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I'm a bit behind on SPN, but (a) I'm so glad to have my headcanon on Dean v. revenge confirmed--it's just not his thing. (Of course he's been able to externalize the desire for revenge to his codependent brother, so it's easier for him, but I think he lacks the taste for it anyway.) (b) I may really have to write Dean/Ketch with Ketch lavishly praising Dean as a good boy. I know Ketch would like the fact that he's also been with Mary, but I can't help thinking that Dean would also find it an unwilling turn-on--Daddy issues, you know.
Owen Gallagher, Reclaiming Critical Remix Video: The Role of Sampling in Transformative Works: Gallagher wants to reclaim “remix” for actual physical copying of bits and pieces of preexisting works, as opposed to the “everything is a remix” position of some current fans of limited copyright.
John M. Barry, The Great Influenza: Wow, this was a terribly written book—repetitive purple prose. The underlying story is really interesting, because the 1918 epidemic broke out right as the science was almost at a point to take serious steps to identify the pathogen and fight it, but the science was no match for the speed of the attack. Most of the book is about the scientists who studied infectious disease at the time, with a secondary focus on how the epidemic hit, spread, and killed.
Melba Kurman & Hod Lipson, Driverless:Driverless cars are coming faster than you think. Big message: there’s no future in the robot-to-human handoff to deal with unexpected events, because the handoff guarantees the human will not be paying attention at the most important moments. So driverless cars should, the authors argue, be made fully autonomous as soon as they’re several times safer than human drivers, which won’t be long now.
David A. Mindell, Our Robots, Ourselves: How do people deal with the automation of previously highly skilled, dangerous work? Sometimes, as with scientists studying the deep sea, they resist the automation and then redefine their work as seeing/manipulating as if they were actually down underwater. Sometimes they decide that the work isn’t that important, as with military pilots looking down on drone operators, even though drone operators face significant psychological trauma and military pilots aren’t often in that much danger flying the kind of missions the US military has today. Mindell also looks forward to driverless vehicles, making the point that most problems defined as technical in this and related spaces are actually problems of humans reacting to machines, and therefore not as easily solved as some technologists expect.
Hanna Nordhous, The Beekeeper’s Lament: The current story of American bees—massive die-offs, along with massive replacement efforts and mobile units that go from one side of the country to the other, fertilizing multiple crops. Nordhous suggests that this very hyperproductivity may be making bees more vulnerable to die-offs, as these working colonies have very little time to rest. Beekeepers tend to be misanthropes, and so she gets a lot of color out of their stories. It’s an ultimately melancholy story of the way that even the least apparently automatable function of agriculture—pollination by bees, still better than any of the alternatives—can be turned into mass production.
Yanis Varoufakis, Adults in the Room: My Battle with the European and American Deep Establishment: I don’t know how much of this book is accurate, but it’s certainly compelling. Varoufakis was Greece’s finance minister briefly, and tried to wring actual concessions out of the bankers in order to put Greece on a more sustainable path, instead of just more extend and pretend plus killing austerity. He didn’t succeed. Lots of nitty-gritty detail of negotiations and a sense of amazed frustration at a system that interlocked to prevent anyone from helping—and deliberately so, he suggests, at the will of Germany, which wanted to impose austerity on the rest of Europe. The negative effects of monetary unification without fiscal unification combined with the desire to pay the big banks back—which is what the loans really did, rather than helping the debtor country or its people—in a killing spiral; Varoufakis wanted to threaten to leave the Euro if they didn’t get real relief, because while Grexit would have been terrible for Greece, he believed it would be less terrible than staying in under austerity, forever. He lost, and Greece is still stuck in neutral, because it has no control over its currency or over its loans.
Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom: Tracks Russia’s propaganda (and at times physical) assault on Ukraine, Europe, and the US. Snyder argues that Russia has fallen under the spell of “eternal time”—in which people believe that nothing can change for the better, and so all that can bring relief/pleasure is a mythic past nationhood that must always be asserted against enemies. Europe and the US were complacent, believing that there was no alternative to modern capitalism—but autocracy was waiting, and has succeeded in placing its representative in the US Presidency. Very distressing look at the theorists, if you can call them that, behind Russia’s export of autocracy, as well as at how Russia invaded Ukraine but got the world to ignore that fact.
Odd Arne Westad, The Cold War: A World History: Starting before WWII, Westad tracks how the US and the USSR’s self-understanding as great powers locked in mortal combat affected their external relations across the globe, and how other nations, whether they agreed or disagreed with this characterization, had to deal with it one way or another. I probably learned most about the PRC and how it positioned itself as the smarter younger sibling of the USSR.
Joshua B. Freeman, Behemoth: A History of the Factory: Tracks factories all over the world, from the US versions to the even bigger Soviet versions to the even bigger Chinese versions. Factories brought people together where they could organize as workers—which is part of why capitalists in developed nations sought to get rid of them, or at least place them in nondemocratic states where labor unrest could be suppressed.
Owen Gallagher, Reclaiming Critical Remix Video: The Role of Sampling in Transformative Works: Gallagher wants to reclaim “remix” for actual physical copying of bits and pieces of preexisting works, as opposed to the “everything is a remix” position of some current fans of limited copyright.
John M. Barry, The Great Influenza: Wow, this was a terribly written book—repetitive purple prose. The underlying story is really interesting, because the 1918 epidemic broke out right as the science was almost at a point to take serious steps to identify the pathogen and fight it, but the science was no match for the speed of the attack. Most of the book is about the scientists who studied infectious disease at the time, with a secondary focus on how the epidemic hit, spread, and killed.
Melba Kurman & Hod Lipson, Driverless:Driverless cars are coming faster than you think. Big message: there’s no future in the robot-to-human handoff to deal with unexpected events, because the handoff guarantees the human will not be paying attention at the most important moments. So driverless cars should, the authors argue, be made fully autonomous as soon as they’re several times safer than human drivers, which won’t be long now.
David A. Mindell, Our Robots, Ourselves: How do people deal with the automation of previously highly skilled, dangerous work? Sometimes, as with scientists studying the deep sea, they resist the automation and then redefine their work as seeing/manipulating as if they were actually down underwater. Sometimes they decide that the work isn’t that important, as with military pilots looking down on drone operators, even though drone operators face significant psychological trauma and military pilots aren’t often in that much danger flying the kind of missions the US military has today. Mindell also looks forward to driverless vehicles, making the point that most problems defined as technical in this and related spaces are actually problems of humans reacting to machines, and therefore not as easily solved as some technologists expect.
Hanna Nordhous, The Beekeeper’s Lament: The current story of American bees—massive die-offs, along with massive replacement efforts and mobile units that go from one side of the country to the other, fertilizing multiple crops. Nordhous suggests that this very hyperproductivity may be making bees more vulnerable to die-offs, as these working colonies have very little time to rest. Beekeepers tend to be misanthropes, and so she gets a lot of color out of their stories. It’s an ultimately melancholy story of the way that even the least apparently automatable function of agriculture—pollination by bees, still better than any of the alternatives—can be turned into mass production.
Yanis Varoufakis, Adults in the Room: My Battle with the European and American Deep Establishment: I don’t know how much of this book is accurate, but it’s certainly compelling. Varoufakis was Greece’s finance minister briefly, and tried to wring actual concessions out of the bankers in order to put Greece on a more sustainable path, instead of just more extend and pretend plus killing austerity. He didn’t succeed. Lots of nitty-gritty detail of negotiations and a sense of amazed frustration at a system that interlocked to prevent anyone from helping—and deliberately so, he suggests, at the will of Germany, which wanted to impose austerity on the rest of Europe. The negative effects of monetary unification without fiscal unification combined with the desire to pay the big banks back—which is what the loans really did, rather than helping the debtor country or its people—in a killing spiral; Varoufakis wanted to threaten to leave the Euro if they didn’t get real relief, because while Grexit would have been terrible for Greece, he believed it would be less terrible than staying in under austerity, forever. He lost, and Greece is still stuck in neutral, because it has no control over its currency or over its loans.
Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom: Tracks Russia’s propaganda (and at times physical) assault on Ukraine, Europe, and the US. Snyder argues that Russia has fallen under the spell of “eternal time”—in which people believe that nothing can change for the better, and so all that can bring relief/pleasure is a mythic past nationhood that must always be asserted against enemies. Europe and the US were complacent, believing that there was no alternative to modern capitalism—but autocracy was waiting, and has succeeded in placing its representative in the US Presidency. Very distressing look at the theorists, if you can call them that, behind Russia’s export of autocracy, as well as at how Russia invaded Ukraine but got the world to ignore that fact.
Odd Arne Westad, The Cold War: A World History: Starting before WWII, Westad tracks how the US and the USSR’s self-understanding as great powers locked in mortal combat affected their external relations across the globe, and how other nations, whether they agreed or disagreed with this characterization, had to deal with it one way or another. I probably learned most about the PRC and how it positioned itself as the smarter younger sibling of the USSR.
Joshua B. Freeman, Behemoth: A History of the Factory: Tracks factories all over the world, from the US versions to the even bigger Soviet versions to the even bigger Chinese versions. Factories brought people together where they could organize as workers—which is part of why capitalists in developed nations sought to get rid of them, or at least place them in nondemocratic states where labor unrest could be suppressed.