On a week when it feels like we're watching a Cuban missile crisis unfold between the judiciary and executive branches, coupled with the sense that weOn a week when it feels like we're watching a Cuban missile crisis unfold between the judiciary and executive branches, coupled with the sense that we might be witnessing the end of the US government as we know it, there is something grotesque in reading about a time when that very government stepped in to prevent the end of the US financial system.
It's only been 17 years since the financial crisis (Monday marked the anniversary of the downfall of Bear Stearns). And yet, with the hindsight that the world got through it, and the absence of hindsight about our current situation, talking about the Great Recession can feel tone-deaf.
Maybe that's just because I was a recent teenage immigrant in 2008, and - even with two freshly unemployed parents, no health insurance, and most stores boarded up at the neighborhood plaza - getting my driver's license and making sense of my American classmates drowned out all other worries while the banks were coming apart at the seams. I would be curious to hear if the tone-deaf sentiment resonates or sounds bizarre to others.
Of course, learning about the lead-up to the collapse of the financial market is never irrelevant. The incentives, culture, and opaqueness of Wall street's bond trading apparatus snowballed to an economic catastrophe. This book (and, to a similar degree, the movie based on it) can help us get a grasp of the fraud that fed into Wall Street's more legitimate tools. The disastrous implications went undetected by almost everyone, thanks to getting buried under layers of financial jargon.
The protagonists of The Big Short are those rare individuals who recognized the steaming volcano on top of which Wall Street was building an upside-down pyramid of bets and hedges. It takes a specific personality, Michael Lewis argues, to not only see the mass delusion, but to have the confidence to stake one's own assets and reputation on the bet that eventually, it's all going to collapse. Even when in hindsight, the delusion should have been obvious - once you sort out what all the financial jargon means.
The book is sliiiightly more dense than the movie in this respect. To pretty much everyone - with the possible exception of people who work in finance - I would suggest watching the movie before reading the book. It made the technical details in the book easier to follow, for me at least. But, even though the movie captures most of the book quite well, it really lacks in the details of how the U.S. government dealt with the financial crisis. For this alone, the book is worth reading.
And then of course, there's Lewis's occasional footnote snark.
Goldman Sachs did not leave the house before it began to burn - it was merely the first to dash through the exit. And then, it closed the door behind it.
There's a person in my life who seems to love assigning psychological types - usually quite unflatteringly - to the people he encounters. Lately, he hThere's a person in my life who seems to love assigning psychological types - usually quite unflatteringly - to the people he encounters. Lately, he has been pinpointing the psychopaths in his social circle. The way he describes it, it would seem that every tenth person walking this planet must be a psychopath.
Is there something to that? Are psychopaths - people who are physically incapable of feeling empathy, possibly due to a pathologically functioning amygdala - really that common, especially among those who rise to stardom in business and politics? Or is this a product of the way psychopaths are defined, and the overzealous eyes of someone who believes that they have the power to spot a psychopath without an MRI machine? That is the question that sends Jon Ronson on a quest in this book.
I picked up this book not out of a special interest in psychopaths, but because I found Ronson's podcast on the history of the culture wars quite good. Ronson seems to have a talent for taking commonly accepted truths (such as, the DSM lists the diagnostic criteria for real mental disorders that cause suffering, and should be treated if possible) and asking - how might a reasonable person question this truth. This then leads him to find people who take such questioning away from reasonable territory and into the realm of conspiracy theory and misinformation.
Ronson's narrative does pull us into some interesting stories, and I enjoyed a fair bit of the book. It does go down paths that don't seem relevant or necessary and serve to frustrate the reader instead of intriguing us. This applies to the opening part of the book, which centers around a mysterious booklet that has been disseminated to a group of scientists. Chapter 1 can be fully skipped by readers who are finding it boring, as I didn't find the book gripping until chapter 2, at which point it grabbed me whole.
But the occasional meandering nature of the book isn't my main issue with it. In the course of this book, Ronson repeatedly questions whether psychiatric diagnoses are real or if the whole discipline is built around people who love assigning pathological labels to normal variations in human behavior. On occasion, Ronson does mediate these musings with a mention that he knows some people whose mental illness is real and not a frivolous invention by MD-carrying shills colluding with big pharma. For instance:
I knew from seeing stricken loved ones that many of the disorders listed - depression and schizophrenia and obsessive-compulsive disorder, and so on - are genuine and overwhelming and devastating.
In the next sentence, though, he goes back to the possibility that the DSM is a sham, lingering on this side of the question for far longer than the two instances I remember of Ronson acknowledging the possibility that it is real.
It is possible to put a medical field under careful examination and bring out some aspects of it that may be outdated and should be improved. But it must be done with care and diligence. This book does not do this in a way that takes care to avoid causing harm and perpetuate stigma, even though I believ that is not Ronson's intention.
The part where Ronson opens the DSM for the first time and diagnoses himself with 12 disorders, then asks how can this book possibly be based in reality, reminded me of something that happened right around the time of this book's publication. A young woman came to a psychotherapist, suspecting that she had bipolar disorder. She was getting auditory hallucinations every night and occasionally was experiencing mild catatonia. When she asked the psychotherapist if she was going through a depressive episode, he answered "We're all a little bit depressed". Five months later, she went to another office, where a psychiatrist diagnosed her with bipolar and prescribed meds. A couple of weeks later, the hallucinations were gone and never returned.
The one thing that I did gain from Jon Ronson's books, though, was an interest in psychopathy. But I think a more thorough book will be necessary to make me feel like I've learned something about the subject....more
Have you ever followed instructions for a knitting pattern, looked at your work and thought - hm, did I do that stitch incorrectly? It looks wonky, anHave you ever followed instructions for a knitting pattern, looked at your work and thought - hm, did I do that stitch incorrectly? It looks wonky, and definitely not like the perfection in the photos on the pattern...
You go back to your knitting book, or the grandma who taught you this craft, and even check out video tutorials for that wonky-looking stitch. And nope! You did everything correctly - yet no amount of frogging and redoing makes it look better. Sound familiar?
Patty Lyons is here to show us why those strange-looking quirks of homemade knitting happen - and how to fix them. What I really love about this book is that she doesn't just present tricks, or hacks, without any context. She explains why the problem happens in the first place, and in the end you understand why each of her tricks actually works.
Some of this wisdom is pretty easy to pick up just by reading the book, no needles in hand. But some of Patty's solutions are actually somewhat convoluted. After you read the text the first time, you kind of have to try her instructions out on your own knitting to really understand what she's saying.
Take, for instance, the One-Move SSK. SSK, when you do it according to standard instructions, just does not look neat. Zig-zaggy, janky, and loose, it looks like it's been knit by an intoxicated four-year old.
But then, you see that Lyons has a much-improved method, and it even says it only takes one step. Heavenly bodies move aside, god is smiling on me tonight! Right?
Riiiight..... about that improved SSK. I have never experienced the miracle of childbirth (that one time when I was the baby in the room notwithstanding), but I'm pretty sure that the concept is similar to the One-Move SSK. Completely with crying and torn... yarn. The only exception is that in the case of the knitting trick, every time you pull the yarn (baby) through the loop, it retreats back to where it came from.
Is the torture worth the impeccable outcome? My perfectionism says yes, 100%. My hands, on the other hand, say that they have booked a ticket to Tenerife, and, quote, "don't even try calling to get us to come back because we've blocked your number and thrown away our phone."
How am I going to keep practicing Patty's knitting tricks when my hands are on an indefinite vacation to recover from the neatly executed SSK? Maybe that's a trick in one of Patty's other books....more
For a book whose title puts such a central focus on a good fit, Donna Druchunas's Image credit: Training sock from Kate Atherley's
For a book whose title puts such a central focus on a good fit, Donna Druchunas's How to Knit Socks That Fit contains very little information on how to adjust sock patterns for one's specific needs.
For instance, take high instep - a very common reason to adjust a sock's pattern. Here's how this book addresses the instep adjustment in the Basic Cuff-Down Sock Pattern:
You can easily adjust the instep depth by making the heel flap shorter or longer.
Ok, but how much longer should we make it? And how does one know that an instep adjustment is necessary? There is no information on how to measure one's instep, or how to tell from poorly fitting socks that an instep adjustment is necessary - the book doesn't even explain what the word "instep" means.
Advice for improving the sock's fit is isolated to a handful of bullet point boxes, such as "Tips for Getting a Good Fit" on page 29 - which contains four tips, two of which are to use ribbing to make the sock fit on the foot, and one is to use stockinette to make the sock-donning foot fit into a shoe.
What about accounting for variation in the ratio of the foot, heel and ankle circumferences - let alone more specific personal tailoring adjustments? On the one occasion I noticed that being addressed, the book's advice is vague, abstract, and leaves the reader not much better off than they are without this book.
It's a fairly good resource for learning to knit socks in general - and if its cover didn't promise socks that fit, I would be giving it 4 stars. Alas, I am walking away from the book not feeling any more equipped to fix the socks that struggle to be pulled over my heel - yet which then wobble around my thin ankle....more
This is a case of something that happens quite a bit in today's books written by scientists who are actively engaged in research: although the book prThis is a case of something that happens quite a bit in today's books written by scientists who are actively engaged in research: although the book presents itself as being about the history of human evolution, its main topic is the researchers who work in the field. Consequently, the bits of text that tell us about human origins aren't told cohesively, and certainly not chronologically.
There are some books where such a focus on the scientists explores the drama of academia politics, and therefore is interesting to read (Priya Natarajan's Mapping the Heavens: The Radical Scientific Ideas That Reveal the Cosmos is one example*). But I don't think that the approach that Tom Higham takes in The World Before Us reaches that riveting level.
____ disclaimer, I know Priya as a colleague and mentor but that's not why I liked her book....more
Reading The Time Machine made me feel like an eleven year old who got to ride a creaky old roller coaster by herself in the middle of a school day. ItReading The Time Machine made me feel like an eleven year old who got to ride a creaky old roller coaster by herself in the middle of a school day. It's old, and so are the views it expresses. There are newer, more polished, longer, and safer books that explore the ideas here in an improved way. But it's still an adventure that I will remember....more
What was there before the Big Bang? Some would say it's nonsensical to ask this question because time didn't exist yet. And in the absense of time, thWhat was there before the Big Bang? Some would say it's nonsensical to ask this question because time didn't exist yet. And in the absense of time, there was no 'before'. This concept can be maddeningly hard to grasp for us humans. Time is inextricably tied to life - to existence itself.
It is telling, therefore, how much time permeates 1984, starting with the title and opening sentence, all the way through the last paragraph. It's speaking to how central being in touch with the passing of time is to our sense of being an individual.
The totalitarian state in 1984 steals its citizens' sense of self by a plethora of means. Robbing them of the knowledge of when exactly in history they are located is a major one. Winston, the main character, is tasked with rewriting history to fit the state's shifting whims. And yet, he doesn't know what year it is; he can't be certain exactly how old he is.
A major question, then, is why is the year so clearly stated in the title? Perhaps by telling us the date - and depriving Winston of that knowledge - Orwell calls out the reader's position as an observer. It's as if we are taking on the role of Big Brother while we read the book, observing Winston's external actions and inner thoughts. It is meant to make us uncomfortable with knowing more about the protagonist than he, arguably, knows about himself.
Lots has been said (largely in the West) about this novel being prophetic, a scary vision of a possible future (or possibly something that might be unfolding already). When politics in one's country is going in an upsetting direction, the scenarios in Orwell's work can get pulled and stretched until they fit the shape of whatever is going on in the West at the time.
But Orwell didn't pluck it all from his imagination. In fact, a large portion of what he describes was happening around the time when Orwell wrote 1984 a few hundred kilometers East of him, in the Soviet Union.
In my opinion, learning about the real history of totalitarian regimes is a better way to equip oneself for detecting them as they build up at home - and what one can do to protect the self and one's family if the let's-hope-we-never-need-this-knowledge case comes to fruition. Journey into the Whirlwind, for example, tells the personal journey of one of the victims of Stalinist repressions. Not only is it real and illuminating about how totalitarianism works on a day-to-day scale, it's also engrossing.
Still, the monologues and long chunks of exposition in 1984 raise questions about what a future regime might do differently from what we can find in history books. This novel is definitely worth reading.
I did struggle in a major way with one aspect of the novel - Orwell's musings on sexual deprivation. Among other things in the novel, there is a celibacy movement among women. Both Winston and Julia say things that imply that not having sex with men turns the women in the celibacy movement into thoughtless mutant tools of authoritarian oppression. One shouldn't need to be female or asexual to see what's wrong in this equation. But being both of those things made1984's stance on women's sexual obligation to men particularly hard to stomach and not see as an insult.
Once I pushed past the parts where Winston and Julia are together on the page, the problem subsided. After that, the novel was absolutely stellar - and discussing totalitarianism in a way I hadn't considered before. The ending was great....more
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