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Eula Biss, Notes from No Man’s Land: Essays about whiteness, and the precarious ways in which white Americans play out their guilt and denial. Some great moments in here, although some of the essays are too short to work up a real head of steam. Also some real shockers, as when Biss talks about starting out to write an essay about telephone poles and then changing when so many of the newspaper stories she found using the words in the first few decades of the twentieth century were about lynchings.
Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do: Readable entry in the “self-help via popular writing about behavioral psych studies” category. Advice on how to break some bad habits (generally, by creating different habits around them) and stories of success—and failure—of same in personal and professional realms.
Virginia Heffernan, Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art: Free review copy. Heffernan is a culture writer for the NYT, and this book is a bunch of meditations on the aesthetics of the internet. From the internet, she argues, we can truly appreciate things like America’s culture of overincarceration, when we find huge message boards dealing with inmates and their families. There are benefits and costs to this new way of being; one cost, she suggests, is dignity—she recounts doing journalism-lite for a website, and compares Michael Pollan’s suggestion not to eat anything your grandmother wouldn’t have recognized as food; her grandmother wouldn’t have recognized rewriting headlines to draw clicks as journalism. She analogizes the rise of apps to the rise of gated communities, making the experience for app users cleaner, safer, more expensive, and “classier” than the buzzing, blooming confusion of the web at large. She analogizes Google’s stated mission to “organize the world’s information” as the echo of “the founding tale of Western ambition: Faust’s deranged craving for unlimited knowledge.” But she also defends Twitter’s brevity, pointing out that “[t]o plenty of poets in plenty of languages, 140 symbols is expansive. Confucius’s adages were rarely longer than twenty Chinese characters.”
And, in a “the more things change” moment, she points to criticisms of early bound books as not “really” reading, compared to the effort required to find something in a scroll. She also reminds us that novels were once considered dangerous to women’s minds, and then that the Kindle was designed for people to read long-form and offline—that is, for women. Best line on gender: “For years technology had seemed to be the masculine form of the word culture.”
Heffernan also argues that reading for information, for highlighting, for good quotes (like I did for this review) is the American way of reading; and yet, she suggests, online, participatory reading—reading to comment, for example—is regarded by cultural gatekeepers as “impure,” inferior, to “serious” reading which is done in books and without immediate response. I was charmed by the idea that “America in the age of rye surplus used to be a nation of drunks, then the overproduction of corn turned us into overeaters, [and] as words have proliferated hypertrophically on the internet, we’ve become a population of overreaders, of hyperlexics.” Guilty.
Heffernan doesn’t like headphones (isolating, especially from the communal experience of listening to music) or MP3s (like trying to dine on painted grapes). She concludes that other people agree with her that something is missing from digital music because of the renaissance in live music, which is an interesting aesthetic take on what many others have presented as a business issue due to declining revenues from recorded music sales.
Alice Dreger, The Talk: Helping Your Kids Navigate Sex in the Real World: Dreger hilariously and depressingly livetweeted an abstinence-focused sex ed class at her kid’s public school, https://storify.com/metkat_meanie/livetweeting-abstinance-sex-ed, and then wrote this Kindle Single as a followup. Dreger’s research is about the history of responses to intersexed and other non-sexually normative people, and she comes at it from that perspective. She believes that there are, on average, biologically based differences between the interests of people born with XX chromosomes and people born with XY, but there’s also a lot of variation, within as well as across since sex isn’t actually binary. Her emphasis is on giving children information and helping them understand that variation is normal, so that they can make choices that are pleasurable and consensual as well as say no to things that aren’t pleasurable and consensual.
Dreger also gives a lot of weight to culture, citing studies showing that adults reinforce gendered behavior. When adults are given “cross-dressed” babies, they “become more impatient with ‘boys’ who are crying and try to engage the ‘girl’ babies with ‘girl’ toys.” But still, she perceives gender as a source of pleasure for many people, so she wants to make that pleasure available without oppression. (I’m not sure it’s possible to have one’s cake and eat it too in this way.)
Because boys with traditionally “feminine” interests are more likely to grow up gay than boys with traditionally “masculine” interests, while there’s no real association between gender-normative behavior and sexuality for girls, she warns against concluding too quickly that a boy who likes to dress as/play as a girl is “actually” a girl. She considers that giving in too quickly to the two-gender system, which may represent discomfort with the full gender spectrum or even unconscious homophobia. Only if a boy’s identification as female persists until age 11 or 12 is there reason to consider intervention, in her view, because at that point it can be useful to use drugs to prevent some of the pubertal changes that the child will perceive as wrong for her. (She doesn’t have as much to say about trans boys; her research has mostly been about trans women. She does say that a toddler daughter who says she’s a boy should be reassured that her interests are fine no matter what they are, but shouldn’t be encouraged to think she’ll have a penis when she grows up.)
The writing is cute: “Babies’ genitals often look kind of funny to adults because they are immature. I mean the baby’s genitals are immature …” But it’s also hard to imagine people reading this who aren’t already really committed to being informative most of the time, rather than teaching their kids shame about sexual desire.
One of the most interesting points for me is that she says that the adolescents she talks to were often prepared to prevent disease and pregnancy, but weren’t prepared for the emotional consequences and difficulties of sex, especially how they often felt differently about sexual encounters than their partners did. She concludes that it’s worth telling kids why lots of sex between adults occurs in long-term relationships, even if you think—as she does—that there’s nothing wrong with consensual sex in any form.
Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do: Readable entry in the “self-help via popular writing about behavioral psych studies” category. Advice on how to break some bad habits (generally, by creating different habits around them) and stories of success—and failure—of same in personal and professional realms.
Virginia Heffernan, Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art: Free review copy. Heffernan is a culture writer for the NYT, and this book is a bunch of meditations on the aesthetics of the internet. From the internet, she argues, we can truly appreciate things like America’s culture of overincarceration, when we find huge message boards dealing with inmates and their families. There are benefits and costs to this new way of being; one cost, she suggests, is dignity—she recounts doing journalism-lite for a website, and compares Michael Pollan’s suggestion not to eat anything your grandmother wouldn’t have recognized as food; her grandmother wouldn’t have recognized rewriting headlines to draw clicks as journalism. She analogizes the rise of apps to the rise of gated communities, making the experience for app users cleaner, safer, more expensive, and “classier” than the buzzing, blooming confusion of the web at large. She analogizes Google’s stated mission to “organize the world’s information” as the echo of “the founding tale of Western ambition: Faust’s deranged craving for unlimited knowledge.” But she also defends Twitter’s brevity, pointing out that “[t]o plenty of poets in plenty of languages, 140 symbols is expansive. Confucius’s adages were rarely longer than twenty Chinese characters.”
And, in a “the more things change” moment, she points to criticisms of early bound books as not “really” reading, compared to the effort required to find something in a scroll. She also reminds us that novels were once considered dangerous to women’s minds, and then that the Kindle was designed for people to read long-form and offline—that is, for women. Best line on gender: “For years technology had seemed to be the masculine form of the word culture.”
Heffernan also argues that reading for information, for highlighting, for good quotes (like I did for this review) is the American way of reading; and yet, she suggests, online, participatory reading—reading to comment, for example—is regarded by cultural gatekeepers as “impure,” inferior, to “serious” reading which is done in books and without immediate response. I was charmed by the idea that “America in the age of rye surplus used to be a nation of drunks, then the overproduction of corn turned us into overeaters, [and] as words have proliferated hypertrophically on the internet, we’ve become a population of overreaders, of hyperlexics.” Guilty.
Heffernan doesn’t like headphones (isolating, especially from the communal experience of listening to music) or MP3s (like trying to dine on painted grapes). She concludes that other people agree with her that something is missing from digital music because of the renaissance in live music, which is an interesting aesthetic take on what many others have presented as a business issue due to declining revenues from recorded music sales.
Alice Dreger, The Talk: Helping Your Kids Navigate Sex in the Real World: Dreger hilariously and depressingly livetweeted an abstinence-focused sex ed class at her kid’s public school, https://storify.com/metkat_meanie/livetweeting-abstinance-sex-ed, and then wrote this Kindle Single as a followup. Dreger’s research is about the history of responses to intersexed and other non-sexually normative people, and she comes at it from that perspective. She believes that there are, on average, biologically based differences between the interests of people born with XX chromosomes and people born with XY, but there’s also a lot of variation, within as well as across since sex isn’t actually binary. Her emphasis is on giving children information and helping them understand that variation is normal, so that they can make choices that are pleasurable and consensual as well as say no to things that aren’t pleasurable and consensual.
Dreger also gives a lot of weight to culture, citing studies showing that adults reinforce gendered behavior. When adults are given “cross-dressed” babies, they “become more impatient with ‘boys’ who are crying and try to engage the ‘girl’ babies with ‘girl’ toys.” But still, she perceives gender as a source of pleasure for many people, so she wants to make that pleasure available without oppression. (I’m not sure it’s possible to have one’s cake and eat it too in this way.)
Because boys with traditionally “feminine” interests are more likely to grow up gay than boys with traditionally “masculine” interests, while there’s no real association between gender-normative behavior and sexuality for girls, she warns against concluding too quickly that a boy who likes to dress as/play as a girl is “actually” a girl. She considers that giving in too quickly to the two-gender system, which may represent discomfort with the full gender spectrum or even unconscious homophobia. Only if a boy’s identification as female persists until age 11 or 12 is there reason to consider intervention, in her view, because at that point it can be useful to use drugs to prevent some of the pubertal changes that the child will perceive as wrong for her. (She doesn’t have as much to say about trans boys; her research has mostly been about trans women. She does say that a toddler daughter who says she’s a boy should be reassured that her interests are fine no matter what they are, but shouldn’t be encouraged to think she’ll have a penis when she grows up.)
The writing is cute: “Babies’ genitals often look kind of funny to adults because they are immature. I mean the baby’s genitals are immature …” But it’s also hard to imagine people reading this who aren’t already really committed to being informative most of the time, rather than teaching their kids shame about sexual desire.
One of the most interesting points for me is that she says that the adolescents she talks to were often prepared to prevent disease and pregnancy, but weren’t prepared for the emotional consequences and difficulties of sex, especially how they often felt differently about sexual encounters than their partners did. She concludes that it’s worth telling kids why lots of sex between adults occurs in long-term relationships, even if you think—as she does—that there’s nothing wrong with consensual sex in any form.
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