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Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies: I got really into reading about Diamond’s Collapse, which gave several key reasons societies collapse and disappear; the critical reactions could generally be summed up as “it’s more complicated than that,” but his overall thesis is so big that it’s hard to handle it merely by going at the evidence for one area of the world. It’s pretty much the same here: Diamond argues that rather than reflecting vital differences among groups of humans, the different trajectories of those groups generally reflects how early those groups became sedentary, engaged in food production rather than hunting and gathering, had a resultant population explosion that encouraged the formation of larger political groups, domesticated large animals that further enabled food production and also encouraged the rise of epidemic diseases to which only high-population groups could develop resistance, which then further set up smaller groups to be decimated by later exposure to these diseases. Geography matters not only in terms of the susceptibility of local plants and animals to high-value domestic production (the large animals of Africa, for example, resist domestication to this day, and various grains and pulses had trouble matching the caloric/protein power of wheat) but also in exportability—by having such a long longitudinal axis allowing plants and animals to spread easily into new territories with similar climates/growing seasons, Eurasia had a critical advantage not matched elsewhere until transportation improved enough to move plants and animals around climatic barriers, late in the game. Guns and steel are much later in the chain than food and domesticated animals and only show up in the title, I think, because some editor decided that would be better than “Food, Germs and Horses.” His explicit aim is to reject biologically based explanations for why Europeans colonized the Americas etc. and not vice versa, and secondarily to argue that history can be understood as a kind of science, even though it can’t sustain the kind of lab experiments that physics can. It’s a bold thesis, and Diamond’s repeated trope of “there are four reasons that X happened, 1, 2, 3, 4” got a little self-parodic after a while, but I did learn from the repeated intercontinental comparisons. Wikipedia has a bit on critical reactions that I found helpful— the book occasionally equivocates about the effects of things like geographic barriers on cultural/technical development.
Lindsay Moran, Blowing My Cover: My Life as a CIA Spy: I guess you could call this book breezy, because that’s the tone, with a fair amount of worrying about weight and the acquisition and disposition of boyfriends, but basically this is about how sexism and inertia make the CIA dumb. Sexism in treating women agents worse, assuming that they’re more at risk of betraying the country for a man while letting male agents do anything with women, while also sending women agents out on the assumption that heterosexual men of other countries are more likely to spy for the US if a woman is the handler. Stupidity and waste in paying out huge sums for worthless information, with no apparent procedures in place for sorting good information from bad. September 11, 2001 made them more frightened but not any better at allocating resources. If you like your downers with a side of wacky adventures in training and avoiding surveillance, then this might be for you! Here, have another one, this time about the FBI.
Jonathan Lopez, The Man Who Made Vermeers: Unvarnishing the Legend of Master Forger Han Van Meegeren: From a recommendation by saraht. Written with a light touch, this is the story of a forger who fooled people for a long time, including Goering, and ended up a folk hero for having sold a forgery to Goering even though he was a Nazi sympathizer who was just trying to screw everyone. Lopez argues that forgery was consistent with facism because of its demonstration of a will to power over the past, and that it was also destructive of van Meegeren’s actual artistic talents. “Slowly but surely, the imitative logic of forgery condemned Van Meegeren to a state of arrested development in which artistic role playing—completely divorced from its legitimate purpose as a tool for growth—became an end in itself. The more adept Van Meegeren grew at imagining his way into the creative concerns of long-dead painters, the more his work as a ‘real’ artist in the contemporary world began to appear eccentrically derivative and shallow.” I was most interested in Lopez’s argument that the fakes looked real to people at the time, but not to us now, because they both borrowed from Vermeer but also were consistent with then current visual codes (in particular, Germanic celebrations of the volk).
Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference: Really engaging look at, among other things, how people respond to stereotypes (even being reminded that one is a woman can decrease performance on a math test, while being exposed to a competent woman can improve it), how society pervasively genders children (I remember how desperate strangers were to figure out whether my infant was a boy or a girl), and how bad neuroscience gets used to “prove” that the differences between men and women are hardwired, because we’re all egalitarians now so obviously any remaining differences are the result of genes. Sample summary dealing with the fact that self-reported data about supposedly gender-linked characteristics is unreliable: “if you want to predict people’s empathic ability you might as well save everyone’s time and get monkeys to fill out the self-report questionnaires.” She has a detailed discussion of supposed brain differences and what they might (or might not) mean for thinking. My favorite bit of that is a quote from someone else—you may have read about the idea that men’s brains are more hemispherically localized while women’s are more interconnected, supposedly making men more suited for in-depth thinking and women for putting things together. Ian Gold, a philosopher of science, says, “May as well say hairier body so fuzzier thinker. Or that human beings are capable of fixing fuses because the brain uses electricity.” In fact, as Fine points out, it’s not surprising that there are different configurations that perform the same functions in the world. The story she tells is both depressing—we’re so eager to declare victory/defeat with respect to sex differences—and inspiring—small interventions can make big differences. I need to figure out how to do more of this debiasing when I teach.
Lindsay Moran, Blowing My Cover: My Life as a CIA Spy: I guess you could call this book breezy, because that’s the tone, with a fair amount of worrying about weight and the acquisition and disposition of boyfriends, but basically this is about how sexism and inertia make the CIA dumb. Sexism in treating women agents worse, assuming that they’re more at risk of betraying the country for a man while letting male agents do anything with women, while also sending women agents out on the assumption that heterosexual men of other countries are more likely to spy for the US if a woman is the handler. Stupidity and waste in paying out huge sums for worthless information, with no apparent procedures in place for sorting good information from bad. September 11, 2001 made them more frightened but not any better at allocating resources. If you like your downers with a side of wacky adventures in training and avoiding surveillance, then this might be for you! Here, have another one, this time about the FBI.
Jonathan Lopez, The Man Who Made Vermeers: Unvarnishing the Legend of Master Forger Han Van Meegeren: From a recommendation by saraht. Written with a light touch, this is the story of a forger who fooled people for a long time, including Goering, and ended up a folk hero for having sold a forgery to Goering even though he was a Nazi sympathizer who was just trying to screw everyone. Lopez argues that forgery was consistent with facism because of its demonstration of a will to power over the past, and that it was also destructive of van Meegeren’s actual artistic talents. “Slowly but surely, the imitative logic of forgery condemned Van Meegeren to a state of arrested development in which artistic role playing—completely divorced from its legitimate purpose as a tool for growth—became an end in itself. The more adept Van Meegeren grew at imagining his way into the creative concerns of long-dead painters, the more his work as a ‘real’ artist in the contemporary world began to appear eccentrically derivative and shallow.” I was most interested in Lopez’s argument that the fakes looked real to people at the time, but not to us now, because they both borrowed from Vermeer but also were consistent with then current visual codes (in particular, Germanic celebrations of the volk).
Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference: Really engaging look at, among other things, how people respond to stereotypes (even being reminded that one is a woman can decrease performance on a math test, while being exposed to a competent woman can improve it), how society pervasively genders children (I remember how desperate strangers were to figure out whether my infant was a boy or a girl), and how bad neuroscience gets used to “prove” that the differences between men and women are hardwired, because we’re all egalitarians now so obviously any remaining differences are the result of genes. Sample summary dealing with the fact that self-reported data about supposedly gender-linked characteristics is unreliable: “if you want to predict people’s empathic ability you might as well save everyone’s time and get monkeys to fill out the self-report questionnaires.” She has a detailed discussion of supposed brain differences and what they might (or might not) mean for thinking. My favorite bit of that is a quote from someone else—you may have read about the idea that men’s brains are more hemispherically localized while women’s are more interconnected, supposedly making men more suited for in-depth thinking and women for putting things together. Ian Gold, a philosopher of science, says, “May as well say hairier body so fuzzier thinker. Or that human beings are capable of fixing fuses because the brain uses electricity.” In fact, as Fine points out, it’s not surprising that there are different configurations that perform the same functions in the world. The story she tells is both depressing—we’re so eager to declare victory/defeat with respect to sex differences—and inspiring—small interventions can make big differences. I need to figure out how to do more of this debiasing when I teach.
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