Books

CT has long been the go-to blog on the cultural significance of underwater zombies (as in this classic). But now as reported by Paul Krugman in the NYTimes, they’ve taken over the ECB.

The _American Prospect_ has published a “review essay”:http://prospect.org/cs/articles?article=bubble_trouble I wrote on Eli Pariser’s “The Filter Bubble”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1594203008/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=henryfarrell-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399373&creativeASIN=1594203008 (I’m not quite sure when this went up on the WWW; I’ve been travelling). It’s an interesting book, which takes some of the empirical developments that Tyler Cowen enthused about in _The Age of the Infovore_ and comes to diametrically opposite conclusions about their normative implications.

bq. What Cowen sees as enhancing individual autonomy, Pariser sees as restricting personal development. Instead of constructing personal micro-economies that allow us to make sense of complexity, we are turning media into a mirror that reflects our own prejudices back at us. Even worse, services like Google and Facebook distort the mirror so that it exaggerates our grosser characteristics. Without our knowing, they reshape our information worlds according to their interpretation of our interests … We are beginning to live in what Pariser calls “filter bubbles,” personalized micro-universes of information that overemphasize what we want to hear and filter out what we don’t. … Cowen’s ideal world—where the private vice of self-centered information leads to the public virtue of a lively interactive culture—is unlikely to be self-sustaining. It’s also difficult to see how regulation could pop information bubbles. … As Harvard political theorist Nancy Rosenblum has argued, partisanship creates its own checks and balances. As long as partisans are contending for a majority of public support, they have to temper their own beliefs in ways that will allow them to appeal to the public and to respond to potentially persuasive arguments from their opponents. Democratic competition is not a complete solution. It does not protect individuals from a narrowing of their horizons. … Even so, democracies are far more robust against information bubbles than Pariser believes.

Last April, Martha Nussbaum’s book Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach came out. Too late for being included in my entry on the capability approach at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, but I’m immediately making up for that omission since I’m working on a book review for the Notre Dame Philosophy Reviews. My verdict? It’s a useful introduction for undergrads and policy makers, but given its length it doesn’t (and cannot) have much depth. (for me, that’s not a criticism: it’s by definition almost impossible for introductory books that cover such a broad range of disciplines to have much, if any, depth). Yet I think it is somewhat more problematic that something is missing that many undergraduates and most policy makers reading this book will want to know, since it doesn’t cover the empirical work being done. Hence the book also ignores all the questions related to measurement, which is, in my experience, the #1 question asked by economists who want to understand this framework, and by policy makers looking for an answer to the question whether the approach has any bite.

One could be inclined to believe that this is merely a teaching book, and it is with that assumption that I read it; yet there is also something in there for scholars of the approach. They will also discover some new claims and statements – some of which I endorse, and some of which I contest.
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I’ve been fixing the footnotes to a new translation of Rousseau’s Considerations on the Government of Poland (fn1) and whilst doing so happened upon a really fascinating bit of Danish history. Rousseau has a cryptic remark:

bq. You have seen Denmark, you see England, and you will soon see Sweden. Profit by these examples to learn once and for all that, however many precautions you may amass, heredity in the throne and liberty in the nation will forever be incompatible things.

What would they have seen in Denmark?
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Here’s NPR’s list. (Kevin Drum is musing about it, among others. He points out: no Pohl, Bester, Delany.)

The Silmarillion beat The Hobbit? Fer reals? (Drum is wondering about that, too.) And a D&D Forgotten Realms book is on the list. So it, too, beat The Hobbit?

No Greg Bear or David Brin? Seems we need at least one of those hard sf ‘killer B’s’. No Uplift books? No Forge of God/Anvil of Stars or Moving Mars? (I understand why Larry Niven is on the list, but couldn’t we drop a Niven/Pournelle book to make room for Bear or Brin?) No Bova neither.

No John Crowley, Little, Big? Seems a crime to omit that one.

No Fritz Leiber?

I’m trying to think what multiple Hugo and Nebula-winning authors have gotten the boot on this list.

Take it away!

Ta-Nehisi Coates has been writing about whether the Civil War should be considered a tragedy or not (his take is emphatically on the ‘not’ side of the ledger). One way to think about this is to think about what would America have looked like if the Civil War hadn’t taken place? This is the kind of counter-factual that both philosophers and science-fiction writers use – and as it happens, there’s a fine and moving short story by the science fiction author Robert Charles Wilson on this topic, “This Peaceable Land: Or The Unbearable Vision of Harriet Beecher Stowe.” (it’s first published in the Other Earths anthology, and also available in a couple of ‘Best of 2009’ round-up SF collections). The story takes place in an America where the Civil War was barely averted, and where the South saw a gradual depopulation of African Americans, hastened greatly by a kind of quiet Holocaust in which many of them were murdered as slavery ceased to be economically viable. The nub of the story is precisely the difficulty that white abolitionist liberals have in seeing that the war that was avoided may have been a lesser tragedy than the unheralded war that was not.

bq. “That is a decent white woman,” Ephraim said when he had heard the letter and given it some thought. … “But I don’t know what she’s so troubled about … This idea that there was no war. I suppose there wasn’t, if by war you mean the children of white men fighting the children of white men. But, sir, I have seen the guns, sir, and I have seen them used, sir, all my life – _all_ my life. And in my father’s time, and before him. Isn’t that war? And if it _is_ war, how can she say war was avoided? There were many casualties, sir, though their
names are not generally recorded; many graves, though not marked; and many battlefields, though not admitted to the history books.”

Or as Coates puts it:

bq. Taken together, the slave system was, itself, a Leviathan–a force with deep roots in the economic, social and political system of this country. From the black perspective it was the nation-state mobilized for more than two and half centuries as a war-machine against that which so many regard as the foundation of humanity, itself–the family. And I do not merely mean the biological nuclear family: The slave system subjected family, in all its permutations–adoptive, same-sex, parent-less, child-less–to consistent, if capricious, violence. If there is such a thing as an African-American people–and I believe there is–then it must be said that that for 250 years, that people lived in a state of war.

NPR has an interview with Terry Pratchett about his early onset Alzheimer’s, his advocacy for assisted suicide, and his forthcoming Discworld novel, Snuff. There’s a short excerpt from it as well, which is pretty funny.

At one point in Zombie Economics, I tried a Popperian (or maybe Paulian) smackdown, saying that some defenders of EMH used arguments that effectively rendered it unfalsifiable. I thought that was a bad thing, but apparently at least one reviewer disagrees. Following my stoush with Murdoch, a commenter pointed me to this piece by Stephen Williamson of Washington University at St Louis, who has apparently been asked to review the book for the Journal of Economic Literature. Williamson claims that I am badly confused about the EMH, and that

Market efficiency is simply an assumption of rationality. As such it has no implications. If it has no implications, it can’t be wrong.

He follows up with “Like the “efficient markets hypothesis,” DSGE has no implications, and therefore can’t be wrong.””
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I’m teaching “Philosophy and Literature” this semester. For one unit – Well Wrought Urns and Stuffed Owls, or somesuch subtitle – we’re going to read the really strong stuff. Like Irene Iddesleigh, Chapter 1 (not the whole book). But also more genuinely enjoyable incompetence: The Young Visiters. And Crippled Detectives. See this Village Voice piece for some – rather sad – background on the latter. Maybe a bit from A Nest of Ninnies. Who knows? Maybe even Ulysses? I’ve always thought of that book as basically The Young Visiters writ old. Bloom is Mr. Salteena, all grown up, but still a child at heart. [click to continue…]

Prompted by a passing thought about TextMate, I thought I’d make a comprehensive, accurate, unbiased, and irrefutable survey of text editors by way of comparison to locations in The Lord of the Rings.

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My performance/recording vs. oral/literary post has gotten lots of comments, so let’s see if I can drive you all off with a follow-up.

Two other books about the evolution of reading culture I read recently: Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading, by Paul Saenger; and Silent Reading and the Birth of the Narrator, by Elspeth Jajdelska.

The Saenger book concerns the Rodney Dangerfield of punctuation marks: the space. (Why do you think that’s the largest key on your keyboard, hmmm?) Let me quote the publisher’s blurb in a way that makes Saenger’s point. Once upon a time, European scribes wrote like this: [click to continue…]

I just read two books back to back to good effect: Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy and Elijah Wald’s How the Beatles Destroyed Rock n Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music [amazon]. (This post is stray book-thoughts, a bit weak in the conclusion department; only so-so in the adequate summary of what the authors are arguing department. Read on at your own risk.) [click to continue…]

A sort of postscript to my “post”:https://crookedtimber.org/2011/06/13/embassytown/ on _Embassytown_ a couple of weeks ago. Sam Thompson’s “LRB review”:http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n12/sam-thompson/monsters-you-pay-to-see had a brief discussion in passing of Miéville’s earlier children’s novel, “Un Lun Dun”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345458443/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=henryfarrell-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399369&creativeASIN=0345458443.

bq. In a novel he wrote for children in 2007, _Un Lun Dun,_ a despotic entity called Mr Speaker turns language into flesh in a literal sense: when he talks each word takes animate form as a weird creature dropping from his mouth. The word ‘jealous’ manifests as a ‘beautiful iridescent bat’, ‘soliloquy’ is a ‘long-necked sinuous quadruped’, ‘cartography’ a ‘thing like a bowler hat with several spidery legs and a fox’s tail’. These ‘utterlings’ are obedient slaves, existing to do their creator’s will. Like Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty, Mr Speaker thinks that when it comes to words, the only important question is ‘which is to be master’: he has none of Alice’s doubts about ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things’. Miéville’s modern Alice is a pre-teen Londoner called Deeba, who, when she encounters Mr Speaker on her journey through the looking-glass city of UnLondon, delights him with fresh vocabulary like ‘bling’, ‘lairy’ and ‘diss’, spawning new kinds of word-critter. But when Mr Speaker orders his words to take her prisoner, she turns the tables by pointing out the flaw in his theory of language. ‘Words don’t always mean what we want them to,’ she says. ‘Like … if someone shouts, “Hey, you!” at someone in the street, but someone else turns around. The words misbehaved.’ Deeba’s subversive logic shows the utterlings that they don’t have to obey Mr Speaker after all, and she escapes as the tyrant is overwhelmed by his own mutinous verbiage.

It was only when I saw this quote singled out that I realized that Deeba’s response is in part a joke very specifically aimed at structural Marxism. I give you Louis Althusser, as “quoted by our own Michael Bérubé”:http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php/weblog/theory_tuesday_iv/

bq. I shall then suggest that ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way that it ‘recruits’ subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or ‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called _interpellation_ or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: ‘Hey, you there!’

bq. Assuming that the theoretical scene I have imagined takes place in the street, the hailed individual will turn round. By this mere one-hundred-and-eighty-degree physical conversion, he becomes a _subject._ Why? Because he has recognized that the hail was ‘really’ addressed to him, and that ‘it was _really him_ who was hailed’ (and not someone else). Experience shows that the practical telecommunication of hailings is such that they hardly ever miss their man: verbal call or whistle, the one hailed always recognizes that it is really him who is being hailed.

This is a class of an “Easter Egg”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_egg_%28media%29, but also a serious point, I think. For Miéville, the delight of language is that it _isn’t_ determinative in the fashion that Althusser says it is. Not all who are hailed recognize it – and if they do recognize it, they can choose to ignore or subvert the fashion in which they are being hailed. It’s also a nice example of how a metaphor can be framed in two registers at once – most readers of _Un Lun Dun_ will have no very great familiarity with defunct Marxist theorists, but they don’t have to be to get the point (it’s more fun for readers who recognize the target of the joke, but it’s not really necessary to the underlying point).

Katie Roiphe recently wrote an article on the new book “Go the F#$k to Sleep.” She makes rather sweeping claims about miserable, sexless yuppies who have mollycoddled their children so extravangantly that the parents can no longer even steal enough time to watch a single episode of Mad Men together. During which they could take notes on parenting tips, one imagines!

Are our enlightened, engaged, sensitive parenting practices driving a certain segment of the population insane? Is the nice, liberal father who has just this Saturday carted his kids to soccer practice, play dates, piano lessons, made sunflower-butter sandwiches, and read Goodnight Moon three times seething with quiet desperation? The surprise ascendance of Adam Mansbach and Ricardo Cortés’ Go the F**k to Sleep on all sorts of best-seller lists eloquently answers that question….One wonders if this hostility [evident in the book] toward the child, who is naturally and rightfully manipulative, is just a tiny bit misplaced….The book, in all its cleverness and artfulness and ingenuity, raises certain other questions: Are they having sex, these slouchy rageful parents? Not enough, perhaps. When the father turns back to the waking child’s bedroom, we look out at the comfy, sexless, vaguely depressive scene of his wife sprawled asleep on the couch under an ugly old blanket. No wonder the slouchy dad is full of rage.

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