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Gordon Wood, Empire of Liberty: The chaos and contradictions of the early American republic (if we can keep it), engagingly told through the lives of specific people, mostly but not entirely white men, famous and not. Reading about this era isn’t just a Hamilton thing for me at this point; it helps reassure me that Americans have always been this confused, vicious, and occasionally great, and that we can probably get through this too. I hope.
Charlie Savage, Power Wars: How the Obama administration took the national security surveillance, detention, and covert action apparatus it inherited from the George W. Bush administration and ended up keeping most of it. Guantanamo wasn’t closed because they didn’t act fast enough, and then Congress blocked the closing despite the harm to our reputation and national honor. But for the rest, Savage argues—surveillance and drone killings mostly—what the Obama policymakers had objected to in the Bush administration was the lack of legal authorization for these acts, the violations of existing laws or actions outside statutorily granted authority. Whether you think this is ironic or not, the Obama administration’s focus on lawfulness rather than human rights meant that they ended up institutionalizing many of the biggest expansions of the national security state by seeking formal methods and procedures for overseeing, but not blocking, these exercises of executive power.
Hope Jahren, Lab Girl: This is a book about studying plants, but also and mostly a book about being a non-neurotypical woman finding her way in a still-often-hostile world while loving science beyond measure. She’s deeply, deeply weird in a way I recognize, with a knack for turning a phrase and some nice subtle uses of plant development to contrast with her own life story.
James Salzman, Drinking Water: The infrastructure of water in the US, and elsewhere, is vital but often underrated (this book was written before the disaster in Flint became national news). Salzman provides a brief history of water infrastructure, as well as a history of bottled water and the interaction between the two. Bottled water is in fact really, really old, and traces at least part of its origin from religious relics from sacred springs; now it’s “natural” and similar meaningless words and images in which we put our faith, even though most bottled water is no better and sometimes worse than most tap water. Salzman suggests that we have some expensive times ahead when it comes to securing clean drinking water—and he also says that it can be very hard to get people to stop drinking dirty water when it’s so expensive to fix. People who either have to travel two hours round trip to get water from the clean well or take a chance with the dirty well nearby will often do the latter, and it’s hard to say that they’re being ridiculous given the many costs involved. Long trips for water in the developing world particularly interfere with women’s education and ability to earn money. In the US we don’t usually have to worry about safe drinking water—but unless we start spending a bunch more money on infrastructure, Salzman warns, we will, as we’ve already seen in Flint.
Eliezer J. Sternberg, NeuroLogic: The Brain’s Hidden Rationale Behind Our Irrational Behavior: Investigations of biological/physical basis for things like what blind people see when they dream, why imagination can help you be a better athlete (etc.), why schizophrenics hear voices (they have a difficulty with recognizing their own voices that has an apparent genetic basis; we are all actually subvocalizing our thoughts, but schizophrenics can hear those subvocalizations without recognizing their source, and, searching for an understandable explanation, conclude that someone else is talking to them), and why people believe in alien abductions (sleep paralysis is involved). Entertaining.
Waverly Duck, No Way Out: Precarious Living in the Shadow of Poverty and Drug Dealing: This was recommended in something I read about Alice Goffman’s On the Run, and I wouldn’t say it’s better, but it is certainly consistent/more focused on the non-drug-dealers in a neighborhood known for being a good place to buy drugs. As an African-American male, he was in a different position than Goffman; one thing that pops up several times is how some residents saw him as a potential mate for themselves or women they knew, given the disproportion between available heterosexual men and women in the neighborhood. Matthew Desmond’s Evicted is probably the best treatment of precarity among the poor, and it too is consistent with this book; what Duck emphasizes is the way that the poor African-Americans living in the neighborhood he studies have values that they can’t necessarily implement in their behavior, and make compromises in order to survive day-to-day. Heterosexual men and women wanted long-term relationships, for example, but men often couldn’t fulfill their assigned roles—and if they could, they were so in demand that they didn’t have to be faithful. Duck tells the story of one who reframed his masculine role as one of providing sex rather than money, even though he clearly had great emotional involvement with his two long-term partners; he wanted to be providing something that distinguished him as a man.
Like many other Americans, Duck says, residents of the neighborhood often view their situation as the product of individual bad choices rather than structures that make it nearly impossible for them to keep stable jobs/housing. One of the most notable structures is lots of fines for minor traffic offenses, leading to imprisonment—which can lead to job loss and eviction, meaning no way out of the poverty/ticketing cycle. Likewise, child support obligations set according to cost-sharing models rather than the father’s income made paying often impossible since, as Duck notes, poor women tend to have children with poor men. Duck characterizes the overall system as one in which collective punishment is imposed on the neighborhood through police and other institutions. Kin networks that in previous decades could take up some of the slack when an individual was stretched to the breaking point are increasingly tapped-out and often no longer able to respond with real help.
Duck also argues that, at least in the neighborhood he studied, what was described by outsiders as drug gang-related violence was often personal disputes/vengeance, given that the “gang” was really a bunch of boys and their uncles and fathers who’d grown up together in contexts where it was easy to get a police record and hard to get a job on the books. One notable fact: Duck says that the “broken windows” of the neighborhood weren’t at all accidental—drug dealers broke light bulbs in order to make it harder to see and chase them, and they maintained piles of trash in order to hide drugs and guns. Gym shoes hanging from electrical wires mark the boundaries of dealers’ territories. Unkempt properties are mostly those of absentee landlords; fining the poor tenants wouldn’t do any good, and demolishing badly maintained properties just creates more lots in which drugs and guns can be hidden.
Ian Klaus, Forging Capitalism: Rogues, Swindlers, Frauds, and the Rise of Modern Finance: This might have been too big a topic to put into one book; the basis thesis is that frauds have always been with us, including during the rise of modern capitalism, and there were various attempts to deal with the risk of fraud that changed over time as capitalism matured. Reliance on the high status of gentlemen failed; reliance on the good reputation of traders failed; reliance on following reasonable and customary practices failed; reliance on case-by-case verification of claims failed; and the final iteration has been self-regulation or plain old government regulation in the form of standardized rules, particularly disclosure. It’s not perfect either, but better alternatives have yet to emerge. Tidbit: the influential newspaper Financial News published “answers to correspondents” in which readers’ questions were answered, but their questions weren’t published; thus they could get functionally anonymous investment advice with answers saying that X was a good investment or that “he” was a known swindler. But when the publisher invested in a scheme of its own, it put that company’s name in the positive answers.
Charlie Savage, Power Wars: How the Obama administration took the national security surveillance, detention, and covert action apparatus it inherited from the George W. Bush administration and ended up keeping most of it. Guantanamo wasn’t closed because they didn’t act fast enough, and then Congress blocked the closing despite the harm to our reputation and national honor. But for the rest, Savage argues—surveillance and drone killings mostly—what the Obama policymakers had objected to in the Bush administration was the lack of legal authorization for these acts, the violations of existing laws or actions outside statutorily granted authority. Whether you think this is ironic or not, the Obama administration’s focus on lawfulness rather than human rights meant that they ended up institutionalizing many of the biggest expansions of the national security state by seeking formal methods and procedures for overseeing, but not blocking, these exercises of executive power.
Hope Jahren, Lab Girl: This is a book about studying plants, but also and mostly a book about being a non-neurotypical woman finding her way in a still-often-hostile world while loving science beyond measure. She’s deeply, deeply weird in a way I recognize, with a knack for turning a phrase and some nice subtle uses of plant development to contrast with her own life story.
James Salzman, Drinking Water: The infrastructure of water in the US, and elsewhere, is vital but often underrated (this book was written before the disaster in Flint became national news). Salzman provides a brief history of water infrastructure, as well as a history of bottled water and the interaction between the two. Bottled water is in fact really, really old, and traces at least part of its origin from religious relics from sacred springs; now it’s “natural” and similar meaningless words and images in which we put our faith, even though most bottled water is no better and sometimes worse than most tap water. Salzman suggests that we have some expensive times ahead when it comes to securing clean drinking water—and he also says that it can be very hard to get people to stop drinking dirty water when it’s so expensive to fix. People who either have to travel two hours round trip to get water from the clean well or take a chance with the dirty well nearby will often do the latter, and it’s hard to say that they’re being ridiculous given the many costs involved. Long trips for water in the developing world particularly interfere with women’s education and ability to earn money. In the US we don’t usually have to worry about safe drinking water—but unless we start spending a bunch more money on infrastructure, Salzman warns, we will, as we’ve already seen in Flint.
Eliezer J. Sternberg, NeuroLogic: The Brain’s Hidden Rationale Behind Our Irrational Behavior: Investigations of biological/physical basis for things like what blind people see when they dream, why imagination can help you be a better athlete (etc.), why schizophrenics hear voices (they have a difficulty with recognizing their own voices that has an apparent genetic basis; we are all actually subvocalizing our thoughts, but schizophrenics can hear those subvocalizations without recognizing their source, and, searching for an understandable explanation, conclude that someone else is talking to them), and why people believe in alien abductions (sleep paralysis is involved). Entertaining.
Waverly Duck, No Way Out: Precarious Living in the Shadow of Poverty and Drug Dealing: This was recommended in something I read about Alice Goffman’s On the Run, and I wouldn’t say it’s better, but it is certainly consistent/more focused on the non-drug-dealers in a neighborhood known for being a good place to buy drugs. As an African-American male, he was in a different position than Goffman; one thing that pops up several times is how some residents saw him as a potential mate for themselves or women they knew, given the disproportion between available heterosexual men and women in the neighborhood. Matthew Desmond’s Evicted is probably the best treatment of precarity among the poor, and it too is consistent with this book; what Duck emphasizes is the way that the poor African-Americans living in the neighborhood he studies have values that they can’t necessarily implement in their behavior, and make compromises in order to survive day-to-day. Heterosexual men and women wanted long-term relationships, for example, but men often couldn’t fulfill their assigned roles—and if they could, they were so in demand that they didn’t have to be faithful. Duck tells the story of one who reframed his masculine role as one of providing sex rather than money, even though he clearly had great emotional involvement with his two long-term partners; he wanted to be providing something that distinguished him as a man.
Like many other Americans, Duck says, residents of the neighborhood often view their situation as the product of individual bad choices rather than structures that make it nearly impossible for them to keep stable jobs/housing. One of the most notable structures is lots of fines for minor traffic offenses, leading to imprisonment—which can lead to job loss and eviction, meaning no way out of the poverty/ticketing cycle. Likewise, child support obligations set according to cost-sharing models rather than the father’s income made paying often impossible since, as Duck notes, poor women tend to have children with poor men. Duck characterizes the overall system as one in which collective punishment is imposed on the neighborhood through police and other institutions. Kin networks that in previous decades could take up some of the slack when an individual was stretched to the breaking point are increasingly tapped-out and often no longer able to respond with real help.
Duck also argues that, at least in the neighborhood he studied, what was described by outsiders as drug gang-related violence was often personal disputes/vengeance, given that the “gang” was really a bunch of boys and their uncles and fathers who’d grown up together in contexts where it was easy to get a police record and hard to get a job on the books. One notable fact: Duck says that the “broken windows” of the neighborhood weren’t at all accidental—drug dealers broke light bulbs in order to make it harder to see and chase them, and they maintained piles of trash in order to hide drugs and guns. Gym shoes hanging from electrical wires mark the boundaries of dealers’ territories. Unkempt properties are mostly those of absentee landlords; fining the poor tenants wouldn’t do any good, and demolishing badly maintained properties just creates more lots in which drugs and guns can be hidden.
Ian Klaus, Forging Capitalism: Rogues, Swindlers, Frauds, and the Rise of Modern Finance: This might have been too big a topic to put into one book; the basis thesis is that frauds have always been with us, including during the rise of modern capitalism, and there were various attempts to deal with the risk of fraud that changed over time as capitalism matured. Reliance on the high status of gentlemen failed; reliance on the good reputation of traders failed; reliance on following reasonable and customary practices failed; reliance on case-by-case verification of claims failed; and the final iteration has been self-regulation or plain old government regulation in the form of standardized rules, particularly disclosure. It’s not perfect either, but better alternatives have yet to emerge. Tidbit: the influential newspaper Financial News published “answers to correspondents” in which readers’ questions were answered, but their questions weren’t published; thus they could get functionally anonymous investment advice with answers saying that X was a good investment or that “he” was a known swindler. But when the publisher invested in a scheme of its own, it put that company’s name in the positive answers.
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