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Nonfiction
Peter Beinart, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: Short and heartfelt about the disaster Israel’s government—with the support of too many of its people—is inflicting on Palestinians. Beinart grew up in apartheid South Africa and doesn’t hold back on the comparisons. I guess that means the Trump regime would call him an antisemite; he is speaking from the heart of our tradition.
Enrico Bonadio & Andrea Borghini, Food, Philosophy, and Intellectual Property: Fifty Case Studies: The book advocates for “soft law” or “paralegal” tools by which it seems to mean public statements claiming local rights in heritage foods/processes, because of the difficulty of defining the scope of protection. While the book rightly says that food is often left out of accounts of creativity, it strikes me that this characterization invites the same gendered dismissal that motivated much exclusion of cooking from previous discussions (especially when the US is deliberately right now setting its “soft power” on fire in order to project a misogynist view of legitimate authority). The book characterizes intellectual property of all types as “hard” law, which is also interesting insofar as there’s a long-running, gendered “soft IP/hard IP” distinction in the profession—patents are “hard” IP and copyrights and trademarks (and the related category of geographic indications (GIs), very important in food law) are “soft.”
The case studies are very short and the GI ones in particular often read like press releases about how important the food at issue is and how legal protection will hopefully lead to increased sales. I learned that the EU is even more protective of GIs than I thought—it allowed a claim for infringement of a GI to proceed on the basis that a defendant made a cheese that looked the same, without using a similar name or otherwise evoking the region. Also, Russia passed a law in 2021 reserving the use of “shampanskoye” to Russian-made sparkling wine and requiring French champagne producers to call their product “sparkling wine,” which is darkly funny to me but also really shows how autocracies abuse their power to flip meaning.
Yongyan Li, Perspectives on Plagiarism in China: History, Genres, and Education: There’s nothing new under the sun, and that includes condemnations of plagiarism and attempts to distinguish plagiarism from acceptable forms of copying and influence. Li examines Chinese texts through various periods of history and finds similar views expressed. I actually loved the Communist argument against plagiarism: it disrespects the hard labor of actual literary work. (At the same time, it seems that academics who fell out of favor with the Party could be accused of plagiarism—a tactic Chris Rufo made much use of in the US recently.) Li also connects plagiarism scandals to paper-buying and other publication shenanigans, since they’re similar methods of getting credentials that can be professionally valuable.
The 2000s onwards led to a focus on improving and standardizing citation practice, which enables better distinctions between justified reliance on other texts and plagiarism. (I liked legal scholar Zhu Suli’s characterization of citation as an “information highway.”) Although poets have complained about plagiarism for millennia, it’s a lot harder to avoid mistakes in scholarship without a Chicago Manual of Style equivalent. Apparently journals now routinely use plagiarism detection software, and there’s even an official source: the Academic Misconduct Literature Detection System of the China National Knowledge Infrastructure. And they’ve promoted the addition of a literature review, as in many English articles, at the beginning of a piece, as well as an explicit statement of what a given piece contributes to the literature. (In the texts I read professionally, the literature review is usually useless to a non-newcomer, and the claim of a contribution is usually wildly overstated, but this does help explain their existence. And it’s not like I can’t just skip the literature review.)
A final chapter looks at Chinese university responses to various learning-evasion practices, whether buying papers or plagiarism. I thought it was interesting that Chinese academic writing textbooks (discipline-specific) tended to present plagiarism as immoral and anti-plagiarism rules as part of a larger moral universe, while English academic writing textbooks written by English language specialists focused more on practicalities and examples, and also on avoiding accidental or inadvertent plagiarism. Chinese-language “anti-plagiarism education has focused on the declarative knowledge that plagiarism, as stealing and cheating, is wrong, but has largely failed to delve into the procedural knowledge of how to avoid plagiarism at the sentence and paragraph levels through proper citation.” Thus, Chinese students who might encounter English-language norms (with the added difficulty of a second language) are vulnerable to engaging in conduct that English-language educators consider plagiarism, such as copying sentences but swapping in different synonyms.
Hadeel Al-Alosi, The Criminalisation of Fantasy Material: Law and Sexually Explicit Representations of Fictional Children: Focuses on obvious fantasy (comics/manga or written stories) to evaluate whether a prohibition on them is justified in Western legal systems (Canada, UK, US, and Australia), and concludes that there are legitimate reasons for that. Relatedly, the book weirdly claims that “[a] slash fiction story often describes at least one underage character in a sexually explicit scenario.” Often? You literally introduced slash as deriving from Kirk/Spock! Even at the end of the book, despite acknowledging that Boys Love/yaoi/slash are not descriptors of genres devoted to children (compare shota, which is), she keeps writing as if they were, which does not strengthen my confidence in her analysis. Neither did her contention in the conclusion that the US is like the other jurisdictions in banning fantasy child abuse material; the US bans obscenity, and fantasy child abuse material can certainly be obscene, but that’s a far more stringent standard than exists in the other nations.
The author interviewed Australian law enforcement/judges as well as fans of sexually explicit comics to get their perspectives. The usual justification beyond disgust is that fantasy material can be used to groom real children/normalize abuse, but there’s no evidence of this (and evidence that abusers use adult pornography to do the same thing anyway). The LEOs said that people who possess real CSAM also often have fantasy materials, which is a classic case of selecting on the dependent variable. Of the Australian comics fans who accessed fantasy sexual material (without regard to depicted age), about half were women and half men. Of those who knew about the Australian prohibition on fantasy child depictions, 67% admitted that illegality in Australia didn’t deter them from accessing material that depicted minors (many of those spoke about 16- and 17-year-old characters, or characters who were explicitly designated as over 18 by the text despite appearances). The ones that didn’t access such material mainly said it was morality or lack of interest that deterred them, not the law. The ones who didn’t think it should be illegal—a majority, but not an overwhelming one—said things like “Why not charge people for shooting fictional characters in video games?” Ultimately, however, the author supports criminalizing fantasy material because (just like violent adult pornography and violent but not sexually explicit videogames) it may encourage anti-social attitudes and willingness to engage in the depicted behavior, and also because, she argues, moral revulsion itself is a legitimate ground for some level of prohibition. I was unconvinced, especially since there's no attempt to ask about the empirics of abuse in Japan, where shota is not practically regulated; she explicitly excludes Japan because it's not Western, and of course there are a lot of other factors involved, but if it were so likely to increase the level of abuse you would think there'd be some evidence since "not Western" doesn't mean "not people."
Kathy Bowrey, Copyright, Creativity, Big Media and Cultural Value: Incorporating the Author: Marred by a lot of passive voice but has interesting arguments. Combines business history with literary/legal history to complicate the account of copyright expansion over the past 150-ish years. For example, claims that authors didn’t get compensated much based on contracts that transferred copyrights for £50 sometimes don’t tell the whole story, as publishers turn out to have made extra payments afterwards. Arthur Conan Doyle innovated not in the detective story (he followed other, initially more successful authors) but in conceiving of his copyrights as placeholders for “readerships or audiences, whose predictable, collective consumptive behaviours rendered them commodities that could be captured and exchanged on the market. The property defined in Doyle’s contract for future Sherlock Holmes stories was very abstract – rights to a series of stories yet to be written, based upon a particular or ‘signature’ story-telling formula and fictional characters that the public associated with the author’s name. This reconceptualisation of the value of Doyle’s copyright was more amenable to profitable sub-divisions across mediums, time and place.” More generally, just as the rise of the international blockbuster movie encouraged superhero stories that translate easily across nations, the rise of crime, mystery, and detective stories was linked to the opening of new international markets for print.
Bowrey argues that the rise of international film markets was mainly driven by business agreements that excluded authors, as American firms locked up distribution mechanisms and patent monopolies, so that authors had only a right to negotiate for compensation but not a real role in how international film would work. Another chapter uses the story of Australian-born opera diva Dame Nellie Melba to do a feminist reading of the history of sound recording copyright. Early recordings often were low-quality and featured local and limited talent. Though many countries perceive performers to be lesser artists than “authors”—composers, playwrights, etc.—which is itself a gendered judgment, “Melba’s unique talents, voice, gendered abilities and restraints were used to bridge the category of invention and authored works.” Getting a big star like Melba to record songs proved that the new technology was important and creative.
She also argues that actually enforceable/valid patents weren’t as important to early sound recording business as is often claimed; it was more the idea of having patents to show marketplace position and ability to innovate that was important to investors—something that research today suggests is still a reality. In addition, trademarks were more important than they’re given credit for. Also, early recording companies didn’t necessarily oppose the expansion of copyright rights that would require them to pay royalties to composers, especially since that opened the door to printing the lyrics on the record jackets, which was a valuable addition to the product—similar to the negotiating stances of the largest video sites like YouTube today, where deals with copyright owners bring them extra benefits.
I thought the final chapter’s observation about the changing role of copyright was quite incisive: “[I]n the recording industry today, copyright no longer commands the central authority it once did. Labels have also pulled back on publicly promoting copyright as a universal property right that artists need to survive because this only exacerbates tensions with artists over unfair contracts in the industry. … Further, today multi-nationals can commercialise their existing and substantial copyright portfolios through negotiations with online platforms on terms that are invisible to the public and hard for artists to penetrate. At the same time, an artist’s copyright position has begun to function more as a brand. A copyright position communicates something distinctive about the artist-producer’s image and their desired relationship with fans-consumers.” The publicity around Taylor Swift’s rerecordings serves as strong evidence for her argument.
Bryan Caplan, The Case Against Education:When I described this as a frank plea for resegregation, my spouse said I was being too kind. Only read this if you need to understand the details of the arguments that the right-wing Maoists in the US make to justify their destruction of education. He argues that government support for education—all education, though he’s willing to deal with fellow travelers who just want to destroy from college on—should be eliminated. Although it’s good to read and know basic arithmetic, he says, most classes in college are useless. Most people who take Spanish don’t become translators, most people who take calculus don’t become mathematicians or use calculus in their jobs, most people who take history classes don’t need history in their jobs, etc. Mendacity and bullshit drip from every proposition. He argues that graduating college is largely signalling and therefore wasteful: it mostly just blesses capacities that you entered college with. Specifically, graduating demonstrates that you have enough intelligence combined with rule-following/agreeability to be a docile employee, which is why students (all of them, apparently) seek easy courses even after working hard to be admitted into exclusive institutions. I’ll try not to go all “and another thing!” here but among the problems: Just like you don’t get Shakespeare without 1000 forgotten playwrights who weren’t much good, just like “half of all the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I can’t tell which half,” education does vary in its effects in unexpected ways! When some seeds come up but not all do, you may well want to investigate to see whether you can do better, but the fact that not all seeds blossomed doesn’t make the process a “waste.” But the book posits capabilities that are fixed by, at the latest, adolescence, making further education beyond reading and calculating a tip useless. It’s a plea for resegregation because that’s not how signalling works (even accepting that education has no value for itself, or for the citizenry). People who can fund their kids’ education will still do so; employers looking for signals in a world where most people can’t afford education will use wealth, race, and other worse signals instead; people who might be great doctors if they’d gotten more opportunities earlier will be denied the chance. (He does concede that education is useful if you’re going to be a doctor.) (Don’t get me started on the contempt for the actual skills required by “most jobs,” delivered with simpering condescension because he, a professor, is willing to joke that he himself has never had a “real job,” or the use of “hippie” (seriously!) as his model of a misfit.)
Errol Morris, The Ashtray: I did not know that the well-known documentarian was deeply involved in the philosophy of science; he was kicked out of Princeton’s PhD program by Thomas Kuhn, who also threw an ashtray at him. (Also he dated Sherrie Levine.) This book is part attack on Kuhn and part attack on Kuhn’s ideas in defense of scientific truth/scientific progress. I’m largely on Morris’s side, though I think he moves very quickly past “there is an is”—that is, the composition of the stars and the square root of two are things in the world regardless of what we think about them—to claims about other kinds of facts in society, which is often far more malleable.
Gary J. Bass, The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide: Ok, turns out Blood was the last name of a US diplomat who sent out a warning that got him sidelined. Anyway, Pakistan carried out a massive slaughter, disproportionately targeting Hindus but also Bangladeshi Muslims, in order to prevent Bangladeshi independence; obviously it only delayed that. Nixon and Kissinger dismissed this in the crudest possible terms because they saw Pakistan’s dictator as the simplest conduit to China, and they considered China the only foreign policy goal that mattered. Dismissing Indira Gandhi as a bitch and Indians as congenitally wily, they maintained that the US had no stake in foreign nations’ internal affairs, which would have come as a surprise to many, many other nations. They also ignored that the US was supplying the very weapons that Pakistan was using to slaughter its people (and threaten India), causing hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshis to pour across the border into some of India’s poorest and most fragile states. India did its best for them out of both humanitarian and political motives, but already couldn’t do much even for its own citizens; death was constant.
India ultimately armed and trained the Bangladeshi rebels, which Bass presents as something of a political necessity given the refugee crisis, although subsequent Indian attempts to weaken Pakistan like assisting Tamil insurgents may have less justification and also the political bitterness still runs deep in Pakistan despite the genocidal decisions that more or less forced India’s hand. (Pakistan formally started the 1971 war against India, but Nixon and Kissinger still blamed India because they were the shittiest people you can imagine—seriously, as bad as you think they were as people, they were worse; realpolitik in their hands seemingly was “I want to do what I want and you aren’t allowed to criticize me”—and they constantly talked about India “raping” Pakistan, which is even worse given all the sexual violence that did occur, on all sides.) Another worrisome echo is the point that “internal” politics are not internal when they send enough refugees fleeing—something I suspect we will continue to see on an ever larger scale in this century.
Carl Elliott, The Occasional Human Sacrifice: Medical Experimentation and the Price of Saying No: A book about the experience of being a medical whistleblower, which is often incredibly painful and rarely ends with vindication, even partial. Elliott argues that whistleblowers are generally people who find out that there are some things they can’t accept because it harms their self-concept as honorable. They couldn’t respect themselves, or respect people who ignore the truth.
Cynthia A. Kierner, The Tory’s Wife: A Woman and Her Family in Revolutionary America:In North Carolina, a woman supported the American rebels while her husband was a loyalist who had to/chose to abandon their family. This is an attempt to read between the lines of the historical records, because she left very few records behind, only three official petitions to the legislature that were crafted to make claims to their sympathies. I get the aspiration but didn’t feel like there was a lot there.
Enrico Bonadio & Andrea Borghini, Food, Philosophy, and Intellectual Property: Fifty Case Studies: The book advocates for “soft law” or “paralegal” tools by which it seems to mean public statements claiming local rights in heritage foods/processes, because of the difficulty of defining the scope of protection. While the book rightly says that food is often left out of accounts of creativity, it strikes me that this characterization invites the same gendered dismissal that motivated much exclusion of cooking from previous discussions (especially when the US is deliberately right now setting its “soft power” on fire in order to project a misogynist view of legitimate authority). The book characterizes intellectual property of all types as “hard” law, which is also interesting insofar as there’s a long-running, gendered “soft IP/hard IP” distinction in the profession—patents are “hard” IP and copyrights and trademarks (and the related category of geographic indications (GIs), very important in food law) are “soft.”
The case studies are very short and the GI ones in particular often read like press releases about how important the food at issue is and how legal protection will hopefully lead to increased sales. I learned that the EU is even more protective of GIs than I thought—it allowed a claim for infringement of a GI to proceed on the basis that a defendant made a cheese that looked the same, without using a similar name or otherwise evoking the region. Also, Russia passed a law in 2021 reserving the use of “shampanskoye” to Russian-made sparkling wine and requiring French champagne producers to call their product “sparkling wine,” which is darkly funny to me but also really shows how autocracies abuse their power to flip meaning.
Yongyan Li, Perspectives on Plagiarism in China: History, Genres, and Education: There’s nothing new under the sun, and that includes condemnations of plagiarism and attempts to distinguish plagiarism from acceptable forms of copying and influence. Li examines Chinese texts through various periods of history and finds similar views expressed. I actually loved the Communist argument against plagiarism: it disrespects the hard labor of actual literary work. (At the same time, it seems that academics who fell out of favor with the Party could be accused of plagiarism—a tactic Chris Rufo made much use of in the US recently.) Li also connects plagiarism scandals to paper-buying and other publication shenanigans, since they’re similar methods of getting credentials that can be professionally valuable.
The 2000s onwards led to a focus on improving and standardizing citation practice, which enables better distinctions between justified reliance on other texts and plagiarism. (I liked legal scholar Zhu Suli’s characterization of citation as an “information highway.”) Although poets have complained about plagiarism for millennia, it’s a lot harder to avoid mistakes in scholarship without a Chicago Manual of Style equivalent. Apparently journals now routinely use plagiarism detection software, and there’s even an official source: the Academic Misconduct Literature Detection System of the China National Knowledge Infrastructure. And they’ve promoted the addition of a literature review, as in many English articles, at the beginning of a piece, as well as an explicit statement of what a given piece contributes to the literature. (In the texts I read professionally, the literature review is usually useless to a non-newcomer, and the claim of a contribution is usually wildly overstated, but this does help explain their existence. And it’s not like I can’t just skip the literature review.)
A final chapter looks at Chinese university responses to various learning-evasion practices, whether buying papers or plagiarism. I thought it was interesting that Chinese academic writing textbooks (discipline-specific) tended to present plagiarism as immoral and anti-plagiarism rules as part of a larger moral universe, while English academic writing textbooks written by English language specialists focused more on practicalities and examples, and also on avoiding accidental or inadvertent plagiarism. Chinese-language “anti-plagiarism education has focused on the declarative knowledge that plagiarism, as stealing and cheating, is wrong, but has largely failed to delve into the procedural knowledge of how to avoid plagiarism at the sentence and paragraph levels through proper citation.” Thus, Chinese students who might encounter English-language norms (with the added difficulty of a second language) are vulnerable to engaging in conduct that English-language educators consider plagiarism, such as copying sentences but swapping in different synonyms.
Hadeel Al-Alosi, The Criminalisation of Fantasy Material: Law and Sexually Explicit Representations of Fictional Children: Focuses on obvious fantasy (comics/manga or written stories) to evaluate whether a prohibition on them is justified in Western legal systems (Canada, UK, US, and Australia), and concludes that there are legitimate reasons for that. Relatedly, the book weirdly claims that “[a] slash fiction story often describes at least one underage character in a sexually explicit scenario.” Often? You literally introduced slash as deriving from Kirk/Spock! Even at the end of the book, despite acknowledging that Boys Love/yaoi/slash are not descriptors of genres devoted to children (compare shota, which is), she keeps writing as if they were, which does not strengthen my confidence in her analysis. Neither did her contention in the conclusion that the US is like the other jurisdictions in banning fantasy child abuse material; the US bans obscenity, and fantasy child abuse material can certainly be obscene, but that’s a far more stringent standard than exists in the other nations.
The author interviewed Australian law enforcement/judges as well as fans of sexually explicit comics to get their perspectives. The usual justification beyond disgust is that fantasy material can be used to groom real children/normalize abuse, but there’s no evidence of this (and evidence that abusers use adult pornography to do the same thing anyway). The LEOs said that people who possess real CSAM also often have fantasy materials, which is a classic case of selecting on the dependent variable. Of the Australian comics fans who accessed fantasy sexual material (without regard to depicted age), about half were women and half men. Of those who knew about the Australian prohibition on fantasy child depictions, 67% admitted that illegality in Australia didn’t deter them from accessing material that depicted minors (many of those spoke about 16- and 17-year-old characters, or characters who were explicitly designated as over 18 by the text despite appearances). The ones that didn’t access such material mainly said it was morality or lack of interest that deterred them, not the law. The ones who didn’t think it should be illegal—a majority, but not an overwhelming one—said things like “Why not charge people for shooting fictional characters in video games?” Ultimately, however, the author supports criminalizing fantasy material because (just like violent adult pornography and violent but not sexually explicit videogames) it may encourage anti-social attitudes and willingness to engage in the depicted behavior, and also because, she argues, moral revulsion itself is a legitimate ground for some level of prohibition. I was unconvinced, especially since there's no attempt to ask about the empirics of abuse in Japan, where shota is not practically regulated; she explicitly excludes Japan because it's not Western, and of course there are a lot of other factors involved, but if it were so likely to increase the level of abuse you would think there'd be some evidence since "not Western" doesn't mean "not people."
Kathy Bowrey, Copyright, Creativity, Big Media and Cultural Value: Incorporating the Author: Marred by a lot of passive voice but has interesting arguments. Combines business history with literary/legal history to complicate the account of copyright expansion over the past 150-ish years. For example, claims that authors didn’t get compensated much based on contracts that transferred copyrights for £50 sometimes don’t tell the whole story, as publishers turn out to have made extra payments afterwards. Arthur Conan Doyle innovated not in the detective story (he followed other, initially more successful authors) but in conceiving of his copyrights as placeholders for “readerships or audiences, whose predictable, collective consumptive behaviours rendered them commodities that could be captured and exchanged on the market. The property defined in Doyle’s contract for future Sherlock Holmes stories was very abstract – rights to a series of stories yet to be written, based upon a particular or ‘signature’ story-telling formula and fictional characters that the public associated with the author’s name. This reconceptualisation of the value of Doyle’s copyright was more amenable to profitable sub-divisions across mediums, time and place.” More generally, just as the rise of the international blockbuster movie encouraged superhero stories that translate easily across nations, the rise of crime, mystery, and detective stories was linked to the opening of new international markets for print.
Bowrey argues that the rise of international film markets was mainly driven by business agreements that excluded authors, as American firms locked up distribution mechanisms and patent monopolies, so that authors had only a right to negotiate for compensation but not a real role in how international film would work. Another chapter uses the story of Australian-born opera diva Dame Nellie Melba to do a feminist reading of the history of sound recording copyright. Early recordings often were low-quality and featured local and limited talent. Though many countries perceive performers to be lesser artists than “authors”—composers, playwrights, etc.—which is itself a gendered judgment, “Melba’s unique talents, voice, gendered abilities and restraints were used to bridge the category of invention and authored works.” Getting a big star like Melba to record songs proved that the new technology was important and creative.
She also argues that actually enforceable/valid patents weren’t as important to early sound recording business as is often claimed; it was more the idea of having patents to show marketplace position and ability to innovate that was important to investors—something that research today suggests is still a reality. In addition, trademarks were more important than they’re given credit for. Also, early recording companies didn’t necessarily oppose the expansion of copyright rights that would require them to pay royalties to composers, especially since that opened the door to printing the lyrics on the record jackets, which was a valuable addition to the product—similar to the negotiating stances of the largest video sites like YouTube today, where deals with copyright owners bring them extra benefits.
I thought the final chapter’s observation about the changing role of copyright was quite incisive: “[I]n the recording industry today, copyright no longer commands the central authority it once did. Labels have also pulled back on publicly promoting copyright as a universal property right that artists need to survive because this only exacerbates tensions with artists over unfair contracts in the industry. … Further, today multi-nationals can commercialise their existing and substantial copyright portfolios through negotiations with online platforms on terms that are invisible to the public and hard for artists to penetrate. At the same time, an artist’s copyright position has begun to function more as a brand. A copyright position communicates something distinctive about the artist-producer’s image and their desired relationship with fans-consumers.” The publicity around Taylor Swift’s rerecordings serves as strong evidence for her argument.
Bryan Caplan, The Case Against Education:When I described this as a frank plea for resegregation, my spouse said I was being too kind. Only read this if you need to understand the details of the arguments that the right-wing Maoists in the US make to justify their destruction of education. He argues that government support for education—all education, though he’s willing to deal with fellow travelers who just want to destroy from college on—should be eliminated. Although it’s good to read and know basic arithmetic, he says, most classes in college are useless. Most people who take Spanish don’t become translators, most people who take calculus don’t become mathematicians or use calculus in their jobs, most people who take history classes don’t need history in their jobs, etc. Mendacity and bullshit drip from every proposition. He argues that graduating college is largely signalling and therefore wasteful: it mostly just blesses capacities that you entered college with. Specifically, graduating demonstrates that you have enough intelligence combined with rule-following/agreeability to be a docile employee, which is why students (all of them, apparently) seek easy courses even after working hard to be admitted into exclusive institutions. I’ll try not to go all “and another thing!” here but among the problems: Just like you don’t get Shakespeare without 1000 forgotten playwrights who weren’t much good, just like “half of all the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I can’t tell which half,” education does vary in its effects in unexpected ways! When some seeds come up but not all do, you may well want to investigate to see whether you can do better, but the fact that not all seeds blossomed doesn’t make the process a “waste.” But the book posits capabilities that are fixed by, at the latest, adolescence, making further education beyond reading and calculating a tip useless. It’s a plea for resegregation because that’s not how signalling works (even accepting that education has no value for itself, or for the citizenry). People who can fund their kids’ education will still do so; employers looking for signals in a world where most people can’t afford education will use wealth, race, and other worse signals instead; people who might be great doctors if they’d gotten more opportunities earlier will be denied the chance. (He does concede that education is useful if you’re going to be a doctor.) (Don’t get me started on the contempt for the actual skills required by “most jobs,” delivered with simpering condescension because he, a professor, is willing to joke that he himself has never had a “real job,” or the use of “hippie” (seriously!) as his model of a misfit.)
Errol Morris, The Ashtray: I did not know that the well-known documentarian was deeply involved in the philosophy of science; he was kicked out of Princeton’s PhD program by Thomas Kuhn, who also threw an ashtray at him. (Also he dated Sherrie Levine.) This book is part attack on Kuhn and part attack on Kuhn’s ideas in defense of scientific truth/scientific progress. I’m largely on Morris’s side, though I think he moves very quickly past “there is an is”—that is, the composition of the stars and the square root of two are things in the world regardless of what we think about them—to claims about other kinds of facts in society, which is often far more malleable.
Gary J. Bass, The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide: Ok, turns out Blood was the last name of a US diplomat who sent out a warning that got him sidelined. Anyway, Pakistan carried out a massive slaughter, disproportionately targeting Hindus but also Bangladeshi Muslims, in order to prevent Bangladeshi independence; obviously it only delayed that. Nixon and Kissinger dismissed this in the crudest possible terms because they saw Pakistan’s dictator as the simplest conduit to China, and they considered China the only foreign policy goal that mattered. Dismissing Indira Gandhi as a bitch and Indians as congenitally wily, they maintained that the US had no stake in foreign nations’ internal affairs, which would have come as a surprise to many, many other nations. They also ignored that the US was supplying the very weapons that Pakistan was using to slaughter its people (and threaten India), causing hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshis to pour across the border into some of India’s poorest and most fragile states. India did its best for them out of both humanitarian and political motives, but already couldn’t do much even for its own citizens; death was constant.
India ultimately armed and trained the Bangladeshi rebels, which Bass presents as something of a political necessity given the refugee crisis, although subsequent Indian attempts to weaken Pakistan like assisting Tamil insurgents may have less justification and also the political bitterness still runs deep in Pakistan despite the genocidal decisions that more or less forced India’s hand. (Pakistan formally started the 1971 war against India, but Nixon and Kissinger still blamed India because they were the shittiest people you can imagine—seriously, as bad as you think they were as people, they were worse; realpolitik in their hands seemingly was “I want to do what I want and you aren’t allowed to criticize me”—and they constantly talked about India “raping” Pakistan, which is even worse given all the sexual violence that did occur, on all sides.) Another worrisome echo is the point that “internal” politics are not internal when they send enough refugees fleeing—something I suspect we will continue to see on an ever larger scale in this century.
Carl Elliott, The Occasional Human Sacrifice: Medical Experimentation and the Price of Saying No: A book about the experience of being a medical whistleblower, which is often incredibly painful and rarely ends with vindication, even partial. Elliott argues that whistleblowers are generally people who find out that there are some things they can’t accept because it harms their self-concept as honorable. They couldn’t respect themselves, or respect people who ignore the truth.
Cynthia A. Kierner, The Tory’s Wife: A Woman and Her Family in Revolutionary America:In North Carolina, a woman supported the American rebels while her husband was a loyalist who had to/chose to abandon their family. This is an attempt to read between the lines of the historical records, because she left very few records behind, only three official petitions to the legislature that were crafted to make claims to their sympathies. I get the aspiration but didn’t feel like there was a lot there.