Book Post for June

Tags

becky chambers, cat valente, effective altruism, mary robinette kowal, ozy blog post, rebecca roanhorse, sex positivity, ursula k le guin

Non-Fiction

The Origins of Happiness: A book about the various things that are correlated with life satisfaction scales. In and of itself, this is an interesting topic. However, the author fancies themself a person who is Reforming Public Policy in order to Bring About A New Focus On Happiness, which makes the entire book epistemically dubious. Here are some criticisms not addressed by the author at any point:

1. A life satisfaction scale involves rating your life on a scale of 1 to 10. While this metric has some advantages (it lets people decide for themselves what factors they want to incorporate into their life satisfaction assessment), at no point does the author provide evidence that this metric is correlated with a common-sense definition of happiness. They also provide no reason to choose life satisfaction over other metrics, such as experiential happiness or “how happy are you?” questions, which often have correlations of different strength or even direction.
2. Correlation does not equal causation. People tend to report higher life satisfaction if they are married, but that doesn’t mean marriage increases life satisfaction. Perhaps happier people stay married for longer and miserable people are more likely to divorce, or perhaps both marriage and happiness are caused by some other factor, such as religiosity.
3. Life satisfaction may be compared against a reference class. If you mostly know people with very very good lives, you might consider your life mediocre, while if you mostly know people with terrible lives, you might consider your life very good– even if your life is the same in every way.
4. In particular, the author’s data suggests that being around richer people lowers life satisfaction, holding income constant. In fact, all the life satisfaction you gain from increasing your income a certain amount is exactly balanced by the amount of life satisfaction lost by the people around you. But this is a strange result: it implies that no one gains any life satisfaction at all from any of the things you can purchase with money, such as education, vacations, nice food, entertainment, health care, or financial security. Life satisfaction is only gained by having more than other people. All goods are zero-sum positional games. The author suggests deprioritizing increasing GDP, but does not suggest any of the more radical policies that are implied by this point of view. If life satisfaction is an accurate measure of wellbeing and nothing you can purchase with money affects wellbeing, why not ban vacations? They cost a lot of resources (e.g. flying planes spews a lot of carbon) and don’t actually make anyone any happier.
5. Depression is highly correlated with low life satisfaction ratings. But standard depression inventories ask many questions that are, essentially, life satisfaction questions, like whether you’re unhappy all the time and whether you think you’re a failure. Does this mean that the mental health condition of depression causes low life satisfaction (and thus that the best way to improve life satisfaction is to treat depression), or does it mean that if you define a mental health condition as “people who have low life satisfaction” it will turn out they all have low life satisfaction?

Addicted to Lust: A fascinating ethnography of porn use in the conservative Protestant subculture.

Conservative Protestants are less likely to use porn than the general population, although (like the general population) their use of porn is rising because the Internet is improving porn access. However, conservative Protestants who use porn face much more severe mental health consequences than people of other denominations or religions who use porn.

They face overwhelming shame, guilt, and stigma. Some are socially isolated because they can’t admit their porn use; this particularly affects women, who are believed not to be visual and not to be tempted by porn, and therefore have a hard time finding support and are often stigmatized as ‘unfeminine’ for needing it. Others find their entire moral life reduced to porn use: male ‘accountability groups’ often discuss only porn, masturbation, and lust without ever thinking about any of the other sins that men commit; some people even have difficulty thinking about anything they might do wrong that isn’t porn use. Porn users avoid volunteering, service, missionary work, or helping out at church because they think they’re too broken to be allowed to participate in Christian life. Many even avoid praying, reading the Bible, or participating in church services. One interviewee says:

[D]uring that time I become a burden to god, too. It’s like ‘yeah, I love you. And you know, I died for you. But really I’m just tolerating you right now because I made a commitment to myself and I have to.'”

Because porn use is conceived of within conservative Protestant culture as a form of cheating, spouses experience tremendous jealousy and betrayal when they find out. People can’t talk to their spouses about their porn use and get support in quitting, because it is perceived as such a betrayal; the deception can poison a relationship. The discovery of a spouse’s porn use often leads to threats or even the reality of divorce, even when the marriage is otherwise happy.

My takeaways from this ethnography are twofold.

First, the corrosive effects of purity culture are hard to overstate. When you make a single common sin a litmus test of how a person is doing morally, it is really bad for people. People experience feelings of guilt, shame, and worthlessness. They are isolated from friends and loved ones. It doesn’t even serve to make the person more ethical. Purity culture takes away your ability to see the moral life holistically. While you’re struggling with the fact that you jerk off to porn for fifteen minutes once a week, you might ignore the fact that you shout at your wife, or that you’re lazy at work, or that you go on luxurious vacations instead of helping the poor– all of which may very well be more serious sins. You can feel like you “don’t deserve” to do the things that give you strength to be a better person: the Christian avoids praying and reading the Bible, but a secular person might avoid therapy, journaling, meditation, reading inspiring books, going to meetups of people who share their values, etc.

Effective altruism has (so far) put a lot of thought into avoiding creating a purity culture, although often not in those terms. However, I think this is something well worth thinking about more.

Second, I have often had a hard time harmonizing my positive personal experience of porn with the research that suggests negative effects of porn use. Addicted to Love’s model, I think, explains this very well. The thing that causes negative effects of porn is not the porn itself; it’s the context and the use to which you put porn. Addicted to Love finds that porn use is correlated with depression if and only if you believe that pornography use is morally wrong. Doing things that go against your values makes you feel guilt and shame. If your partner feels betrayed by your pornography use or worries that it means you don’t find them attractive anymore, it is likely to make your relationship worse; watching porn together and using it as a springboard to discuss your sexual fantasies is likely to make it better.

You can expand this model further. A culture around porn which clearly discusses which aspects of porn are reality and which fantasy leads to accurate beliefs about sex; in the absence of such a culture, people might try unlubed anal sex. (Ouch.) In a sex-positive culture of experimentation and open communication, being interested in more sexual acts means you have more sexual variety; in a more sex-negative culture, it can lead to frustration and even sexual coercion. Isolating yourself in your bedroom to jerk off for four hours is different from writing a porny giftfic for a friend. Saying what effects porn has in the abstract is like saying what effects Marvel movies have in the abstract; you have to consider the individual, the culture, and their relationship to porn.

Ursula K. Le Guin: Conversations on Writing: At some point Ursula K. Le Guin is going to really truly publish her last book, but apparently not yet. Conversations on Writing is an interview with Le Guin about writing; like all Le Guin’s writing, her compassion and wisdom is palpable, even when I disagree with her. By far the most delightful part of the book is a short story Le Guin wrote about Zombie Michael Chabon infecting literary writers with genre, but the rest is well worth your time.

An Informal History of the Hugos: This book is baffling. I have no idea what the target audience is. Jo Walton briefly talks about her opinions of the Hugo nominees for each year, lists off the titles of various books that might otherwise be nominated, and says whether she thinks the right one won. Since I have usually heard of half of the nominees and very few of the non-nominated books each year, this is incredibly boring.

Fiction 

Space Opera: This is… an incredibly weird book. It’s a Douglas Adams pastiche where aliens decide which newly contacted species are sapient by having them compete in galactic Eurovision; if they come in last place, they’ll get destroyed. Unfortunately, the list of musicians who might have a chance of not coming in last was generated by a time traveling alien who got confused, so only one of them is alive: a washed-up, drunken David Bowie/Freddie Mercury expy who hasn’t had a hit in a decade and has to get the band back together to save humanity.

Cat Valente is one of the best prose stylists in modern science fiction, and she uses all her talent to make Space Opera’s twee whimsy, with a core of jaded cynicism. This is the sort of book that drives me to metaphor. Reading the book is like eating twenty pounds of cupcake frosting: you enjoy the individual bites, but you eventually want something more substantial, and the whole experience makes you kind of sick. The book itself is like building the Statue of Liberty out of cheese: you set a goal and you accomplished it and it’s hard to come up with criticisms that aren’t ‘instead of doing this you should have done a different thing,’ but… maybe instead of this you should have done a different thing.

That said, I’m probably going to vote it #1 for the Hugos this year. I didn’t particularly like Space Opera, I don’t recommend it, but there’s something about “I thought the surprise mpreg reveal in the climax was superfluous” that captures the anarchic spirit of science fiction, and I think that’s what we should honor with our awards. And if it’s the sort of book you like you’ll really like it.

Trail of Lightning: Meh. I don’t like action heroes who are brooding and violent and angry and never talk about their feelings and you have to be SYMPATHETIC to them because they are TRAUMATIZED. Manpain bores me. It does not actually bore me any less if the person experiencing manpain is a Native American woman.

The Calculating Stars: I gave up in disgust after the first part, so take this review with a grain of salt, but: UGH. The author wants to write an alternate history where a giant meteorite landed on Washington D. C. in the 1950s, which kicked off catastrophic global warming, and the only way to save humanity is to go to a moon colony. Fine. Okay. I am willing to suspend disbelief about ‘moon colony’ being a better option than ‘geoengineering’ if only because of the Rule of Cool.

But the author clearly fails to think about the internal life of her villains for even a second. The president’s advisers respond to the protagonist’s report that catastrophic global warming is going to happen with spontaneous climate-change denialist tropes literally five minutes after she delivers it, even though this makes zero sense. No one would think it’s absurd and laughable that a meteorite that destroyed DC would have other catastrophic effects, and climate change denialism is a thing because fossil fuel companies have spent tons of money spreading doubt, a thing which they would have no reason to do in setting and which they could not possibly have pulled off in five minutes.

The protagonist, a former member of the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs) in WWII, is forbidden to fly a plane to rescue refugees because “nursing is more feminine,” despite the fact that this is literally the sort of thing the WASPs did in WWII and a meteorite just destroyed Washington DC. Women are forbidden from becoming astronauts because they will become hysterical in space; a female character points out that you can’t have a self-sustaining moon colony without women, but it is never discussed what the fuck the villains think about this obvious objection.

Look, I’m not saying that the villains’ behavior is completely unreasonable. (Okay, the climate change denialism is unreasonable and clearly just put in to make a political point.) Maybe the protagonist is forbidden from rescuing refugees by one guy, who’s not very competent at running a military and is only doing it because the entire hierarchy fell apart because DC got a meteor dropped on it, and who’s clinging desperately to normality in the wake of an abnormal situation. Maybe they’re planning to include women in later flights but don’t want to include them right away because they’re concerned about not having developed the safety equipment to deal with their hysteria. But you have to justify this! You can’t just be like “sexists are sexist because they are sexist, this is completely causeless behavior totally unaffected by circumstances or incentives.” That’s not how people work.

Record of A Spaceborn Few: Record of a Spaceborn Few is set on a former generation ship, a few generations after first contact, which currently orbits around a star. The sociological worldbuilding is rich and complex. A great deal of care and thought has been put into the sort of society a generation ship would have: the religious beliefs, the tensions, the economics, the leisure activities, the social arrangements.

It would be misleading to say nothing happens. Many things happen. But there is not very much in the way of plot. It is essentially the events that happen over the course of a particularly interesting few months in the lives of a dozen ordinary people on the generation ship. It is a slice-of-life story; it is as interested in parenting struggles and teenagers fighting with their best friends as it is in starship accidents or the alien ethnographer studying the human colony.

I have literally been craving this book for the past fifteen years. (I really really want it in post-apocalyptic, but you can’t have everything.) If slice-of-life SF with rich sociological worldbuilding is your thing, you’ll really love it.

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Book Post for May

Tags

drugs cw, martha wells, naomi novik, neoreactionaries cw, neurodivergence, ozy blog post, seanan mcguire, sex positivity

Rising Out Of Hatred: This book– about former white nationalist Derek Black and how he stopped being a white nationalist– takes place at the college I attended as a undergraduate, while I attended. For that reason, I’m not sure I should give much of an opinion on the book; gossip about my college acquaintances is not of public interest, and my book on the story is going to be fundamentally affected by the fact that I took classes with Derek Black, in a way that makes it less useful for other people. I can, however, state that as far as I’m aware its description of events is accurate. There were a couple of places where I’d quibble with the description of New College, but nothing I’d consider generally unreasonable.

The Sober Truth: “There isn’t great evidence that AA works. Despite its pretensions of secularism, AA is a clearly Christian-influenced organization, which makes it problematic for both devout members of non-Christian religions and atheists. AA is prescribed over and over again for people for whom it clearly isn’t working. THEREFORE, we should use the true evidence-based treatment for alcoholism, which is psychodynamic psychotherapy.”

Inside Rehab: I started internally screaming in the first chapter, when someone described how one of their rehabs only gave you Suboxone as a reward for good behavior. I did not finish internally screaming until I finished the book.

Interesting facts: Your chance of receiving evidence-based treatment is generally higher if you’re poor or homeless and lower if you pay for rehab out of pocket, because NGOs and governments have leverage to demand that rehabs implement evidence-based treatment, while private rehabs can just do whatever sounds good (equine therapy, Reiki) even if there is no evidence behind it. Rehabs (particularly for people with mild substance abuse problems and teenagers) can make drug addictions worse by introducing the client to more severely addicted friends and teaching them about new drugs and ways of hiding them. AA specifically leads to binges in some people by teaching them that if they have one drink they might as well go on a binge. Thirty percent of people have had an alcohol use disorder at some point in their lives; this is because alcohol use disorder is defined very broadly and essentially includes anyone whose use of alcohol has ever caused a problem in their lives. As you might guess, most people with mild alcohol use disorders are capable of drinking moderately.

One thing I’m confused about is that the author complained that rehabs are very expensive, and then complained that addiction counselors are untrained people whose only qualification is being former addicts, and then complained that rehabs almost never offer much individual therapy (often less than once a week). Presumably the last two things would make rehabs less expensive? Are rehabs directing money in a useless way (towards equine therapy or administrator salaries or nice bedrooms)? Or are rehabs inherently very expensive for some reason? If it is the second thing, maybe we should transition to outpatient therapy, which is less expensive.

Highly recommended both for people who want to gain a better understanding of the rehab system in the United States and for people considering rehab for themselves or their loved ones. The lists of questions to ask rehabs seem very helpful.

Sex Addiction: A Critical History: I was really excited when I bought this book, because I think sex addiction is a problematic concept and I was really looking forward to an in-depth history of how it came to be, along the lines of (say) David Valentine’s excellent Imagining Transgender. (Incidentally, if you’re interested in the social construction of transness, Imagining Transgender is an absolutely invaluable book and I highly recommend it.)

Unfortunately, the authors have Szaszian sympathies, so instead of enjoying the book I spent the entire time raging about their terrible, terrible politics. “‘Sex addiction’ is bad because it’s another example of the psychiatric industry medicalizing normal human behavior, the way that depression medicalizes normal sadness! You can tell, because there’s a continuum between sex addiction and normal behavior and you can’t draw a non-arbitrary line between ‘sex addiction’ and ‘normalcy.’ How negatively sex addiction affects you depends as much on your environment as it does on your objective symptom severity. In some contexts sex addiction can be neutral or even conducive to your flourishing.”

But the problem is that all those things are true of literally every psychiatric condition. Psychosis is on a continuum with normal hallucinations that ordinary people experience, and it’s hard to draw a non-arbitrary line between psychosis and normal voice-hearing. How negatively psychosis affects you depends as much on your environment as it does on your objective symptom severity. In some contexts psychosis can be neutral or even conducive to your flourishing. Either you bite the bullet and go “psychosis is fake, the homeless schizophrenic guy is exactly like everyone else”– which, to his credit, Szasz does– or you realize that we have to have a way to think about psychiatric conditions that features the social model of disability and the fact that psychiatric conditions are all on a continuum with normal human behavior.

Unfortunately, the authors are so busy having stupid opinions about psychiatric diagnosis that they didn’t do anything more than touch on the genuine incoherency and thorny ethical issues associated with the ‘sex addiction’ concept.

The behavior highlighted by the PATHOS screening for sex addiction– preoccupation with sexual thoughts, hiding some sexual behavior from others, seeking treatment for sexual behavior, sexual behavior that hurts others emotionally, feeling controlled by your sexual desire, feeling depression after sex– just doesn’t have one simple set of causes. Some people might have hypersexuality symptoms associated with mania or a personality disorder. Some people might be closeted gay people in a homophobic environment, or kinky people in an environment where kink is stigmatized. Some people might use sex as a quick source of pleasure when they’re depressed. Some people might have a history of sexual trauma. These are all different problems with different solutions and I don’t think it makes sense to treat them all as one thing.

(And what’s with that “hiding sexual behavior from others” thing. I hide sexual behavior from others because I have boundaries.)

The concept of ‘sex addiction’, I think, highlights a particularly thorny ethical problem. If a system of sexual ethics is particularly demanding– in particular, if it demands that a person not masturbate, or not masturbate when in a relationship, or not masturbate using porn or erotica or sexual fantasies of people other than their partner, or only have sex with people they aren’t oriented towards– a certain percentage of the population will find themselves engaging in sexual behavior they don’t endorse. But those people are not going to have sexually compulsive behavior in general. If they stop believing that gay sex, pornography use, or masturbation is wrong, they’ll probably use porn, have gay sex, or masturbate a perfectly reasonable amount that is in balance with the rest of their lives. They certainly won’t escalate to nonconsensual behavior, adultery, or pedophilia (as is sometimes implied by sex/porn addiction discourse).

I’m not sure what we should do about that. On one hand, some part of me says that the problem here is clearly not the masturbation or porn use or gay sex, the problem is the stigma, and the therapist should destigmatize the sexual behavior in question. On the other hand, it seems to me that therapists should not impose their ethical beliefs on their patients. I certainly wouldn’t like it if a therapist tried to do CBT to my demanding ethical beliefs! The therapist should let the patient set their own goals according to their own values instead of imposing the therapist’s values. I think this is a legitimately complicated ethical issue, and saying “if you masturbate when you don’t endorse masturbating then you are a sex addict which is exactly the same sort of thing as an alcoholic” elides it. This is exactly the sort of issue I hope would be addressed by a critical history of sex addiction, and exactly the sort of issue that was not addressed.

Artificial Condition: Murderbot is back! Murderbot is on a quest to figure out whether, last time he’d hacked his governor module, he’s committed mass murder instead of his current occupation of binging TV shows. He stumbles across some humans he feels like he has the duty to protect, and much to his grave irritation has to stop watching TV in order to protect them from their own suicidal tendencies. Murderbot is one of the most likeable and engaging protagonists in recent SF, and every novella he is in is a delight. ART, a television-obsessed spaceship, is equally likeable and a delightful foil. Pick up the series next time you have a bad day and need something fun and not too deep.

Spinning Silver: A fast-paced and page-turning fantasy novel. A moneylender boasts that she can turn silver into gold catches the attention of a gold-loving fairy, who threatens to kill her if she doesn’t turn his silver to gold and marry her if she does; a noblewoman uses the fairy silver, which makes others see her as beautiful to marry the tsar, but there is more to him than it seems. Lots of fascinating plot twists; it manages to be very gripping without having any fight scenes, which is always something I like in a novel. The secondary world is Russian-influenced, which is an interesting variation on the stock European fantasy novel. Highly recommended.

Beneath the Sugar Sky: Down Among The Sticks And Bones was so good! And this was so not good! WHY.

The protagonist’s sole personality trait is being fat. She is insecure and feels bad about her body because she is fat. She is bullied because she is fat. She is an endurance athlete because fat athletes exist. She is magically transported to an alternate world and turns into a mermaid, and suddenly becomes an athlete because being fat is actually helpful in ultraendurance swimming. (This is legitimately pretty cool and I would have hella appreciated it if the character had had at least three non-weight-related personality traits.) She expects to be bullied for being fat, but everyone is tolerant. She has to go to a magical world made out of candy, where the villainess surrounds herself with candy and never eats any of it in order to stay thin, and talks to her about how if she diets she will be thin. Every five pages we get some “and Cora was tired but she couldn’t ask for a rest because people would assume it was because  she was overweight.”

I get it! I’m on board! We should be nice to fat people! PLEASE GIVE YOUR FAT CHARACTER ANOTHER PERSONALITY TRAIT.

At one point Cora is like “the only thing people see in me is fat fat fat” and I was like “yes! that’s so true it’s even affecting your author!”

There were some really interesting ideas. The “nonsense world” made out of candy felt like a real world from a genuine children’s portal fantasy novel. Kade, a transgender male side character, had some really lovely and interesting characterization (which is unfortunately a spoiler). But overall this is a very weak entry in the series.

Book Post for April (Global Poverty and Misc)

Tags

effective altruism

Global Poverty

The Gender Effect: An ethnography of the Nike Foundation. The author cannot write, which is very unfortunate, because she has some amazing data; reading between the lines, she wound up volunteering at a bunch of Nike-Foundation-associated NGOs until they forgot she was doing research and were perhaps more candid than they really ought to be.

“Women in development,” “women and development, and “gender and development” are apparently three different paradigms for studying gender and international development. Why. (“Women in development” is the liberal economics-y one, “women and development” is the Marxist one, and “gender and development” is the intersectional, postmodernist one.)

At the time the data was collected, the Nike Foundation prioritized economic empowerment for adolescent girls. Their implicit definition of “adolescent girl” was constructed on a Western and developed-world line– the adolescent girl is unemployed, in school, not pregnant, etc.– which doesn’t match the concrete reality on the ground. Adult women were explicitly excluded, on the grounds that they were already married and employed and had children and therefore their position in life is set and they could not be meaningfully economically empowered.

Girls specifically are prioritized because, the Nike Foundation believes, women are selfless and invest in their communities, unlike men. There’s this appalling anecdote where a staff member at an NGO says “we want to help girls, because when you go to the beach and no one has any money, who pays? the girl.” This is a remarkable example of sexist pedestalization wearing a feminist hat, and puts an enormous burden on marginalized teenage girls. Not only are they responsible for their own well-being and flourishing, they’re responsible for lifting their entire community out of poverty? There’s an assumption that of course women are responsible for the wellbeing of everyone around them, which honestly is incredibly sexist! Perhaps we should be empowering women to set reasonable boundaries about what things are and are not their personal problems.

One of the NGOs studied provides job education to teenage girls. At the beginning of the program, the girls had a variety of different aspirations: vet, architect, doctor. At the end of the program, literally all of them wanted to become administrative assistants. The researcher asked the NGO why it channeled them into becoming administrative assistants, instead of encouraging them to go to college, which they would probably be able to do for free; the answer is that they were poor black girls from the favela and being a secretary was pretty much the best the NGO felt they could hope for. Not only did the “economic empowerment” charity reduce girls’ aspirations, it also failed to particularly economically empower them: most of the participants were unemployed and most of the employed participants had menial jobs.

The Nike Foundation made a bunch of investments on the theory that economically and educationally empowering teenage girls would pay off. The Foundation did not want to have to switch to a different cause area. This, naturally, caused their monitoring and evaluation division to nudge the grantees to get certain results. To quote one informant:

 They have this M&E [monitoring and evaluation] framework into which the grantees’ work is supposed to feed. The reason we are supporting you is because we want to say this after we fund you. It is really particular and really easy for them to be disappointed. . . . They have big plans for the messaging around the M&E, which is why they are trying to set up the M&E so carefully. It is almost pre-messaged. Let’s see. Its engagement with grantees is set up in such a way that their findings are already anticipated. Can we say this, can we say that?

In particular, the Nike Foundations M&E programs tended to prioritize things the evaluators considered important (age at first marriage, age at first pregnancy, assets, income) rather than things the participants considered important. This creates perverse incentives. One NGO pressured its participants not to have children so their funding wouldn’t be revoked. Delaying pregnancy and marriage were used as metrics even when studying women in their late teens and early twenties, many of whom may prefer to marry and have children. The Nike Foundation’s messaging around “if a woman gets pregnant, she can no longer become economically empowered” fails to engage with on-the-ground realities, such as some women who go back to school after their children are born in order to create a better life for their kids.

Doomed Interventions: I object to the premise of this book. There is very little evidence about whether HIV/AIDS interventions in Africa are succeeding or failing. The evidence that does exist often suggests that they’re succeeding: for example, new HIV infections are dropping in Africa. The author insists she is not making any claims about whether HIV interventions are working or not, but the literal subtitle of her book is “The Failure of Global Responses To AIDS In Africa.”

Africans, as a group, tend to deprioritize HIV/AIDS. This is a major mismatch with donor funding: in many years, more aid money is spent on HIV/AIDS than is spent on all other health programs in Africa combined. HIV-positive Africans and those who lost a loved one to HIV were not much more likely to prioritize HIV spending. It seems like some of what is going on is that people with HIV benefit from public health measures that help everyone: for example, people with AIDS are particularly likely to die from opportunistic infections, so they benefit from clean water.

The author discusses aid spending from the point of view of principal-agent problems. This causes her to combine two distinct situations in her analysis. First, sometimes aid money is just stolen, which is obviously bad. Second, sometimes headmen (village leaders) redirect money earmarked to HIV for causes their constituents care about more, such as clean water or improved agriculture. The latter seems… fine? Unless we have some specific reason to believe that we know better than the headmen what the village’s needs are– which does happen, headmen do not have Sci-Hub access and cannot read the latest economics papers about the effect of deworming on development– it is a good thing for headmen to redirect money towards more pressing needs.

A baffling fact that was shared without any explanation whatsoever is that, in Malawi, the highest-risk groups for HIV infection include primary school teachers. (Malawi has essentially no blood-related transmission of HIV.) Why do primary school teachers have such a high rate of HIV? What the fuck? Does anybody know the answer to this?

Further interesting facts:

• Traditional healers typically give accurate information about how to reduce your risk of HIV. At least one peddler of a quack HIV prevention medicine claims it only works if you and your partner are monogamous.
• The Chichewa word for “white person” translates as “wonder maker.”
• Village headmen are not typically elected in Malawi. However, if they do a poor job, they will be driven out of the village by a group of women jeering and hurling insults.
• People in Malawi seem to get a lot of divorces, to the point that a major source of a village headman’s power is the fact that he typically is a mediator during divorces. I would be interested in reading more about how this works.

Portfolios of the Poor: The subtitle is “How The World’s Poor Live On $2 A Day” and I bought it hoping that it would tell me about how you get food, shelter, and medical care if you live on $2 a day. This is not actually the topic of the book. Instead, Portfolios of the Poor is about how the global poor do financial management and budgeting.

The global poor have “triple whammy”: their incomes are low, their incomes are unpredictable and uneven (some days they earn a lot of money and others none at all), and they do not have access to financial instruments designed to deal with their unique problems. They must figure out how to smooth consumption, raise lump sums when necessary, and deal with emergencies. The global poor use a surprisingly sophisticated array of financial techniques to manage this triple whammy. In fact, the amount of money saved, loaned, or borrowed over the course of the year is often many times the family’s income.

From the perspective of the global poor, there isn’t necessarily a difference between savings and loans. The global poor often pay money to save: for example, they may pay a person to stop by their house every day and bug them to give the person ten cents, of which they will receive $2.50 at the end of the month. The global poor often also pay off their loans and then immediately take out a new loan. It is easy to see how, from the perspective of a member of the global poor, these may be considered the same financial instrument. While it may seem economically irrational, it actually makes sense: you can buy many more things with $2.50 than with ten cents every day, you can’t procrastinate on saving money, and no one is going to steal your savings.

For this reason, it’s important to design financial services for the global poor that reflect the needs of the global poor. It’s a mistake to assume that the global poor are going to use their microloans to invest in a small business and move out of poverty. Instead, microfinance should strive to provide a convenient, reliable, flexible way to access lump sums of money that doesn’t require the global poor to exercise an inhuman level of self-discipline.

Miscellaneous

Who Could That Be At This Hour?: I generally found the VFD sections of the Series of Unfortunate Events books rather tedious and uninteresting, and Who Could That Be At This Hour is literally nothing but VFD content. If it is the sort of thing you’re interested in, you may be interested in it, but I was not.

The Dialectic of Sex: The Dialectic of Sex is an incredibly frustrating book. On one hand, it is one of the few feminist books that presents a utopia that I find exciting. Many feminist utopias are bland and don’t really question the nature of society (“what if… there was still day care… but it was 24 hours a day and free”). Others lack specifics (“everyone loves their bodies and racism is over”). Still others are just really really unappealing (“everyone lives in harmony with nature and respects their moon cycles,” “we have finally eradicated the scourge of kinky sex from the world”).

But Shulamith Firestone’s vision is a place where I want to live. Increasing automation frees both women and men from the burden of unchosen work, allowing them plenty of time for art and play. Contraceptives, artificial wombs, improved formula, and similar technological advancements will give women and men an equal role in all parts of the childbearing and childrearing process, except by personal choice. Coercive education is abolished, children are integrated with all of society as full citizens, and children’s rights are massively expanded, including a right of children to switch households. People have complete sexual freedom, and all consensual sexual decisions are unstigmatized. It is no longer assumed that everyone wants a monogamous, committed, romantic-sexual life partnership or that romantic relationships are more important than friendships. The fundamental unit of society is the household, a group of adults who have agreed to share their lives and build a family together; it is not assumed that a household must consist of two people in a romantic-sexual relationship, or that people must limit their romantic or sexual relationships to their own household. The last chapter of The Dialectic of Sex describes the feminist world I want to have.

I also think the core of Shulamith Firestone’s analysis is accurate. Women’s oppression is related to their biology: that is, as long as men are physically stronger than women, and women spend much of their lives pregnant or breastfeeding, there will be a division of labor between men and women. The division of labor will produce gender roles which do not necessarily serve the flourishing of either men or women, and because men are not constrained by taking care of small children they will generally wind up with political and economic power. The sensible and practical solution is to minimize biological sex divisions through, most importantly, contraceptives and artificial wombs.

Unfortunately, the Dialectic of Sex is fundamentally marred by many of the weaknesses of second-wave feminist theory. It assumes Freudianism is an accurate model of human psychology, which is responsible for many of its most baffling claims (in an ideal feminist society people would no longer have the incest taboo) and simple factual inaccuracies (children raised in gender-equal households will all be bisexual). This is hardly Shulamith Firestone’s fault– the book was published in 1970– but it means much of the work is not useful for a modern feminist thinker.

I really want someone to take Firestone’s basic framework and update it to create a powerful vision of a liberatory, sex-positive, anti-work, pro-children’s rights transhumanist feminism.

Without You, There Is No Us: A fascinating, powerful memoir about a woman who taught English to the sons of North Korea’s elite. By far the most interesting part of the book is how many questions it leaves unanswered. Even living in North Korea does not give you a lot of information about what North Korea is like. Her students lie thoughtlessly and constantly, about easily observable facts: saying they partied with their friends at other schools on summer break when all their friends were doing forced construction labor; saying they slept in till 8am when they were clearly doing drills at 6am. The author goes on a trip to a Christian church full of North Koreans; she wonders, uneasily, whether the church was made up as a show for her. The book tells you very little about what North Korea is like, but makes you acutely aware of how little you know about it.

The Only Harmless Great Thing: In an alternate history with sapient elephants, after a radium company had to stop using human women, it used elephants. Sometimes you get a feeling that the author has read the same viral Tumblr text posts you have. I enjoyed it fine– the radium girls are a very interesting historical setup– but it didn’t feel deep or well-thought-out. It really felt like the author’s engagement with history consisted solely of Tumblr text posts.

Book Post for April (Parenting)

Tags

ozy blog post, parenting

Parenting

It’s Okay To Go Up The Slide: The first book in this series– It’s Okay Not To Share– is one of my favorite parenting books, and I was eager to read It’s Okay To Go Up The Slide, which is aimed at parents of elementary schoolers. Much of the advice was solid. Let children read books that are scary or sad or have unhappy endings; it builds empathy and helps them process bad things that happen in their own lives. Elementary school homework causes stress and family conflict and takes time that could be spent on more valuable activities, and there’s no evidence that suggests any benefit; consider campaigning against it at your child’s school or– if you have the class/education/race privilege to pull it off– simply informing the teacher that your child shall not be doing homework. Recess is tremendously beneficial to children, but many schools are cutting it to spend more time on academics or punish children by removing recess (boo! hiss!); encourage your school to end these harmful policies and transition towards spending perhaps a quarter of the child’s time at school at recess. Allow your children bodily autonomy by not requiring them to kiss or hug adults.

Unfortunately, there was a section I found appalling, which was the section on technology. The respect for children’s autonomy that pervades the rest of the series was thrown out the window as soon as the topic of screens came up. The authors encourage long periods of uninterrupted free play in which children can make their own decisions, but also encourage limiting screen time to thirty minutes per day. The authors encourage violent play as a way for children to process their feelings and play with power, but first-person shooters make them clutch their pearls about encouraging violence. The authors talk about the ridiculous, almost gaslight-y “right to engage with the real, non-screen world for most of the day.” Setting aside the bizarre definition of the word “real”– where talking to a friend who lives far away is not real, and watching actors pretend to be imaginary people in a play is real, and whether a fantasy novel is real depends on whether you’re using a laptop to read it– if you have to force a person to do something against their will in order to get them to exercise their right, it’s not a fucking right.

I’m not knee-jerk pro-screen-use. I am as troubled as anyone else by the addictive nature of social media and some video games. I am concerned about low-value Internet browsing crowding out the healthy boredom that builds creativity and cherished childhood memories. I plan to limit my children’s use of screens before bed because I am concerned it will disrupt their sleep.

But I think we need to be careful and discerning about what our children’s screen use means. Are they writing a novel, or are they getting in dumb fights on Facebook? Is it a situation where we should take away their laptop, or a situation where we should support them in learning the skill of managing their own Internet use? Is excessive screen use a coping mechanism for some other problem– boredom, inability to access space away from adults, depression– that would be worsened by getting rid of screen use? What are the benefits of screen use for our child? (I myself am autistic and developed social skills online, because I could lurk to teach myself social rules and because there was no confusing body language or vocal tone, which meant that online social skills were simpler to develop. Spending “too much” time online was one of the best things I could have done in my adolescence.)

On a less important note, the chapter on princesses was clearly aimed at an audience different from me. The chapter was all “I know you think little girls (and boys!) pretending to be princesses is awful, but have you considered that instead of banning princesses entirely you can limit the number of times they watch princess movies and not buy them princess dolls?” Dude, if I have a daughter I am going to watch Mulan with her because Mulan is a great movie and you are missing out. Sofia the Great is pretty solid too.

I honestly don’t get this objection to princesses. A lot of the criticisms (“princesses don’t do anything, they just wait for a man to rescue them”) imply that the speaker literally has not watched a Disney princess movie that came out within my lifetime. People are very rarely troubled by little boys and girls playing superhero or Star Wars, despite the problematic messages in those stories; why are we troubled by them playing princess? Honestly, I think the number of little girls playing princess is linked to the fact that– although this trend is shifting due to shows like Steven Universe– there is very little media that has multiple female characters and doesn’t have any princesses in it. (Okay, yeah, Tinkerbell, but I think the anti-princess crew is probably not a big fan of Tinkerbell either.)

Bottled Up: Honestly, mainstream parenting as it is described in this book sounds horrifying? I started out breastfeeding my son, then started giving him supplementary bottles, and eventually switched to full-time bottlefeeding when I realized that breastfeeding was giving me severe gender dysphoria. No one has ever commented negatively on this or judged me. My parent friends who breastfeed were very supportive of my decision to switch to bottles (in fact, one was like “why are you even breastfeeding?”).

Anyway, I’m very grateful I’m not in this horrifying subculture of people who are weirdly invested in what other people do with their boobs. If you are in this subculture, consider picking up the book; it might be validating.

Cribsheet: I loved Emily Oster’s Expecting Better and I bought Cribsheet, her book about birth through preschool, on the first day it came out. It’s skippable if you’re generally an evidence-based parenting nerd, but if you’d like a reasonable introduction I’d put it right up there with Science of Mom.

Take home lessons, if you want to skip the research and just want to know what she believes:

• Newborn baths are unnecessary but not damaging; do a tub bath.
• Circumcision has small benefits and small risks.
• Rooming in probably doesn’t have a big effect on whether you breastfeed or not, but make sure not to fall asleep with your infant in the hospital bed.
• Swaddling reduces crying and improves sleep. Be sure to swaddle your baby in a way where they can move their hips and legs.
• Colic will EVENTUALLY STOP. Changing formula or maternal diet and giving baby a probiotic may help.
• Limit the exposure to germs of infants under three months, because the interventions for young feverish infants are very aggressive and stressful for parents and baby.
• You will bleed for several weeks after childbirth and you may have vaginal tearing which will take several weeks to heal. It will take significant time for you to be mobile after a C section.
• You can start exercising a week after giving birth and return to your normal exercise routine by six weeks after giving birth.
• You can have sex as soon as you feel comfortable and ready and aren’t in pain. The “wait six weeks” thing was made up by doctors who want to give women an excuse not to have sex.
• Postpartum depression is common and treatable.
• There is limited evidence of health benefits to breastfeeding early on and no strong evidence of long-term health or cognitive benefits to breastfeeding. Breastfeeding reduces your risk of breast cancer.
• Skin-to-skin contact immediately after birth improves likelihood of breastfeeding success.
• Fixing a tongue or lip tie can reduce pain but doesn’t necessarily improve nursing.
• Nipple shields can improve a latch but can also be hard to quit.
• There is not a lot of evidence on how to prevent pain with nursing, although fixing the latch may help. If you are in pain a few minutes into the feeding or a few weeks into nursing, seek help; it might be an infection or something else with a solution.
• The evidence does not suggest nipple confusion is a thing.
• Most women have milk come in within three days after the baby is born, but for a quarter of women it takes longer.
• Nursing more will increase your milk supply. The evidence for non-drug/herbal interventions is limited.
• Pumping SUCKS. It is time-consuming, unpleasant, and degrading.
• Babies should sleep on their backs.
• Bed sharing can be risky. The risks are higher if you or your partner smoke or drink alcohol. But if it’s the only way you can get some rest, the risks are going to be worth it for many people. Sleeping on a sofa with an infant is EXTREMELY DANGEROUS. ALWAYS take your baby into your bed if the other option is sleeping with them on the sofa.
• Room sharing is beneficial in the first three months. Both your sleep and your child’s may be better if they sleep in a different room after the first few months.
• Crib bumpers have a very small risk and a very small benefit.
• Don’t put soft stuff in your baby’s crib. Do give them a wearable blanket/sleep sack.
• In general, longer nighttime sleep starts around two months, three regular naps around four months, two naps around nine months, one nap around fifteen to eighteen months, and no naps around age three.
• Children’s sleep schedules are very very different from each other and you cannot control them.
• Most babies and toddlers wake up between 6 am and 8 am.
• Putting your baby or toddler to bed earlier will cause them to sleep longer.
• VACCINATE YOUR KIDS.
• Babies benefit from their mothers taking maternity leave.
• Studies do not show any consistent positive or negative effects from having a stay-at-home parent. Do what works for your family.
• The most important thing about childcare is quality. Look for a warm, responsive provider who cuddles the baby, reads to them, comforts them when they’re sad, and plays with them.
• Kids in day cares typically have slightly better cognitive outcomes and slightly worse behavior outcomes. Kids in day care get sick more but develop more immunity.
• Parenting quality is way, way more important than childcare quality, even though your child is spending lots of time with their childcare providers.
• “Cry it out” methods encourage nighttime sleep, improve mental health for parents, and do not harm infants in the short or long term.
• All sleep training methods work about equally well. Choose something you can stick with, then stick with it.
• Expose your children to food allergens early on to prevent food allergies.
• Expose your children to a variety of foods. Even if they reject it the first time they have it, keep offering the food.
• There is no evidence behind the usual recommendations for when to introduce food. Baby-led weaning isn’t magic but it works fine
• Give your baby vitamin D but don’t freak out about missing a day here or there.
• Delayed motor development can be a sign of certain disabilities such as cerebral palsy, but variations within the wide normal range are not a cause for concern.
• Children get about one cold per month during the winter. Buy lots of lotion tissues.
• Children under the age of two can’t learn from TV. Children from age three to five can. But the evidence is sparse.
• Try to expose children to high-quality educational TV such as Sesame Street.
• The timing of language development is correlated with later outcomes, such as test scores, but pretty weakly.
• Starting intensive potty-training before 27 months does not seem to lead to earlier completion of potty training. After 27 months, potty-training earlier leads the child to use the potty earlier.
• There is limited evidence on potty-training methods.
• Some children may refuse to poop in the potty. Praising children for pooping in the diaper may reduce the rate of children refusing to poop in the potty, but there is not a lot of evidence.
• To discipline your child, don’t get angry and provide consistent rewards and punishments.
• Spanking is associated with worse behavior throughout childhood and into adulthood.
• Read to your children starting in early childhood.
• Your baby cannot learn to read. A few unusual two- or three-year-olds can read.
• Evidence on preschool philosophies is limited.
• Marital satisfaction declines after you have kids. If you’re happy before you have kids, and the kids are planned, the declines are smaller and briefer.
• Unequal division of labor and less sex probably cause at least some of the decline in marital satisfaction, but we don’t know how important they are.
• There is limited evidence that marital counseling and marriage checkup programs increase marital satisfaction.
• The data does not provide guidance on the ideal number of children or birth spacing, but very short birth intervals may lead to preterm birth and possibly higher risk of autism.

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.

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.