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Nonfiction
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Matt Stoller, Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy: How the progressive case against monopoly was eliminated from liberal politics. It wasn’t corruption in the conventional sense, but rather ideological constraints such that technocrats thought they had to reward bigness and neglect unions and small businesses in order for the polity as a whole to grow. Stoller describes it as “a joint attack on populism by the left and the right by people who, for their own reasons, distrusted the messiness and vibrancy of democracy.” Even bipartisan consensus on the brilliance of Hamilton reflected this embrace of rule by elite technocrats. “The bailouts from 2008 to 2010 were not intended to stop a depression, they were intended to stop a New Deal. And so they did.” Stoller is now, unsurprisingly, writing about monopolies in the present day—his newsletter is quite illuminating.
Joanne Elizabeth Gray, Google Rules: The History and Future of Copyright Under the Influence of Google: Not much new for people who have followed the copyright wars closely but a good summary if you haven’t. As Gray notes, Article 17 in the recent EU copyright directive is supposed to encourage industries to negotiate with each other, and there’s every reason to think that Google (an “apex predator”) will come out stronger even if the internet as a whole doesn’t. Google’s size lets it set standards that others can’t meet that policymakers are tempted to adopt, even as it announces its support for fair use and user-generated content.
Andrew Marantz, Anti-Social: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation: A series of New Yorker-style pieces on the mostly pitiful people who are destroying society. The internet is terrible because many people are terrible. (The best aside: the printing press enabled Martin Luther to distribute his Ninety-Five Theses, but also later a pamphlet he wrote called On the Jews and Their Lies, in which he advised his followers to “set fire to their synagogues or schools and to bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn.”) People who moved in conventional publishing and policy circles ignored what was happening online until it was too late: for example, John McCain was widely praised for rejecting an audience member’s assertion that Obama was “an Arab,” but “[f]ew people thought to wonder exactly what the woman had been reading, or which content-distribution algorithm had served it to her.” There is no magic switch that radicalizes people, but aimless people who aren’t sure what they believe or what they should be doing are vulnerable to extremism spread virally. Marantz argues that online gatekeepers could be doing a lot better at setting rules, though his time behind the scenes at Reddit suggests just how hard “doing better” is at scale. He concludes with what I think might be as hopeful a statement as is possible: “the arc of history is not bent inexorably or automatically. It does not bend itself. We bend it.”
Anna Wiener, Uncanny Valley: A Memoir: Working at several tech startups in the last ten years, Wiener writes about the difficulties of being a highly educated but ultimately disposable cog, and a female one at that, trying to find a workplace to love while the owners never invest the same amount of care in their employees or users. As has often been reported, it’s striking how Wiener tries to avoid any proper names (so Facebook becomes, repeatedly, “the social network everyone hates”); I’m not sure it adds a lot to the book but it does tie into her point that she spent too much time looking for stories when she should have been asking about systems.
Bill Schutt, Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History: Fairly episodic treatment of cannibalism across species, from insects to mammals. Schutt is on the side of “cannibalism did happen” in some cases where anthropologists have disagreed; he spends some time on cannibalism in Russia during WWII and China during the Great Leap Forward.
Jodie Adams Kirshner, Broke: Hardship and Resilience in a City of Broken Promises: The United States has turned into a machine extracting wealth from all those who are already not very wealthy. Detroit’s bankruptcy and the methods it (and the state of Michigan) chose to try to recover had real and often very bad impacts on the people who lived there, on whose ill-resourced backs Detroit relied. Tax foreclosures kicked people out of their houses, leading those houses to become abandoned and deteriorated. Detroit rents were in the top five in the United States, but landlords didn’t bother to pay their (often overestimated) taxes. Michigan’s Republican elected leadership gutted state taxes, requiring Detroit to turn further to property taxes, fines, and fees. Detroit residents unable to pay incredibly high car insurance rates—in part based on inflated medical prices—got very expensive tickets and lost their licenses, then having to choose between working (since bus service had been slashed) or risking further fines and even jail. With Michigan spending on tax incentives for business instead of education, residents were on their own, including in finding a decent education for their children. Despite the incredible persistence of most of the individual characters in the book, it’s a story of massive institutional failure.
Leo Marks, Between Silk and Cyanide: British codebreaker’s memoir of WWII, where he tried to keep agents safe and occasionally succeeded. Dry British humor and lots of bureaucratic infighting.
A.K. Sandoval-Strausz, Barrio America: How Latino Immigrants Saved the American City: Transnational, sort of, story about how urban policy in the US abandoned cities to white flight and disinvestment, but Latino (Sandoval-Strausz’s preferred term) immigrants often brought vibrancy and recovery nonetheless, even though elite opinion preferred to praise the largely white creative classes’ return to the cities and even though they were regularly denied mainstream credit. Immigrants worked, built businesses, and bought houses when they could, despite generally lower wage rates; the communities they revitalized sustained property values where others collapsed, and they also had much lower crime rates. This all happened despite the 1965 introduction of severe limits, for the first time, on lawful immigration from this hemisphere, which created a crisis of legality and was part of depressing wages. Initially, many Latino immigrants tried to claim whiteness the way several other immigrant groups had done; the Texas-based League of United Latin American Citizens officially denounced King’s 1963 March on Washington.
In 1986, many immigrants got the opportunity to obtain legal status; the tradeoff increased criminalization of unlawful immigration ended up keeping more undocumented migrants in the US, since border crossings became more dangerous, and many even brought their families here for the first time for the same reason; this dynamic also increased the percentage of female immigrants. Newly legalized immigrants could demand higher wages and better working conditions, but wages and conditions also deteriorated for the still-undocumented, and employers shifted to subcontracting for better deniability about their hiring. The law also shifted immigrants to the cities, because agricultural work was seasonal and now it was dangerous to go back and forth so people needed year-round work.
Unsurprisingly, the book ends by discussing the 2016 election and Trump’s racism, noting that Trump won where there were fewest immigrants. Those voters, among other things, “were least in a position to see that Trump’s linkage of immigration and crime was simply not true. After all, they had heard stories of big-city danger during the decades of the urban crisis. How were they to know that crime had plunged, since they’d long ago forsaken the cities?” But Latino immigrants are also coming to rural areas, where they are often the only hope for revival: from 2000-2010, “Latinas and Latinos comprised 58 percent of all population growth in counties outside metropolitan areas.”
Lisa Olstein, Pain Studies: Very poetic prose about migraines, pain more generally, the TV show House, and related topics. Perhaps precisely because writing about the experience of pain is like dancing about architecture, I couldn’t get into it, but I was particularly struck by the one line where the self and the pain merge: “Migraine says, this cage is a mirror, this cage can make itself disappear; here, I will make a tray of you for the sky.”
Megen De Bruin-Molé, Gothic Remixed: Monster Mashups and Frankenfictions in 21st-Century Culture: Focuses on things like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies as well as gothic visual art, the TV show Penny Dreadful, and new series using old characters meeting up, e.g. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. This kind of appropriation is often from one dominant culture to another, contrasting and mashing up “literature” and popular fiction, the monstrous and the mainstream, irony and nostalgia, traditional gender roles and female empowerment. Despite the supposed promise of such texts, they’re still largely brought to us by the same group of mostly white, mostly guys; their revolutionary potential remains potential. I liked the point that, when “ ‘legitimate’ authors set out to protect the integrity or originality of their authorship, they are always protecting it from someone else,” which she connected to the idea of fiction as dangerous to women, extending “the Romantic logic of genius in which art is ‘displaced male sexuality … but misplaced female sexuality’” (quoting another author).
Matt Stoller, Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy: How the progressive case against monopoly was eliminated from liberal politics. It wasn’t corruption in the conventional sense, but rather ideological constraints such that technocrats thought they had to reward bigness and neglect unions and small businesses in order for the polity as a whole to grow. Stoller describes it as “a joint attack on populism by the left and the right by people who, for their own reasons, distrusted the messiness and vibrancy of democracy.” Even bipartisan consensus on the brilliance of Hamilton reflected this embrace of rule by elite technocrats. “The bailouts from 2008 to 2010 were not intended to stop a depression, they were intended to stop a New Deal. And so they did.” Stoller is now, unsurprisingly, writing about monopolies in the present day—his newsletter is quite illuminating.
Joanne Elizabeth Gray, Google Rules: The History and Future of Copyright Under the Influence of Google: Not much new for people who have followed the copyright wars closely but a good summary if you haven’t. As Gray notes, Article 17 in the recent EU copyright directive is supposed to encourage industries to negotiate with each other, and there’s every reason to think that Google (an “apex predator”) will come out stronger even if the internet as a whole doesn’t. Google’s size lets it set standards that others can’t meet that policymakers are tempted to adopt, even as it announces its support for fair use and user-generated content.
Andrew Marantz, Anti-Social: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation: A series of New Yorker-style pieces on the mostly pitiful people who are destroying society. The internet is terrible because many people are terrible. (The best aside: the printing press enabled Martin Luther to distribute his Ninety-Five Theses, but also later a pamphlet he wrote called On the Jews and Their Lies, in which he advised his followers to “set fire to their synagogues or schools and to bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn.”) People who moved in conventional publishing and policy circles ignored what was happening online until it was too late: for example, John McCain was widely praised for rejecting an audience member’s assertion that Obama was “an Arab,” but “[f]ew people thought to wonder exactly what the woman had been reading, or which content-distribution algorithm had served it to her.” There is no magic switch that radicalizes people, but aimless people who aren’t sure what they believe or what they should be doing are vulnerable to extremism spread virally. Marantz argues that online gatekeepers could be doing a lot better at setting rules, though his time behind the scenes at Reddit suggests just how hard “doing better” is at scale. He concludes with what I think might be as hopeful a statement as is possible: “the arc of history is not bent inexorably or automatically. It does not bend itself. We bend it.”
Anna Wiener, Uncanny Valley: A Memoir: Working at several tech startups in the last ten years, Wiener writes about the difficulties of being a highly educated but ultimately disposable cog, and a female one at that, trying to find a workplace to love while the owners never invest the same amount of care in their employees or users. As has often been reported, it’s striking how Wiener tries to avoid any proper names (so Facebook becomes, repeatedly, “the social network everyone hates”); I’m not sure it adds a lot to the book but it does tie into her point that she spent too much time looking for stories when she should have been asking about systems.
Bill Schutt, Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History: Fairly episodic treatment of cannibalism across species, from insects to mammals. Schutt is on the side of “cannibalism did happen” in some cases where anthropologists have disagreed; he spends some time on cannibalism in Russia during WWII and China during the Great Leap Forward.
Jodie Adams Kirshner, Broke: Hardship and Resilience in a City of Broken Promises: The United States has turned into a machine extracting wealth from all those who are already not very wealthy. Detroit’s bankruptcy and the methods it (and the state of Michigan) chose to try to recover had real and often very bad impacts on the people who lived there, on whose ill-resourced backs Detroit relied. Tax foreclosures kicked people out of their houses, leading those houses to become abandoned and deteriorated. Detroit rents were in the top five in the United States, but landlords didn’t bother to pay their (often overestimated) taxes. Michigan’s Republican elected leadership gutted state taxes, requiring Detroit to turn further to property taxes, fines, and fees. Detroit residents unable to pay incredibly high car insurance rates—in part based on inflated medical prices—got very expensive tickets and lost their licenses, then having to choose between working (since bus service had been slashed) or risking further fines and even jail. With Michigan spending on tax incentives for business instead of education, residents were on their own, including in finding a decent education for their children. Despite the incredible persistence of most of the individual characters in the book, it’s a story of massive institutional failure.
Leo Marks, Between Silk and Cyanide: British codebreaker’s memoir of WWII, where he tried to keep agents safe and occasionally succeeded. Dry British humor and lots of bureaucratic infighting.
A.K. Sandoval-Strausz, Barrio America: How Latino Immigrants Saved the American City: Transnational, sort of, story about how urban policy in the US abandoned cities to white flight and disinvestment, but Latino (Sandoval-Strausz’s preferred term) immigrants often brought vibrancy and recovery nonetheless, even though elite opinion preferred to praise the largely white creative classes’ return to the cities and even though they were regularly denied mainstream credit. Immigrants worked, built businesses, and bought houses when they could, despite generally lower wage rates; the communities they revitalized sustained property values where others collapsed, and they also had much lower crime rates. This all happened despite the 1965 introduction of severe limits, for the first time, on lawful immigration from this hemisphere, which created a crisis of legality and was part of depressing wages. Initially, many Latino immigrants tried to claim whiteness the way several other immigrant groups had done; the Texas-based League of United Latin American Citizens officially denounced King’s 1963 March on Washington.
In 1986, many immigrants got the opportunity to obtain legal status; the tradeoff increased criminalization of unlawful immigration ended up keeping more undocumented migrants in the US, since border crossings became more dangerous, and many even brought their families here for the first time for the same reason; this dynamic also increased the percentage of female immigrants. Newly legalized immigrants could demand higher wages and better working conditions, but wages and conditions also deteriorated for the still-undocumented, and employers shifted to subcontracting for better deniability about their hiring. The law also shifted immigrants to the cities, because agricultural work was seasonal and now it was dangerous to go back and forth so people needed year-round work.
Unsurprisingly, the book ends by discussing the 2016 election and Trump’s racism, noting that Trump won where there were fewest immigrants. Those voters, among other things, “were least in a position to see that Trump’s linkage of immigration and crime was simply not true. After all, they had heard stories of big-city danger during the decades of the urban crisis. How were they to know that crime had plunged, since they’d long ago forsaken the cities?” But Latino immigrants are also coming to rural areas, where they are often the only hope for revival: from 2000-2010, “Latinas and Latinos comprised 58 percent of all population growth in counties outside metropolitan areas.”
Lisa Olstein, Pain Studies: Very poetic prose about migraines, pain more generally, the TV show House, and related topics. Perhaps precisely because writing about the experience of pain is like dancing about architecture, I couldn’t get into it, but I was particularly struck by the one line where the self and the pain merge: “Migraine says, this cage is a mirror, this cage can make itself disappear; here, I will make a tray of you for the sky.”
Megen De Bruin-Molé, Gothic Remixed: Monster Mashups and Frankenfictions in 21st-Century Culture: Focuses on things like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies as well as gothic visual art, the TV show Penny Dreadful, and new series using old characters meeting up, e.g. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. This kind of appropriation is often from one dominant culture to another, contrasting and mashing up “literature” and popular fiction, the monstrous and the mainstream, irony and nostalgia, traditional gender roles and female empowerment. Despite the supposed promise of such texts, they’re still largely brought to us by the same group of mostly white, mostly guys; their revolutionary potential remains potential. I liked the point that, when “ ‘legitimate’ authors set out to protect the integrity or originality of their authorship, they are always protecting it from someone else,” which she connected to the idea of fiction as dangerous to women, extending “the Romantic logic of genius in which art is ‘displaced male sexuality … but misplaced female sexuality’” (quoting another author).
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Reading various spy/intelligence memoirs, it often appears that for intel types, the enemy is not so much their opposite numbers on the other side, but other intelligence agencies/departments on their own side (because of turf wars, mostly, but also frequently a strong conviction that the other agency/department is Getting Everything Wrong.)
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(I know that part of the problem with Operation Market Garden was that by the time that one rolled around, it had become clear that most of the agents in the Dutch Resistance had been killed or compromised, and nobody was trusting any intel that came out of the Netherlands anymore -- so that when actual good intel came in about a Panzer division operating in the area, nobody in British intelligence believed it.)
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I hope you and your family are all healthy and doing well!
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