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Sorry I haven't been around! End of semester weirdness.
Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: Stories of the great wave of African-American internal migration, South to North, tracking a few specific stories—a woman who moved to Chicago and got factory work, a man who moved to New York and worked the trains, and a man who moved to Los Angeles and finally found the kind of work as a doctor he sought. Through them, Wilkerson tracks the incredible bravery required to escape, often under circumstances where blacks could be killed for trying to leave and killed for any reason if they stayed. She recounts the hard work and tradeoffs the migrants made, as well as the racist barriers they left and the ones they encountered in the North—they often got the lowest pay and the worst jobs, which were still often better than the options in the South, but left them with little opportunity to supervise their children. Among her points is that the migrants, like many immigrants, were often highly ambitious and risk-taking and that they were wrongly blamed for causing social problems in Northern cities, whereas they had higher education, employment, and marriage rates than native-born Northern African-Americans. Racism was the problem, and they found partial solutions, as well as individual triumph and tragedy, by leaving the South (and often longing for many of its traditions for decades afterwards).
Joshua Wolf Shenk, Powers of Two: Finding the Essence of Innovation in Creative Pairs: Shenk tries to strike a middle path between the myth of the lone genius and the creative person embedded in context, though he says he believes the latter, by focusing on more graspable entities: the creative pair, like Lennon and McCartney. He cheats a bit by including a few rivals, like two basketball greats (Larry Bird and Magic Johnson), as competitors who spurred each other to perform even better. As a set of stories of how creative partnerships can form, inspire great work, and either persist or fall apart, it’s moderately interesting, but it’s hard to find big lessons except “be open to the contributions of others” and “look for someone who’s enough like you to communicate but different enough to make your work better.”
Stephen M. Best, The Fugitive’s Properties: Literary theory attempt to meld property law with cultural analysis; mostly flew over my head. As I understand the argument: Slavery, or fugitive slaves, served as a metaphor or playing out of the collapse between concepts of personhood and of property in the 19th century. Fugitivity was also the condition of value in a newly credit-based economy; the fiction that slaves “owed” their masters service also was consistent with the generation of supposedly contractual links between parties that sustained a modern commercial economy. This is somehow connected with racist narratives about black inferiority as well as African-American practices of signifying. Credit and wordplay “share a disdain for the real … Puns break the neck of meaning,” a phrase I liked but am not sure I understand. New legal doctrines condemned “reaping without sowing” in the context of using a celebrity’s identity for commercial purposes without consent, while at the same time speculators in stock/commodities reaped without sowing and, not without contest, became founding figures of the new economy. Metaphors (like reaping without sowing) enable intellectual property to work, but aren’t true of the real world, and thus “[f]orgetting and denial are … the cognitive styles that predominate in intellectual property law.” Mostly I couldn’t make the connections the author seemed to see, though.
Bartow Elmore, Citizen Coke: The Making of Coca-Cola Capitalism: Now this book, unlike Empire of Cotton, has a real working definition of the kind of capitalism it identifies: capitalism in which private profits are enabled by resource extraction subsidized by the state, epitomized by Coca-Cola’s success at getting others to bear the costs of its ventures. These others include grocery stores, local water sources, local landfills, coffee and coca farmers, etc.—by owning very little except the syrup making itself, Coca-Cola is able to buy from the cheapest source worldwide and use its brand name to produce huge profits year after year. I was particularly interested in how Elmore, given his thesis, presented the use of trademark law to go after cola competitors like Koke as an example of Coca-Cola’s deployment of state power to secure its own profits. He finds the same pattern in water, caffeine, bottling materials, and other raw materials. The chapter on litter also was very insightful, focusing on Coca-Cola’s public service campaigns that instructed consumers that “Cleaning up America is your job.” This anti-litter campaign excused litter from being Coca-Cola’s problem in that Coca-Cola was the entity that created nonreturnables because they were cheaper (they didn’t require transportation back to the bottling plant). As with Coca-Cola’s free/subsidized water, subsidized sweetener, etc., the company managed to individualize and offload costs on the reception end just as much as on the production end.
Michael Lewis, Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt: The story of an outsider who figured out some of the ways in which big banks and high-frequency trading firms were screwing ordinary investors (e.g., your retirement account, if you have one, and mine) and did a little bit about it. Frustrating in that regulators don’t know and don’t care, and the one person who goes to jail in the book is a Goldman Sachs employee who doesn’t seem to have done anything wrong (he was just reconvicted on state charges, making the story even sadder). What’s amazing was how compartmentalized so much of this was, such that the people building the technology didn’t know what it was being used for. Here’s a quote from one: “I felt like the getaway driver .… Each time, it was like, ‘Drive faster! Drive faster!’ Then it was like, ‘Get rid of the airbags!’ Then it was, ‘Get rid of the fucking seats!’ Towards the end I’m like, ‘Excuse me, sirs, but what are you doing in the bank?’” And yet there was information if you knew where to look—people would disclose on their LinkedIn pages that they were specialists in manipulating particular exchanges, “like saying on your LinkedIn profile, ‘I have all the skills of a robber and I know this one house intimately.’” Key deals are done with no documentation—sound like anything else the banks have done recently? Although this particular story ends well, with the new exchange succeeding in getting a ton of business protecting investors, it’s hard to believe the manipulations have ended.
Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: Stories of the great wave of African-American internal migration, South to North, tracking a few specific stories—a woman who moved to Chicago and got factory work, a man who moved to New York and worked the trains, and a man who moved to Los Angeles and finally found the kind of work as a doctor he sought. Through them, Wilkerson tracks the incredible bravery required to escape, often under circumstances where blacks could be killed for trying to leave and killed for any reason if they stayed. She recounts the hard work and tradeoffs the migrants made, as well as the racist barriers they left and the ones they encountered in the North—they often got the lowest pay and the worst jobs, which were still often better than the options in the South, but left them with little opportunity to supervise their children. Among her points is that the migrants, like many immigrants, were often highly ambitious and risk-taking and that they were wrongly blamed for causing social problems in Northern cities, whereas they had higher education, employment, and marriage rates than native-born Northern African-Americans. Racism was the problem, and they found partial solutions, as well as individual triumph and tragedy, by leaving the South (and often longing for many of its traditions for decades afterwards).
Joshua Wolf Shenk, Powers of Two: Finding the Essence of Innovation in Creative Pairs: Shenk tries to strike a middle path between the myth of the lone genius and the creative person embedded in context, though he says he believes the latter, by focusing on more graspable entities: the creative pair, like Lennon and McCartney. He cheats a bit by including a few rivals, like two basketball greats (Larry Bird and Magic Johnson), as competitors who spurred each other to perform even better. As a set of stories of how creative partnerships can form, inspire great work, and either persist or fall apart, it’s moderately interesting, but it’s hard to find big lessons except “be open to the contributions of others” and “look for someone who’s enough like you to communicate but different enough to make your work better.”
Stephen M. Best, The Fugitive’s Properties: Literary theory attempt to meld property law with cultural analysis; mostly flew over my head. As I understand the argument: Slavery, or fugitive slaves, served as a metaphor or playing out of the collapse between concepts of personhood and of property in the 19th century. Fugitivity was also the condition of value in a newly credit-based economy; the fiction that slaves “owed” their masters service also was consistent with the generation of supposedly contractual links between parties that sustained a modern commercial economy. This is somehow connected with racist narratives about black inferiority as well as African-American practices of signifying. Credit and wordplay “share a disdain for the real … Puns break the neck of meaning,” a phrase I liked but am not sure I understand. New legal doctrines condemned “reaping without sowing” in the context of using a celebrity’s identity for commercial purposes without consent, while at the same time speculators in stock/commodities reaped without sowing and, not without contest, became founding figures of the new economy. Metaphors (like reaping without sowing) enable intellectual property to work, but aren’t true of the real world, and thus “[f]orgetting and denial are … the cognitive styles that predominate in intellectual property law.” Mostly I couldn’t make the connections the author seemed to see, though.
Bartow Elmore, Citizen Coke: The Making of Coca-Cola Capitalism: Now this book, unlike Empire of Cotton, has a real working definition of the kind of capitalism it identifies: capitalism in which private profits are enabled by resource extraction subsidized by the state, epitomized by Coca-Cola’s success at getting others to bear the costs of its ventures. These others include grocery stores, local water sources, local landfills, coffee and coca farmers, etc.—by owning very little except the syrup making itself, Coca-Cola is able to buy from the cheapest source worldwide and use its brand name to produce huge profits year after year. I was particularly interested in how Elmore, given his thesis, presented the use of trademark law to go after cola competitors like Koke as an example of Coca-Cola’s deployment of state power to secure its own profits. He finds the same pattern in water, caffeine, bottling materials, and other raw materials. The chapter on litter also was very insightful, focusing on Coca-Cola’s public service campaigns that instructed consumers that “Cleaning up America is your job.” This anti-litter campaign excused litter from being Coca-Cola’s problem in that Coca-Cola was the entity that created nonreturnables because they were cheaper (they didn’t require transportation back to the bottling plant). As with Coca-Cola’s free/subsidized water, subsidized sweetener, etc., the company managed to individualize and offload costs on the reception end just as much as on the production end.
Michael Lewis, Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt: The story of an outsider who figured out some of the ways in which big banks and high-frequency trading firms were screwing ordinary investors (e.g., your retirement account, if you have one, and mine) and did a little bit about it. Frustrating in that regulators don’t know and don’t care, and the one person who goes to jail in the book is a Goldman Sachs employee who doesn’t seem to have done anything wrong (he was just reconvicted on state charges, making the story even sadder). What’s amazing was how compartmentalized so much of this was, such that the people building the technology didn’t know what it was being used for. Here’s a quote from one: “I felt like the getaway driver .… Each time, it was like, ‘Drive faster! Drive faster!’ Then it was like, ‘Get rid of the airbags!’ Then it was, ‘Get rid of the fucking seats!’ Towards the end I’m like, ‘Excuse me, sirs, but what are you doing in the bank?’” And yet there was information if you knew where to look—people would disclose on their LinkedIn pages that they were specialists in manipulating particular exchanges, “like saying on your LinkedIn profile, ‘I have all the skills of a robber and I know this one house intimately.’” Key deals are done with no documentation—sound like anything else the banks have done recently? Although this particular story ends well, with the new exchange succeeding in getting a ton of business protecting investors, it’s hard to believe the manipulations have ended.
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The Isabel Wilkerson book sounds most appealing to me and probably one I will pick up to read. Thanks for these.