Assorted Book Reviews

Epic Measures: A book about the creation of the global burden of disease studies. The author thinks that he’s Michael Lewis but is not, so we have to put up with pages and pages of tedious “characterization” in order to “make the people involved feel real” when actually I just want them to get back to the part about how all the statistics are bad and Christopher Murray made them better.

Epic Measures brings home to me how difficult effective altruism would have been before relatively recently. Before the global burden of disease studies, for example:

• There were at least nine different commonly used models for estimating life expectancy, which varied by as much as fifteen years.
• If you added together the estimates of child deaths by various causes by the WHO groups that specialized in various illnesses, 30 million children died every year. (This excluded, for example, car accidents, which didn’t have a WHO group.) UN demographers, however, estimated 20 million children died every year.
  • In fact, just the estimated deaths from diarrhea, pneunomia, malaria, and measles outnumbered the estimated number of dead children.
• If UN and World Bank estimators had no new information about life expectancy, they assumed that the life expectancy improved by two to three years every five years up to a life expectancy of 62.5, at which point it stopped improving.
• The Demographic Yearbook sometimes used life expectancy estimates from governments and sometimes from the UN Population Division, which means that life expectancies sometimes rose or dropped by an entire decade from one year to another.
• Countries that didn’t collect vital statistics or that didn’t like the vital statistics they collected often just made up their data.
• Even countries that collected vital statistics had inconsistent ways of measuring it: for example, the percentage of French deaths due to cancer was 10% higher than it would have been if the reporting standards of the US were applied, which means it looked like French people were more likely than Americans to die of cancer when actually they were less likely.
• Countries regularly recorded “garbage codes” as causes of death, which either made no medical sense (“senility,” which is not a thing people die of) or were so vague as to be useless (“brain trauma” instead of “car accident” or “fall”). In some cases, as many as 40% of a country’s official causes of death were garbage.
• The number of people who died of malaria in Nigeria every year was five times the number of people who were reported to contract malaria every year, suggesting the estimate was a thousand times off.
• For more than twenty years, it was believed the number of women who died annually from pregnancy or childbirth hadn’t changed. In reality, it had dropped by a third.

I literally have no idea how GiveWell would be able to work in that environment. (Well, actually, I do– it would be ACE.) I think an underexplored reason for effective altruism existing now, instead of earlier, is that only relatively recently have we had enough data to be able to say conclusively what the best global-poverty interventions are.

Best anecdote: North Korea complained that their country’s healthy life expectancy was wrong because “healthy life expectancy in North Korea is the same as life expectancy, because nobody is sick.”

Best reason to have complicated feelings about George W Bush: apparently in Uganda people were terrified when George W Bush left office because they were afraid Obama would defund PEPFAR, since it was a Bush project, and hundreds of thousands of people with HIV would die.

Pure: Definitely one of my favorite books about evangelical purity culture. Each chapter summarizes the experiences of a particular woman (or, in one case, a trans man) with evangelical purity culture; the author’s experiences are woven throughout. A thoughtful, nuanced exploration of the lifelong sexual trauma that evangelical purity culture can cause.

I particularly enjoyed Katie’s chapter. While older evangelical women “dating Jesus” is often mocked, Katie’s chapter sensitively explores how conceptualizing Jesus as the loving partner she otherwise doesn’t have empowers Katie to take care of herself and follow her passions. After all, Jesus loves her, and therefore Jesus wants her to take herself out on a dinner date with Him when she’s had a bad week and to go back to college to pursue a degree in science. Her chapter also includes the appalling declaration that she tries to separate masturbation from anything “dark and horrible,” such as imagining about people she finds attractive being with her, touching her, and saying things that make her excited. (Seriously. Man, fuck evangelical purity culture.)

Opening Up: A Guide To Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships: This book is fine, I guess, but I feel somewhat deceived. I bought it because I was informed it was a polyamory book. Whatever it is the people in this book are doing, it’s not any form of polyamory I recognize. For example, there’s this checklist where you and your partner can talk about what kinds of sexual partners they are forbidden to date (?!), which includes sections for gender, sexual orientation, D/s orientation, coupled status (?!), and appearance (?!?!). And then there’s a section about sex with a list of specific sex acts your partner can rule out you doing with other people.

Look, I’m not judging you or anything, but if one of your partners can say to you “I don’t want you to date any brunettes or eat any ass” and expect you not to laugh in their face, you are clearly doing a different thing than the thing I am doing and it is confusing to call them the same thing. If I wanted my husband to be able to decide who I had sex with I’d just be monogamous.

I am also extremely confused by this book’s insistence that “not allowed to fall in love with other people” is a reasonable agreement. I can imagine circumstances where this is the case– only seeing sex workers? only having one-night stands? grandfathering in a particular fuckbuddy you’ve been fucking for years and haven’t fallen in love with yet? monoromantic bisexual? aromantic person?– but in most situations it just seems impossible to enforce. When you go out on dates with people and have sex with them sometimes you are going to fall in love. That is how people work.

It’s Okay Not To Share: This is one of my favorite parenting books I’ve read so far!

If I had to sum it up in a single phrase, it would be “non-aggression principle parenting.” If a behavior hurts people or property, you might want to forbid it. (For a broad sense of “hurts people or property,” where the child themself is a person and “your parents’ ears hurt from all the screaming” or “your parent is really annoyed about having to clean up after your mess” counts as harm.) But if a behavior doesn’t hurt people or property– if it’s climbing trees, saying “I HATE the baby!”, refusing to share a toy, putting up a “no girls allowed” sign, running, swearing, poking dead birds with a stick, playing with toy guns, or crossdressing– you should almost always allow it.

One particularly insightful point was that if children don’t get practice resolving conflicts then they will be worse at resolving conflicts– just like with any other skill. Many parents want their children to be peaceful, so they interrupt at any sign of conflict and resolve the problem themselves. But that actually doesn’t teach your kid to be peaceful, any more than stopping your child every time they scribble on a piece of paper and drawing the tree for them teaches them art. If you want kids to be good at coming to a solution that works for everyone, you should let them practice resolving conflicts themselves (within reasonable limits), even if they’re bad at it at first

One thing that annoyed me in this book was all the unnecessary gender. Maybe I shouldn’t hold the gender against it, because it did have a chapter about how boys can wear dresses and be ballerinas if they want to, and I appreciate that. But they were continually like “it’s especially important to let boys run around, because boys tend to be more energetic than girls” or “it’s especially important to let boys do ‘big’ art projects, because boys tend to have worse fine motor skills than girls.” Why not just say “this is particularly important for energetic children” and leave the gender out of it? It’s not like there aren’t any energetic girls.

Legal Systems Very Different From Ours: Strongly recommended for any worldbuilder or person who wants to share interesting facts at parties. Legal Systems Very Different From Ours is an explanation of various historical legal systems and their unusual traits. A handful of interesting facts:

• Among the Roma, violations of Roma law are sometimes punished by reporting the perpetrator to the gadje authorities for the crimes or welfare fraud everyone already knew the person was doing.
• In classical Athens, you could search someone else’s house for your stolen property, but only if you did it naked.
• In Imperial China, it was a criminal offense for a child to report to the authorities that their parent committed a crime, even if the parent is guilty.
• In medieval Iceland, you could buy and sell the legal status of being a victim of a crime.
• Maimonides wrote that a wife has a right to expect sex no more than once a week from a scholar, because “the study of Torah weakens their strength.”
• In eighteenth-century England, criminals were sometimes transported to America as indentured servants; to earn money, the government chose to sell them to merchants. The government did not actually make a profit because of the number of young, old, alcoholic, female, etc. criminals they wound up holding indefinitely waiting for a merchant to pay for them.
• The Comanche considered killing a man’s favorite horse to be murder.
• In medieval Ireland, if a lord broke a contract, you were supposed to go on a hunger strike in front of his house; if a lord eats while someone is hunger-striking in front of his house, he owes double damages. For non-lords, you are supposed to break into the contract-breaker’s house with witnesses to complain about it, and the fourth time you are allowed to steal all of his cows.
• Multiple feud systems don’t consider killing someone to be murder if you immediately confess to witnesses. (It is still a killing, which has a smaller penalty.)

Good to Go: An interesting and evidence-based review of the science behind exercise recovery. If you’re just interested in the advice, it is as follows:

• Drink water when you’re thirsty and don’t when you’re not.
• Take rest days; listen to your body about how much rest you need.
• Get enough sleep.
• Eat enough protein and calories, but don’t worry about eating within a particular window after your workout.
• Do specialized “recovery” things if you enjoy them and they make you relax, but otherwise don’t bother. Anything that helps you relax will probably work equally well.

If you enjoy a trip around the world of pseudoscience, as I do, it’s a really fun and engaging read.

Advertisements

Book Post for December

Tags

all cops are bastards, effective altruism, neoreactionaries cw, ozy blog post

Mate: Become The Man Women Want: When I started the dating advice book by Tucker “I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell” Max and Geoffrey “Dear obese Ph.D. applicants: if you didn’t have the willpower to stop eating carbs, you won’t have the willpower to do a dissertation” Miller, I was not expecting that my primary complaint would be that the book was irritatingly politically correct. And yet here we are.

The primary thesis of the book is that if you acquire a bunch of generic, common-sense good qualities– volunteering, having a clean house, exercising regularly, getting enough sleep, treating your depression, learning to appreciate the small things in life– then women will be more attracted to you and you will be able to parlay your attractiveness into lots of casual sex or a relationship with a woman who similarly has a bunch of generic common-sense good qualities. I’m not necessarily opposed to this dating advice. It seems pretty harmless. Even if it fails you’ll end up with an exercise routine and a clean kitchen. But it is also obviously not how human sexuality works.

Like… there are lots of beautiful, intelligent, kind, and in every way desirable women (and men, and nonbinary people) who will ignore a dozen potential partners with many generic common-sense good qualities and zero in on the sad three-legged puppy that they need to rescue with the power of their love. Of course, if you want to date an emotionally healthy person with good boundaries– and you do– you probably want to have a handle on your mental health shit. But it is just not true that everyone is more attracted to people who have a handle on their mental health shit than people who don’t. Lots of those emotionally healthy people with good boundaries have gone through a long process of personal growth in which they realize that, regardless of what their heart and/or boner say about the matter, they should stop trying to save wildly dysfunctional people with the power of their love.

Romance novel heroes are standardly issued with a dark and tragic past! Mr. Darcy is one of the most iconic romance novel heroes of all time! Loki fangirls exist! This is because being a complete garbage disaster is in fact a thing many people find attractive!

This book is also peppered with a variety of baffling statements. Depressed people aren’t funny! (Have you ever met a stand-up comedian?) Jason Statham would have an easier time getting laid than Johnny Depp! (I admit that I am too gay to appreciate Jason Statham, a person with a continual air of being thirty seconds away from talking to me about grills, but I think even straight women have to agree that, setting aside the ‘is an abuser’ issue, Johnny Depp is more attractive.) Women paradoxically want both assertive and competent men and kind and sweet men, and it is baffling because those things are basically opposites, but she really wants you to be sweet to her and assertive to other people! (What.)

In conclusion, you should instead read Models. Models is good.

Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty: Should be renamed Dictators Behaving Badly, because much of the charm of this book comes from learning about all the different ways in which dictators behave badly. (I now have strong feelings about the former president of Uzbekistan. Fuck the former president of Uzbekistan in the ear.)

Acemoglu’s thesis is that institutions can be divided into “extractive institutions” and “inclusive institutions”. (Of course, there are also nations with totally nonfunctioning institutions, such as Somalia during the Civil War.) Inclusive institutions enforce property rights, treat people equally, incentivize economic activity, create law and order, and give everyone a say in government. Extractive institutions are structured to extract resources from the many to the few. In general, extractive institutions result in less growth. Extractive institutions oppose the destabilizing force of innovation, which might make it more difficult for elites to get all the money, and which is necessary for economic growth. And extractive institutions tend to be politically unstable, because the primary way to earn money is to control the institutions.

In general, both extractive institutions and inclusive institutions tend to persist in a particular location. Revolutions that overthrow extractive institutions tend to just install a new set of people in charge of the same old extractive institutions. However, major events that disrupt the existing political and economic balance in a society can cause institutions to shift from extractive to inclusive, or vice versa. Historical examples include the Black Death, the Industrial Revolution, and the opening of Atlantic trade routes.

Highly recommended. I think this sort of economic history approach is one of the best ways for me to learn history– it helps me understand not only what happened but also why.

The Little Book of Restorative Justice: I always kind of thought the thing I believed about criminal justice was called “restorative justice”, and I have read this book and now I know it’s definitely called that, so that’s good.

The conventional criminal justice system focuses on offenders getting what they deserve. Restorative justice is focused on victims getting what they need and on offenders taking responsibilty to repair the harm they caused. For example, victims often need to understand exactly what happened, to tell their story, to have a sense of empowerment, and to receive restitution. In a restorative-justice framework, offenders if necessary are at least temporarily restrained, take accountability for their actions, change their behavior so they don’t commit crimes again, and reintegrate into the community.

It’s simultaneously very surprising and not surprising at all that restorative justice was invented by a Christian. On one hand, it’s a very Christian set of beliefs. On the other hand, I rarely expect Christians to behave in a particularly Christian way. The author is Mennonite, and I have a vague sense that Mennonites are better on the radical forgiveness thing than most Christians.

Solstice Picture Books: A Review

Tags

ozy blog post, solstice

Ideally, Secular Solstice would be a holiday for families– one that teaches children humanist values. Unfortunately, it is at present celebrated by only a few hundred people, so we do not have picture books that explain Solstice-related concepts in an accessible fashion. We must appropriate picture books that were not written as Solstice books but which happen to address Solstice-related themes. I will review several here.

Many solstice themes appear to be entirely absent from picture books. For perhaps obvious reasons, few picture books appear to address existential risk, the fact that the universe doesn’t care, stoicism, or perseverence in the face of a harsh world. While many picture books do address the subject of death, few do it in a way anti-deathist atheists would find remotely satisfying. My selections also include a puzzling absence of books about trying to be good, building things together, or hope for the future, perhaps because I was mostly looking at humanist/atheist picture books and these topics are discussed more generally. I am interested in suggestions from readers for picture books that address each of these themes.

Older Than The Stars: A brief history of the universe. Excellent use of rhyme, rhythm, repetition, and alliteration make this book a delight to read out loud. The main text is relatively light on science, although it does touch on the Big Bang and how all atoms formed in stars; however, each page contains science facts for the older reader which are, as far as I know, accurate.

Solstice themes addressed: humans are built of meat and stardust; existence is neat.

Grandmother Fish: A Child’s First Book of Evolution: A lovely, reasonably scientifically accurate book about evolution. The book explains that we are descended from various kinds of animal, who evolved various abilities, and related to all different kinds of animals. The book is interactive, prompting the reader to wiggle and chomp just like Grandmother Fish. I worry somewhat that it promotes a teleological view of evolution: it talks about how Grandmother Reptile evolved the ability to breathe air, but does not mention that Grandmother Reptile also lost certain abilities that Grandmother Fish had. However, that’s a fairly minor flaw in an otherwise wonderful book.

Solstice themes addressed: humans are built of meat and stardust; existence is neat.

If…: A Mind-Bending New Way of Looking At Big Ideas and Numbers: Each page offers a concrete visualization of a big, complicated number: what if the Milky Way galaxy were the size of a dinner plate? what if all the wealth in the world were a hundred coins? what if the events of the past 3000 years were condensed into a single month? As such, this book does not address many Solstice themes. However, it can be a jumping-off point for a lot of Solstice-y discussions. Families who prioritize global poverty may find its visualizations of wealth inequality a way to spark a discussion about why the family donates the way they do. The section about history may prompt conversations about past human achievements and what we might do in the future.

Solstice themes addressed: existence is neat; building things together; tangentially, trying to be good and hope for the future.

If The World Were A Village: A Book About The World’s People: Similar to If…, and written by the same authors, If The World Were A Village focuses on a single concrete visualization of a big, complicated number: what if the entire world were a village of a hundred people? How many people would be Christian? What languages would they speak? How much money would each person have? How many people would have a computer? The book is intended to build “world-mindedness,” a sense of the diversity of the world and caring about people in other countries; this seems like a good rationalist/effective altruist virtue, but perhaps not a Solstice-y one. If read around the time of Solstice, then this book mostly seems useful as a jumping-off point for discussion, particularly among families who prioritize global poverty. It brings up questions about why some countries have more food than others; the parent might also bring up that a few hundred years ago all countries were more similar to the global poor than to the global rich. The book was published in 2011, so many statistics may be out of date; figuring out how to update the statistics might be a good project for a homeschool.

Solstice themes addressed: tangentially, building things together, trying to be good and hope for the future.

I Wonder: This is an adorable book and I definitely recommend getting it. Eva takes a walk with her mother and asks many questions, from why the moon stays close to us to where butterflies come from. She learns the answer to some of her questions, but also learns that there are a lot of questions even grownups don’t know the answer to. I think this is a good book that models curiosity about the unknown, but I’m not sure that it’s very Solstice-y. Not every rationalist virtue needs to be crammed into a single holiday. This might be one to keep on the shelves year-round.

Solstice themes addressed: existence is neat? building things together? trying to be good?

Annabelle & Aiden Presents: Oh The Things We Believed: Very much disrecommended. The book itself is flimsy and feels cheap. The author is attempting to write verse, but does not seem to at all understand the concept of scansion, and the rhymes are very forced. The story is all over the place. I am baffled by the author’s choice to have a bunch of magic things happen in a book the moral of which is that magic doesn’t happen. The cloud isn’t magic, but what about the talking fucking stegosaurus? Maybe that might be magic? Worst of all, the book contains several factual inaccuracies, such as that people used to believe the earth was on the back of infinite turtles. As far as I am aware, no culture believed this. Do not buy this book for your child; I would also probably avoid the rest of the Annabelle & Aiden series.

Solstice themes addressed: we can build things together; perseverance in the face of a harsh world.

Book Post for October

Tags

not like other ideologies, ozy blog post, rationality, star wars, this is a prussian education system hateblog

The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark: Not particularly interesting as a work of skepticism, unless you happen to have an interest in space aliens particularly for some reason. Fascinating as a look into the pre-New-Atheist skepticism movement.

Sagan pays a truly baffling amount of attention to what seem to me to be relatively unimportant kinds of woo, like psychic powers and alien abductions. Of course, neither psychic powers nor alien abductions are real, and it is better to not believe in them. But from my perspective there are far more important false beliefs that actually destroy lives. Sagan mentions false memories of abuse; equally important are certain incorrect medical beliefs (such as fraudulent cancer cures and anti-vaccine sentiment) and, of course, religion.

As someone who came of age as a skeptic around New Atheists, I am struck by Sagan’s restraint as regards religion. He several times makes arguments the logical implication of which is atheism, and then backtracks that there are many liberal religious believers who of course are very rational and accept evolution and support science. I don’t agree with all of Sam Harris’s excesses, but I think it is much more intellectually honest to say that the logical implication of skepticism is atheism.

Most interesting fact: quasars were originally believed to be aliens!

The Core: Teaching Your Child The Foundations of Classical Education: This is the worst homeschooling book I have ever read.

The author literally looked at the modern education system and said to herself, “what we really need is MORE pointless memorization and meaningless execution of rote techniques.” In the standard classical-education system, memorization is most of your education from first to fourth grade. After fourth grade education concentrates on logical reasoning and clear communication. The Core eliminates that frivolous “logical reasoning” and “clear communication” part of education and replaces it with more memorization.

It’s hard to say what the worst advice in this book is, because there are so many options. The Core advises requiring your child to do literally every math problem in their textbook, even if they have mastered the material and are complaining about being bored. (I literally cannot think of a better strategy to teach children to hate math.) History consists solely of memorization: memorizing the dates of 204 world events, memorizing the US presidents, memorizing “six stories of twelve sentences each” that summarize a major era, and copying and rewriting paragraphs from histories. (You do, also, get to read historical fiction.) Writing education consists of copying out sentences and paragraphs assigned by the teacher, memorizing a bunch of rules of grammar, and learning to write five-paragraph essays.

Star Wars: Thrawn: The greatest villain in Star Wars history has returned to his proper place in the canon. With the benefit of almost thirty years of hindsight, Zahn understands exactly what the reader wants out of a Thrawn book, which is more Thrawn. It was an absolute pleasure to open to a new chapter and realize that I didn’t have to return to reading about Luke or Leia or someone boring like that.

It is difficult to write a genius character; all too often, writers rely on technobabble or unjustified leaps of logic. Not so Thrawn. Zahn plays fair with the reader; Thrawn rarely has more information than the reader does, and in theory you could often figure out what his plan is before it is revealed, even though you rarely do. Nothing is left mysterious. Star Wars: Thrawn is wonderful and I am eager about starting the sequels.

[Here are spoilers for the Dark Lord’s Answer.]

Dark Lord’s Answer: A very cool premise, poorly executed. An economist 24/7 submissive is transported into a medieval fantasy world. Because sound economic advice is often counterintuitive or even evil-sounding, in order to get anyone to take her advice she had to set up shop as a Dark Lord. Because she’s an 24/7 submissive, she sets up a puppet Dark Lord whom she submits to while also being the power behind the throne.

Inexplicably, instead of choosing to explore this incredibly interesting character and teach the reader some economics along the way, Dark Lord’s Answer chooses to leave this as a ‘mystery’ the entire time and make it a big reveal.

Book Reviews for August

Tags

effective altruism, god bothering, neurodivergence, ozy blog post, PRECIOUS sexual energy

The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against The United States: A terrifying science fiction novel by an expert in nuclear nonproliferation, the 2020 Commission Report creates a vivid picture of a world where misunderstandings and recklessness result in the death of millions of people in a nuclear war. The format is very interesting: it’s written as a commission report similar to the 9/11 commission report, in which experts are told by Congress to figure out exactly what went wrong to make the nuclear war happen. The format creates suspense and allows for a lot of otherwise tedious infodumps. Up-to-the-minute news (several stories from 2018 are mentioned) creates a sense of realism. For the best effect, I recommend reading this one soon, before real life proves it wrong (one hopes).

Building the Benedict Option: In many ways, I am not the target audience for this book. If anything, I’m exactly the antitheist, queer, sex-positive social justice warrior that the Benedict Option is meant to separate itself from. As such, there’s a lot in here I disagree with. For example, while I agree with Libresco about the importance of alloparenting, many people who are not aunts and uncles can alloparent and many aunts and uncles have no interest in the task. As such, I find her claim that we should all have lots of children so that our children will have more alloparents baffling.

However, the death of community and the isolation of the nuclear family are things that I’m concerned about, and as such I’m interested in potential solutions. Building the Benedict Option is at its best when it’s gently encouraging the reader to practice the virtue of hospitality, making it feel attainable to invite friends over to a dinner party or take cookies to your neighbors. That is something we can all support.

Also, I liked the shoutouts to my friends. (Ray Arnold, you’re in a book!)

Starved for Science: I purchased this book before realizing it was published in 2008 and therefore is sadly out of date; however, I’m not sure how to get more up-to-date information about GMOs in Africa. Be aware that all information in this review is a decade out of date.

Starved for Science makes the case that agricultural science, particularly but not solely GMOs, is under-utilized in Africa, resulting in more famines and malnourishment than would otherwise occur. In developed countries, many people are skeptical of GMOs, in part because we are generally well-fed and most people hardly notice the few cents’ drop in price that results from the use of GMOs. (Notably, people in the developed world are fine with genetically modified drugs, because they do notice and care about a longer and healthier life.) If citizens of developed countries prefer to pay more money for food that they feel is more natural, even though it isn’t actually any healthier, that’s fine– people are allowed to care about dumb things.

Unfortunately, the fear of GMOs has also been exported to Africa, which desperately needs GMOs, for several reasons. African countries export to Europe, which is hysterical about GMOs, and are afraid that adoption of GMO technology would hurt their trade. Africa relies heavily on foreign aid, which at the time the book was written tended to underfund agricultural science and not to fund GMOs at all. Certain nonprofit groups have campaigned for strict regulations on GMOs in Africa and have misled African governments about the dangers of GMOs. Under pressure from developed countries, the UN has promoted very cautious regulatory schemes for GMOs, which have an outsize effect on African countries because they didn’t have any GMO regulatory scheme to begin with.

Women and Girls with Autism Spectrum Disorder: Autism in adults is underresearched, and autism in girls is underresearched, so combined it means that a lot of this book is like “here’s some anecdotes, we really hope that at some point someone is going to do some research on them.” (I continue to be confused about where that huge research budget for autism is going. They can’t be spending that much money on trying to give flies developmental disabilities.) Still, I think it’s worth attending to the fact that autism in women and people assigned female at birth (AFAB people) presents differently than autism in cis men.

Most of all, this book feels shallow to me. A chapter might say that autistic women and AFAB people are particularly likely to be LGBTQ, or that autistic mothers have a hard time with the expectation that they intuitively understand and feel strong emotions about their children, or that autistic women and AFAB people are likely to have “socially acceptable” special interests like boy band members or popular book series, or that autistic women often marry autistic men even if one or both is undiagnosed. But it rarely draws out the implications of these facts, explains what it is like to be an autistic woman/AFAB person, or provides advice either for the autistic female and AFAB readers or their loved ones.

While the book acknowledges the high rate of gender dysphoria among autistic people assigned female at birth, it repeatedly insists on referring to them as women, often in spite of their explicit self-identification.

Beating Back the Devil: I genuinely don’t understand why the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service isn’t a TV show. It would be amazing. It’s half cop show, half medical show. We follow a quirky team of surprisingly attractive epidemiologists as they investigate ripped-from-the-headlines epidemics and public health crises. Epidemiologists attached to a public health department actually do a bunch of different stuff, so you could totally realistically have them investigate West Nile spread by organ transfusions one week and track down which vegetables are making people sick the enxt. (There is generally one EIS officer per public health department, not a quirky and surprisingly attractive team, but we’d have to make concessions for television.) Once a season they’d investigate a terrorist attack. It would be great and then lots of people would want to become epidemiologists. Seriously, guys. I bet it would improve the world’s pandemic preparedness so much.

Anyway, this was a great book and I highly recommend it for people who want to read a suspenseful book about brave and hardworking epidemiologists investigating things.

These Beautiful Bones: A book about nonsexual implications of the Catholic theology of the body, which has as its primary thesis the idea that God wants you to act like an upper-middle-class person.

Consider the chapter on clothing. Of course, These Beautiful Bones opposes dressing in a sexualized fashion. (The author offers the opinion that wearing Daisy Dukes says that you have such low self-esteem that you see yourself as an object and want other people to see you as an object too. Personally, I think if you can’t be sexually attracted to someone and not see them as an object for your sexual gratification, that sounds like a personal problem.) To their credit, however, the author mostly discusses nonsexual ethics of clothing. To their detriment, the author’s primary opinion is that these overly casual modernists should dress up nicely for church and stop wearing blue jeans to work.

The moral issue of spending too much money on clothes is never addressed. Indeed, the author implies it is virtuous to spend more money on clothes, since nice clothes are expensive and it costs more to have clothes for several different levels of formality. Nowhere does the author mention not showing off one’s wealth, despite the fact that this is literally the only modesty issue ever addressed in the Bible (1 Timothy 2:9). Being anti-consumerist is briefly mentioned, but the author definitely leaves open the interpretation that it’s okay to spend a bunch of money on clothes as long as you don’t have labels all over the place.

The whole book is like this.

Strongly disrecommended.

(To be clear, I think that buying nice clothes can be a moral thing to do: dressing unprofessionally and losing your job is not exactly helping anyone. I think people should donate a sustainable percentage of their income, and part of sustainability is having an entertainment budget. Choosing to spend your entertainment budget on clothes is okay, just like spending it on movie tickets or restaurant meals or a vacation is okay. I am strongly opposed to the idea that wearing nice clothes in general is more ethical than wearing cheap clothes in general. I am also strongly opposed to bad Biblical interpretation, and I think the clear and consistent message of the Bible is that you should sell all you have and give it to the poor.)

[The next three reviews are of porn books.]

Show Yourself to Me: Queer Kink Erotica: Some of the stories are very hot, particularly if you’re interested in trans people, knives, Daddy/boy play, or boots/feet. I’m three out of four, so I enjoyed it a lot. Unfortunately, I kept being thrown out of the stories by the author’s conspicuous social justice politics. I don’t want to hear about how the thing that Alice found really attractive about Bob was his commitment to constant affirmative consent, nor am I particularly interested in being told that the characters all accommodate each other’s disabilities. Show, don’t tell, Jesus.

In addition, many of the stories are far too short for my taste. Just when I’m getting into the swing of things the story ends.

The Slave: The Marketplace series is a BDSM porn series focused on a subculture in which wealthy people actually buy and sell slaves, all of whom are people who have enthusiastically consented to being bought and sold. Each book focuses on a few slave or slaves as they go through the process of being trained and sold. If it sounds like your thing, it probably is.

Characterization is the strongest point of the series. Each slave has a unique personality, strengths, and weaknesses, and their training is customized for them as an individual; you find yourself rooting for the slaves to succeed at their training and even skipping past sex scenes so you can find out whether they end up okay. Robin, the protagonist of The Slave, is no exception.

The Slave is probably an ideal entry point for heterosexual male readers, because Robin is female and present in all the sex scenes, and all the other books have a lot of gay male sex along with the straight and lesbian sex.

Chris Parker, the slave trainer and series protagonist, is probably my single favorite pornographic representation of a trans man. The author clearly put significant thought into how his gender dysphoria affects his sex life, creating a realistic and very sexy depiction of transmasculine sexuality.

The bonus short story at the end is one of my favorite Marketplace pieces: Robin is dressed as a boy in order to serve as a bootblack at a gay male orgy, and winds up getting fucked while still in drag.

The Trainer: By far my least favorite book in the Marketplace series. The author makes the puzzling decision to have the viewpoint character be a slave trainer who thinks slavery is all about sex and who orders a bunch of domestic slaves he’s supposed to be training to have sex with him. Naturally, this means I spend every sex scene for the first four-fifths of the book dying of secondhand embarrassment. Secondhand embarrassment is not hot.

Only worth reading if The Slave made you a hardcore Robin/Chris shipper, as there is some excellent Robin/Chris content.

Book Reviews for June: Hugo Awards Edition

Tags

ozy blog post

Since WorldCon is in San Jose this year, I’m going to WorldCon, which means I can vote in the Hugo Awards. For the last few months, most of the books I’ve been reading have been Hugo nominees. And now, well after I could possibly influence anyone’s vote, I’ll tell you which nominees I loved and which nominees I hated. (Since otherwise this post would be really unacceptably long, I’m skipping the ones I was meh on.)

Nominees I Loved

The Stone Sky: I have to say, when I began this series, I was skeptical. “It already won two Hugos, and now it’s nominated for a third?” I said to myself. “We can’t give every book in this series a Hugo. Are we sure none of these are spite-Hugos directed at Vox Day?”

After I finished it, I have to say: the Broken Earth series absolutely deserved both of its Hugos and, if N. K. Jemisin is not completely and unjustly robbed, will absolutely deserve its third Hugo as well. This is, without any exaggeration, absolutely one of the best science fiction series I have ever read: its sheer originality, its complex and well-thought-out worldbuilding, its deeply flawed and yet acutely sympathetic characters, and a climax that will leave you incoherent with wonder, its thematic exploration of trauma and suffering and apocalypse, on the level of people and the level of societies and the way that trauma and suffering can make you a worse person and make you traumatize others.

It is difficult to describe any of the plot without spoilers, so I won’t try. Be warned that it is very dark post-apocalyptic fiction and may not be suited to those of a delicate temperament.

Six Wakes: Locked-room mystery IN SPACE. In a world where people’s memories can be transferred into clone bodies, six clones wake up midway through a trip through space, with only memories of their first day on the ship, and have to solve the murders of their previous selves. The ending is a little bit of a deus ex machina, but otherwise it’s really clever, and I always enjoy a science fiction novel that has a relatively “small” story.

All Systems Red: A security robot hacks his own governor module, which allegedly is supposed to make him rampage around killing people. Instead, he just spends the entire time binging on TV shows. When the people he’s supposed to be guarding are threatened, he has to solve the mystery as quickly as possible, without revealing that he’s hacked his governor module, so that he can get back to watching TV. Unutterably charming.

Down Among the Sticks and Bones: Twin sisters– one forced into femininity, one into tomboyishness, by their abusive parents– walk through a portal into a Hammer Horror story. It really needed an extra chapter or two to tie up all the loose ends, but overall creepy and wonderful.

And Then There Were (N-One): A woman is invited to a convention of her alternate-universe selves, only to discover one of them is a victim of murder– and the only possible perpetrators are her other alternate universe selves. Lots of really cool details fleshing out the core concept; my one complaint is that it really could have stood to be twice as long as it was.

The Secret Life of Bots: A maintenance robot is just trying to fulfill task nine hundred forty four in the maintenance queue, but winds up accidentally saving the day. Very, very cute.

Wind Will Rove: A generation ship loses all its recordings of old media. While the older generation tries desperately to record as much as it can based on people’s memories, the newer generation questions why they need to keep any art from Earth at all.

Welcome To Your Authentic Indian Experience(tm): Philip K Dick meets cultural appropriation. I was like “meh” until I figured out the twist and then I was like “HOLY SHIT OMG THIS STORY IS AMAZING.”

The Martian Obelisk: The first half is very dull and cynical, but the second half is real triumph-of-the-human-spirit pump-fist-in-the-air awesomeness. I am actually reminded of The Martian when I try to explain the feeling this story gives me, but I’m not sure if it’s just the title.

Fandom for Robots: Exactly what it sounds like– a robot joins a fandom. Silly, funny, and intensely self-indulgent, I recommend saving this story for when you’ve had a horrible day.

The Deep: Afrofuturist Lovecraftian hiphop written by none other than Daveed Diggs. You know you want it.

Summer in Orcus: A YA novel by the author of Digger which shares Digger’s rich creativity and deeply sensible protagonists. If you’re read Digger, you’re probably already enthusiastic; Summer in Orcus is an excellent read-aloud book for a child you love (although be warned that it does have some scary content which might give nightmares to younger readers). If you haven’t read Digger, what are you doing, READ DIGGER. IT’S FREE AND HAS A WOMBAT. WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR.

Nominees I Loathed

New York 2140: This seems like an incredibly interesting RPG sourcebook and I have no idea why Kim Stanley Robinson tried to turn it into a novel. His heart is clearly not in the process.

River of Teeth: The premise sounds like this book should be on the “nominees I loved” list: it’s a Western caper set in an alternate history in which someone introduced hippos to the Louisiana Bayou and now all the cowboys ride hippos. Unfortunately, the author felt the need to Represent People, and thus all the characters are like “he’s a [rolls dice] Korean-British [throws dart] bisexual who’s [draws card] dating a nonbinary person.” Marginalized identities do not actually substitute for giving a character a personality.

Marginalized identities should also affect the characters at some point. The nonbinary character is a particular offender about this. Why is someone in the nineteenth century using they/them pronouns? I mean, I’m not refusing to buy this, it’s just that I want some sort of explanation. Did the hippos advance trans acceptance? Did they hook up with some early queer community? What is the nonbinary character’s understanding of themselves? What do the people they encounter think about this? “Exactly the same as a nonbinary person in the 21st century on all counts and I’m not explaining why” is a bad answer.

Sleeping with Monsters: I hate that late-2000s snarky feminist style with the exclamation points and the “um, wow” and the sarcasm and the ALLCAPS. I admit that I write like that, which makes this negative review a bit hypocritical, but no one ever nominated me for a Hugo.

Also, the author’s feminist criticism could be replaced by a checklist like so:

[] Is there a female character?
[] Does this story pass the Bechdel test?
[] Is the female character fridged?
[] Are there LGBTQ characters?
[] Do all LGBTQ characters end the story in happy, functional relationships in which all members are alive?
[] Is there a character of color?

And so on and so forth.

I just really don’t want to read a book of literary criticism where I ever have to read a paragraph about all the characters’ marginalized identities before I get to the part where I find out what the book is about.

Crash Override: The obvious, plus this is in no way a Best Related Work. It is not related to science fiction or fantasy! Zoe Quinn does not write science fiction or fantasy, and Gamergate was about video games. Okay, sure, Sad Puppies, but I feel like this is a very tenuous connection.

The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage: I was tentatively considering a His Dark Materials reread but… no. Nope. Not after reading this. I prefer my childhood memories unsullied, thank you.

I think the primary problem with La Belle Sauvage is that Pullman is trying to write Atheist Narnia instead of Humanist Narnia. There are lots of things he’s against (God, religion, the afterlife) but not a lot he’s for. It makes for dreary reading.

[content warning: eating disorders]

The Art of Starving: Do not write a young adult book about eating disorders that includes descriptions of the protagonist’s ways of hiding that he’s starving and also exact calorie counts. Why would you even do that? Some poor person might decide to give this to someone struggling with an eating disorder because They Can Relate To It and then you have a remission on your hands.

On an artistic level, while the premise was very cool (a boy with an eating disorder has superpowers that are powered by hunger), the protagonist didn’t actually do anything with his superpowers. Like, okay, you humiliate a bully, great, that’s Act 1, where’s the part where you save people? The boy’s decisions near the end of the book are particularly dubious, although I guess at that point you have the defense that he’s starving to death and therefore probably doesn’t have much spare brainpower for things like “does this plan advance my goals, like, remotely at all?” The ending was such a copout I wanted to throw it against the wall.

Book Reviews for April

Tags

ozy blog post

Whores and Other Feminists: An interesting anthology, but profoundly marred by its inclusion of only relatively privileged sex workers. More essayists worked at a single San Francisco peep show, the Lusty Lady, than did street sex work. While many contributors were queer, there was no discussion of intersections of sex work with addiction, abuse, or immigration, and the contributors of color were safely cordoned off in their own section. Interesting essays include those by sex work feminist foremothers Annie Sprinkle and Nina Hartley, as well as an interview with a butch lesbian second-wave feminist who accidentally got a substantial fraction of her local second-wave lesbian feminist community to work at an erotic massage parlor. Also, I am as disappointed as anyone that dapper butch escort for lesbians is not a profitable profession.

Even among this group of relatively privileged sex workers, all of them acknowledge that sex work is not “empowering” but instead just a job– and often a crappy one at that. (The one exception is a New Agey sex worker who identifies as a sacred whore. This is a very San Franciscan book.) It’s just that, as crappy as their jobs are, the situation won’t be improved by making it illegal. Hopefully this will put to bed the straw man that sex workers’ rights activists think that sex work should be legal because of how ~empowering~ it is.

Conquering GRE Math: A very complete review of the math that’s on the GRE. It concentrates more on computation than on the mathematical reasoning that the GRE mostly tests.

The Unschooling Handbook: Probably the best unschooling book I’ve read so far. Instead of endlessly discussing the principles of unschooling and children’s natural desire to learn, the unschooling handbook focuses on what it’s like to unschool, including three chapters that describe weeks in the life of three different unschooling families and an extensive list of resources.

The Unschooling Handbook is fairly old, so its discussion of the Internet is hilariously out of date. (“We have the Internet at our library, but we only use it to check our email– there are so many books to read!”) I continue to be suspicious of claims about the educational value of video games and television.

To unschool reading: read to your children, have an environment full of text, play pre-reading games, and guide them to books that match their interests. To unschool writing: offer opportunities to write stories, poetry, and essays; reluctant writers may enjoy having a pen pal. To unschool math: play math games and do math puzzles; look for math in everyday life, such as cooking and allowances; have math manipulatives such as tangrams and Cuisenaire rods; play games that involve a math element, such as most card games (probability); read books about math and watch math videos. To unschool science: encourage experimentation; read books about science and watch science videos; take trips to museums, parks, and zoos; have scientific tools such as a microscope and a telescope. To unschool history: maintain a timeline; read history books, especially biographies; study genealogy; go to living history events; read and watch historical fiction and critique the inaccuracies; travel. To unschool the arts: let children experiment with music, painting, sculpture, and acting; buy nice art supplies, which allow children to produce higher-quality and more satisfying art. In each subject, follow the child’s interests: it’s okay if they learn all about the rainforest but never quite get to learning about Pluto.

[content warning: child abuse]

The Baby Thief: The Untold Story of Georgia Tann, the Baby Seller Who Corrupted Adoption: Learn from my mistakes: Don’t read this book when you have a newborn baby or you will start crying while clutching your baby and demanding reassurance that no one will steal him from you.

A fascinating work of investigative journalism about Georgia Tann, one of the women who popularized adoption in the twentieth century. Tann was a piece of work. She took children from their parents who loved them and wanted them, often justifying it because the parents were poor. Some children, taken for adoption at age four or six, lived for decades without knowing whether their parents or siblings were alive. Tann would lie to parents that their children had died and then take the child for adoption. Tann ran ads with adorable pictures of adoptable babies, encouraging people to adopt a child for Christmas as if they were a puppy. She did only the most cursory screening of adoptive parents; many adoptees were abused or treated as slaves. One adoptive parent even screamed at her child that if she had known he would be such a disappointment she wouldn’t have paid so much for him. Tann was neglectful of the children she took for adoption; in fact, her neglectfulness managed to raise the Memphis infant mortality rate to the point that the US government investigated.

Tann was also a lesbian. I guess it’s… nice?… to have LGBT representation among totally evil people.

Sensate Focus in Sex Therapy: An Illustrated Manual: A clearly written explanation of sensate focus, intended for clinicians.

Sensate focus is the Swiss army knife of sex therapy interventions, useful for everything from premature ejaculation to sexual trauma. At its core, sensate focus is very similar to mindfulness: you touch your partner, focusing only on the physical sensations of touch, such as soft/hard, hot/cold, or smooth/rough. You touch the parts of your partner’s body you find interesting to touch. Arousal may happen, but it is not expected; sensate focus has no particular goal other than exploring your partner’s body. Over the course of a few months, a couple undergoing sensate focus passes through several stages: alternating touching, with breasts and genitals off limits; alternating touching with breasts and genitals allowed; simultaneous touching; touching genitals to genitals; PIV without movement; PIV with movement.

The book has a useful chapter about adapting sensate focus for different problems: for example, a patient with hypoactive sexual desire may need to be coached in developing a sexual fantasy life and encouraged to read or view erotic literature. The book has a much less useful chapter about adapting sensate focus for sexual minority groups (LGBT people, kinky people, poly people), which mostly says that they can do sensate focus like anyone else. It would be interesting if they had talked about, say, whether one could use pain play during sensate focus or the common trans experience of dissociating during sex.

Ask Me About My Uterus: A Quest To Make Doctors Believe In Women’s Pain: A harrowing and engrossing memoir about one woman’s experience with endometriosis. Full of interesting facts about endometriosis: did you know that some female fetuses have endometriosis? Norman experienced a depressing amount of medical sexism, such as a doctor whose primary goal was not preventing her pain but saving her fertility (despite the fact that she wasn’t sure whether she wanted children and was in so much pain she was incapable of enjoying PIV). I think people who have never had a uterus should read this memoir so that they can feel properly grateful.

[Spoilers for the Octavian Nothing series.]

The Pox Party: I adored the premise of this book. On the eve of the Revolution, a teenage slave who believes he is an African prince is being educated by a set of eccentric Enlightenment philosophers intent on discovering whether black people have the same intellectual capacity as white people.

Unfortunately, the sequel was far less engrossing due to replacing the eccentric Enlightenment philosophers with assorted Loyalist soldiers, and I quit halfway through.

I am confused about the definition of YA. Does it just mean “has a teenage protagonist”? Because there were multiple gruesome torture scenes in this book and while I support teenagers reading whatever they want I think some adults might have objections.

Truth Overruled: The Future of Marriage and Religious Freedom: I read this book to gain more insight into the social conservative point of view.

I think what Anderson calls the consent-based and the conjugal views of marriage are both coherent. The consent-based view holds that marriage is a private matter between people who love each other. The purpose of legal marriage is to provide certain benefits people usually want to give to people they love, such as hospital visitation and inheritance rights. Socially, if we don’t recognize a couple as married, we’re implicitly saying that they don’t love each other.

The conjugal view, however, views marriage as primarily a vehicle for the production of children. Anderson tries to spiritualize it, but I think for most of the past this was primarily an economic arrangement. Children are not any different from any other economic value husbands and wives provided for each other, from clothes to agriculture. (It’s important to note that only relatively recently did children become a net economic drain on their parents.) Gay marriage, premarital sex, divorce, and adultery can all be coherently forbidden from this point of view. However, I think it has implications that social conservatives don’t particularly like: most notably, that love between the couple is also irrelevant. It’s nice if it happens, but if you’re vaguely fond of each other and you have an economically productive household, that is an entirely successful marriage. (Notably, many marriages in a conjugal model are arranged.)

“Love is irrelevant to marriage, you should be happy to marry someone who’s nice but whom you have no particular romantic feelings for and then have lots of babies” is a hard pill for straight people to swallow, and I don’t blame Anderson for trying to get around it. But I don’t think you can. If you accept love as a valid basis for marriage, gay marriage, no-fault divorce, and the rest come along with it.

I found Anderson’s religious freedom arguments often unconvincing. If the state requires that all adoption agencies give children to gay couples, and then the adoption agencies refuse and close, it’s not really a violation of their religious freedom. You don’t have a religious-freedom right to run an adoption agency. Similarly, if the state required that all doctors provide actual medicine, and you are a Christian scientist doctor who believes you should never treat any illness with anything except prayer, I do not think it would be a violation of religious freedom for them to revoke your medical license. You have a right to believe whatever you like and to practice your faith freely, but you don’t have a right to have special exceptions to religion-neutral rules.

You also don’t have a religious-freedom right for other people not to boycott your business. Like, really, this is not a right that exists at all. I am sympathetic to the desires of assorted wedding-cake bakers not to bake cakes for gay weddings, but it is a bit much to say that not only should you have the legal right to refuse service to gay weddings but you should also have the right not to face any consequences of your actions whatsoever.

I thought it was very amusing how Anderson would advocate for traditional marriage and then pull out slippery-slope arguments about polygamy. A man marrying multiple wives is very traditional.

Uniquely Human: A Different Way Of Seeing Autism: This is the single book that most eloquently expressed how my own autism works. Prizant emphasizes the role of anxiety in autism. Much autistic behavior– from the emphasis on routines, to stimming, to meltdowns, to infodumps–. can be understood as a way of trying to cope with an overwhelming world. He emphasizes that both sensory issues and social problems can create a world that causes anxiety for autistic people, and it makes sense that we would want to maintain a sense of control. He discusses the importance of understanding echolalia as a form of communication, not as meaningless parroting. He explains that enthusiasms– whether it’s an interest in space, car license plates, or the way your fingers look when you draw them across your face– should be encouraged and used as a tool to help educate autistic people, not eliminated. It may be necessary to teach autistic children to take turns in conversation and infodump consensually, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t ever infodump at all. Prizant says that there is no autistic behavior, even the “severest”, that is without parallel in allistic people; I think that is likely to be accurate.

Unfortunately, Prizant focuses consistently on parents of autistic children. Even when he discusses autistic adults, it is to encourage the parents of autistic children by telling them that their children might be happy someday. I don’t resent parents of autistic children having books at all. But if a book is entitled “A Different Way of Seeing Autism” instead of “A Different Way For Parents To See Their Autistic Children,” I expect it to discuss autistic adults (who, after all, are more common than autistic children) and to target both autistic people ourselves and our non-parental loved ones.

Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (And Why We Don’t Talk About It): One thing I absolutely loved about this book is that after Anderson wraps up her main argument there are three essays by other experts disagreeing with her. That is amazing. Every nonfiction book should do this.

Anderson’s argument is that employers can be productively understood as “private governments”; specifically, they are typically centrally planned authoritarian dictatorships. Employers often have minute control over every detail of their employees’ working lives, from dress to speech; workers have minimal right to privacy and other protections. Employers often extend their dominance into the employees’ private lives: most famously, employees from across the political spectrum have been fired for their off-duty speech. Unless the employee is in a protected group, they have no recourse. Certainly, employees can leave, but “you can always quit” is an argument much like “we don’t need democracy, you can always emigrate.” Many people do not have another country or corporation that wants to take them.

Anderson claims that we don’t notice the government-like nature of the workplace because of our ideologies of the free market. Adam Smith and other original creators of the free-market ideal believed that in a free market most people would own their own small businesses. Whatever the advantages of most people working for pay– ranging from economies of scale to lower risk for employees– if most people are employees, corporate governance becomes an issue.

Anderson suggests that, in addition to making it easier for people to leave their jobs, we should use the public government (the state) to limit employers’ rights, perhaps by forbidding employers firing employees for their off-duty speech or behavior. She also argues that employees should be given a voice in corporate governance, perhaps by reserving some seats on the board of directors for employee-elected people.

If nothing else, highly recommended because you get to read Anderson telling Tyler Cowan to check his privilege.

Book Post for November, Nonfiction Books

Tags

diets cw, follow ozymandias271 for more sad gays, neurodivergence, polyamory, science side of tumblr, sex positivity

Game Changer: A Memoir of Disruptive Love: A memoir by Franklin Veaux, author of More than Two, about his marriage to an obligate monogamous person while being obligate poly. If you are like “wow, that seems like an incredibly horrible idea,” you are far more sensible than anyone in this book, who universally seem to be under the impression that this situation can be managed by coming up with a bunch of rules about Franklin’s dates with other people. (No “I love you”s! No sleeping in their bed! His wife for years gives him, a grown man, a curfew.) Naturally this entire situation is very painful for Franklin, his wife, and all of Franklin’s other partners. Somehow this relationship, which in any sensible world would have ended after the third date, managed to stay together for eighteen years. Eighteen years! That is definitely an impressive feat of endurance if nothing else.

Trauma Stewardship: An Everyday Guide To Caring for Self While Caring for Others: I really wanted to like this book. I think the concept of “trauma stewardship” is really interesting and important: the author reframes trauma exposure responses (the mental health consequences often faced by people who help others– whether people or animals– cope with highly traumatic situations) as trauma stewardship, the entire conversation about how we come to do the work, how we’re affected by it, and how we make sense of it. I think it’s a really interesting move to understand helpers’ relationship to trauma as stewardship, as taking a valuable thing which has been entrusted to us and which we have responsibility for but which ultimately does not belong to us. Unfortunately, I have a limited tolerance for woo, and after the sixth or seventh comment about the wisdom of Native Americans I checked out. So it did not really live up to its potential from my perspective.

The Myth of Sex Addiction: I really, really wanted to like this book. And to be fair some of its arguments are effective. Probably the most effective argument in the book is a case study of a college student and evangelical Christian who identified as a sex addict because he felt like he couldn’t control his masturbation no matter what he did and it was causing him serious distress. He masturbated twice a month. That, I think, is the best argument I’ve ever heard that some cases of sex addiction are best treated with sex positivity and destigmatization, not attempting to get the patient to reduce their masturbation to zero times a month.

I also find it plausible that the diagnosis of sex addiction is, as it were, gynecentric. That is, “sex addiction” doesn’t just pathologize unusual but harmless behavior such as BDSM; it pathologizes behavior that, for whatever cultural or biological reason, is far more common in men than in women (a desire for anonymous sex, enjoying sex outside of a relationship context, seeing sex workers, daily masturbation to pornography).

Unfortunately, The Myth of Sex Addiction itself has an addiction to gee-whiz clickbait-headline thirty-undergraduates-from-an-Intro-Psych-class this-is-never-going-to-replicate psychology studies. It tells us that these studies are Just How Men Are,  because of Biology and Evolution, without ever doing any sort of cross-cultural analysis or acknowledging that its sample is WEIRD. It repeatedly cites the SurveyFail guy, who years later has still not managed to work out that women don’t jerk off to fade-to-black romance novels.

The Myth of Sex Addiction very confidently claims that women don’t have fetishes. I think this is a bizarrely confident claim to make after you’ve spent five pages mustering the evidence that women are less likely to masturbate and to approve of porn and non-PIV sex. Maybe they do have fetishes and they just have no idea? Also, the definition of fetish is actually androcentric. My research suggests that men don’t have fetishes, because while it is very common for women to dream of being ravished by a cowboy, almost no men dream of being ravished by a cowgirl. In fact, the entire genre of cowgirl-ravishment books appears to be aimed at lesbians.

As always when I read books about mental illness that don’t come from a social-model perspective, I think the social model would make this guy’s life so much easier. Yes, it is possible for the same mental trait to be an illness if it causes you distress or difficulty functioning, and a quirk if it doesn’t. The fact that I don’t experience any negative consequences from my hypersexuality doesn’t mean anything one way or the other about whether it’s a mental illness; it just means that my environment accommodates me.

Utopia for Realists: I am honestly pretty surprised by this book, because I didn’t expect anyone to be so slavish in following Silicon Valley political orthodoxy. Guaranteed basic income, shorter work weeks, randomistas in foreign aid, open borders… it honestly surprised me that there wasn’t a chapter on fixing the housing crisis by building more houses. Anyway, it was all pretty boring for me, because I live here and am already familiar with the arguments for and against a guaranteed basic income and open borders, but if you are curious what Your New Tech Overlords think about things there are really far worse books you can read.

The Joy of Gay Sex: A evocation of gay male life circa 2009 cleverly disguised as a sex advice book. The sex advice itself is mostly not very interesting, assuming you have some idea of the mechanics of anal sex. The little essays about HIV, chosen families, monogamy, and all the other details of gay life build up a rich tapestry that really helps you intuitively understand what it’s like to be a (certain kind of) gay man. The sections on the Internet were particularly interesting to me, because they were written pre-Grindr; the gay Internet as described in the book is both recognizable and distinctly less convenient than the present Internet. My one complaint is the underrepresentation of the gay and bisexual men of my acquaintance (where are the furries? where are the anime nerds?) but I suppose that they don’t really hang out at gay bars so perhaps the author never had a chance to meet them.

Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche: I am leery of giving a positive review of this book, because it is written by a journalist, and it is very possible the author is misunderstanding all the research because he doesn’t have a background in the field. Perhaps Scott Alexander or Sarah Constantin or someone could fact-check it for me.

Until it is fact-checked by someone I trust on psychiatry, my tentative opinion is that this book is very plausible. Essentially, the thesis is that certain things (trauma, mental distress, psychosis) are universal, but we tend to express symptoms of those things depending on what’s floating in the cultural “symptom pool.” A psychotic person who grows up in America will think the CIA is mind-controlling them; a psychotic person who grows up in a developing country will think demons are talking to them. A person in severe emotional distress in the United States may be anorexic or self-harm; a person in severe emotional distress in Indonesia may commit a mass assault. (Caveats: it does occasionally happen that people pick up symptoms that aren’t usual for their culture; anorexia is probably not caused by the “thin ideal”, and in fact one of the strongest pieces of evidence for anorexia as a culture-bound syndrome is the existence of societies with a thin ideal and very very low rate of anorexia.) When a syndrome only exists in another culture, it is called a “culture-bound syndrome.” When a syndrome only exists in the Anglosphere, it is called “how people work.” Because the DSM is seen as authoritative, we export our local symptom pool around the world.

I am personally interested in the prospect of cultivating the symptom pool to reduce distress in mentally ill people. Through careful messaging, could we remove harmful symptoms like anorexia, somatization which results in chronic pain, and running amok and replace them with less harmful expressions of distress like snapping a rubber band against your wrist or cutting off your hair? I imagine how much future schizophrenics could be helped by a hundred million dollars directed towards PSAs about people who have a positive relationship with their voices and representation of people with nice voices in popular culture. Sadly, the book does not explore this concept.

The last chapter was annoying. While it established that pharmaceutical companies increased the rate of antidepressant prescription in Japan by raising awareness of depression, it did not provide any evidence that this actually increased the rate of emotional distress in Japan. Would one assume from the Viagra marketing campaign that before Viagra no one had ever had erectile dysfunction?

Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People: I agree with the main thesis of this book: I think that sexism, homophobia, and other oppression-related cognitive biases affect how we interpret biological data and lead to inaccurate conclusions. I appreciated Joan Roughgarden pointing out that commonly used terms like “female mimic” and “cuckoldry” can lead scientists to assume one explanation has to be true (that the animal is pretending to be female, that the female is passing off offspring from an extra-pair copulation as the male’s) when they haven’t collected the data to justify the assumption.

Some of her criticisms seem quite valid to me. For example, it does seem implausible that if humans can tell apart with the naked eye females and female mimic males of a species with sharp eyesight, then the male (who has an evolutionary reason to be good at telling these things apart) does not. Perhaps the female mimic male assists the male somehow: helping him defend his territory or allowing him to signal that he won’t attack the female. It also seems implausible that male seabirds never notice extra-pair copulations occurring in public, and thus we should look for alternate explanations in which the female having extra-pair copulations improves the male’s reproductive success somehow. Maybe extra-pair copulations reduce the risk of another male committing infanticide if the female’s partner dies.

However, I think Roughgarden has a bad habit of presenting her interpretations as settled science, when in reality they’re just interpretations. We would have to do a lot more detailed ecological work to decide whether her conclusions are accurate. And every time she says “this interpretation has an unfortunate oppressive implication” as an argument against a particular interpretation of the data, I want to cringe. That is not what science is supposed to do. You can’t decide the truth by saying what’s most convenient to your ideology.

Roughgarden writes mostly about the potential adaptive benefits of genetic diversity in humans, which makes me really curious about her opinions about the adaptive benefits of neurodiversity in humans. I agree with her hypothesis that many genetic impairments would not be as common as they are if the genes didn’t pose some fitness benefit, the way that people who are heterozygous for sickle-cell anemia genes are protected against malaria. However, she once again fails to consider alternate hypotheses. Many genetic impairments, for example, are very common in Ashkenazi Jews, who have a relatively small effective population size and thus are particularly susceptible to genetic drift. There is no reason to suppose that those impairments have an adaptive benefit.

[this review talks about rape]

Unscrewed: Women, Sex, Power, and How to Stop Letting the System Screw Us All: Probably my least favorite of Jaclyn Friedman’s books so far. I mean, anticapitalism aside, she’s right about everything. Reproductive justice does need to include not just the right to contraception and abortion but the right to start a family, have adequate perinatal care, and not be shackled to the bed while giving birth. Sex work stigma does harm women who aren’t sex workers and combating it is a vital part of sex-positive activism. The de facto legalization of rape of Native American women on reservations is horrifying. While level of vaginal arousal is completely uncorrelated with level of self-reported arousal, reporting this as “women don’t know what they want, are all secretly bisexuals who like fucking bonobos” both is sexist and misrepresents the science. While there are personal decisions that affect sex-negative cisheteropatriarcy, like volunteering for a rape crisis center or choosing not to be an asshole to people whose sex lives you disapprove of, whether or not you flash their boobs and say “wooooo!” is not one of them, either on a “this is empowering!” or a “this is objectifying!” level.

I continue to highly recommend Yes Means Yes, and maybe if any of those statements is surprising to you consider checking out Unscrewed.

I was very annoyed at the chapter on masculinity. Jaclyn Friedman is, in fact, a decent person who comes to the correct conclusion that male gender norms both hurt men and cause men to hurt others and that both aspects should be recognized. But goddamn does she feel like she needs to signal that she is still a Woke Feminist who engages in Fashionable Misandry. Is it really necessary to make fun of men who internalize oppositionally sexist norms to the point that they can’t buy female-branded products? Do you have to put in that paragraph about how the harm male gender roles cause to women ought to be enough to get men to be feminists, but okay if we have to we can talk about the harm it causes to men? Notably, Friedman does not do that in the chapter on how sex work stigma hurts non-sex-workers, which I can’t help but figure is related to the fact that Friedman is a woman and is not a sex worker.

[the next book is about dieting]

Health at Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight: I realize that no one knows why weight set points are going up, but I wish there had been more discussion of various hypotheses. Instead, the author basically goes with “dieting causes weight set points to rise!”, which is one plausible hypothesis but also seems really convenient for the book about how you should stop dieting.

The advice for practicing Health at Every Size is as follows:

1. Stop hating yourself and your body. Find supportive people who won’t talk about how you need to lose weight. Practice reframing your negative thoughts about your body, food, and exercise.
2. Eat delicious food. Pay attention when you eat. Eat when hungry; stop when full. If you find yourself eating to manage an emotion, use a different self-care technique while practicing self-compassion (it is perfectly natural to use food to manage your emotions if you don’t have another way to do so).
3. Integrate movement into your daily life. Eat a variety of food, mostly plants, almost all unprocessed food, 100% food you enjoy. Get enough sleep. Manage your stress.
4. If you have a hard time with the food advice in #3: learn to cook, check out community-supported agriculture programs, eat in a peaceful and loving environment, slow down, and pay attention to presentation.

Book Post for November, Parenting and Fiction Books

Tags

diane duane, elizabeth bear, emily st. john mandel, georgette heyer, mary renault, parenting

The Nursing Mother’s Companion: Look, in six months I will tell you which of these breastfeeding books I liked the best. This one has individual survival guides for various stages of breastfeeding, covering concerns such as mastitis and nursing strikes that occur at various ages, which seems very useful and a clear improvement on how scattered they are in many nursing books.

Precious Little Sleep: The Complete Baby Sleep Guide for Modern Parents: Highly recommended; evidence-based and extraordinarily complete. I appreciate that the author characterizes both “cry-it-out” and “no-cry” methods of sleep parenting as right for some parents and some babies; this seems to me to be consistent with the research. (No, cry-it-out will not ruin your attachment with your baby, nor will no-cry methods prevent your child from developing independence.)

Newborn sleep is generally all over the place and there’s not much point to sleep training before the child is about two to four months old. Use lots of soothing techniques and try not to let your newborn stay awake too long, lest they get overtired; it’s also a good idea to establish a bedtime routine you can build on when the child is older.

People who aren’t newborns have sleep associations. Your sleep association might be the sound of white noise, reading a bit, having a cup of tea or warm milk, your blanket, or your partner on the other side of the bed. If your sleep association isn’t present, you’ll often have a hard time falling asleep. Unlike adults, babies wake up all the time in the night, so they need their sleep associations to fall asleep every time they wake up. If your baby’s sleep association is thirty minutes of being bounced on an exercise ball, then nobody is going to get a lot of sleep. It’s even worse if you, like many parents, rock your baby to sleep and then leave them in the crib. Imagine how you’d feel if you fell asleep in your bedroom, full of your sleep associations, and then suddenly woke up in a crib. You’d probably cry too.

Useful soothing tools to help babies sleep include white noise, swaddling, pacifiers, baby swings, and managing your child’s schedule so they consistently sleep at the same times each day, when they are neither not sleepy nor overtired. These should mostly be phased out by six months; white noise can be used throughout the first year, and schedule management is useful throughout life.

The easiest time to teach a baby to sleep on their own is when they are two to four months old. The second easiest time is right now; it gets harder the older the baby is. Start with bedtime; set yourself up for success by choosing a bedtime when the child is tired but not overtired, going through a quiet and soothing bedtime routine, and making the room be very very dark.

“No-cry” methods (a misnomer; they usually involve some crying) include:

• Providing lots of soothing in ways you can live with that don’t involve you waking up all the time
• Experimenting with seeing if the child will fall asleep on their own if you leave them alone in their crib for ten or twenty minutes.
• Soothing your child fully to sleep using whatever method works best for you, then waking them a little when you put them in bed.
• Gradually weaning your child from whatever you’re doing that helps them fall asleep.

The “cry-it-out” method is basically just leaving your kid in a safe and comfortable place to sleep and then not returning until they fall asleep. The author recommends full extinction (not checking on the child) as a quicker and more effective method, although parents often prefer checking on the child at regular intervals as it seems more loving.

The book also covers night waking, night eating, weaning your child from sleep soothing techniques, common causes of sleep setbacks both medical and nonmedical, and sleep in older children. It’s good. Check it out.

Your Orgasmic Pregnancy: Little Sex Secrets Every Hot Mama Should Know: A pamphlet’s worth of information stretched out into a book through lots and lots of padding, most of it entirely unrelated to sex (did you know that doing prenatal yoga is good for you?). There is some misinformation: the book claims that masochism is entirely off-limits during pregnancy, when in reality many forms of masochism are perfectly safe. It would be really useful if they had spent less time trying to pitch me on prenatal yoga and more time talking to kink-aware obstreticians to provide an actually useful resource. That said, the list of pregnancy sex positions is genuinely useful, and they had several pretty cool ideas for pregnancy-themed roleplay.

Siblings Without Rivalry: How To Help Your Children Live Together So You Can Live Too: The correct techniques for dealing with sibling rivalry are surprisingly similar to the correct techniques for metamour management. Acknowledge and accept that your partners might have negative feelings about each other, and don’t try to tell them their feelings are wrong or bad. Don’t compare your partners, saying that one is more romantic and the other is funnier. Make it clear that you love each of your partners as unique people with whom you have a unique relationship, and you do not have a hierarchy. Spread your time among them based on your needs (and, in the case of partners, the seriousness of your relationship– presumably it is relatively rare to have a secondary relationship with one’s offspring). If they start arguing with each other, listen to both sides respectfully but don’t get in the middle; leave them to resolve it themselves. However, one advantage of partners is that they are adults and can be generally trusted not to hit each other on the head with a toy truck, while children have no such guarantee.

Instead of dismissing a child’s negative feelings about a sibling, acknowledge the feelings:

• Put the child’s feelings into words (“you’re furious!”).
• Express what the child might wish (“sometimes you want your sibling to go away”).
• Help children channel their feelings into creative or expressive outlets (e.g. art).
• Stop hurtful behavior. Show how angry feelings can be expressed safely. Don’t attack the attacker.

Alternatives to comparing children:

• Acknowledge what you see or feel (“you put away your blocks and your truck. It’s a pleasure to look at this room”) without favorably comparing the child to another child.
• Describe the problem (“you didn’t do your homework”) without unfavorably comparing the child to another child.

Instead of worrying about treating children equally:

• Focus on each child’s individual needs (e.g. give more food to a child that is very hungry).
• Show children how they’re loved uniquely (“in the whole wide world there’s no one else like you’).
• Give time based on the child’s needs (“your sister needs help with tying her shoes right now”).
• Acknowledge the abilities of disabled children.

When one child bullies another:

• Don’t focus on the aggressor. Attend to the injured party.
• Don’t put one child in the role of “bully”. Acknowledge their ability to be kind and control themselves and correct others or the child themself when they describe the child as a bully.
• Don’t put one child in the role of “victim”. Show them how to stand up for themself (“I bet you can make an even scarier face back) and correct others or the child themself when they characterize the child as weak or helpless.

When children are fighting:

1. Acknowledge the children’s anger towards each other.
2. Listen to all sides with respect.
3. Show appreciation for the difficulty of the problem.
4. Express faith in the children’s ability to solve the problem.
5. Leave the room.
6. If the children appear to be hurting each other, describe the situation, set your limit, and separate the children.
7. For recurring or serious problems, you may wish to hold a parent-guided family meeting, in which you hear all sides and their rebuttals, brainstorm solutions as a family, and pick a solution everyone can live with.

Infant Massage: A very annoying amount of this book is devoted to the fallacious argument that cuddling babies is very important for their mental and physical health and therefore you should devote fifteen minutes a day to a massage. To be clear, cuddling babies is very important to their mental and physical health; a baby deprived of cuddles may get sick, have lifelong developmental disabilities, or even die. That is why parents and alloparents feel a natural, instinctive desire to cuddle babies. Outside of very exceptional circumstances– a Romanian orphanage under Ceausescu, a neonatal intensive care unit, or strictly following the advice of a quack parenting book that thinks you should avoid cuddling your child so you can tame their innate sinfulness or avoid rewarding negative behavior– you will instinctively give your baby enough cuddles that they develop properly.

(Note that most neonatal intensive care units practice “kangaroo care,” in which the baby regularly spends skin-to-skin time with the parents, and if your NICU does not you should absolutely throw a fit until they start practicing the standard of care.)

But on the other hand massage is a nice thing to do with your baby, and I have no objection to the instructions, including chapters on adjusting your infant massage for premature babies, babies with special needs, and toddlers. Might be useful for parents who want to try massaging their babies.

—

Fire From Heaven: The first book in Mary Renault’s the Alexander Trilogy, focusing on Alexander’s early life. Much less enjoyable than the Persian Boy, because she keeps interrupting all the gay romance with this boring “battles” stuff. Why are there battles in my book about Alexander the Great? That is definitely not what I am reading the series for. However, the Persian Boy is sadly light on Ptolemy (Alexander’s half-brother and future ruler of Egypt, not the astronomer), who is an absolute delight. And Bagoas is not exactly what one would call a “reliable narrator” about Hephaiston, which means that Fire From Heaven is the only book in the Alexander Trilogy with any amount of Hephaiston content at all, which is tragic, because Hephaiston is the best.

Mary Renault outdoes herself with the extremely euphemistic sex scenes in this one; I actually had to flip back and reread a few pages before I worked out that “some time later a mother fox walked by with her cubs” was Alexander and Hephaiston losing their virginity to each other.

An Apprentice to Elves: I read this series because it provides me with gay Vikings telepathically bonded to wolves. This book is not, in fact, about the gay Viking telepathically bonded to a wolf; it is about his daughter Alfgyfa who is apprenticed to the svartalfar (the elves of the title). I mean, it is a fine book, but I have expectations and they were not met. I did appreciate Fargrimr, who is probably one of my favorite trans male characters in fiction, and his complete incomprehension about why the not!Romans kept calling him a girl. “Uh, I’m obviously a man, have you ever seen a woman be a jarl?” In general, from a worldbuilding perspective, I appreciate a society that has culturally accepted roles for LGBT+ people that are weird. (“Oh, sure, you can be gay, as long as you telepathically bond with a wolf first. Oh, sure, you can be a trans guy as long as you dad needs an heir, but if you have six brothers you’re shit out of luck.”) It just feels more realistic than societies which are completely perfect and accepting and everyone talks like they have a Tumblr.

A Civil Contract: I regret the decade and a half of my life I wasted not reading Georgette Heyer. If you’re the sort of person who has worn out your copy of Pride and Prejudice and mourns that there is only so much Austen in the world, you should pick up this book. The protagonist Adam is in love with Julia, a beautiful but very silly woman. His father dies and he discovers his father has run up enormous gambling debts; the only way to preserve his family fortune is to marry Jenny, a heiress, who is plain and practical and sensible. Naturally he falls in love with Jenny and then takes five chapters to work out that he’s in love with her. It contains all the Austen goodness: a gently mocking and ironic narrative, absolutely ridiculous mothers and fathers, and a truly delightful snarky little sister. Also, at one point there is Serious Dramatic Tension about whether one guy’s investments are going to pay off. It’s great. Highly recommended.

Station Eleven: An excellent post-apocalyptic novel, in which 99% of humanity dies of a pandemic. The protagonists are a traveling theater/music troupe who visit post-apocalyptic settlements and perform Shakespeare and symphonies for them, because (as the slogan on their wagons reads) “survival is insufficient.” Unlike most post-apocalyptic novels I’ve read, the plot does not derail halfway through to be about some group of survivors fighting a war with some other group of survivors. It is consistently about rebuilding civilization all the way through. I never once had to skip past a loving three-page description of someone’s gun. I think this is an excellent decision on the part of the author and more post-apocalyptic novels should follow her example.

When I reached the end of the book I discovered this was actually Literature, because there were discussion questions in the back. In retrospect, this makes sense of the otherwise puzzling decision to devote multiple chapters to a pre-apocalypse boring middle-aged actor having affairs. However, as chapters about boring actors having affairs go, it was fairly tolerable and the rest of the book was very enjoyable.

Uptown Local and Other Interventions: A short story collection by Diane Duane. I particularly enjoyed The Fix (in which Duane actually manages to pull off starting a story with a dream sequence) and Uptown Local (set in the Young Wizards verse; even for the Young Wizards universe, has a particularly high level of the spirit of Secular Solstice). A good book to read if you’re a Duane fan.

The Door Into Fire: I thought it was just a Young Wizards thing that the villain is entropy, but apparently Diane Duane’s grudge against entropy shows up in all her books. Since she used to write for Scooby Doo, does this mean that there’s a long-lost episode where Freddie unmasks the villain and reveals that he is the second law of thermodynamics?

Mostly a fairly bland and forgettable epic fantasy novel, although I appreciated the detail that everyone is bisexual and polyamorous and this is just totally normal. I was bracing myself when a jealousy plotline happened, but it honestly felt like it was written by someone who actually understands how polyamory works and that in a poly context jealousy reflects underlying relationship problems and unmet needs, not the fact that you are in Twoo Wuv.

Warning for people considering starting the series: the last book has literally been delayed longer than I’ve been alive.

Book Post for October

Tags

follow ozymandias271 for more sad gays, neil gaiman, neurodivergence, parenting, racism

Creating Your Perfect Family Size: How To Make An Informed Decision About Having A Baby: I hoped that this book would, like, give me information about how many children I should have, but instead it was just a long list of different things people think about when they have kids. You mean people who for religious reasons don’t use birth control generally have a lot of kids? I had no idea!

The Breastfeeding Book: Everything You Need To Know About Breastfeeding Your Child From Birth Through Weaning: I continue to have difficulties reviewing the practical advice in breastfeeding books, on account of I have never breastfed. It is inaccurate about the things breastfeeding books are always inaccurate about (yes, some people can’t produce sufficient milk; no, breastfeeding does not have all those benefits you’re claiming it does; yes, parents should be concerned about the iron levels of their exclusively breastfed six-month-olds). However, I appreciate the Sears’s characteristic kindness and empathy, and I wish their commitment to never making parents feel guilty for being unable to do something would extend to the parent blogosphere. I also really liked the chapter on how non-breastfeeding parents can help with breastfeeding, both through supporting the breastfeeding parent (cleaning, shooing away busybodies, giving them time for themselves) and through nurturing the baby (through babywearing, playing, and singing).

Norse Mythology: Neil Gaiman is always at his best when telling short stories, and this is essentially a collection of short stories, covering the major Norse myths. Grand, heroic, and with a sly sense of humor. Gaiman loves mythology and it shines out from every page of this wonderful book. Excellent for reading out loud.

Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life: An excellent introduction to the practice of mindfulness meditation. Unfortunately, I only figured out halfway through that it was not actually intended for me, it was intended for mentally well people who want to try meditation, and Jon Kabat-Zinn has a completely different book for us crazies. Oh well.

The New Jim Crow: I feel like I am literally the last person to jump on this bandwagon but THIS IS AN AMAZING BOOK YOU SHOULD READ IT, especially if you have any interest at all in anti-racism and/or libertarianism. I started the book being like “well, mass incarceration is pretty bad, but it seems like a bit much to claim it is literally a racial caste system like Jim Crow” and ended it “welp, I guess mass incarceration is a racial caste system like Jim Crow.”

One point I found particularly insightful was her argument that to end mass incarceration you will need to enlist poor white people and middle-class-and-above black people by explaining to them how ending mass incarceration will benefit them. Poor white people receive the psychological wage of whiteness, which (in our colorblind society) has changed from “I might be poor but at least I’m not an [n word]” to “I might be poor but at least I’m not a criminal.” Middle-class-and-above black people receive benefits such as affirmative action, which ultimately uphold the system by promoting the pretense of colorblindness; if a black man can be President, it must be the fault of individual black people that they keep going to prison. To enlist these groups, a movement to end mass incarceration must explain why it is offering a better deal than the one currently on offer.

I hadn’t realized before how much we cut off people with criminal records from society. People who have committed felonies are not allowed in public housing or to get food stamps. In many states, they can’t vote or serve on juries; in many other states, they can get their right to vote back, but it’s an expensive process with many fees (this is not a poll tax because of reasons). There is massive discrimination against people with criminal records; making it illegal merely shifts the discrimination to black men more generally. Getting a job is often a requirement if you’re on parole. Since various bits of the government don’t talk to each other, people on parole can wind up with literally 100% of their wages being garnished, meaning that licit work is a money-losing proposition. Parolees are also often required not to talk to people with felony records; apparently no one who made this rule thought about the fact that in many neighborhoods a third of adult men have a felony record.Honestly, if I had to put up with all that shit I would probably commit crimes too.

One of the most striking points was the comparison between drunk driving and smoking crack cocaine, both of which were criminalized at about the same time. Drunk driving literally kills people, while smoking crack only rarely harms people other than yourself. The vast majority of people who drive drunk are white men, while crack is usually smoked by black people. Naturally, drunk driving is punished with a misdemeanor conviction, a week or two in jail, mandatory alcohol treatment, maybe your license getting suspended. Smoking crack, conversely, is punished with literally years in prison.

To highlight the scope of the problem: to get the number of people imprisoned down to even 1970s levels, which were already elevated, four out of every five prisoners would need to be released. This would involve perhaps a million people losing their jobs, many of whom are in rural districts that play an outsize role in elections (particularly since imprisoned people count for population size even though they can’t vote).

The argument that gangsta rap is a modern-day minstrel show is interesting. Like minstrel shows, gangsta rap portrays stereotypes of black people aimed at a white audience, although black people often enjoy them in part because it is a major source of black celebrities.

Out of the Darkened Room: When a Parent is Depressed: Protecting the Children and Strengthening the Family: By far the most valuable part of this book for me was the stories about children of depressed parents. Most people who mention that their parents were depressed are people who are fucked up about it. If your dad was depressed for most of your childhood and you’re fine, you don’t generally bring up your dad’s depression very often. But if you were traumatized by it, it comes up a lot. So it’s really easy for depressed people (me) to conclude that depressed people are universally shitty parents who fuck up their kids. And it was really comforting for me to read pages and pages of stories about mentally ill parents whose children were fine. In spite of having a parent who attempted suicide, had manic episodes, or lay in bed all day crying, the kids were happy, got good grades, had friendships, got into good colleges, and generally had perfectly reasonable childhoods.

The steps for parenting well while depressed were:

1. Discussing depression openly with one’s spouse and other loved ones.
2. Learning about depression and resilience.
3. Addressing the children’s needs (for relationships outside the family, success away from home, reflection on and understanding of what they’ve gone through).
4. Planning how to talk to the children.
5. Having a family meeting with the children.
6. Continuing to openly discuss issues of mental illness and the children’s response.

In general, resilient children are realistic about what they’re dealing with (understanding that mental illness will recur and they can recognize it), are aware of and can articulate strategies for offsetting the effects of mental illness on themselves, and believe their actions make a difference and take action based on that understanding.

Note that while the book title says “depression”, it actually covers all mood disorders.

Smart Parenting for Smart Kids: Nurturing Your Child’s True Potential: grrrrrraaaaarrrrrrggghhh

Large sections of this book are not, in fact, “how to help your gifted child with the struggles of being gifted”, but instead “how to help your twice exceptional child with the struggles of being twice exceptional.” That would be great– as a former 2E kid myself I’m all for advice about helping us– except that the authors seem to have no idea that disabled gifted children exist. Clearly, infodumping, impairments in perspective taking, and difficulty making eye contact are just part of being gifted, not a sign that your child has autism at all!

Much of the advice provided in this book seems, to my mind, decent. However, it is interspersed with mind-bogglingly awful advice, particularly on social skills. For example, parents are encouraged to tell children who read at recess that they’re part of the school community (fine) and ignoring community members is rude (what? no it isn’t!). At no point is it mentioned that children might read at recess because they’re being bullied or as a way of managing their emotions during an overstimulating school day. Parents are also told to tell children that correcting teachers who teach incorrect facts is rude (even though it is literally the teacher’s job to teach things that are true). Parents are told to tell children to lie and pretend they like sports even when they don’t to avoid making other children feel bad.

All the goals here are reasonable. Reading at recess is not a very good way of making friends. Correcting the teacher in public is likely not to work as well as talking to them after class. It’s important to be tactful (“sports aren’t really my thing”) instead of blunt and rude (“sports are stupid and boring”). But for children with social impairments (whether subclinical or clinical) it is particularly important to give accurate reasons for your advice. It is not true that you have to hide what you’re interested in to have friends, or that correcting powerful people is always wrong, or that it is rude to ignore people you don’t like or who mistreat you if they happen to be a member of some broadly-defined “community”. While these might cause effective behavior in the short run, in the long run they will cause extremely ineffective behavior: pretending to be someone you’re not, letting your boss make a dumb decision rather than correcting her, tolerating mistreatment or even abuse. With children with social impairments you must tell the truth.

I remain deeply puzzled at the number of times parenting books tell me not to do my children’s homework for them. People, if it has occurred to you to make your kids’ dioramas for them because all the other parents make their kids’ dioramas for them and you don’t want your kid’s to look like it was made by a child (because it was), you are too fucking invested in your kid’s dioramas.

I recommend skipping this book and instead reading Mind in the Making.

Against Equality: Queer Revolution Not Mere Inclusion: This was an uncomfortable read in the best way; it really challenged a lot of my viewpoints and I’m not sure what I believe. Against Equality is an anthology of essays centered around the claim that LGB rights activism actually winds up reinforcing oppressive institutions: the military, the prison-industrial complex, and marriage. On one hand, I’m pretty sympathetic to the idea that it shouldn’t be particularly high priority to advocate for queers to also be able to commit war crimes, murder brown people, and suffer lifelong trauma. Like, why are you advocating for our full inclusion in doing something that no one should be doing in the first place? And it seems like the resources directed towards gay marriage and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell could have been directed towards abolishing marriage and giving queer people in poverty more non-shooting-related options so the military isn’t their only way out. (Also, HIV healthcare access. The state of access to HIV-related health care is a disgrace.)

On the other hand, there is no requirement that every queer in the world agree with the political opinions of me, Ozy. Even if I choose not to donate towards or advocate for queer inclusion in the military, other queer people think joining the military is a noble sacrifice for the sake of their country, and it really isn’t that reasonable for me to object to their activism because of our shared non-normative gender identity. There are actual, practical, material benefits to military and marriage equality: I have friends whose literal physical safety depends on the legality of same-sex marriage. Why are we, the oppressed people, the ones who have to sacrifice for the sake of ending an oppressive institution.? Straight people first! It smacks of privilege, which was an annoying trend throughout this book (particularly when they talked shit about the rich white cis gay boys at the HRC– guys, choosing to become a performance artist does not magically take away your class privilege). Frankly, some of the concerns people have in this book are even more privileged than the ones they’re criticizing: arts funding? Really?

The HRC could quite reasonably object that they are the Campaigning In Favor Of Gay Legal Equality organization and DADT was obviously an example of gay people not being legally equal. While advocating for economic justice, the rights of sex offenders, open borders, and prison reform is great, none of them are gay legal equality, and the HRC should stay within its area of competence. Anyway, the natural extension of “money is better spent on homeless shelters for queer youth than pro-gay-marriage campaigning” is “money is better spent on African public health than on anything even remotely related to queer people,” so you know.

The weakest section is about marriage, partially through no fault of its own (at the time the book was published it was not clear that legal gay marriage would also help improve attitudes towards LGB people in general). The strongest section is about the prison-industrial complex, mostly because it outlines a mechanism through which hate crime laws strengthen prisons (they put people in prison for longer, mandatory minimums are still bad if you’re woke). I’d particularly like to highlight the excellent section on sex offender registries, false accusations of Satanic ritual abuse, and other abuses directed at people accused of being sex offenders.

The Persian Boy: Tragic gay romance novel about Alexander the Great and his extremely Slytherin boyfriend, the Persian eunuch Bagoas. If this summary makes you want to buy the book, you should. Reading the Persian Boy felt somewhat invasive, like someone had taken my id and spread it across the pages for anyone to see; given that I read it for the first time in middle school, this is probably because it made my id.

The Persian Boy is really an absurdly sexy book given that all the sex scenes are like this:

He really wanted love from me. I could not credit such fortune; nobody ever had before. In the past, I had taken pride in giving pleasure, since it was my skill; never had I known what it was to take delight in it. He was not quite so ignorant as I had supposed; it was just that what he knew had been very simple. He was a quick learner, though. All I taught him that night, he thought that by some happy harmony of our souls, we were discovering together. So, indeed, it seemed at last even to me.

(That is the entire scene.)

Like, that is definitely a sexy passage, it’s just that it is missing such normal aspects of sexy passages as “more than ten sentences” and “a reference to genitals” and “literally any idea of what the protagonists are doing.”

Be sure to read the afterword, in which Mary Renault is wonderfully snarky about all her sources.

The Health Hazards of Homosexuality: What The Medical and Psychological Research Reveals: I don’t recommend reading this book but it was definitely worth my ten dollars for the following paragraph–

The name of the website Feministing makes obvious reference to the practice of “fisting” (insertion of one’s hand into a partner’s rectum or vagina). The website’s banner shows a naked female form with hand upraised in the insertion position.

And also this passage, discussing the DSM’s change to the ‘paraphilia’ definitions so they can only be diagnosed if there is impairment in social or vocational functioning or if the patient experiences distress:

(Was the famous coprophiliac Adolf Hitler’s daily functioning impaired due to this practice, or did he continue to hold down his job – at least for a time?)

Also, it seems to me that if you’re going to spend all that time concern-trolling about the children you shouldn’t take creepy photos of teenagers at gay pride and illustrate your book with them. (I mean, did they consent to being in the homophobe book?)

Intersectionality: Key Concepts: I am the sort of person who buys books about intersectionality to read for fun and I was bored by this book. It’s basically all about the definition of intersectionality? Which, okay, fine, there are lots of people who are confused about that point, but surely you could knock out the definition in one chapter and then spend the rest of the time on an intersectional analysis of prison or agriculture or sex or something actually interesting.

All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenting: Definitely a parenting must-read. Children make parents unhappy: they take away sleep, make it harder to engage in flow (one of the most pleasant human experiences), force you to spend large amounts of time with a person who doesn’t understand niceties like “clothes” and “not screaming,” reduce your freedom, make it harder to advance in your job, and aren’t even that fun– studies consistently show that interacting with children is generally less enjoyable than e.g. folding the laundry. Childrearing particularly tends to worsen marital satisfaction, in part because women tend to do more childcare, especially boring childcare (like toothbrushing, not playing catch) and watching the children while doing other tasks. (Interestingly, fathers experience more work/life conflict than mothers, perhaps because they want to feel like evolved parents.) Childrearing leads to social isolation and lack of sex, neither of which are exactly good for a marriage.

Parents feel like they must engage in “concerted cultivation,” driving their children from extracurricular activity to extracurricular activity, entertaining them when they’re bored, hoping to make them well-rounded adults; this is stressful and unpleasant. If you don’t do this, you feel like a bad parent who is dooming your child to never get into college and who will probably get kidnapped when you tell them to go play in the front yard. In the American colonial era, children made an economic contribution to the household from a fairly young age (even five-year-olds can pick weeds) and were mostly ignored before then. Now children are useless from a family perspective; their work is about improving themselves. The new uselessness of children is particularly grating on adolescents, who developmentally want to start contributing to society. This is part of the reason why parenting adolescents makes people really really unhappy. (Another part is that they keep getting into stupid fights about their children’s hair or music taste. Parents of adolescents: the research suggests you will be a lot happier if you commit not to fight with your child about anything other than issues of morality or safety, on which adolescents are generally much more likely to listen to their parents.)

Then why do we raise kids? (Other than a combination of ignorance, optimism, and the fact that in most states one cannot drop the child off at a safe haven once they are older than a few weeks.) Young children can yank parents out of their preoccupations, inhibitions and routines, allowing them to be more present in the moment rather than wrapped up in their anxieties and achievements. Young children can connect you to the physical world and encourage you to ask deep questions. And they offer an opportunity to give love without any return. While the experiencing self typically doesn’t enjoy parenting, the remembering self does; our relationships with our children are among the most important relationships in our lives, and being a parent consistently increases one’s sense of meaning. In the stories people tell about themselves, being a parent plays an important role.