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Joanne B. Freeman, The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War: Great, disturbing book about how much violence there was in the antebellum Congress—a guy died in a duel, and that’s not even the thing you know about (Sumner’s caning). John Quincy Adams deliberately used his elderly, decrepit statesman status to say things that other Northerners couldn’t say without getting called out for a literal duel, because Southerners were amazing bullies and used that bullying to prevent discussion of slavery. Eventually Northerners got fed up and started electing representatives who professed themselves willing to fight back, though Northerners still disapproved of dueling and so it was always a tightrope. But white Southerners were committed to their ideals of slavery and manhood as aggression, and so we got the Civil War. Not promising for today’s situation.
Bess Williamson, Accessible America: A History of Disability and Design:The book traces the history of design for accessibility since the early 20th century—here moving from prostheses and designs that enabled people to drive cars to building/built environment design and finally back to wheelchairs and other objects (like OXO Good-Grips), now under the aegis of “universal design.” Williamson argues that a key issue has always been American individualism and bias against shared resources—was accessibility a way of enabling individual citizens to fulfill their productive potential, or was it coddling/harming others in order to benefit a minority? Appealing to the former conception helped disabled advocates and their allies, but also accepted the individualist premise. Likewise, using polio survivors and disabled war veterans as paradigmatic representatives of disabled populations allowed appeals to normative white masculinity and femininity—accessibility helped otherwise middle-class white people fulfill their appropriate roles—but didn’t challenge the normativity of those depictions. Radical interventions in the 1960s and beyond have tried to frame access as enabling individuals to choose how they want to live in the world, and to discuss inaccessibility as both literally and more-than-literally structural replication of disadvantage, but the simultaneous rise of “universal design” also made it easy for disability as a particular way of life to disappear, since designers are now supposedly designing for everyone.
Ayelet Waldman & Michael Chabon eds., Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Various writers on Israel’s Occupied Territories.The writers are generally very talented, which makes the topic harder and easier to bear; they convey the pain of living under occupation, the arbitrary actions of others that control your life and make time unpredictable and endless, the way that Israel is trying to squeeze Palestinians out of the territories by squashing economic and other forms of development.
Susan Orlean, The Library Book: Reading about a giant 1986 library fire in LA now counts as escapism. Orlean is a great writer who moves from the history of the LA library system to the way a fire spreads to an inquiry into the life of the guy who was ultimately blamed for (but never charged with) starting the fire. It’s a great read.
Geoffrey Kabaservice, Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, From Eisenhower to the Tea Party: Kabaservice really likes small government (but antidiscrimination law is good and the distinctive accomplishment of moderate Republicans, for which they didn’t get credit). He tells the story of the destruction of the moderate Republicans as a tragedy; Barry Goldwater’s candidacy seems in retrospect like a rehearsal for Trump, though that’s so awful that the horror with which Goldwater would have regarded Trump can’t even be ironic.
Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar: Compassionate advice about going on or changing things when you can’t see how that could be done.
Jack Lewis, The Science of Sin: Why We Do The Things We Know We Shouldn’t: Review of the brain structures involved in bad behavior, organized by the seven deadly sins. Argues for the benefits of religion from an atheist/agnostic standpoint: religion helps us make sense of life and provides the ability to create connections among people that are our greatest protection against vulnerability to the sins. Also argues that social media are reinforcing our narcissism (interestingly, musicians seem to have lower narcissism scores than other public figures, with reality stars being the worst). And that obesity (though not as deadly as sloth) prevents fully voluntary decisionmaking by contributing to low-grade systemic inflammation and blockages of minor blood vessels in the brain that are the enough to cause mild cognitive impairments, which can often be alleviated by gastric band surgery. To improve teen eating habits, he suggests “[b]ringing their attention to the injustice associated with huge, well-funded multinational companies generating profits from the obesity epidemic and even doing everything in their power to encourage it,” to trigger their powerful impulses towards justice and against being fooled.
Porn, he argues, is changing [male] sexual arousal in unnerving ways. “Binge-watching pornography induces … behaviour changes by altering the responsiveness of the ventral striatum, not just to sexually explicit materials, but to any rewarding stimulus…. [The] phenomenon has been likened to the work of Nikolaas Tinbergen, who won a Nobel Prize for his work with herring gulls. His birds also learned to prefer supernormal artificial stimuli over and above the real thing. His research involved creating artificial eggs that were larger or much more colourful than the birds ’ own eggs. The gulls often chose to sit on the supersized or vividly coloured eggs.”
There are other bad dynamics in modern society: being out of work itself seems to cause conscientiousness to decrease, perhaps as a consequence of demoralization or even the lack of a consistent schedule. And then other people make it worse, both by direct discrimination against the unemployed and by the withdrawal of empathy: part of the medial prefrontal cortex that is normally activated when we look at a human but not when we look at other animals or inanimate objects, “does not kick in when we see the dishevelled appearance of a homeless person.” However, if respondents “spent a weekend volunteering to help homeless people in a soup kitchen, their brains changed almost overnight” and they started to recognize others’ humanity again.
On the upside (perhaps), apparently our quick decisions are less likely to be selfish and greedy; only thought convinces us to cheat others. Repetition, and wealth, also increase our tolerance for greed and inequality. And such bad behavior is corrosive, because cooperating with a cheat is for suckers; it takes groups of cooperative people to maintain such overall beneficial behavior in the face of persistent cheaters, which is where supportive communities come back in. Lewis also supports benign envy, the kind that makes us work harder and become more deserving of good things that others like us have, as opposed to destructive envy that looks to tear down.
What about psychopaths? Lewis argues that lacking emotional empathy means that they don’t mind causing others harm, and most psychopaths aren’t very good at what they do and get caught, but they don’t seem to care about future consequences. His pet theory is appealing: these two things are related, because psychopaths have zero empathy for their future selves.
Imani Perry, Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry:A “third person memoir” using Hansberry’s life to explore the promise and peril of blackness in America. Hansberry was an economic radical, a lesbian married to a man, a woman whose girlhood included living in a house in a white neighborhood that her mother defended with a Luger while her father was away, and many other amazing things.
Bess Williamson, Accessible America: A History of Disability and Design:The book traces the history of design for accessibility since the early 20th century—here moving from prostheses and designs that enabled people to drive cars to building/built environment design and finally back to wheelchairs and other objects (like OXO Good-Grips), now under the aegis of “universal design.” Williamson argues that a key issue has always been American individualism and bias against shared resources—was accessibility a way of enabling individual citizens to fulfill their productive potential, or was it coddling/harming others in order to benefit a minority? Appealing to the former conception helped disabled advocates and their allies, but also accepted the individualist premise. Likewise, using polio survivors and disabled war veterans as paradigmatic representatives of disabled populations allowed appeals to normative white masculinity and femininity—accessibility helped otherwise middle-class white people fulfill their appropriate roles—but didn’t challenge the normativity of those depictions. Radical interventions in the 1960s and beyond have tried to frame access as enabling individuals to choose how they want to live in the world, and to discuss inaccessibility as both literally and more-than-literally structural replication of disadvantage, but the simultaneous rise of “universal design” also made it easy for disability as a particular way of life to disappear, since designers are now supposedly designing for everyone.
Ayelet Waldman & Michael Chabon eds., Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Various writers on Israel’s Occupied Territories.The writers are generally very talented, which makes the topic harder and easier to bear; they convey the pain of living under occupation, the arbitrary actions of others that control your life and make time unpredictable and endless, the way that Israel is trying to squeeze Palestinians out of the territories by squashing economic and other forms of development.
Susan Orlean, The Library Book: Reading about a giant 1986 library fire in LA now counts as escapism. Orlean is a great writer who moves from the history of the LA library system to the way a fire spreads to an inquiry into the life of the guy who was ultimately blamed for (but never charged with) starting the fire. It’s a great read.
Geoffrey Kabaservice, Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, From Eisenhower to the Tea Party: Kabaservice really likes small government (but antidiscrimination law is good and the distinctive accomplishment of moderate Republicans, for which they didn’t get credit). He tells the story of the destruction of the moderate Republicans as a tragedy; Barry Goldwater’s candidacy seems in retrospect like a rehearsal for Trump, though that’s so awful that the horror with which Goldwater would have regarded Trump can’t even be ironic.
Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar: Compassionate advice about going on or changing things when you can’t see how that could be done.
Jack Lewis, The Science of Sin: Why We Do The Things We Know We Shouldn’t: Review of the brain structures involved in bad behavior, organized by the seven deadly sins. Argues for the benefits of religion from an atheist/agnostic standpoint: religion helps us make sense of life and provides the ability to create connections among people that are our greatest protection against vulnerability to the sins. Also argues that social media are reinforcing our narcissism (interestingly, musicians seem to have lower narcissism scores than other public figures, with reality stars being the worst). And that obesity (though not as deadly as sloth) prevents fully voluntary decisionmaking by contributing to low-grade systemic inflammation and blockages of minor blood vessels in the brain that are the enough to cause mild cognitive impairments, which can often be alleviated by gastric band surgery. To improve teen eating habits, he suggests “[b]ringing their attention to the injustice associated with huge, well-funded multinational companies generating profits from the obesity epidemic and even doing everything in their power to encourage it,” to trigger their powerful impulses towards justice and against being fooled.
Porn, he argues, is changing [male] sexual arousal in unnerving ways. “Binge-watching pornography induces … behaviour changes by altering the responsiveness of the ventral striatum, not just to sexually explicit materials, but to any rewarding stimulus…. [The] phenomenon has been likened to the work of Nikolaas Tinbergen, who won a Nobel Prize for his work with herring gulls. His birds also learned to prefer supernormal artificial stimuli over and above the real thing. His research involved creating artificial eggs that were larger or much more colourful than the birds ’ own eggs. The gulls often chose to sit on the supersized or vividly coloured eggs.”
There are other bad dynamics in modern society: being out of work itself seems to cause conscientiousness to decrease, perhaps as a consequence of demoralization or even the lack of a consistent schedule. And then other people make it worse, both by direct discrimination against the unemployed and by the withdrawal of empathy: part of the medial prefrontal cortex that is normally activated when we look at a human but not when we look at other animals or inanimate objects, “does not kick in when we see the dishevelled appearance of a homeless person.” However, if respondents “spent a weekend volunteering to help homeless people in a soup kitchen, their brains changed almost overnight” and they started to recognize others’ humanity again.
On the upside (perhaps), apparently our quick decisions are less likely to be selfish and greedy; only thought convinces us to cheat others. Repetition, and wealth, also increase our tolerance for greed and inequality. And such bad behavior is corrosive, because cooperating with a cheat is for suckers; it takes groups of cooperative people to maintain such overall beneficial behavior in the face of persistent cheaters, which is where supportive communities come back in. Lewis also supports benign envy, the kind that makes us work harder and become more deserving of good things that others like us have, as opposed to destructive envy that looks to tear down.
What about psychopaths? Lewis argues that lacking emotional empathy means that they don’t mind causing others harm, and most psychopaths aren’t very good at what they do and get caught, but they don’t seem to care about future consequences. His pet theory is appealing: these two things are related, because psychopaths have zero empathy for their future selves.
Imani Perry, Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry:A “third person memoir” using Hansberry’s life to explore the promise and peril of blackness in America. Hansberry was an economic radical, a lesbian married to a man, a woman whose girlhood included living in a house in a white neighborhood that her mother defended with a Luger while her father was away, and many other amazing things.
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