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Once Upon a Time in Wonderland: I was underwhelmed; I'm so busy that I probably won't add this to the watch list but would be willing to return later in the season if reliable sources say that the good stuff gets better.
Basically I wasn’t that interested in Alice’s quest for her presumed-fridged boyfriend. I mean, yay that it’s Alice the protagonist, but I am deeply turned off by “when it’s love, you don’t need proof, you just know!” There may be stupider guiding propositions, but IMO you have to get to “attack the mayor with hummus” levels to find them. Also (unless there is deliberately something deeply off about Alice’s “reality”) I found the “psychiatric facility” as abusive and one-dimensionally villainous as Jafar, and that left a bad taste in my mouth. And I had no idea what was going on with the Red Queen, which might be a matter of acting choices or might be a symptom of the show just not knowing what to do with her. Maybe it's just that right now TV is catering to my interests more, so I feel like I can be pickier. I did find the Cheshire cat engagingly creepy, though.
Jesse Bering, Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us: Somewhat overlapping with the much better What Do Women Want?, this is an evo-bio tinged argument that “perversion” is natural (in the sense that some people, especially men, are readily sexually aroused by things other than the prospect of intercourse, including things that many others find nonsexual and even disgustng) and that natural is not a synonym for good, so that we should be focusing on harm instead. If you already believe this, you’ll find little new here, and, although it’s couched as an argument for acceptance, it’s addressed to people who believe themselves sexually “normal” and repeatedly indicates that the reader is expected to find many of the described practices weird and troubling, including the harmless ones.
Duncan Watts, Everything Is Obvious* Once You Know the Answer: Engaging criticism of “common sense” and warning about our ability to narrativize what happened as if the sequence of events were itself causal. Maybe Apple is the most valuable company in the world because of Apple’s great decisions—but there are a lot of great decisions that didn’t turn out so well. That doesn’t mean we can never know anything, but it does mean that sociological causation is very different from physics-style causation. Watts ends up advocating for big data (it can generate patterns that are more reliable in aggregate than other kinds of predictions, at least in the absence of huge changes in behavior that are themselves hard to predict) and small-scale solutions. Instead of planning at a large scale, policymakers should look for what’s already working in a few places and try to react fast to new information–though this is of course easier said than done. In the process, he unfortunately misdescribes the “Race to the Top” education initiative, which he uses as an example of a good, market-based idea—he says it sets broad goals and lets individual school districts figure out how best to meet the goals, but actually it favors states that fire principals and teachers and substitute charters, exactly the kind of preconceived solution he crticizes elsewhere.
Sheri Fink, Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital: At Memorial Hospital after Katrina, doctors deliberately injected certain patients with morphine and Versed, hastening their deaths. How did it come to that? Fink recounts the uncertainties, rumors, miscommunications and fears that led to the injections, noting that racial anxieties made it easier for some people to believe that rioting and looting was a real problem—which then interfered with actual rescue attempts. What emerges is a portrait of a system unprepared for crisis, and while plenty of people innovated to save lives, some of the decisions were short-sighted and tragic. Unfortunately, Fink suggests, many of the lessons of Katrina remain unheeded in terms of preparing for crisis. (On the other hand, she notes, current proposals for triage have little empirical basis in terms of identifying people who are more likely to survive; to the extent that triage plans lead medical professionals to write certain patients off as not worth saving, having no triage plan and keeping “first come first served” as the general rule might actually save more lives—but “no triage plan” and “no disaster plan” are two very different things and we really need more of the latter.)
Basically I wasn’t that interested in Alice’s quest for her presumed-fridged boyfriend. I mean, yay that it’s Alice the protagonist, but I am deeply turned off by “when it’s love, you don’t need proof, you just know!” There may be stupider guiding propositions, but IMO you have to get to “attack the mayor with hummus” levels to find them. Also (unless there is deliberately something deeply off about Alice’s “reality”) I found the “psychiatric facility” as abusive and one-dimensionally villainous as Jafar, and that left a bad taste in my mouth. And I had no idea what was going on with the Red Queen, which might be a matter of acting choices or might be a symptom of the show just not knowing what to do with her. Maybe it's just that right now TV is catering to my interests more, so I feel like I can be pickier. I did find the Cheshire cat engagingly creepy, though.
Jesse Bering, Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us: Somewhat overlapping with the much better What Do Women Want?, this is an evo-bio tinged argument that “perversion” is natural (in the sense that some people, especially men, are readily sexually aroused by things other than the prospect of intercourse, including things that many others find nonsexual and even disgustng) and that natural is not a synonym for good, so that we should be focusing on harm instead. If you already believe this, you’ll find little new here, and, although it’s couched as an argument for acceptance, it’s addressed to people who believe themselves sexually “normal” and repeatedly indicates that the reader is expected to find many of the described practices weird and troubling, including the harmless ones.
Duncan Watts, Everything Is Obvious* Once You Know the Answer: Engaging criticism of “common sense” and warning about our ability to narrativize what happened as if the sequence of events were itself causal. Maybe Apple is the most valuable company in the world because of Apple’s great decisions—but there are a lot of great decisions that didn’t turn out so well. That doesn’t mean we can never know anything, but it does mean that sociological causation is very different from physics-style causation. Watts ends up advocating for big data (it can generate patterns that are more reliable in aggregate than other kinds of predictions, at least in the absence of huge changes in behavior that are themselves hard to predict) and small-scale solutions. Instead of planning at a large scale, policymakers should look for what’s already working in a few places and try to react fast to new information–though this is of course easier said than done. In the process, he unfortunately misdescribes the “Race to the Top” education initiative, which he uses as an example of a good, market-based idea—he says it sets broad goals and lets individual school districts figure out how best to meet the goals, but actually it favors states that fire principals and teachers and substitute charters, exactly the kind of preconceived solution he crticizes elsewhere.
Sheri Fink, Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital: At Memorial Hospital after Katrina, doctors deliberately injected certain patients with morphine and Versed, hastening their deaths. How did it come to that? Fink recounts the uncertainties, rumors, miscommunications and fears that led to the injections, noting that racial anxieties made it easier for some people to believe that rioting and looting was a real problem—which then interfered with actual rescue attempts. What emerges is a portrait of a system unprepared for crisis, and while plenty of people innovated to save lives, some of the decisions were short-sighted and tragic. Unfortunately, Fink suggests, many of the lessons of Katrina remain unheeded in terms of preparing for crisis. (On the other hand, she notes, current proposals for triage have little empirical basis in terms of identifying people who are more likely to survive; to the extent that triage plans lead medical professionals to write certain patients off as not worth saving, having no triage plan and keeping “first come first served” as the general rule might actually save more lives—but “no triage plan” and “no disaster plan” are two very different things and we really need more of the latter.)
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