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Now just to get enough writing done.
Links: Marco Rubio says the age of the earth is “one of the great mysteries.” No. No, it’s not!
Men’s emotions as the standard for rationality.
Hilarious! For certain values of hilarious, anyway. How to make pseudoephedrine from meth. The factchecking comments at BoingBoing also warm my heart (what’s the chemical reaction there?).
Cory Doctorow wrote a book about video remixers. Apparently they’re all dudes, though? And I have to admit I’m sympathetic to this review, which argues that he severely overstacks the deck against Big Content and that there is a difference between remix (especially remix that starts with paid-for DVDs/downloads, yay DMCA exemptions!) and wholesale downloading for consumption’s sake.
Simon Johnson & James Kwak, 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown: Another history of the financial crisis, this one reaching back to the Jefferson/Hamilton dispute about the role of banking versus manufacture in the economy. The focus is tightest on ideological/material capture: Washington is dominated by Wall Street money, regulators who revolve in and out of the private sector they’re supposed to regulate, and most significantly by Wall Street ideas. The failure of regulation and even reregulation after the crisis of 2008 wasn’t simple corruption, but something harder to fight: true belief (that just happened to correspond to large potential paychecks) in the importance of not hampering financial firms with pesky regulations, while also ensuring that they wouldn’t suffer from bad bets with a government backstop/bailout. The main takeaway: too big to fail is too big to exist. Amen to that; I just heard a paper where part of the argument was that size regulations are bad because there are theoretical circumstances under which big banks are efficient, and I didn’t get to ask my question, which was “Who cares? Even if big banks weren’t able to capture regulators, which they are and which means the ‘efficiency’ may just be that they can borrow money more cheaply than other banks because of the implicit government guarantee and distort markets, why does the possibility of greater efficiency justify ramping up the systemic risk?” Crony capitalism isn’t just something we can tut-tut at other countries about, though the most bitterly funny part of the book is people like Geithner describing why “nationalize the banks, make the shareholders eat the losses and the creditors take haircuts” was good medicine for other people’s economies but not for ours, that is, not for his friends.
Leslie R. Crutchfield & Heather Mcleod Grant, Forces for Good: The Six Practices of High-Impact Nonprofits: Business book (short takeaways at the end of each chapter, case studies, etc.) with the titular twist. My takeaways: creating positive, engaging experiences for volunteers beyond donation is vital; ideological purity diminishes immediate impact (but I think the book understates the indirect importance of radicals making the middle-of-the-roaders look more plausible); the Environmental Defense Fund used to have the motto “Sue the Bastards” (awesome!); building links outside the organization, with other nonprofits and institutions, pays off in the long term more than internal development; the most effective organizations combine providing services to constituents with policy advocacy; these last two points work together: some level of internal management is necessary, though messiness can be tolerated, but lack of external engagement is fatal—high impact nonprofits build “good enough” management and then spend their energies on programs and policy advocacy.
M. Carmen Gómez-Galisteo, The Wind Is Never Gone: Sequels, Parodies and Rewritings of Gone with the Wind: The good: This might be the first book I've read that treats the authorized and unauthorized sequels/rewritings of a canonical, in-copyright work on an equal footing, covering the authorized sequels, the conventionally published parodies (mainly The Wind Done Gone), and fan fiction all as equally significant interventions into the interpretation and continued life of the novel. As some, including some of you reading this, have suggested, it is time to start doing literary analysis of fan fiction as well as ethnographic/sociological/psychological analysis, and this book walks that walk. The bad: shows little understanding of copyright law or legal reasoning in the relevant court cases, and even the citations in the Wind Done Gone chapter seem messed up. The literary analysis seems to be of equally limited quality. But major points for beginning the project!
Links: Marco Rubio says the age of the earth is “one of the great mysteries.” No. No, it’s not!
Men’s emotions as the standard for rationality.
Hilarious! For certain values of hilarious, anyway. How to make pseudoephedrine from meth. The factchecking comments at BoingBoing also warm my heart (what’s the chemical reaction there?).
Cory Doctorow wrote a book about video remixers. Apparently they’re all dudes, though? And I have to admit I’m sympathetic to this review, which argues that he severely overstacks the deck against Big Content and that there is a difference between remix (especially remix that starts with paid-for DVDs/downloads, yay DMCA exemptions!) and wholesale downloading for consumption’s sake.
Simon Johnson & James Kwak, 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown: Another history of the financial crisis, this one reaching back to the Jefferson/Hamilton dispute about the role of banking versus manufacture in the economy. The focus is tightest on ideological/material capture: Washington is dominated by Wall Street money, regulators who revolve in and out of the private sector they’re supposed to regulate, and most significantly by Wall Street ideas. The failure of regulation and even reregulation after the crisis of 2008 wasn’t simple corruption, but something harder to fight: true belief (that just happened to correspond to large potential paychecks) in the importance of not hampering financial firms with pesky regulations, while also ensuring that they wouldn’t suffer from bad bets with a government backstop/bailout. The main takeaway: too big to fail is too big to exist. Amen to that; I just heard a paper where part of the argument was that size regulations are bad because there are theoretical circumstances under which big banks are efficient, and I didn’t get to ask my question, which was “Who cares? Even if big banks weren’t able to capture regulators, which they are and which means the ‘efficiency’ may just be that they can borrow money more cheaply than other banks because of the implicit government guarantee and distort markets, why does the possibility of greater efficiency justify ramping up the systemic risk?” Crony capitalism isn’t just something we can tut-tut at other countries about, though the most bitterly funny part of the book is people like Geithner describing why “nationalize the banks, make the shareholders eat the losses and the creditors take haircuts” was good medicine for other people’s economies but not for ours, that is, not for his friends.
Leslie R. Crutchfield & Heather Mcleod Grant, Forces for Good: The Six Practices of High-Impact Nonprofits: Business book (short takeaways at the end of each chapter, case studies, etc.) with the titular twist. My takeaways: creating positive, engaging experiences for volunteers beyond donation is vital; ideological purity diminishes immediate impact (but I think the book understates the indirect importance of radicals making the middle-of-the-roaders look more plausible); the Environmental Defense Fund used to have the motto “Sue the Bastards” (awesome!); building links outside the organization, with other nonprofits and institutions, pays off in the long term more than internal development; the most effective organizations combine providing services to constituents with policy advocacy; these last two points work together: some level of internal management is necessary, though messiness can be tolerated, but lack of external engagement is fatal—high impact nonprofits build “good enough” management and then spend their energies on programs and policy advocacy.
M. Carmen Gómez-Galisteo, The Wind Is Never Gone: Sequels, Parodies and Rewritings of Gone with the Wind: The good: This might be the first book I've read that treats the authorized and unauthorized sequels/rewritings of a canonical, in-copyright work on an equal footing, covering the authorized sequels, the conventionally published parodies (mainly The Wind Done Gone), and fan fiction all as equally significant interventions into the interpretation and continued life of the novel. As some, including some of you reading this, have suggested, it is time to start doing literary analysis of fan fiction as well as ethnographic/sociological/psychological analysis, and this book walks that walk. The bad: shows little understanding of copyright law or legal reasoning in the relevant court cases, and even the citations in the Wind Done Gone chapter seem messed up. The literary analysis seems to be of equally limited quality. But major points for beginning the project!