![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Covert Affairs: When Annie & Auggie touched foreheads before she left the van: I would ship that transcontinentally. I even forgive them the “Metro Center Mall.” What, you couldn’t have said Pentagon City?
Once again, A Softer World is SPN-appropriate.
R.J. Anderson, Ultraviolet: Alison has synesthesia, which her mother has taught her to hide and fear. But one day, in the middle of a fight with a school rival, her senses go haywire—and she causes the other girl to disintegrate. Locked in a psych ward while the police try to figure out what happened, Alison struggles to figure out what’s real and what’s her own fantasy. The story moved at a good pace and neatly contrasted the themes of trust in one’s own unreliable perceptions versus trust in one’s unreliable friends. I didn’t think the “… or was it?” hint in the ending was as successful, but emotionally Alison’s experience of being trapped in an institution that was sort of indifferent to her and sort of wanted to help her worked well.
Kathleen Duey, Sacred Scars (A Resurrection of Magic, Book Two): The braided stories from the first book continue: Hahp, a boy trying to survive a terrible school of magic long enough to kill his tormentor Somiss, and Sadima, a woman who also has reasons to hate and fear Somiss—hundreds of years earlier. Their stories center around the (religious, for Sadima) question of whether magic is always bad, not just despite the good things it can bring but perhaps because of them. There is also substantial child abuse/child harm and nonexplicit rape; it is a grim story. I think I have to read the third book when it comes out just to see whether Somiss gets what’s coming to him, and whether that’s an ok thing for the world.
Karen Ho, Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street: This is a great book; my review won’t do it justice. Ho, an anthropologist, worked as an analyst on Wall Street and starts by exploring in depth the ideology of “merit” that firms use, which turns out to involve being as much like a privileged white guy with a Harvard/Penn education as possible. At the same time, much of the 100-hour week is spent on busywork and self-described bullshit and lying in order to justify deals. Convinced that they’re on top because they work so hard and are so smart, bankers also have an ideology that tells them that they enhance the efficiency of the market by furthering shareholder value. Unfortunately, the concept of shareholder value leads them to ignore all the other stakeholders in an economic entity, including most prominently the employees. Paradoxically, the laser focus on shareholder value—for which read stock price—leads to a short-term mentality that routinely destroys long-term value even for shareholders. Ho argues that Wall Streeters’ own experience of employment insecurity—even in good years tons of them are fired and replaced by others with degrees from elite institutions—leads them to accept this volatility as natural and appropriate, regardless of whether you’re a steelworker with limited ability to find a different job. Because there’s no point in building up a long-term orientation within a firm, they care only about this year’s bonus (or maybe at this point it’s vice versa), not about the long-term success of the firm and certainly not about the success of the clients they worked tirelessly to draw into revenue-generating deals. Additional toxicity was contributed by bankers’ conviction that the government would help them if they really screwed up because they were too big to fail. As Ho says, they depended on government to absorb the risk of their focus on immediate profits for themselves. Depressing but important reading.
Once again, A Softer World is SPN-appropriate.
R.J. Anderson, Ultraviolet: Alison has synesthesia, which her mother has taught her to hide and fear. But one day, in the middle of a fight with a school rival, her senses go haywire—and she causes the other girl to disintegrate. Locked in a psych ward while the police try to figure out what happened, Alison struggles to figure out what’s real and what’s her own fantasy. The story moved at a good pace and neatly contrasted the themes of trust in one’s own unreliable perceptions versus trust in one’s unreliable friends. I didn’t think the “… or was it?” hint in the ending was as successful, but emotionally Alison’s experience of being trapped in an institution that was sort of indifferent to her and sort of wanted to help her worked well.
Kathleen Duey, Sacred Scars (A Resurrection of Magic, Book Two): The braided stories from the first book continue: Hahp, a boy trying to survive a terrible school of magic long enough to kill his tormentor Somiss, and Sadima, a woman who also has reasons to hate and fear Somiss—hundreds of years earlier. Their stories center around the (religious, for Sadima) question of whether magic is always bad, not just despite the good things it can bring but perhaps because of them. There is also substantial child abuse/child harm and nonexplicit rape; it is a grim story. I think I have to read the third book when it comes out just to see whether Somiss gets what’s coming to him, and whether that’s an ok thing for the world.
Karen Ho, Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street: This is a great book; my review won’t do it justice. Ho, an anthropologist, worked as an analyst on Wall Street and starts by exploring in depth the ideology of “merit” that firms use, which turns out to involve being as much like a privileged white guy with a Harvard/Penn education as possible. At the same time, much of the 100-hour week is spent on busywork and self-described bullshit and lying in order to justify deals. Convinced that they’re on top because they work so hard and are so smart, bankers also have an ideology that tells them that they enhance the efficiency of the market by furthering shareholder value. Unfortunately, the concept of shareholder value leads them to ignore all the other stakeholders in an economic entity, including most prominently the employees. Paradoxically, the laser focus on shareholder value—for which read stock price—leads to a short-term mentality that routinely destroys long-term value even for shareholders. Ho argues that Wall Streeters’ own experience of employment insecurity—even in good years tons of them are fired and replaced by others with degrees from elite institutions—leads them to accept this volatility as natural and appropriate, regardless of whether you’re a steelworker with limited ability to find a different job. Because there’s no point in building up a long-term orientation within a firm, they care only about this year’s bonus (or maybe at this point it’s vice versa), not about the long-term success of the firm and certainly not about the success of the clients they worked tirelessly to draw into revenue-generating deals. Additional toxicity was contributed by bankers’ conviction that the government would help them if they really screwed up because they were too big to fail. As Ho says, they depended on government to absorb the risk of their focus on immediate profits for themselves. Depressing but important reading.
Tags:
From:
no subject
Great review - I definitely need to check this out.