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James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Another interesting work from Scott about what mostly powerless people do to resist domination. The key argument: you can’t necessarily tell what people believe by what they say, especially in public/in front of more powerful people. If noblesse oblige is the duty the elites owe to maintain face before peasants, paysan oblige is the public duty that peasants owe to make elites feel superior; that doesn’t mean they’re committed to it in private. But it’s full of interesting insights from this starting point. Scott argues that the very justifications for domination (divine right to rule or otherwise) supply the rhetoric that people can use to object that the currently powerful have lost the plot (or mandate of heaven). Thus, “if the czar only knew!” is not necessarily an actual claim about the benevolence of the czar, but rather an attack on local powers—and a reason for the czar to allow at least some local rebellions to succeed, as long as they stop quietly once the immediate pain stops. He also suggests that it’s the members of oppressed classes who believed the dominant ideology but were then betrayed by it who make the most likely revolutionaries/terrorists/etc. Likewise, the carnivalesque—per Bakhtin—may be a safety valve to bleed off resentment, but the history of powerful elites’ attempts to suppress it also suggests that it teaches the tools of resistance; the mobs who wear masks when they tar and feather people are taking instruction from carnival. This can of course just increase injustice—Scott is well aware that people who are disrespected may hurt anyone they can, which often means people even weaker than them. Likewise, gender and age hierarchies can be extra sticky because they hold out the promise of higher status to people who survive them long enough (and, in the case of gender, become a mother of a powerful enough son).
James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance: Scott studies a Malaysian village in the late 1970s/early 80s, when the Green Revolution had fully arrived, creating a substantial disruption in the lives of the poor and the (locally) wealthy. While increased crop yields had initially been a boon for everyone, the arrival of the combine harvester made much of poor laborers’ historical work obsolete, which led to the consolidation of land and related changes that increased inequality. They resisted as best they could, using gossip, petty theft, and appeals to Islamic values that had previously been the justification for charity/interdependence with the rich. Scott writes against the idea that peasants have false consciousness; they knew quite well that they were being harmed, but they didn’t see much they could do about it. They were also circumspect about admitting to disagreement with people who could hurt them.
Agustin Fuentes, Sex Is a Spectrum: The Biological Limits of the Binary: Short, but I would still have appreciated more fun science facts and less reiteration of what it says on the tin. I did learn that gamete/gonad/genitalia (the 3 Gs)-correlated differences in upper body strength seem to be evolutionarily very recent.
Deborah Valenze, The Invention of Scarcity: Malthus and the Margins of History: In this time of renewed open eugenics, it’s useful to revisit the ways that theorists of supremacy have always distorted the evidence. This book interestingly focuses on Malthus’s assumption that grain and bread were the only legitimate core sources of nutrition; hunting (and war) were the occupations of lazy savages, and other forms of animal husbandry and crops were also degraded and degrading. So Malthus fit into a larger project of delegitimizing everyone but the Europeans who engaged in large-scale farming, which included the poor Europeans who lived in cities.
Jane Marie, Selling the Dream: The Billion-Dollar Industry Bankrupting Americans: Breezy takedown of multilevel marketing (MLM) schemes, which cause 99% of participants to lose money but have better cooldowns than most other fraudsters, so people blame themselves for failing. MLMs prey on financial insecurity and identity insecurity—the relentless message, not just from MLMs, that we should be succeeding all on our own and that success is a matter of effort and resulting wealth. MLMs offer a convergence of human psychological blind spots: We’re vulnerable to love bombing. We’re are bad at understanding exponential math (which makes it clear why MLMs must cause most participants to lose money) and easily convince ourselves that we’ll be among the chosen few who succeed. We’re bad at accounting, so we don’t see how much money we’re spending after the initial low-dollar investment—and don’t see the balance sheet netting gains against expenses. Sunk costs keep us in, and ashamed. The fact that you’ve been encouraged to recruit new members keeps you committed to the dream—you don’t want to have been part of scamming others. And in the US particularly, the fact that everything else is falling apart helps—after all, getting a college degree is no guarantee of financial security either.
Becca Rothfeld, All Things Are Too Small: Essays part literary criticism, part philosophical about value of excess in life and love. I thought it was interesting but too didactic (e.g., minimalism is harmful, as is meditation). She writes passionately in criticism of those who think that sex should be “good” in particular ways (heterosexual, part of love, etc.) but endorses her own ideal of vulnerability-maximizing, risk-taking consensual sex.
Douglas Brinkley, The Boys of Pointe du Hoc: Ronald Reagan, D-Day, and the U.S. Army 2nd Ranger Battalion: Tells the story of a fabled assault on a German position and how it came to be rediscovered in the 80s and adopted by Reagan for a key speech.
Anthony Shadid, Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War: Iraqis often hated Saddam and were weary of sanctions, but also rejected foreign invasion and despised American incompetence in terms of getting the power back on. Perhaps a timely reminder given current events.
Guru Madhavan, Applied Minds: How Engineers Think: Short, not very in depth book about systems thinking and anecdotes of how engineers apply it in different circumstances.
Theatre Fandom: Engaged Audiences in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Kirsty Sedgman, Francesca Coppa, & Matt Hills: Fandom studies and live theater, including the artifacts people produce related to live theater. I liked the studies of highly engaged theatergoers, who were willing to see something that they didn’t like or that didn’t work because they liked artistic variety, and often used connections and knowledge to see a lot of theater (as opposed to buying a lot of expensive tickets). But this also means that discount tickets don’t do much to broaden the diversity of the audience. Francesca Coppa argued that theater studies, which often emphasizes ephemerality, needs to take into account the rise of transmedia, as does fan studies (which therefore may have to qualify its account of the participatory nature of fandoms). Coppa isn’t the first to note that “the binary between the live and the mediated is in many ways false.” But, he notes, her students often defend liveness as special even as they invest in shows like Wicked or Hamilton they haven’t seen on stage. “I think this insistence on liveness is only a proxy for what theatre fans really want to argue: that their engagement matters, that they affected the play just as the play affected them.”
Francesca Coppa’s contributed essay, unsurprisingly, was my favorite. Fannish identifications, she argues, don’t have to be grounded in representation and it may be useful when they’re not: “taking on what may seem to others an unexpected (or mismatched) role can allow one to say the unsayable and feel the unfeelable; it allows expression of the messy, ntersectional complexities of the self that realistic representations often don’t allow for. She argues for the value and normality of singing along/tapping your feet to the cast recording when you’re on your own—the admonitions not to sing along “only go[] to show how much we want to.” Dominique Morrisseau’s conversation with Kirsty Sedgman discusses the related issue of white audience norms—it’s called “Can You Enjoy the Play a Little Quieter, Please?”
Dan Ariely, The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone - Especially Ourselves: Ten years after publication of this book, Ariely became embroiled in a data falsification controversy focused on a coauthor of some studies with him (as well as some controversy about data for which he was responsible). I tried to find out if the coauthored studies in this book had been retracted; they don’t seem to have been, but it’s hard to assess their reliability, which is of particular interest to me because they involved assessing whether wearing sunglasses believed to be counterfeit affects people’s willingness to cheat on an assessment (they found that it did). Anyway, it seems that there’s other evidence not tainted by this particular scandal that (1) most people cheat a little, but try to stay “fair” about it, (2) we cheat more when we’re stressed and when social conditions seem to support it, and (3) various interventions in surveillance or invoking moral principles can limit that.
Tony Judt, When the Facts Change: Essays, 1995-2010: Judt’s focus was European/international relations, and these essays are then-prescient, now-harrowing reminders that most of our current problems result from the hollowing-out of the US’s democratic institutions, which were coasting on past glories/eating our seed corn for decades. His analysis of Israeli policies seems hopeful now, insofar as he saw some actual prospect of an Israel that decided to be democratic instead of giving up either land or an officially Jewish state.
KC Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organizing: Short book focused on reorienting your understanding of household maintenance towards functionality and away from morality. Giving yourself grace, and considering half measures to be worthwhile, are part of it. I also liked the concept that there are only five things in every room: trash, dishes, laundry, things that have a place and aren’t in that place, and things that don’t have a place. If you focus on one of these things at a time, in the amount of space you can manage at the time, then you can make your space more livable for you.
James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance: Scott studies a Malaysian village in the late 1970s/early 80s, when the Green Revolution had fully arrived, creating a substantial disruption in the lives of the poor and the (locally) wealthy. While increased crop yields had initially been a boon for everyone, the arrival of the combine harvester made much of poor laborers’ historical work obsolete, which led to the consolidation of land and related changes that increased inequality. They resisted as best they could, using gossip, petty theft, and appeals to Islamic values that had previously been the justification for charity/interdependence with the rich. Scott writes against the idea that peasants have false consciousness; they knew quite well that they were being harmed, but they didn’t see much they could do about it. They were also circumspect about admitting to disagreement with people who could hurt them.
Agustin Fuentes, Sex Is a Spectrum: The Biological Limits of the Binary: Short, but I would still have appreciated more fun science facts and less reiteration of what it says on the tin. I did learn that gamete/gonad/genitalia (the 3 Gs)-correlated differences in upper body strength seem to be evolutionarily very recent.
Deborah Valenze, The Invention of Scarcity: Malthus and the Margins of History: In this time of renewed open eugenics, it’s useful to revisit the ways that theorists of supremacy have always distorted the evidence. This book interestingly focuses on Malthus’s assumption that grain and bread were the only legitimate core sources of nutrition; hunting (and war) were the occupations of lazy savages, and other forms of animal husbandry and crops were also degraded and degrading. So Malthus fit into a larger project of delegitimizing everyone but the Europeans who engaged in large-scale farming, which included the poor Europeans who lived in cities.
Jane Marie, Selling the Dream: The Billion-Dollar Industry Bankrupting Americans: Breezy takedown of multilevel marketing (MLM) schemes, which cause 99% of participants to lose money but have better cooldowns than most other fraudsters, so people blame themselves for failing. MLMs prey on financial insecurity and identity insecurity—the relentless message, not just from MLMs, that we should be succeeding all on our own and that success is a matter of effort and resulting wealth. MLMs offer a convergence of human psychological blind spots: We’re vulnerable to love bombing. We’re are bad at understanding exponential math (which makes it clear why MLMs must cause most participants to lose money) and easily convince ourselves that we’ll be among the chosen few who succeed. We’re bad at accounting, so we don’t see how much money we’re spending after the initial low-dollar investment—and don’t see the balance sheet netting gains against expenses. Sunk costs keep us in, and ashamed. The fact that you’ve been encouraged to recruit new members keeps you committed to the dream—you don’t want to have been part of scamming others. And in the US particularly, the fact that everything else is falling apart helps—after all, getting a college degree is no guarantee of financial security either.
Becca Rothfeld, All Things Are Too Small: Essays part literary criticism, part philosophical about value of excess in life and love. I thought it was interesting but too didactic (e.g., minimalism is harmful, as is meditation). She writes passionately in criticism of those who think that sex should be “good” in particular ways (heterosexual, part of love, etc.) but endorses her own ideal of vulnerability-maximizing, risk-taking consensual sex.
Douglas Brinkley, The Boys of Pointe du Hoc: Ronald Reagan, D-Day, and the U.S. Army 2nd Ranger Battalion: Tells the story of a fabled assault on a German position and how it came to be rediscovered in the 80s and adopted by Reagan for a key speech.
Anthony Shadid, Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War: Iraqis often hated Saddam and were weary of sanctions, but also rejected foreign invasion and despised American incompetence in terms of getting the power back on. Perhaps a timely reminder given current events.
Guru Madhavan, Applied Minds: How Engineers Think: Short, not very in depth book about systems thinking and anecdotes of how engineers apply it in different circumstances.
Theatre Fandom: Engaged Audiences in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Kirsty Sedgman, Francesca Coppa, & Matt Hills: Fandom studies and live theater, including the artifacts people produce related to live theater. I liked the studies of highly engaged theatergoers, who were willing to see something that they didn’t like or that didn’t work because they liked artistic variety, and often used connections and knowledge to see a lot of theater (as opposed to buying a lot of expensive tickets). But this also means that discount tickets don’t do much to broaden the diversity of the audience. Francesca Coppa argued that theater studies, which often emphasizes ephemerality, needs to take into account the rise of transmedia, as does fan studies (which therefore may have to qualify its account of the participatory nature of fandoms). Coppa isn’t the first to note that “the binary between the live and the mediated is in many ways false.” But, he notes, her students often defend liveness as special even as they invest in shows like Wicked or Hamilton they haven’t seen on stage. “I think this insistence on liveness is only a proxy for what theatre fans really want to argue: that their engagement matters, that they affected the play just as the play affected them.”
Francesca Coppa’s contributed essay, unsurprisingly, was my favorite. Fannish identifications, she argues, don’t have to be grounded in representation and it may be useful when they’re not: “taking on what may seem to others an unexpected (or mismatched) role can allow one to say the unsayable and feel the unfeelable; it allows expression of the messy, ntersectional complexities of the self that realistic representations often don’t allow for. She argues for the value and normality of singing along/tapping your feet to the cast recording when you’re on your own—the admonitions not to sing along “only go[] to show how much we want to.” Dominique Morrisseau’s conversation with Kirsty Sedgman discusses the related issue of white audience norms—it’s called “Can You Enjoy the Play a Little Quieter, Please?”
Dan Ariely, The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone - Especially Ourselves: Ten years after publication of this book, Ariely became embroiled in a data falsification controversy focused on a coauthor of some studies with him (as well as some controversy about data for which he was responsible). I tried to find out if the coauthored studies in this book had been retracted; they don’t seem to have been, but it’s hard to assess their reliability, which is of particular interest to me because they involved assessing whether wearing sunglasses believed to be counterfeit affects people’s willingness to cheat on an assessment (they found that it did). Anyway, it seems that there’s other evidence not tainted by this particular scandal that (1) most people cheat a little, but try to stay “fair” about it, (2) we cheat more when we’re stressed and when social conditions seem to support it, and (3) various interventions in surveillance or invoking moral principles can limit that.
Tony Judt, When the Facts Change: Essays, 1995-2010: Judt’s focus was European/international relations, and these essays are then-prescient, now-harrowing reminders that most of our current problems result from the hollowing-out of the US’s democratic institutions, which were coasting on past glories/eating our seed corn for decades. His analysis of Israeli policies seems hopeful now, insofar as he saw some actual prospect of an Israel that decided to be democratic instead of giving up either land or an officially Jewish state.
KC Davis, How to Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organizing: Short book focused on reorienting your understanding of household maintenance towards functionality and away from morality. Giving yourself grace, and considering half measures to be worthwhile, are part of it. I also liked the concept that there are only five things in every room: trash, dishes, laundry, things that have a place and aren’t in that place, and things that don’t have a place. If you focus on one of these things at a time, in the amount of space you can manage at the time, then you can make your space more livable for you.