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Fandom feeds on the AO3! Great rejoicing! Helloooo, Revenge and Alphas. Also, subscriptions to individual works for WIPs!
Poison pen review by Evgeny Morozov of a book on privacy. Sample: “Had Jarvis written his book as self-parody—as a cunning attack on the narrow-mindedness of new media academics who trade in pronouncements so pompous, ahistorical, and vacuous that even the nastiest of post-modernists appear lucid and sensible in comparison—it would have been a remarkable accomplishment. But alas, he is serious. This is a book that should have stayed a tweet.” Also: “This is how Sarah Palin would read Habermas if she could read Habermas.” Good times!
Michael Lewis, Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World: Greece, Ireland, Iceland, Germany, and the US: all places where people did very strange, foolish, and criminal things with money in the past decade, sometimes more than one of those at once, and where people (some of them overlapping with that first set) are now suffering for it. Lewis is more interested in looking for national differences than in causation, really, producing a book rich in small details and impoverished in explanations: everyone he meets seems bewildered about what happened, and he never does a lot to clear it up.
Jon Ronson, The Psychopath Test: Unfortunately unfocused book about the author’s own anxieties, his meetings with Scientologists in an attempt to figure out whether mental illness is “real,” his meetings with criminals, profilers, and psychiatrists to figure out if psychopaths are “real” and whether they can be detected, and so on. There’s a great book to be written about the dangers of checklists for classifying human beings, but this isn’t it.
William Patry, How to Fix Copyright: Of course I’m not really the audience for this entry into the ever-growing category of books on copyright for the general-interest reader; this one has some nice bits, though, including a riff on copying as a central element of creativity—Patry focuses mostly on copying as training before the development of one’s individual style, but he notices that individual styles still retain a bunch of copying, necessarily. I liked his take on why we should restore formalities (notice and registration/renewal to keep a copyright over a longer term): “The theocracy of formality-free copyright belongs to the Romantic ideal of artists starving in their Parisian garret. Copyright doesn’t want to be free any more than information does.” He defends fair use and “unauthorized creativity,” pointing out that copyright owners don’t like criticism or competition and are perfectly willing to use law to suppress both, but that doesn’t mean we should let them do it.
Poison pen review by Evgeny Morozov of a book on privacy. Sample: “Had Jarvis written his book as self-parody—as a cunning attack on the narrow-mindedness of new media academics who trade in pronouncements so pompous, ahistorical, and vacuous that even the nastiest of post-modernists appear lucid and sensible in comparison—it would have been a remarkable accomplishment. But alas, he is serious. This is a book that should have stayed a tweet.” Also: “This is how Sarah Palin would read Habermas if she could read Habermas.” Good times!
Michael Lewis, Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World: Greece, Ireland, Iceland, Germany, and the US: all places where people did very strange, foolish, and criminal things with money in the past decade, sometimes more than one of those at once, and where people (some of them overlapping with that first set) are now suffering for it. Lewis is more interested in looking for national differences than in causation, really, producing a book rich in small details and impoverished in explanations: everyone he meets seems bewildered about what happened, and he never does a lot to clear it up.
Jon Ronson, The Psychopath Test: Unfortunately unfocused book about the author’s own anxieties, his meetings with Scientologists in an attempt to figure out whether mental illness is “real,” his meetings with criminals, profilers, and psychiatrists to figure out if psychopaths are “real” and whether they can be detected, and so on. There’s a great book to be written about the dangers of checklists for classifying human beings, but this isn’t it.
William Patry, How to Fix Copyright: Of course I’m not really the audience for this entry into the ever-growing category of books on copyright for the general-interest reader; this one has some nice bits, though, including a riff on copying as a central element of creativity—Patry focuses mostly on copying as training before the development of one’s individual style, but he notices that individual styles still retain a bunch of copying, necessarily. I liked his take on why we should restore formalities (notice and registration/renewal to keep a copyright over a longer term): “The theocracy of formality-free copyright belongs to the Romantic ideal of artists starving in their Parisian garret. Copyright doesn’t want to be free any more than information does.” He defends fair use and “unauthorized creativity,” pointing out that copyright owners don’t like criticism or competition and are perfectly willing to use law to suppress both, but that doesn’t mean we should let them do it.
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