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I wrote a thing: It’s meta!Jensen Ackles/meta!Jared Padalecki, from The French Mistake. Your guess is as good as mine about where that came from.
Mary Otto, Teeth: The Story of Beauty, Inequality, and the Struggle for Oral Health in America: Basically a very extended Atlantic article. Oral health is strongly linked to overall health, but for historical reasons—including a feud between two Baltimore dentists, and dentists’ opposition to “socialized” medicine—dental care has long been excluded from standard health care coverage, with only some recent attempts to fix that for kids. Medicaid pays so little that many dentists don’t accept Medicaid patients; cosmetic procedures are more profitable and thus more pursued than basic care. There’s one dentist for every 350 people in my community, while one for every 15,000 residents of a poorer county nearby. Dentists, of course, have resisted the use of lower-cost dental technicians to provide community care and routine cleanings. Dental visits to ERs cost lots and rarely result in any help, other than short-term pain relief at best. Poor kids thus often have rotting teeth, with consequences for school performance, employability (more than one out of three low-income adults avoids smiling), and daily pain in everyday life.
One heartbreaking story comes from Alaska, where a dental technician explains that you have to ask why people are doing things before you can give them the right care: a mother puts soda pop in her baby’s bottle to keep him quiet; it’s important to be quiet because if he cries when his uncles are around, they’ll beat him. This mother had managed to get her child and a sibling on a plane from her remote village to get a checkup; she prioritized survival over good teeth, and the technician could give her tips but not change her priorities. Our deeply disturbed health care system also produces moments of black humor, such as when an anti-segregation Jewish dentist gets called in front of HUAC and refuses to name names of members of “subversive” organizations. Told he’s not a good sport, he says, “I don’t think this is a sporting situation, actually.” After being lectured by the congressmen, he goes back to work—and eventually invents dental insurance.
Bill Schutt, Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History: Hey, did you know that lots of animals eat their own kind? There are some rules of thumb, no pun intended, most of which make sense as soon as you see them: young animals are more often on the menu; many animals, “particularly invertebrates, do not recognize individuals of their own kind, especially eggs and immature stages, which are simply regarded as a food source”; females cannibalize more than males; cannibalism is correlated with hunger/an absence of other food sources; and cannibalism is often directly correlated with overcrowding. In some species, young animals consume their littermates in order to accelerate their own development, which helps them out of the most defenseless stage of life. Cannibals otherwise tend to disfavor eating kin, to prevent decreases in inclusive fitness.
The greatest drawbacks to cannibalism seem to be the risk of getting sick—parasites and pathogens are more easily transmitted within species; there’s an extensive discussion of kuru/CJD (which turns out to be quite possibly viral, not the result of prions as such; proteins get digested in the gastrointestinal tract, while viruses get through unscathed). (Reminder that the government investigator who investigated the death of a young girl at the beginning of the outbreak in Britain warned her grandmother not to say anything because of the damage it would do to the economy.) If the pattern is the same as with kuru acquired via ritual cannibalism, then it may be decades before Europeans exposed in the 1970s and 80s start to die en masse—one estimate is one carrier of the abnormal prion protein for every 2000 people in the UK (though not all carriers will fall ill).
I also never considered breastfeeding or chewing one’s own fingernails as cannibalism, but it turns out to be hard to have a working definition without at least putting those on the borders. The caecilians—limbless amphibians—eat their mother’s skin off her body soon after they’re born. The young of live-bearing caecilians also “tear away and consume the lining of their mothers’ oviduct.” Yum!
The bulk of the book is about human cannibalism, both as a recognized part of culture and as desperate act of attempted survival. Schutt notes that Europeans tended to describe other groups as cannibals precisely to the extent that they wanted the land on which the cannibals lived; there’s apparently a big anthropological dispute about whether any cultures deemed such really engaged in cannibalism at all, or whether it was all Western propaganda. Schutt seemingly comes down on the side of those who say that there is/was at least some endocannibalism (eating one’s own naturally expired dead as a way to respect them, as opposed to eating enemies killed in battle). Then there’s Chinese medical cannibalism, and some European medical cannibalism (and the modern practice among rich white women of eating placenta). He also mentions the slaughter of Jews for supposed attacks on the Host during the Middle Ages, which was thought to have been revealed by bleeding Hosts—which could actually have been bacterial contamination.
Laurie Penny, Bitch Doctrine: Essays for Dissenting Adults: Oh look, another pained and angry woman writing powerfully but depressingly about what it’s like to be in 2017 in the US/UK as a feminist. Which is to say: it’s good, but I don’t know how many more of these I can read without giving up. “All politics are identity politics, but some identities are more politicised than others.” Penny thinks that self-blame on the left is in some sense a self-protection technique: if it’s our fault, then there’s something we can actually do, rather than the situation being beyond our control. On online harassment: “Every so often I wonder why I didn’t become a restaurant critic. They get free dinners. Being a feminist journalist, I get free death threats.” She argues that it’s better for most young, heterosexual women to be single, mostly because men their age usually haven’t learned to treat women like people; you might find a unicorn, but probably you’ll be wrong about that. Penny reads Austen and finds her an amazing horror writer, whose heroines are depressed and economically desperate in claustrophobic environments whose only escape is by marriage. She diagnoses rape culture as one in which (1) women (and children) are assumed to lie about rape and thus are not credible when they speak out, and simultaneously (2) rape is so omnipresent that all activity should be calibrated to avoid it, and when it happens there’s always some way to say “she was X so what did she expect?” She also describes the Wives of Mad Max: Fury Road as “what would happen if someone decided to heavily arm a Burberry ad,” heh. (And then she adds that the movie gives the lie to the idea that, in societal collapse, women will want men to protect them—men might be “precisely the thing they are trying to survive.”)
Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America: The New Deal was a devil’s bargain: major programs to alleviate the suffering of the Depression, but with Southern-demanded local control so that whites could continue to control blacks and deny them the benefits of government intervention. This or none, they said, and the good white people of the north and west chose this. When the pro-union national law started to enable unions to make gains in the South, threatening to improve blacks’ relative positions, Southern Democrats switched sides and joined Republicans to write laws that deterred unionization in agriculture and stemmed the union tide in general. And while the GI Bill provided major benefits for some black men—as did participating in the WWII armed forces even under segregated conditions—the national Democrats didn’t even try very hard to avoid local control, meaning that black veterans were regularly denied the educational, vocational, and mortgage/business help that whites received. White middle-class wealth increased tenfold; black middle-class wealth did not, even as incomes by class/occupation started to equalize. Katznelson ends with a call to recognize current affirmative action for African-Americans as a response to deliberate exclusion from government benefits in the past, whether done on the retail level or wholesale (by excluding “domestics” and agricultural workers from Social Security at its inception, for example).
Freek Vermeulen, Breaking Bad Habits: Defy Industry Norms and Reinvigorate Your Business: Business book as self-help. Some interesting factoids, such as: take on hard cases even though that decreases your success rate. The things you do to deal with the outliers train and improve your skills overall, as with IVF clinics that took on patients with a poor prognosis. Don’t do things just because your competitors are doing them; they might be jumping off the proverbial cliff without knowing it. Or everyone may be optimizing on one metric for too long—he gives the example of TVs whose images are so sharp that we now have to make screens bigger and bigger before we can detect any improvement. Watch out for practices that have an initial success rate (like selecting IVF patients with simple cases) or that rely on firm culture for success, since it’s hard to transplant an entire culture and tacit knowledge, as with Japanese car production techniques that didn’t work for US companies. “In an attempt to replicate a best practice, firms end up transforming a complex practice into a much simpler one, and this simplified version, which is much more alluring and easier to copy, is transferred from one firm to the next, becoming less and less useful—and eventually harmful.” Beware of survivor bias: business schools focus on the best companies, “ignoring the less-sexy average types”—if you look at how a practice works in an entire industry, you may see that on average it’s harmful when it looks good because it’s in use at the top companies (it may even producer greater-than-average variance, so it has really good and really bad outcomes).
I liked the discussion of the hidden harms of outsourcing—losing understanding and insight from the entire production process. For example, firms that outsourced patent filing lost some ability to identify potential competitors, and those competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, early in the process. Vermeulen also suggests asking dumb questions about why a practice is shared by your competitors, like “why is the newspaper printed the size it is?” It turns out that everyone does it that way because of a 1712 tax on the number of newspaper pages, in response to which publishers made the pages larger. But now one can succeed without doing that. He also suggests targeting specific groups, in a way that won’t necessarily scale up: e.g., find a specific group of consumers or employees, and eliminate things they don’t care about, decreasing your costs while enabling you to charge them a lower but still profitable price. His example is a consulting firm that only has senior consultants, no juniors—more expensive at the outset but also more experienced (thus outsourcing the process of developing junior talent to others in the market, by the way). Another example: he argues that pharma detailing doesn’t make as much sense in today’s information-risk environment, and that firms can succeed by having a few drugs that they promote well without detailing.
The biggest example, and possibly the most troubling, is low-cost airlines, which eliminated all the frills but also all the comfort, and offloaded costs onto employees and passengers, and yes we all went along with it, but probably to our collective detriment at this point. (Among other things, we now load planes in the least efficient way possible, with the people who pay more for aisle seats and overhead space allowed to board first, instead of boarding from the back of the plane.) But he does make the point that many of these practices only make sense in tandem—a traditional carrier doesn’t actually save much by only eliminating onboard niceties if they don’t also shift their routes, aircraft, and ticket sales. For full-service airlines, having some nonprofitable segments, meals, etc. is instead quite sensible.
More advice: Borrow solutions from other domains, not your competitors (this is also a common theme in creativity research generally). Try out changes just for change’s sake—this is disruptive but also provides useful lessons, such as forcing employees to interact with new sets of people, which can lead to new connections and innovations. While “never make a happy baby happier” is good parenting advice, for businesses it can lead them to ignore subtle changes either in the market or in their own operations that are losing opportunities.
Mary Otto, Teeth: The Story of Beauty, Inequality, and the Struggle for Oral Health in America: Basically a very extended Atlantic article. Oral health is strongly linked to overall health, but for historical reasons—including a feud between two Baltimore dentists, and dentists’ opposition to “socialized” medicine—dental care has long been excluded from standard health care coverage, with only some recent attempts to fix that for kids. Medicaid pays so little that many dentists don’t accept Medicaid patients; cosmetic procedures are more profitable and thus more pursued than basic care. There’s one dentist for every 350 people in my community, while one for every 15,000 residents of a poorer county nearby. Dentists, of course, have resisted the use of lower-cost dental technicians to provide community care and routine cleanings. Dental visits to ERs cost lots and rarely result in any help, other than short-term pain relief at best. Poor kids thus often have rotting teeth, with consequences for school performance, employability (more than one out of three low-income adults avoids smiling), and daily pain in everyday life.
One heartbreaking story comes from Alaska, where a dental technician explains that you have to ask why people are doing things before you can give them the right care: a mother puts soda pop in her baby’s bottle to keep him quiet; it’s important to be quiet because if he cries when his uncles are around, they’ll beat him. This mother had managed to get her child and a sibling on a plane from her remote village to get a checkup; she prioritized survival over good teeth, and the technician could give her tips but not change her priorities. Our deeply disturbed health care system also produces moments of black humor, such as when an anti-segregation Jewish dentist gets called in front of HUAC and refuses to name names of members of “subversive” organizations. Told he’s not a good sport, he says, “I don’t think this is a sporting situation, actually.” After being lectured by the congressmen, he goes back to work—and eventually invents dental insurance.
Bill Schutt, Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History: Hey, did you know that lots of animals eat their own kind? There are some rules of thumb, no pun intended, most of which make sense as soon as you see them: young animals are more often on the menu; many animals, “particularly invertebrates, do not recognize individuals of their own kind, especially eggs and immature stages, which are simply regarded as a food source”; females cannibalize more than males; cannibalism is correlated with hunger/an absence of other food sources; and cannibalism is often directly correlated with overcrowding. In some species, young animals consume their littermates in order to accelerate their own development, which helps them out of the most defenseless stage of life. Cannibals otherwise tend to disfavor eating kin, to prevent decreases in inclusive fitness.
The greatest drawbacks to cannibalism seem to be the risk of getting sick—parasites and pathogens are more easily transmitted within species; there’s an extensive discussion of kuru/CJD (which turns out to be quite possibly viral, not the result of prions as such; proteins get digested in the gastrointestinal tract, while viruses get through unscathed). (Reminder that the government investigator who investigated the death of a young girl at the beginning of the outbreak in Britain warned her grandmother not to say anything because of the damage it would do to the economy.) If the pattern is the same as with kuru acquired via ritual cannibalism, then it may be decades before Europeans exposed in the 1970s and 80s start to die en masse—one estimate is one carrier of the abnormal prion protein for every 2000 people in the UK (though not all carriers will fall ill).
I also never considered breastfeeding or chewing one’s own fingernails as cannibalism, but it turns out to be hard to have a working definition without at least putting those on the borders. The caecilians—limbless amphibians—eat their mother’s skin off her body soon after they’re born. The young of live-bearing caecilians also “tear away and consume the lining of their mothers’ oviduct.” Yum!
The bulk of the book is about human cannibalism, both as a recognized part of culture and as desperate act of attempted survival. Schutt notes that Europeans tended to describe other groups as cannibals precisely to the extent that they wanted the land on which the cannibals lived; there’s apparently a big anthropological dispute about whether any cultures deemed such really engaged in cannibalism at all, or whether it was all Western propaganda. Schutt seemingly comes down on the side of those who say that there is/was at least some endocannibalism (eating one’s own naturally expired dead as a way to respect them, as opposed to eating enemies killed in battle). Then there’s Chinese medical cannibalism, and some European medical cannibalism (and the modern practice among rich white women of eating placenta). He also mentions the slaughter of Jews for supposed attacks on the Host during the Middle Ages, which was thought to have been revealed by bleeding Hosts—which could actually have been bacterial contamination.
Laurie Penny, Bitch Doctrine: Essays for Dissenting Adults: Oh look, another pained and angry woman writing powerfully but depressingly about what it’s like to be in 2017 in the US/UK as a feminist. Which is to say: it’s good, but I don’t know how many more of these I can read without giving up. “All politics are identity politics, but some identities are more politicised than others.” Penny thinks that self-blame on the left is in some sense a self-protection technique: if it’s our fault, then there’s something we can actually do, rather than the situation being beyond our control. On online harassment: “Every so often I wonder why I didn’t become a restaurant critic. They get free dinners. Being a feminist journalist, I get free death threats.” She argues that it’s better for most young, heterosexual women to be single, mostly because men their age usually haven’t learned to treat women like people; you might find a unicorn, but probably you’ll be wrong about that. Penny reads Austen and finds her an amazing horror writer, whose heroines are depressed and economically desperate in claustrophobic environments whose only escape is by marriage. She diagnoses rape culture as one in which (1) women (and children) are assumed to lie about rape and thus are not credible when they speak out, and simultaneously (2) rape is so omnipresent that all activity should be calibrated to avoid it, and when it happens there’s always some way to say “she was X so what did she expect?” She also describes the Wives of Mad Max: Fury Road as “what would happen if someone decided to heavily arm a Burberry ad,” heh. (And then she adds that the movie gives the lie to the idea that, in societal collapse, women will want men to protect them—men might be “precisely the thing they are trying to survive.”)
Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America: The New Deal was a devil’s bargain: major programs to alleviate the suffering of the Depression, but with Southern-demanded local control so that whites could continue to control blacks and deny them the benefits of government intervention. This or none, they said, and the good white people of the north and west chose this. When the pro-union national law started to enable unions to make gains in the South, threatening to improve blacks’ relative positions, Southern Democrats switched sides and joined Republicans to write laws that deterred unionization in agriculture and stemmed the union tide in general. And while the GI Bill provided major benefits for some black men—as did participating in the WWII armed forces even under segregated conditions—the national Democrats didn’t even try very hard to avoid local control, meaning that black veterans were regularly denied the educational, vocational, and mortgage/business help that whites received. White middle-class wealth increased tenfold; black middle-class wealth did not, even as incomes by class/occupation started to equalize. Katznelson ends with a call to recognize current affirmative action for African-Americans as a response to deliberate exclusion from government benefits in the past, whether done on the retail level or wholesale (by excluding “domestics” and agricultural workers from Social Security at its inception, for example).
Freek Vermeulen, Breaking Bad Habits: Defy Industry Norms and Reinvigorate Your Business: Business book as self-help. Some interesting factoids, such as: take on hard cases even though that decreases your success rate. The things you do to deal with the outliers train and improve your skills overall, as with IVF clinics that took on patients with a poor prognosis. Don’t do things just because your competitors are doing them; they might be jumping off the proverbial cliff without knowing it. Or everyone may be optimizing on one metric for too long—he gives the example of TVs whose images are so sharp that we now have to make screens bigger and bigger before we can detect any improvement. Watch out for practices that have an initial success rate (like selecting IVF patients with simple cases) or that rely on firm culture for success, since it’s hard to transplant an entire culture and tacit knowledge, as with Japanese car production techniques that didn’t work for US companies. “In an attempt to replicate a best practice, firms end up transforming a complex practice into a much simpler one, and this simplified version, which is much more alluring and easier to copy, is transferred from one firm to the next, becoming less and less useful—and eventually harmful.” Beware of survivor bias: business schools focus on the best companies, “ignoring the less-sexy average types”—if you look at how a practice works in an entire industry, you may see that on average it’s harmful when it looks good because it’s in use at the top companies (it may even producer greater-than-average variance, so it has really good and really bad outcomes).
I liked the discussion of the hidden harms of outsourcing—losing understanding and insight from the entire production process. For example, firms that outsourced patent filing lost some ability to identify potential competitors, and those competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, early in the process. Vermeulen also suggests asking dumb questions about why a practice is shared by your competitors, like “why is the newspaper printed the size it is?” It turns out that everyone does it that way because of a 1712 tax on the number of newspaper pages, in response to which publishers made the pages larger. But now one can succeed without doing that. He also suggests targeting specific groups, in a way that won’t necessarily scale up: e.g., find a specific group of consumers or employees, and eliminate things they don’t care about, decreasing your costs while enabling you to charge them a lower but still profitable price. His example is a consulting firm that only has senior consultants, no juniors—more expensive at the outset but also more experienced (thus outsourcing the process of developing junior talent to others in the market, by the way). Another example: he argues that pharma detailing doesn’t make as much sense in today’s information-risk environment, and that firms can succeed by having a few drugs that they promote well without detailing.
The biggest example, and possibly the most troubling, is low-cost airlines, which eliminated all the frills but also all the comfort, and offloaded costs onto employees and passengers, and yes we all went along with it, but probably to our collective detriment at this point. (Among other things, we now load planes in the least efficient way possible, with the people who pay more for aisle seats and overhead space allowed to board first, instead of boarding from the back of the plane.) But he does make the point that many of these practices only make sense in tandem—a traditional carrier doesn’t actually save much by only eliminating onboard niceties if they don’t also shift their routes, aircraft, and ticket sales. For full-service airlines, having some nonprofitable segments, meals, etc. is instead quite sensible.
More advice: Borrow solutions from other domains, not your competitors (this is also a common theme in creativity research generally). Try out changes just for change’s sake—this is disruptive but also provides useful lessons, such as forcing employees to interact with new sets of people, which can lead to new connections and innovations. While “never make a happy baby happier” is good parenting advice, for businesses it can lead them to ignore subtle changes either in the market or in their own operations that are losing opportunities.
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