecca Traister have written two moderately-mainstream-media takes on Hillary Clinton that I liked. Greenfield takes on her father’s participation in the sexism deployed against Hillary and points out that her father's racism comparisons are diversions; Traister celebrates Hillary’s status as a pain in the ass.
Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: A look at Lincoln through a look at his cabinet, men of greater public fame and distinction than Lincoln when he was elected. Goodwin emphasizes Lincoln’s political savvy and good judgment, capable of recruiting others to his goals and of impressing men who were primed to consider him a hayseed. Lincoln comes off as essentially the perfect politician. My husband argues that American historians are too kind to presidents, engaging in too much hagiography. Lincoln may have been the greatest president, but is he responsible for—for example—lengthening the Civil War by allowing leadership positions in the Army to be filled through patronage, while the South did the smarter thing and promoted everyone with military training? What I wondered about was Goodwin’s brief description of the scurrilous things the Southern newspapers said about Lincoln before his election, raising the temperature in the South so much that secession seemed the only rational choice. How did the equivalent of Fox News get to be the unquestioned source of information in those states? (It doesn’t seem like things were any better in the North, I should say.) I’m interested in reading a good history of journalism in the nineteenth century, which might explain something about the commitments of journalists in the twentieth century.
Read Montague, Your Brain Is (Almost) Perfect: How We Make Decisions (previously published as Why Choose This Book?): A fairly abstract review of the intersection between neuroscience, psychology, and economics (with economics defined as a focus on resource allocation in conditions of scarcity). Brains are computers, and very efficient computers at that. Montague reviews the evidence for this proposition, though I’m most interested in the situations in which our ordinary capacities fail us—Parkinson’s disease, gambling, drug addiction—and I wished he’d spent more time on those. Montague is one of the researchers who showed that people actually taste the trademark when they know they’re drinking Coke, so he’s doing interesting work, but the book never really took off for me, hovering awkwardly between the too technical and the too simplified. But people who regularly read Scientific American might have a more favorable reaction.
Casey Greenfield and Rebecca Traister have written two moderately-mainstream-media takes on Hillary Clinton that I liked. Greenfield takes on her father’s participation in the sexism deployed against Hillary and points out that her father's racism comparisons are diversions; Traister celebrates Hillary’s status as a pain in the ass.
Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: A look at Lincoln through a look at his cabinet, men of greater public fame and distinction than Lincoln when he was elected. Goodwin emphasizes Lincoln’s political savvy and good judgment, capable of recruiting others to his goals and of impressing men who were primed to consider him a hayseed. Lincoln comes off as essentially the perfect politician. My husband argues that American historians are too kind to presidents, engaging in too much hagiography. Lincoln may have been the greatest president, but is he responsible for—for example—lengthening the Civil War by allowing leadership positions in the Army to be filled through patronage, while the South did the smarter thing and promoted everyone with military training? What I wondered about was Goodwin’s brief description of the scurrilous things the Southern newspapers said about Lincoln before his election, raising the temperature in the South so much that secession seemed the only rational choice. How did the equivalent of Fox News get to be the unquestioned source of information in those states? (It doesn’t seem like things were any better in the North, I should say.) I’m interested in reading a good history of journalism in the nineteenth century, which might explain something about the commitments of journalists in the twentieth century.
Read Montague, Your Brain Is (Almost) Perfect: How We Make Decisions (previously published as Why Choose This Book?): A fairly abstract review of the intersection between neuroscience, psychology, and economics (with economics defined as a focus on resource allocation in conditions of scarcity). Brains are computers, and very efficient computers at that. Montague reviews the evidence for this proposition, though I’m most interested in the situations in which our ordinary capacities fail us—Parkinson’s disease, gambling, drug addiction—and I wished he’d spent more time on those. Montague is one of the researchers who showed that people actually taste the trademark when they know they’re drinking Coke, so he’s doing interesting work, but the book never really took off for me, hovering awkwardly between the too technical and the too simplified. But people who regularly read Scientific American might have a more favorable reaction.
Tags: