rivkat | Nonfiction

John Pollack, Shortcut: How Analogies Reveal Connections, Spark Innovation, and Sell Our Greatest Ideas: Free LibraryThing Early Reviewer book. The subtitle and frankly bizarre Gladwell-esque cover position this as a business-ideas book; fewer of its examples are drawn from business than I would have expected, though there’s a fair amount about Apple. It’s a breezy, entertaining tour through the various uses of analogies for good and ill. Probably the most interesting fact I learned was that, per Frank Luntz, “battle” imagery turns women off, and therefore the NFL now discourages the use of war analogies in reporting/marketing in order to promote a shift towards more gender-balanced audiences; Pollack reports that this has been a success. He identifies five overlapping criteria for a good analogy: it uses the familiar to explain something less familiar; it highlights similarities and obscures differences; it identifies useful abstractions; it tells a coherent story; and it resonates emotionally. We have trouble fighting analogies (“the government’s budget is like a household budget and should balance”; “a Justice’s role is like an umpire’s, calling balls and strikes”) because they are so cognitively seductive, and if they’re bad we need to fight back before they control the narrative, sometimes with other analogies. Not much practical advice about how to do that, other than “think carefully about whether this works,” but maybe that’s the best that can be said.

C.J. Chivers, The Gun: History of the Kalashnikov rifle and related weapons, and of Kalashnikov himself (with concessions to the unreliability of Soviet history, including the multiple stories the inventor himself told). Starts with the beginning of automatic weaponry in the Civil War and various colonial endeavors up to WWI, where the great powers ignored all the lessons they should’ve learned unloading automatics on colonized peoples, as if white skin protected against the devastation these weapons could cause. Ends with the dissemination of AK rifles and related weapons to insurgents, terrorists, and freedom fighters around the world; what started as a weapon of the state turned into a weapon against it, since the rifles are not much use against really well-trained fighters but can be used—even by barely-trained children—to disrupt and destroy civilian life. There’s not much of a through-line to the story, but it’s one part of the answer to the question ‘how did we get into this mess?’

Debora J. Halbert, The State of Copyright: The Complex Relationships of Cultural Creation in a Globalized World: A power- and class-based analysis of copyright law. Copyright is a tool of state power—often US state power projection, as we harangue other countries to adopt stricter laws. At the same time, claims that intellectual property protection serves American interests often hide the fact that the biggest content companies’ profits don’t flow to American owners, much less American workers—these companies have legacy American names, but multinational owners. While creativity may start at the level of the individual, intellectual property laws combine with economic pressure to concentrate ownership in the hands of capital, leaving creators struggling to survive (and sometimes blaming poor people for piracy when it’s contracts with the wealthy that control most of their money). Halbert also spends a chapter exploring the American government’s attempt to use art to promote (supposedly) American values—ironic government support behind the ideology of “free market” production. Halbert argues that relentless expansion of rights has undermined the very certainty the expansion was supposed to bring, as new claimants show up: “Once someone understands a previously unprotected thing as property, then by default a new struggle over ownership ensues.” She uses fan fiction as one of her examples of the kinds of new cultural production copyright law should support instead of interfere with. After all, she notes, the culture industries have no problem appropriating from folk culture—we should be able to appropriate back.