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Including mention of some by me!
Dear law review: Honestly, you guys have been great so far—excellent editing suggestions, and you haven’t even tried to remove my contractions. I do wish you didn’t want two footnotes per sentence introducing a case (one right after the case name, one at the end of the sentence, as if the reader will have forgotten), and also I’m always going to be amused when you suggest a change in order to improve the formality of the text in an article that includes the phrase “pictures or it didn’t happen.” But mostly I’m amazed that (1) it was apparently surprising that I asked the lead editor to pass on my thanks to the other editors, because they rarely get thanked, and (2) you apparently deal with so many ego-bombs that every change is couched as a suggestion. Here are actual examples: “Please consider making this bold” (where this is plainly an error on my part) and, my personal favorite, “The author's name is spelled 'Bohannon.' Please consider 'Bohannon.'" (where I had spelled it Bohannan). I think this practice is hilarious, but in a certain sense it does devalue the actual requests, where I have a real choice to make about whether to follow the suggestion or not.
Good review of a book on the border states of the pre-Civil War US.
Errol Morris, Believing Is Seeing (Observations on the Mysteries of Photography): Morris makes documentaries, and this is definitely a book written by a documentarian, which is not entirely a criticism. There are a lot of transcripts of long exchanges between him and people he calls up to talk to about various photos (which is actually not how he does his documentaries, where you almost never hear his side of the interview). The most interesting chapters of the book are about Abu Ghraib photos—what does it mean to misidentify the famous hooded man, as the NYT did? Given that the man they misidentified was also imprisoned, was also tortured, why focus on whether the picture was of him? What about the photos of US military personnel smiling and giving thumbs-up signs in front of humiliated prisoners? When we see a social smile, we think it indicates pleasure even when it instead represents discomfort with nowhere to go. Morris has a lot of important stuff to say about framing, reality, and how we shape the meaning of images; he also has a lot of stuff to say about how he figured out which of two pictures of a battlefield was taken first, where a less obsessive person would have given you the answer and the reasoning without telling you all about all the unsuccessful attempts to figure it out in other ways.
David Salsburg, The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century: A bunch of mini biographies of statisticians, along with sort-of descriptions of why what they did was important. I say sort-of because there was often not enough for me to really understand why what they did was important—I will certainly accept that the difference between parametric and nonparametric statistics is vital and has real-world implications, but this isn’t the book to explain why, and maybe such a book would have to be a textbook. To me, the book hung awkwardly between “popular” and “science,” and I would have liked more on the latter.
Dear law review: Honestly, you guys have been great so far—excellent editing suggestions, and you haven’t even tried to remove my contractions. I do wish you didn’t want two footnotes per sentence introducing a case (one right after the case name, one at the end of the sentence, as if the reader will have forgotten), and also I’m always going to be amused when you suggest a change in order to improve the formality of the text in an article that includes the phrase “pictures or it didn’t happen.” But mostly I’m amazed that (1) it was apparently surprising that I asked the lead editor to pass on my thanks to the other editors, because they rarely get thanked, and (2) you apparently deal with so many ego-bombs that every change is couched as a suggestion. Here are actual examples: “Please consider making this bold” (where this is plainly an error on my part) and, my personal favorite, “The author's name is spelled 'Bohannon.' Please consider 'Bohannon.'" (where I had spelled it Bohannan). I think this practice is hilarious, but in a certain sense it does devalue the actual requests, where I have a real choice to make about whether to follow the suggestion or not.
Good review of a book on the border states of the pre-Civil War US.
Errol Morris, Believing Is Seeing (Observations on the Mysteries of Photography): Morris makes documentaries, and this is definitely a book written by a documentarian, which is not entirely a criticism. There are a lot of transcripts of long exchanges between him and people he calls up to talk to about various photos (which is actually not how he does his documentaries, where you almost never hear his side of the interview). The most interesting chapters of the book are about Abu Ghraib photos—what does it mean to misidentify the famous hooded man, as the NYT did? Given that the man they misidentified was also imprisoned, was also tortured, why focus on whether the picture was of him? What about the photos of US military personnel smiling and giving thumbs-up signs in front of humiliated prisoners? When we see a social smile, we think it indicates pleasure even when it instead represents discomfort with nowhere to go. Morris has a lot of important stuff to say about framing, reality, and how we shape the meaning of images; he also has a lot of stuff to say about how he figured out which of two pictures of a battlefield was taken first, where a less obsessive person would have given you the answer and the reasoning without telling you all about all the unsuccessful attempts to figure it out in other ways.
David Salsburg, The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century: A bunch of mini biographies of statisticians, along with sort-of descriptions of why what they did was important. I say sort-of because there was often not enough for me to really understand why what they did was important—I will certainly accept that the difference between parametric and nonparametric statistics is vital and has real-world implications, but this isn’t the book to explain why, and maybe such a book would have to be a textbook. To me, the book hung awkwardly between “popular” and “science,” and I would have liked more on the latter.
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That's fantastic.
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