Review: When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut

I went into this book unaware of what awaited me, and I was caught off-guard. It is an unusually structured book, and sails through history and historical personages at a brisk knot, and it took a while for me to find my sea legs.

The book begins with a three chapter preface, which makes up the first two fifths of the book. Labatut threads together 20th century inventions and discoveries: cyanide, black holes, algebraic proofs. Inventors and inventions both find themselves deployed in wars. Science and society are inextricably linked: developments in one shape the outcomes of the other. Both are driven by individuals, but advance on a scale so immense and interconnected that no one individual can turn the tides. Labatut’s stories are a mesmerizing blend of fact and fantasy, and it’s not always clear what is true, what is disputed, and what is fully invented.

The main section of the book continues in tone, focusing in particular on Schrodinger, Heisenberg, De Broglie, as they investigate the nature of matter and light. These hallowed figures find themselves caught up in madness, despair, sexual deviancy, mysticism, and spiteful feuds as they grapple with the biggest questions of physics and ramifications of their answers.

The final tenth of the book is a 5-part essay titled The Night Gardener. It echoes the themes and motifs of the preceding pages, but now without the giants of 20th century science: suicide, poison, fascists, the misuse of science in society, the struggle for individuals to shape society, society’s likely impending doom.

Negative reviews of this book point at its rehashing of tired science tropes: the lone genius driven mad by his discovery, oblivious to social norms and lacking in emotional awareness. Women enter the pages only to be objects of sexual desire. The author revels in the popular aesthetics of science — frantic midnight scribblings covering reams of paper, dramatic postulations at a lecture stand — more than shedding light on the experience of actually doing science. 

While these critiques are well-founded, it would be a shame to entirely dismiss the book on these grounds. Although the narrative revolves around science, the emotional aspects explored are not unique to science. What do you do when you cease to understand your world, when what you thought you knew is unveiled to be an illusion? Perhaps you’ve discovered your government aids a genocide, or someone dear to you breaks your trust. Do you withdraw into yourself? Abandon everything or end your life? Throw yourself back in with everything you have, and keep fighting? What is it like to feel torn between ambitions of greatness and feelings of uselessness? How do you come to terms with the fruits of your creative labour dispersing into the wild to be used and transformed beyond your intentions, out of your control? Labatut repeats these refrains in different keys and different voices. His unusual storytelling makes for a thought-provoking read with more to offer than a summary might suggest.

Review: Medical Apartheid by Harriet Washington

 I think this one is a must-read for anyone conducting biomedical research.

Some parts — particularly the first third, dealing with the slavery and reconstruction era of US history — I'd read before in books like Angela Davis' Race, Women and Class. A few parts felt like rather long deviations that I didn't feel added all that much to the central thesis — for example, the chapter on display of Black people at zoos and freak shows, the part on apartheid South Africa's bioterrorism against its own citizens (the US, as Washington clearly demonstrated, has done plenty such terrorism and testing against its own citizens).

Some parts I thought I knew well — the Tuskegee syphilis trials, for example — but I was surprised there were still shady details to learn (for example, the time pressure on the ad hoc Tuskegee investigative committee, the shameful political maneuvering by its chair to soften the language of the report).

The book was written in 2006, and in the intervening 15 years, I think the big new issue we need to grapple with is the role Big Data plays in healthcare. Non-interventional anonymized healthcare data is sold and re-sold so companies can better target their marketing efforts or assess the potential ROI of a pharmaceutical intervention. These companies have data on some 300 million Americans (of 330 million people). This type of use of medical records has minimal benefit to the people whose records are being sold and analyzed, and I think few people know their information is used this way. I don't think it should be tolerated.

Review: Take Back The Fight: Organizing Feminism for the Digital Age by Nora Loreto

I got three things out of this book.

First, I learned for the first time, the history of feminism in country of my birth and my citizenship. It's embarrassingly easy to accidentally form ones understanding of politics and history based only on events in the US. This is harmful in three ways: first it becomes too easy to look at failures south of the border and pat oneself on the back and conclude nothing needs to be done because "at least we are better than them." Second, it masks very real, very uniquely Canadian issues. Third, it makes Canadian would-be activists ill-equipped to advocate for their causes: what worked successfully, what didn't, what examples can we draw from? I though Loreto did a fantastic job laying out the story of the NAC and its eventual demise.

Second, I liked her analysis of #MeToo, Slut Walks and other 21st century feminist movements -- what lasting change did they have, and why didn't they have a larger impact? Although I'd lived through them, for many of them I didn't have the political consciousness to really examine at the time. It was fun to revisit, particularly through the lens of identifying what is required for sustained political movements and change.

Third, I enjoyed her argument for the value of debate. Debate within an organization prepares an organization for attacks from outsiders. Debate brings newcomers into the fold. Debate trains the next generation of leaders to think and speak. I was not fully swayed by Loreto that some of this couldn't happen in online spaces -- discord servers, smaller Zoom groups, etc... I think some of her critique of the hazards of diffuse organizational structures was better said by feminist Jo Freeman in her 1972 (!) essay on The Tyranny of Structurelessness. But I do agree there's value in real world physical togetherness.

I felt there was a gap in terms of assessing economic and political structure. Examples of positive change were almost entirely instances of bills being passed. Can we eradicate white supremacy, state violence, and misogyny through the passage of new laws one by one, maintaining the fundamental structure of Canada intact throughout? Or what major systems need to be removed or reinvented from the bottom up? What is the role of feminism versus a movement rooted in class analysis and anti-capitalism?

Overall, it was an easy, compelling read, if not necessarily succinct. I'm glad I read it, and would recommend it to Canadian feminists looking for an introductory to moderately advanced read.

Review: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff

Briefly, Zuboff's accounts of the horrors of surveillance capitalism (clandestine collection of data and manipulation of behaviors) and the landmark legal cases surrounding this industry are well-documented but won't contain new stories for anyone already familiar with the topic.

This book isn't without a few good points. The repeated mantra of "who knows? who decides? who decides who decides?" is a good starting point for media/PR criticism. I also agree with Zuboff that using only terms like "monopoly" and "privacy" as grounds for criticizing surveillance capitalism industry leaves us woefully unprepared for battling surveillance capitalism and the commodification of human behavior.

I was hoping she would deliver on the promises she made in the intro: to demonstrate that surveillance capitalism was a separate beast from regular old capitalism. And while she uses terms that make it seem like the nuts and bolts of surveillance capitalism are distinct from capitalism (e.g., "behavioral surplus", "prediction imperative"), I think she really fails at making this argument. Is Google hiding how much data it collects from you really all that different from Apple hiding the conditions of its manufacturing facilities? Is Facebook's attempts to manipulate your emotions or your sense of self-worth really a whole new beast or just another step in the advertising industry's development? Is the desire of surveillance capitalism companies to expand vertically and horizontally into new parts of our lives and into new parts of the world, to privatize or profit off public goods any different from the same expansion drive of any other company? If anything, Zuboff inadvertently convinced me the exact opposite is true: surveillance capitalism is just capitalism.

Review: Stamped from the Beginning by Ibram X. Kendi

 Rating: 3/5

It was fine.

It bills itself as "The Definitive History of Racist Ideas," and in all fairness it was a history of racist ideas. It started with recounting how Ancient Greeks thought the climate of Africa was sub-optimal for fostering culture and intellectual development, and ended with Black Lives Matter. 

I suppose I was expecting more argument, more examination of themes to help anchor stories together. Instead, it was largely a narrative. Person A was an assimilationist who did Y. Person B, who was a segregationist, responded with Z. Person C, believing in upliftsuasion, tried to do X. Movie D came out, which critics praised as W, although writer E said V. There was so much mentioned, and yet many things were mentioned so briefly that it seemed more of a name drop or a checklist than an actual presentation of an idea, its roots, its legacy. Paul Robeson was mentioned twice, for example, but if I didn't already know something about him, I wouldn't have learned anything about him except that he existed. And he's a pretty cool figure.

The structural format of telling the history of racist ideas through examination of five particular people felt a little limited to me. Some of these figures, like William Lloyd Garrison took a back seat to their own chapters. Some of the links were so tenuous. "Jefferson might have read this newspaper article, although we don't know what he thought about it or if he did for sure." The chapter on Du Bois was, I thought, the most effective at exploring the change in thinking through the work of the featured philosopher. The chapter on Angela Davis was more disappointing. Having recently read Race, Women & Class and Are Prisons Obsolete it was nice to get a little context of her life, although there wasn't all that much that was new to me. I was hoping to get a deeper understanding of how her thoughts evolved over her life, or who she considers to be intellectually influential to her and how. Actual description of her philosophy was quite thin - you're far better off actually reading something by her. To get just a narrative of her life you might indeed be better off reading her wikipedia page - for some reason, the author kept interrupting the story of her arrest, for example, with tangentially related cultural moments, like about the first actress who sported an afro.

 I wondered what a better framing may have been - perhaps picking eight or ten aspects of racism and exploring the change in philosophical thought through these facets? It could be something like worker's right, notions of beauty, health & medicine, education, voter rights, criminal justice.... All these aspects came up through the stories the author explored, and yet they weren't really linked together.

The definition of "anti-racist" was a little unclear to me. Is there a difference between anti-racist and simply not racist? My intuition is that there is - that it is not simply enough to not hold racist beliefs, but one must actively attempt to right societal and historical wrongs. But if so, I didn't feel this distinction was made either explicitly or through example in the text.

I wondered a little who the audience for this book is - and I think it is an excellent read for a person that doesn't think Barack Obama, America's first Black president, is racist against Black people, but is open to understanding that statement.

Review: Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Y. Davis

 Rating: 4/5 stars

While others squabble about racial sensitivity training for cops and corrections officers, or body cams, or what the appropriate amount of educational/vocational programs for felons is, in Are Prisons Obsolete? Angela Davis zooms out and questions the role prisons play in society entirely.

Why were people so quick to assume that locking away an increasingly large proportion of the U.S. population would help those who live in the free world feel safer and more secure? This question can be formulated in more general terms. Why do prisons tend to make people think that their own rights and liberties are more secure than they would be if prisons did not exist?

(...) First of all, we think of the current system, with its exaggerated dependence on imprisonment, as an unconditional standard and thus have great difficulty envisioning any other way of dealing with the more than two million people who are currently being held in the country’s jails, prisons, youth facilities, and immigration detention centers.

She points out the strange assumption at the heart of most criminal justice reform movements - that some form of locking people away must always exist. As in Race, Women & Class, Davis does a fantastic job at cutting to the heart of the issue, and showing the intersectionality of race, sex, and capital versus the working class. 

Slavery, lynching, and segregation are certainly compelling examples of social institutions that, like the prison, were once considered to be as everlasting as the sun.

She then traces the origins of the current American prison industrial complex, from the "Enlightenment" philosophy that drove the current structure of the institution through the role of the prison in perpetuating oppression of Black Americans.

It was after these first few phenomenal chapters that I found the book wavered a little for me. While the chapters on reform and on gender weren't uninteresting or bad, I felt like it could have been a little more data driven. However, she did a good job at humanizing the men and women who have been disproportionately abused by the system - and perhaps if it had been exhaustively founded in numbers and statistics my critique would have been that she left out the human element. She also makes an excellent point that to use statistics - which come primarily from the very prison industrial complex itself - one must in some ways adopt the same injustices, such as lumping together in one number those who have been imprisoned for possession of minor amount of drugs with those who have raped and murdered and ignored those who have committed state-sanctioned crimes.

The chapter on the prison industrial complex is excellent. Angela Davis carefully demonstrates how closely tied the prison system is with the rest of the economy, and convincingly makes the case that those that wish to reform or abolish the prison system must expand the scope of their activism to target corporations and the capital class more broadly.

Extensive corporate investment in prisons has significantly raised the stakes for antiprison work. It means that serious antiprison activists must be willing to look much further in their analyses and organizing strategies than the actual institution of the prison.

The final chapter, on what abolition of prisons would look like, is also fantastic. The solutions she proposes include expansion of mental health services and addiction services free of charge, decriminalization of sex work and drug use, and changes to how punishment and force are used in educational systems. Many of these same solutions tie in with the current (Summer 2020) calls to abolish the police. Interestingly, she doesn't discuss abolition of the police or reform of the court system - but I suppose she left those similarly weighty topics for another book.

She ends on the following quote, by Peter Biehl, the father of a murdered woman.

“We tried to explain that sometimes it pays to shut up and listen to what other people have to say, to ask: ‘Why do these terrible things happen? ’ instead of simply reacting.”

What would it mean to have a plan to make things better, rather than just reacting to things that go wrong? That same question could be applied to medicine, to economics, to psychology, to politics, to software engineering at most companies. It makes me wonder what exactly it is about humans or society that makes us so ill-equipped to tackle this question.

Review: The Autobiography of Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley

 Rating: 4/5 stars

There were parts of The Autobiography of Malcolm X that I really struggled with, but overall, it was an interesting peak into a fascinating man whose premature death was really a loss for the world.

I wish that I had known before reading it that the autobiography was written during the years before and after his split from the cult-like hate group Nation of Islam, and about how much his views and rhetoric changed during the last couple years of his life. I found the surprisingly uncritical chapters extolling the virtues of Mr Mohammad/Nation of Islam to be rather tedious while I was reading it; but the later chapters, written after his split from the NoI and after his trip to Mecca (and his shifting viewpoints as relayed by Alex Haley in his epilogue) more than redeemed these chapters. Malcolm X was a thoughtful man with a lot of integrity and an admirable and assiduous capacity for reflection and change and the humility to admit error. This autobiography captured this period of dynamism beautifully.

I found Malcolm X's rhetoric towards women to be off-putting; towards the end of his Harlem period, I found it so pervasive and unquestioning that I considered putting down the book. At the encouragement of a friend, I sought out some writing by Black feminists to see how they interpreted the paternalism, sexism and misogyny of Malcolm X. I read several essays that helped me feel less alone and frustrated in struggling with this part of his autobiography, and contextualized his opinions. For example, at the time of his death/autobiography, Malcolm X was a devout Muslim, and it's likely he wished to portray publicly the (hierarchical) family structure recommended by his religious beliefs. However, Betty Shabazz's recollection of their marriage was far more equal than Malcolm's recount:

We would have little family talks. They began at first with Malcolm telling me what he expected of a wife. But the first time I told him what I expected of him as a husband it came as a shock. After dinner one night he said, "Boy, Betty, something you said hit me like a ton of bricks. Here I've been going along having our little workshops with me doing all the talking and you doing all the listening." He concluded our marriage should be a mutual exchange.

Still, it is always odd to see someone so good at identifying power imbalances and stereotyping and the impact of a lifetime of oppression on someone's behavior and psyche..... so unable to translate those insights from one social justice issue to another.

Malcolm X's curiosity about the world and his impressive ability to identify social dynamics and deftly argue his opinions shone through this book - particularly in the first few chapters about his upbringing and the final third of the book about his disillusionment with the NoI and his visit to Mecca. Many of his observations were not entirely new to me; there has been a ton of fantastic writing about the overt and subtle ways racism manifests in America in the five-and-a-half decades since the writing of this autobiography. Many insights were just painfully relevant to 2020 discourse:

[W]hite people have created a benevolent image of themselves as having had so much “good-will toward our Negroes,” every time any “local Negro” begins suddenly letting the local whites know the truth—that the black people are sick of being hind-tit, second-class, disfranchised, that’s when you hear, uttered so sadly, “Unfortunately now because of this, our whites of good-will are starting to turn against the Negroes….It’s so regrettable…progress was being made…but now our communications between the races have broken down!”

In a [press poll after the March on Washington], not one Congressman or Senator with a previous record of opposition to civil rights said he had changed his views. What did anyone expect? How was a one-day “integrated” picnic going to counter-influence these representatives of prejudice rooted deep in the psyche of the American white man for four hundred years?

 

Where the really sincere white people have got to do their “proving” of themselves is not among the black victims, but out on the battle lines of where America’s racism really is—and that’s in their own home communities; America’s racism is among their own fellow whites. That’s where the sincere whites who really mean to accomplish something have got to work.

Malcolm X, circa 1964/1965, would probably be the first to caution against holding any one human being up as an ideal, and he was certainly a flawed person. Still, I came away from the autobiography just incredibly frustrated at how he has been portrayed in the years since his death, and saddened that he wasn't allowed a few more years on this world to change it.

Review: Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine

 Rating: 5/5 stars

Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference is well organized, thorough, approachable, and has a delightfully sarcastic voice. Parts of the literature I was already quite familiar with, after a few psychology courses and a decade of reading feminist books/articles, but other parts, particularly the child psychology aspects, were new to me. This book should be mandatory reading for anyone that teaches men and women, manages men and women, or has/plans to have girl or boy children. So virtually everyone.

I finished the book both really wanting to invite Fine over for coffee, and wanting to tell everyone I know things I had learned in the book.

Review: Down Girl by Kate Manne

 Rating: 3/5 stars

Briefly: Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny is an inconsistent book written from a sometimes frustratingly limited perspective that nevertheless has some good ideas that I will incorporate in how I describe the world.

I really liked Manne's framing of misogyny as the methods by which status quo social hierarchies are enforced and maintained. I found her examples of how this framing explains behavior such as Elliot Rodger and Rush Limbaugh to be compelling and useful. However, I wish she had expanded it to be the gender arm of a broader set of behaviors that act to keep down those who are dis-empowered not just due to gender but also due to race, sexual orientation, ability, country of origin, etc. Yes, Manne alludes briefly to the importance of intersectionality and includes a few examples of misogynoir and ableism in her book. But her framing of misogyny as an enforcement tool of its own, rather than a subset of tools of enforcement of the status quo in my opinion greatly limited her ability to discuss gender dynamics in her book and interpret political events in general.

I (currently, at least) follow Kate Manne on twitter, and nearly unfollowed her during the tail end of Elizabeth Warren's 2020 presidential campaign. To Manne, there is no single rational reason that someone could support Sanders over Warren; this phenomenon cannot be explained by anything except sexism. No, if I was disappointed in Warren's inability to understand the harms of claiming to be racialized for her own benefit, it is because I am sexist. If I trust in Sander's decades-long commitment to progressive causes and am wary of Warren's conservative roots, it is because I am sexist. If I thought Warren's somewhat wishy-washy position on universal healthcare was less preferable than Sander's enthusiastic support for universal healthcare, it is because I am sexist.

So to an extent, I knew full well what I was getting into with this book. And yet I was still somewhat surprised about the extent to which this book praised Hillary Clinton and refused to engage with left-wing criticisms about Clinton's neoliberal and oligarchic political platform. In Down Girl, Manne presents leftwing criticisms of Clinton being corrupt or conniving as misogynist reactions to Clinton requesting space in a male dominated sphere. The one Sanders supporter trotted out as an example of this is some no-name HuffPo contributor who write a piece about his friend accusing him of sexism for supporting Sanders over Clinton. Imagine instead a discussion where due to misogyny and oligarchic pressures, the first woman allowed to become a US presidential candidate was one so set on generally maintaining the power structure status quo!

Manne allows for two criticisms of Clinton: yeah maybe she got paid too much for a few speeches, and also some of her foreign policy was "misguided." This latter criticism is foiled against Obama, who had very similar foreign policy, and who benefited from enthusiasm from his voters in his history-making nomination as the first black presidential candidate. So why didn't Clinton get the same voter enthusiasm?! Misogyny, obviously! Not at all due to the fact that 2016-Clinton had decades in which to publicly demonstrate her values while 2008-Obama was a relatively blank slate upon which we could project, and who was less associated with the ruling class/more able to present himself as a Washington outsider. (Washington outsiders performed well in 2016!) Again, an example where exploring the relationship between gender and wealth/social class could have proven instructive.

I was a little shocked that the shooting of Michael Brown was used to describe victim blaming (so as to better understand female survivors of rape, or course), with very little discussion about race (with little more than a token mention that the word thug, as used to describe Brown, is usually applied to people of colour) or police violence.

I think what made this so frustrating was that there were great ideas woven together in this book, so their limited application (to misogyny only, at the expense of insightful discussion of race, class and other issues) was just that much clearer.

For instance, I liked that Manne identified that social expectations of woman were not just to provide particular acts of service/emotional labor/ego-boosting to men, but are expected to provide it enthusiastically, willingly, lovingly. I found particularly information her explanation of how covert coercion of this behavior in a patriarchal society is necessary and results in this form of internalized misogyny where women "valorize depictions of the relevant forms of care work as personally rewarding, socially necessary, morally valuable, 'cool', 'natural' or healthy (as long as women perform them)."

I thought Manne fairly deftly handled the relationship between individual agents being misogynist and social structures being misogynist. The overall thesis of chapter 1, in which she defines misogyny, was well argued (if a little mired in overly academic phrasing). I also liked the give/take framing of social expectations of women:

(1) she is obligated to give feminine-coded services to someone or other, preferably one man who is her social equal or better (by the lights of racist, classist, as well as heteronormative values, in many contexts), at least insofar as he wants such goods and services from her; (2) she is prohibited from having or taking masculine-coded goods away from dominant men (at a minimum, and perhaps from others as well), insofar as he wants or aspires to receive or retain them (Chapter 4)

Manne's definition of misogyny seemed to me to include scenarios in which men attempt to act outside the usual gender roles and experience violence or backlash, and one question I would have for Manne is whether she would consider this misogyny. I thought it was interesting that this type of violence against men (who are acting/presenting "womanly") was not discussed.

Manne's depictions of the Rush Limbaugh/Sandra Fluke, Elliot Rodger, Brock Turner, Trump Access Hollywood Tapes, and Daniel Holtzman stories were good. However, having recently lived through these stories, and already interpreted them through a feminist lens, I didn't find them to be so edifying. Still, it was fun to get to practice using and applying the new tools/framings presented by Manne that I described above.

Overall, some useful bits that make it worth the read, if you're prepared to skim through some rather awkward and dry prose, and can stomach reading political takes from someone who attributes Clinton's 2016 loss to sexism.

Review: Because Internet by Gretchen McCulloch

Rating: 5/5

Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language is very much a quick and approachable intro into basic linguistics concepts, and how these concepts apply to the development of internet-specific communication mores. Although the culture of the internet develops so quickly, by anchoring her observations/study about the internet in theory, Gretchen McCulloch really gives you the tools to think about new developments in internet communication. For example the etiquette of social distancing Zoom calls isn't covered in the book, but now I have Thoughts about what she might have written. I think this approach will also give the book a little more staying power - it isn't a description of the rules of a particular meme, or a guide to when and how to use phrases like "I can't even". It's much more about how technology and communication needs intertwine to produce new quirks of informal internet speak. Her writing tone is funny, thoughtful, and informative. I loved it.

I think my favourite part of the reading experience was recognizing a bit of a kindred spirit in McCulloch. For example, she's daydreamed about a research project involving the variation in the language of "missing cat" posters around Montreal neighbourhoods. She's a "full internet" person, like me, and fluent in internet culture. Many of the aspects of internet communication she highlighted are things I've used, seemingly naturally, and then picked apart and analyzed. (Why did I use "hahaha" there, "hahahaaaa" there, but "lol" in the response before? Why two :joy: emojis there? It feels better to correct my phone's autocorrect there to use a lowercase to start the sentence... but why?) Her nerdy delight in research and understanding the world around her was familiar and contagious.

Because Internet goes a little deeper than just face-value text frequency studies like "which letters are most likely to be repeated/elongated." There's also examination of how communities form, how people share and interpret intense emotions, how people express and develop their senses of identity, how different people encounter and use the internet in their lives. There's no pearl-clutching about the kids these days not knowing how to write well - and in fact, she combats this myth with thorough examination of casual versus formal writing styles over the years.

There's a few areas she touches on but doesn't really go into that I would have liked to hear more about. For example, she dates the end of "Advice Animals" memes to around 2014, but doesn't explain what contributed towards their demise. I've thought about this before - I suspect reddit removing the subreddit from its "default subs" led to its sharp drop in popularity, but I have a feeling that this meme format was already on the downward slope. This could have been an interesting avenue to discuss in more depth how the decisions of social networking companies shape language development. She mentions very briefly the alt-right's use of the pepe frog, but not how their ironic use of rapidly changing memes and slang and extreme irony allow them to pretend they were less hateful than they were, and communicate somewhat unseen with each other in the rest of the internet.

The author read the audiobook, and I liked her reading of it.