Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer by Duncan J. Watts

There must be something about Dan Gardner that coerces me to read his topics in pairs. When I read Gardner’s last book, The Science of Fear, I immediately read Physics for Future Presidents as well, which had a fair amount in common.

Now Gardner’s latest book, Future Babble, is largely a sociological study, and what should I read immediately afterward but another sociology book, with no small amount of overlap. In fairness, Watts’ book ends up being the superior of the two.

When I was young, and first getting into classical music, I used to imagine that I was, say, the genius who wrote Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto #3, instead of Sergei himself. I would then wonder, because I was occasionally precocious, if the work could still be a widely-respected and deeply-loved member of the classical canon if it were written by some American schmuck in the last years of the 20th century. Sadly, I reasoned, probably not.

This is also one of Watts’ central points, albeit made with the Mona Lisa rather than a concerto. Watts builds up his argument around the notion of “common sense”, a notion we all know but would find difficult to accurate define or quantify. He falls back and punts with Carl Taylor:

By common sense I mean the knowledge possessed by those who live in the midst and are a part of the social situations and processes which sociologists seek to understand. The term thus used may be synonymous with folk knowledge, or it may be the knowledge possessed by engineers, by the practical politicians, by those who gather and publish news, or by others who handle or work with and must interpret and predict the behavior or persons and groups.

Our common sense tells us that the Mona Lisa is a great painting because, as Watts puts it, “it has attributes X, Y, and Z. But really what we’re saying is that the Mona Lisa is famous because it’s more like the Mona Lisa than anything else.” What we perceive to be common sense—namely, that a famous piece of art is great—is really backformed from our knowledge that the art is already famous. At this point, the subtitle(?) “Once You Know the Answer” should have an obvious meaning.

The same effect occurs in prediction-making, whence comes much of the overlap with Dan Gardner’s book. After an event has happened, it’s very easy to explain why… except that so often, this is never the explanation we would have given before it happened. Our common sense also tends to favor individual, dynamic actors, rather than an aggregation of low-level, systemic causes. In this, Watts politely savages Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, which ascribed major changes to the activity of a few significant people enacting large change. In fairness, I believe Gladwell acceded the point that a few “influencers” alone could not enact change without an otherwise critical mass; Watts suggests, however, that these kinds of social network dynamics are nondeterministic, with predictions thwarted even by small random variations.

The problem, as Watts repeatedly points out, is that unlike repeatable experiments, the iconic stories which inform our common sense only happen once; we cannot rewind them and try them a different way to see if our hindsight explanation is the correct one. Is Apple successful because Steve Jobs is a dynamic leader and a visionary? Our common sense tells us it is, but we really don’t know for sure with any scientific certainty.

Watts’ particular milieu, at least lately is the technological incarnations of those social networks—e.g. Facebook and Twitter, the latter of which he once used for a “Tipping Point”-style experiment. Sample size helps to illustrate Watt’s second big point, namely that no matter how well we understand the individual parts of a situation, it doesn’t necessarily mean we understand the whole. We see the trees, in other words, but manage to miss the forest. But the sum of most things is greater (or less, I suppose), than its parts, which is why point to a part in retrospect doesn’t make us any better at predicting the future. It’s also perhaps why Watts, who emigrated from the field of physics, virtually always formulaic and rational, understands better than anyone how social science is a trickster god in the pantheon of scientific disciplines; his introduction (which I thought strange at the time) was the story of his defection and the generally poor reception of social science by those who are expecting functional, mechanistic knowledge of the engineer or the chemist.

Personally, I’m just glad I’m not the only one who can’t explain Facebook.

What the Dog Saw by Malcolm Gladwell

I’ve read all three of Malcolm Gladwell’s previous books before; in order from most to least recent, there’s Outliers, Blink, and The Tipping Point. I’ve said in each review that I believe Gladwell’s books have generally improved as a function of time; as a columnist, his ability to adapt to a longer form of writing (where his point must be sustained for several hundred pages without diverting into obscurity) has evolved noticeably with practice.

But Gladwell has been writing for the New Yorker for about fifteen years now, and in that time amassed a much larger collection of short (the word here is relative) pieces than he has larger themed works. In a move designed both to make money (I’m sure) as well as disseminate his best work to those without the benefit of access to the New Yorker‘s last fifteen years worth of archives, Gladwell collected his favorite pieces from that rag into a big, this time without concern for an overarching theme. It’s a collection of essays, though given Gladwell’s polished narrative style, it feels often more like a compendium of short stories by a particularly pedantic fabulist.

The formula here is unvaried from the Gladwell we know and love: pick several topics, as if pulled from a hat of audience-submitted errata, and then find some unifying principle which explains their common behavior, or to a less extent, in the excrescent tradition of “everything you know is wrong” books like SuperFreakonomics, explains why our commonly-held beliefs about the How? or Why? of the bespoke phenomenon is wrong or at least vastly incomplete. There’s a bit less of this latter form in What the Dog Saw, in stark contrast to some of Gladwell’s more recent books. In fact, the essays here seem like confrontational in their revelation and more like your nerdy friend explaining how tides work.

Its highlights include an exposé on ketchup, and why the general vinegary Heinz flavor we know and love has resisted encroachment on its market share in precisely the same way that yellow mustard did not when Dijon-style mustard exploded onto the American culinary landscape in the late 70s. The latter’s success may have less to do with the general superiority of the Dijon-style and more to do with the brilliant ad campaign rolled out by Grey Poupon—we all remember the Rolls Royce and the crisp, English “Pardon me… do you have any Grey Poupon?”—and in fact Gladwell’s essay is just as much a history of advertising geniuses and hopeful gourmet ketchup salesmen (with an aside about the history of ketchup generally) as it is about the way in which modern ketchup as it’s currently institutionalized manages to invoke all our various senses of taste, which may account in part for our resistance to new and different varieties of it.

Another essay—a republication of what appears to be his first column for the New Yorker—examines the space program’s various mishaps over the years, and—counterintuitively—why laying blame for disaster like the explosion of the Challenger is not as straightforward or satisfying as it may first appear, since it may have much more to do with the sheer statistical probability of failure in complex systems than with the fiendish ineptitude of Martin Thiokol or the arrogance of NASA bureaucrats.

Its title essay explains the (admittedly controversial) success of Cesar Millan, the “dog whisperer”, noting how the nuts and bolts of what Millan does in a course of training matters much less than the way in which he does it—that is, in a calm but assertive manner that doesn’t allow dogs to notice and “channel” any fear, uncertainty, or anxiety from its owners.

I can’t help but enjoy the friendly rivalry (or perhaps less friendly and more passive-aggressive) between Gladwell and Stephen Pinker. I have no idea when it began, but Pinker’s shot across the bow appeared in the New York Times. Notice the rising action which appears to compliment Gladwell without ever really speaking to his abilities as an author: he’s “indefatigably curious”, he’s “become a brand”, he’s “popular”, “prolific’; Pinker crescendos thus and peaks with the left-handed compliment that Gladwell is “a minor genius who unwittingly demonstrates the hazards of statistical reasoning and who occasionally blunders into spectacular failures.”

Ouch. Since Pinker is as well known for being a writer (an elucidator of science in the grand tradition of Steven Jay Gould, though perhaps less well known) as he is an intellectual, it’s no surprise that he leaps praise upon Gladwell for being an excellent writer with a knack for prose and the ability to explain complicated concepts in relative small spaces. But he more or less lambastes Gladwell for talking about things he doesn’t understand (which appears to be, well, everything, according to Pinker), and follows up with this jewel:

It is simply not true that a quarter­back’s rank in the draft is uncorrelated with his success in the pros, that cognitive skills don’t predict a teacher’s effectiveness, that intelligence scores are poorly related to job performance or (the major claim in “Outliers”) that above a minimum I.Q. of 120, higher intelligence does not bring greater intellectual achievements.

And that seems to be it as far as Pinker’s assertion is concerned; we are left to take it on his word (as an authority on linguistics, I suppose?) that the preceding sentence is true. With Gladwell, anyway, we at least get the benefit of a generously-sized narrative that leads readers from initial assumption to rebuttal (and sometimes to contrary conclusion, though not always). Of course Gladwell is not the most brilliant mind ever to put pen to paper; of course the act of writing science for a lay audience will have the consequence of allowing ambiguity where previously there was none. Additionally, it’s possible that Gladwell’s conclusions may sometimes be wrong; after all, he’s one man interpreting evidence as he reads it. But this is a risk one takes with any sort of popular science; it’s no reason to avoid Gladwell, and in fact I would call Gladwell one of the most interesting pop-sci writers working today.

The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell

I read Gladwell’s latest non-anthology, Outliers last year, and his sophomore effort a few months later. It appears that I am working backwards, having just finished his debut book, The Tipping Point. My review of Outliers was more favorable than Blink; this was due in part, I think, to Gladwell’s progression as a writer and thinker. Sadly, it also means that The Tipping Point being his first published book and now a decade old, is the weakest offering yet.

Perhaps the big problem is muddle. The Tipping Point, you see, is an attempt to put layer bits of epidemiology over social science. Using a few workhorse examples, such as Hush Puppies and Airwalk brand shoes, he tries to explain the phenomenon of small changes suddenly snowballing into large events. Actually, that’s not even quite correct; as the title suggests, what we’re really talking about is things (e.g. shoe sales) which show little response to stimulus until a certain input variable tips them over the precipice. It’s a particular distinction, and Gladwell doesn’t do a very good job of staying true to it; much of the time, I’m unaware exactly what Gladwell is trying to tell me outside of the most immediate anecdote.

He identifies three factors which influence these so-called “tipping points”. The first is the “stickiness” factor, which is merely a different way of calling something memorable or engaging. As his example, Gladwell cites Sesame Street, which would have failed early on had its initial creators not done studies in order to maximize child engagement in the program. In the context of, say, shoe sales, I suppose you could call the product advertising and cultural importance its “stickiness”.

The second factor, so obvious that it hardly needs stating, is that humans are powerfully affected by context. In other words, criticality in epidemiological terms requires a suitable environment for the “outbreak” to happen. One of his examples is New York City’s attempt to combat turnstile jumping (historically considered a waste of manpower) which had the effect of lowering crime—including violent crime—in general; the implication is that turnstile-jumpers also happen represent a disproportional amount violent criminals, though Gladwell doesn’t ever say this outright.

Finally, and most importantly, Gladwell builds upon Stanley Milgram’s 1967 “Six Degrees of Separation” experiment to construct a theory of how people and word-of-mouth creates tipping points. Gladwell renames the Pareto Principle (or “80/20 rule”) the “Law of the Few”, and fashions, RPG-like, a set of character classes to define the constituent members of these “Few”. Though he never claims to have come up with it, and initially refers to it by its more common “80/20″ moniker, Gladwell’s persistent use of his own term feels just slightly underhanded to me; the effect is to build the notion in the reader’s mind that it is in fact Gladwell that came up with the term.

As if feeling the need to contribute, Gladwell proposes three archetypes: the Connector, or the well-connected person whose relationships spread important cultural data; the Maven (also called a “wonk” where I’m from), or the person emotionally invested in a particular product or family of product whose enthusiasm forms the initial momentum toward a tipping point; finally, the Salesman, or the charismatic persuader, which I feel is the least developed and least relevant character in Gladwell’s trio.

Toss these disparate elements together and you have Gladwell’s thesis, which is….. well, I’m not sure what his thesis is. He’s established that certain phenomenon do “tip” and he’s described, in general terms, the actors involved in the process. He’s even posited, in even more general terms, why some things tip and others don’t. But what he doesn’t ever tackle is why so many phenomenon have predictable causal relationships (i.e., imagine a smooth line on a graph) and others appear impervious to change before suddenly exploding overnight (i.e. a near-flat line on a graph spiking midway through). Though he mentions “geometric progression” as a boilerplate explanation for sudden rapid change in his comparison of sociological phenomenon to viruses, he doesn’t identify what qualities of some phenomena make them progress geometrically as opposed to arithmetically.

Despite the many criticisms one could level at Gladwell and his work, I am generally a fan of his: I think his approach to topics is refreshing, his stubborn curiosity admirable, and his writing style well-suited for his intended audience. That The Tipping Point is a lesser book than Outliers comes as no great surprise, and neither are the tendencies of science popularizers to over-simplify their subjects to the point of inaccuracy or banality. For those who haven’t read Gladwell and would like to, my advice is to focus on his newer books and essays, and they are an entirely different level of quality.

Let it not be said that I am discomfited or alarmed by new forms of media; that I’m posting this to a blog after finding the article on Facebook, cross-posted from Twitter itself, may say something about my attitude toward the new and the popular. At the same time, I am extraordinarily distrustful of smiling cretins who like to whitewash the tendency of pop-culture to both reflect and encourage those things about ourselves which are ultimately damaging—the execrable Everything Bad is Good For You is a good example of just how facile such attempts can be.

A Rejection of Summaries

Pinker addresses the metonymized arguments that Powerpoint and Twitter (and media of that nature) stultify our discourse and represent an insidious verbal rot that (ostensibly) takes perfectly intellectual people and stupefies them into a torpid hulk. One gets the feeling that his implied opponents view humanity as a sort of real-life Flowers for Algernon, arising out of savagery by the power of the printed word and the reward of intellectual acumen; only to sink slowly and inexorably into monosyllables and dismayed puzzlement. Of course, these two forms of media merely represent the logical evolution of their predecessors—namely, notecards and text messages, respectively. In fact, though I have some sympathy for those linguistic and academic conservatives who are weeping and rending their garments over the Titanic (read: majestic, yet ill-fated) that is modern cultural intelligence, I am nonetheless inclined to agree with Pinker that panic is undue. But here’s his segue:

But such panics often fail basic reality checks. When comic books were accused of turning juveniles into delinquents in the 1950s, crime was falling to record lows, just as the denunciations of video games in the 1990s coincided with the great American crime decline. The decades of television, transistor radios and rock videos were also decades in which I.Q. scores rose continuously.

Immediately, Pinker makes what I feel is a completely unfair comparison. Comic books may be, in many cases, rather paltry intellectual fare if in no other regard than exercising verbal skills, but their real controversy was in their subject matter. As David Hadju notes in his excellent The Ten-Cent Plague, comics’ ostensible lack of intellectual depth paled in comparison to their subject matter, which included sex, violence, rebellion, drugs, more violence, and all the other neat things that developing kids like to consume. The glorification of these things, it was said, was corrosive to moral fibre, and would invariably lead to a generation of deviants, criminals, and probably Communists, too. A virtually identical argument is made against video games (notably modern ones such as the notorious Grand Theft Auto series), occasionally bolstered by studies which show some correlation between violent video games and aggressive behavior immediately after playing.

The argument against new forms of social media are not the hysterical bleatings—”Won’t somebody please think of the children?“—of moral decay, but rather the fear that the diminishing requirements for dialogue are lowering the intellectual bar. The latter, even if you don’t agree, is a rather more plaintive and reasonable argument; no, Twitter will not turn today’s children into slavering nitwits, but it does draw converts from other sorts of media that may have once asked its users to expound upon something, rather than simply abbreviate it. I started this blog in 2004, and though I make no particular case for the quality of its entries, one of the reasons I have continued to update it long after blogs passed their peak is that it forces me to explain, transcribe whole series of thought into words, and construct something potentially readable by others. When I started, the same sorts of people who now use Twitter all gamboled around Xanga and Blogspot and tried their hand—however unsuccessfully—at extended forms of communication.

A Confusion of Tongues

Of course, there’s the argument to be made that Twitter itself isn’t really even a form of dialogue so much as an electronic series of handshakes and nodding of heads; I mentioned that I first learned of Pinker’s article via Facebook, and ultimately Twitter, and in that sense these media acted as little more than conduits in order to reach the meatier medium of the website article—a medium not capped at 140 characters. As a filter or aggregation of information, Twitter and its ilk succeed as well as can be expected; I frequent the software-oriented DZone for much the same reason. Perhaps Pinker is aware of a collective sigh of woe regarding the use of social media as a way to share information external to these services, but the chorus of criticism of which I am aware has little to do with that and more to do with diminishing the faculties of communication by sheer atrophy.

It can’t be said that using social media is somehow poisonous to these faculties; I know of innumerable people who manage to participate in such terse or thin media and manage to retain their verbal skills without any apparent effort. But it would be sheer folly to assume that our preferred or popular modes of discourse have no peripheral effect on how we act otherwise. But Pinker seems to think so:

The effects of consuming electronic media are also likely to be far more limited than the panic implies. Media critics write as if the brain takes on the qualities of whatever it consumes, the informational equivalent of “you are what you eat.” As with primitive peoples who believe that eating fierce animals will make them fierce, they assume that watching quick cuts in rock videos turns your mental life into quick cuts or that reading bullet points and Twitter postings turns your thoughts into bullet points and Twitter postings.

He seems to obliquely reference his prior examples of comics and video games, dismissing the common assumption that, e.g., watching violent media necessarily make one a violent person. The topical parallel suggests that similarly, reading 140-character tweets does not truncate one’s internal monologues at 140 characters as well. But might communicating in 140-character tweets have such an effect? I can’t say one way or the other, but I can say with relatively authority that the longer I go between writing entries on my blog, the more difficult it is to resume doing so. As with most tasks both physical and mental, practice is the key to ongoing success; the doomsday scenario implied by these media’s harshest critics is a motley group of teens whose communicative and contemplative faculties are entirely destroyed by the diminishing trend of online dialogue. At the same time Pinker denies this absorptive effect, he also stresses the need to remove oneself from said media—”develop strategies of self-control, as we do with every other temptation in life”—which would seem to indicate that he believes even the lovely and novel can ultimately be detrimental if they demand too much of our time and attention. A great many users of such media—one might even say the vast majority—manage a separation of concerns; what worries the worriers, of course, is the remaining portion for whom these media have the described deleterious effect: I have known classmates who, because they relied on Powerpoints, did not in four years of university develop even a passable acuity for speaking in front of groups.

A Disparity of Objects

Speaking of universities:

It’s not as if habits of deep reflection, thorough research and rigorous reasoning ever came naturally to people. They must be acquired in special institutions, which we call universities, and maintained with constant upkeep, which we call analysis, criticism and debate. They are not granted by propping a heavy encyclopedia on your lap, nor are they taken away by efficient access to information on the Internet.

With this single paragraph, it seems as though Pinker has not understood at all the very criticisms he has been deflecting. I would of course agree that institutions of higher education, along with the continued exercise of the intellect, are necessary for said “deep reflection”. Of course, the “analysis, criticism, and debate” to which he refers are the very items on the cultural chopping block—Twitter, for all its many merits, does not have the proper facilities for an organized or reasoned conversation, and while perhaps we’d like to think of each tweet as a doorway to something more interesting, we all know that a great many are the more sickly and pallid tabloid variety.

Perhaps the crux of my disagreement comes down to how Pinker sees the very nature of social media: “efficient access to information on the Internet” and “Facebook” or “Twitter” are synonymous only in the most crudely general of ways. No one expects that without glib and carefree media of this sort we’d all turn into lexicographers and physicists with tweed jackets, but neither is it fair to say that media which is a product of our own glib and voyeuristic tendencies, and which conducts itself as such, is equivalent to real collaborative effort or collected knowledge: in other words, Twitter may point you to a Wikipedia entry, but in that case only the Wikipedia entry itself constitutes any real form of information aside from (maybe) the tweeter’s succinct binary opinion. As a method of collating or evaluating full-text information, therefore, social media has some function, but at the cost of indulging those of our impulses which aren’t interested in the “constant upkeep” of our contemplative faculties.

In other words, I’m not sure what idealized technologies Pinker has been looking at, but those I’m aware of aren’t nearly so pure. The arguments he cites against Twitter and Powerpoint remain largely unanswered, neatly sidestepped in favor of defending some utopian vision of electronic media in general as a necessary filter which allows us to comfortably engage the widening gyre of global information—not to mention a glib, hapless shrug at the notion that radically changing primary means of communication will somehow have an effect on individuals and culture as a whole. It is oddly delinquent of Pinker, from whom I’ve come to expect so much better.

Foundation by Isaac Asimov

In what has become an unofficial theme for my reading selections this year, I’ve chosen yet another classic or important piece of science fiction; Asimov himself is considered, if not the father of science fiction (that title is usually reserved for Verne), then at least one of its major players during the genre’s ascension in the middle half of last century (along with Heinlein and Clarke). Foundation is the first book in the eponymous trilogy (and later an even longer series), and arguably his most popular and important book. Though parts of it have aged poorly, it’s easy to see how the book propelled its genre into orbit.

The main character of Foundation (and, I’m assuming, the entire series) appears alive only in the first chapter. His name is Hari Seldon, and he is a “psychohistorian” living on the central city of the Empire, a vast galactic empire sometime in the distant future. On a side note, this imperial city—known as Trantor—formed the basis for George Lucas’ Coruscant, since it’s a planet whose entire surface, give or take, has been turned into a single contiguous city.

Psychohistory, perhaps more than Seldon himself, forms the impetus for the plot of Foundation. Though it’s purely Asimov’s invention, it is more or less a melange of statistical probability, sociology, and anthropology: in effect, by understand human behavior, and the statistical likelihood of people and civilizations following expected patterns, one can accurately predict the long-term future of large cultural bodies (such as empires). When we join the story, Seldon is in the middle of predicting the Empire’s ultimate collapse—and with it, the downfall of humanity. To the Emperor, at the head of a seemingly thriving imperial organism, this seems crazy and seditious, but naturally Seldon is proven right and the empire shortly (in psychohistorical terms) collapses. Seldon arranges for his followers to be moved to a far-flung planet called Terminus, where they will ostensibly work non-stop on a giant Encyclopedia, in order to document and codify human knowledge before the 30,000-year galactic dark age sets in.

The rest of the book is a chronicle of Terminus and its surrounding planets on the edge of the galaxy, far from the (collapsed/dying) imperial center. I need hardly tell you that Seldon, though long dead, is right in every prediction, and the events of the book follow his plan—which aims to reduce the interregnum period from 30’000 years to a mere 1’000—with an almost mechanical precision. Generally, this takes the form of some actor having to wait until there is simply no other alternative, and then executing the remaining action. As you may imagine, this makes for something of an impoverished story, and you would be right in the sense that this political vignettes, separated by generations and each starring different descendants of Seldon’s original Encyclopedists, are not individually particularly compelling bits of statecraft or war. Their cumulative effect, however, says a great deal about someone’s idea of human progression (Seldon’s? Asimov’s?).

It is, in some ways, a rather cynical outlook, if a common one: humans, by way of their nature, build themselves and civilizations in cycles or waves. The empire, like each individual in it, will crest and then trough. That this nature should be so predictable and ineluctable that Seldon could predict it with mere statistical calculation (albeit it complex), is not a glowing endorsement for the intelligence or resilience of collective humanity. One must remember, too, that Asimov published Foundation in 1951, after the cataclysmic and literally explosive end of World War II and the foreboding start of the Cold War: the storied and continual squabbling and sabre-rattling of superpowers must have seemed as wearisome then as it does now. To Asimov’s credit, his galactic recreation of the fall of Rome and the ensuing dark ages contains more than simply war: rather, it is a “what-if” analysis of the possibility of concerted effort to retain scientific knowledge in the face of moral and informational vacuum—barbarism, in other words. Everything from religion to commerce is used a vehicle for achieving an end (perpetuating the scientific knowledge of the previous empire, including that of atomic power), an idea which is once again somewhat cynical, but also novel.

During one period, the Foundation turn their knowledge into a religion called Scientism (since many planets, having regressed to a relative Iron Age, could not distinguish between science and magic), and I can’t help but think of Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, which must have taken some inspiration from Asimov. Both books were serial novels, compiled from separate short stories; both deal with institutions which seek to preserve knowledge during dark ages; both comment upon the cyclical (and let’s face it: destructive) nature of human existence; both, too, comment upon the nature of the institutions doing the safeguarding. But while Miller’s story illustrated his conflicting views on the Catholic Church, Asimov’s Foundation contains very little ambivalence upon its eponymous institution, perhaps in part because Asimov himself had no allegiances to religious institutions (he was a Humanist), and while Foundation‘s view of human nature may have been somewhat cynical, it was paradoxically complimentary, a tribute to the ability of enlightened individuals to preserve societal good from self-destruction.

On Monsters by Stephen T. Asma

Hot on the heels of a book about a monster comes a new about monsters generally, though I honestly did not plan it that way. Though I’m not an avid fan of old (or new, for that matter) monster movies, I am generally interested in the engines of culture which generate monsters. This is one of the reasons that I like Kornwolf so much: where monsters come from is ultimately more interesting than the monsters themselves.

Asma seems to be of this same opinion. He begins his book with a few notable examples of mythical monsters from antiquity, such as the griffon/gryphon, and uses these examples to illustrate a few salient points about our basic cultural archetypes of monsterdom. First, monsters are liminal creatures—that is, they usually have some connection, however tenuous, with things within the normal realm. The aforementioned griffin, for instance, may be made of parts from several different creatures, but they are at least recognizable animals. The unease we feel about monsters, therefore, is the degree to which they approach humanity or recognizability while still remaining foreign or apart. I use the word “foreign” on purpose, because what quickly becomes apparent to the astute reader is that the prehistoric cultural or biological forces which create monsters are also responsible for such wonderful things as racism—that is, our fear or hatred of the liminal.

If the initial chapter had someone bolstered my expectations of this book as a simple bestiary or codex of cryptids, I would find myself sorely mistaken in successive chapters. In fact, Asma’s book quickly veers away from any cryptozoological phenomenon at all, turning into a rather dense work of sociological scholarship. By the end of the book, he has wended his way from the combinatorial monsters of antiquity to modern-day “monsters” like serial killers, riding all along on a thread that monsters are really the dividing line in the Self/Other binary which forms the grist for so many Orientalist tracts. This is not to say, of course, that we “make” monsters like John Wayne Gacy, or monsters are simply misunderstood creatures or any kind of simpering apologetic nonsense of that sort, but rather that monsters are invariably made within the system, and reflect the fears and vagaries of that system.

In some cases, monsters act as foils to man’s hubris: as King Kong or Godzilla checked man’s arrogance against nature, so the Biblical “Leviathan” was a reassertion of Yahweh’s ultimate power (via nature). Similarly, the Hebrew “Golem” is an example of an uncontrolled creation running rampant. In this way, Asma’s opening etymology of the word monsters—from the Latin monere, meaning “to warn”—is prescient. Monsters are warnings about something; the object of that preposition varies depending on culture and context, and may vary from the reasonable and timeless (for a modern-day analogy to the Golem, consider atomic weapons) to the savage and ignorant (consider the Nazi campaign to portray der Juden as slavering, hook-nosed predators).

The heartening theme of this book is that one can watch the steady progression of humanity’s approach to monsters, or to those peripheral elements of our consciousness made manifest in fear and legend. Begin with the relatively barbarous approach of some ancient Greeks to the birth of hermaphroditic infants—drowning them—and proceed through the ages: some points are low—witch burnings—and some are better—the point at which our understanding of evolution and genetics removes the superstition and stigma from birth defects, mutants, and other various and sundry phenomenon. Whereas a woman who gave birth to a child with harlequin ichthyosis may once have been thought to cavort with the devil, or her husband too much or too little semen, we now know such things are mere generic vagary, even though it took us a long time to get to that point. The very name of the book—On Monsters—is a reference to 16th century surgeon Ambroise Pare’s On Monsters and Marvels, perhaps the first semi-scientific approach to explaining birth defects in humans and animals.

Though not necessarily the right book for those looking for more lurid details about monsters or cryptozoology, On Monsters was a surprisingly good read—perhaps a little plodding at times—and rich enough in insight to leave one thinking long after the last page is read. Our own fears and imaginations, after all, are the generative principle behind our monsters; what do our monsters look like?

Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins

I don’t recall at what point I became aware of John Perkin’s tell-all exposé on the seedy underworld of global politics, but while the idea was intriguing, it sounded a bit too exaggerated for my tastes, and I left it well enough alone. Finally, I could not resist the temptation to read this tome by Perkins, who is referred to as a “frothing conspiracy theorist” (more on this later) but praised by a multitude of readers.

First, the story as Perkins tells it. After being evaluated by the NSA, Perkins is offered a lucrative position by the firm Chas. T. Main, whom Perkins thereafter refers to as MAIN, as though it’s a secret criminal organization like SPECTRE. Taught by a mysterious woman named Claudine, he is told upfront that he will be an “Economic Hit Man,” thereinafter referred to as EHM. The modus operandi of such people is to act as economic advisers to developing nations, convincing them to invest millions or billions of dollars into infrastructure, the creation of which will be contracted out to rich American firms like Chas. T. Main, Halliburton, Brown and Root, and all those other semi-governmental private industries that have come into such prominence in the last decade or so. This, however, was the early 70s, and the US was locked in a Cold War with the Soviet Union, and trying to stave off the encroachment of—gasp!—socialism by propping up rightwing dictators in Latin America, and generally engaging in all kinds of general skullduggery of the clock-and-dagger variety. Perkins takes to his job, visiting such locales as Equador, Iran, Indonesia, Panama, and Saudi Arabia. Most of the time, he is plagued by a feeling of guilt that what he’s doing is right. Eventually, he resigns, founds a successful energy company, sells it, and is eventually prompted to finish and publish this book by the events of 11 September 2001.

There are a number of different aspects to consider about this story. First of all: is it true? That’s difficult to say. Perkins relies solely on his authorial voice to win over his audience. There is, after all, no paper trail or mountain of evidence or stolen documents that he produces which gives any concreteness to his claims. Narrator reliability becomes a critical issue for readers, especially as the size and scope of Perkins’ accusations grow and become more wide-eyed and hysterical. It doesn’t help that the whole thing sounds like the plot of a cheesy Ian Fleming impersonator: when Perkins talks about the arsenal of economic hitmen, he doesn’t stop at merely making inflated economic forecasts (which he did), but also likes to throw around lists that include “sex and murder,” as though writing copy for the dustjacket flaps of airport bookstore inventory. Then, too, are the not-quite-accusations that the CIA or some other nefarious government agency was responsible for the deaths of —among others—Jaime Roldós Aguilera, the reformist president of Ecuador, and Omar Torrijos, president of Panama. It’s no secret that the United States was involved in some pretty terrible things in Latin America at this time, and so Perkins’ accusations in this regard are not terribly far-fetched, though he ultimately ties everything back to what he calls the “corporatocracy”: a shifting conglomerate of politicians and business leaders who exercise both legal and illegal control over world affairs through a variety of means.

We know that there is a revolving door between the private sector and the halls of government in America; but Perkins’ contention is that, for instance, he was evaluated by the NSA prior to his hiring by “MAIN,” and that even though his paycheck came from Chas. T. Main, he was in essence working for the government, or some governmental-industrial complex which Perkins envisions. One sympathizes with the man, since his accusations resonate with our cynicism about the government, but he ultimately sounds so histrionic that I’m tempted to dismiss him as a quack. I’m sure the events he described happened in some capacity or another, but my guess is that minor discrepancies between his recollections/narrative and the truth make all the difference in the world.

Sebastian Mallaby wrote a scathing critique of the book several years ago. Its thrust was that Perkins is either a raving conspiratorial nutcase with flecks of spittle on his tinfoil hat, or else an opportunist, tapping the guilt of the hysterical left to sell his book. Surprisingly, Mallaby takes the most issue not with Perkins’ position that we swept through developing countries and convincing them to farm out millions of dollars of work to American firms, but rather with Perkins’ bitter note that these infrastructural improvements did not help poor people. Of course they helped the poor people, Mallaby proclaims, as though that is the fine line between fraud and aid. Perhaps he’s missing the point. Or perhaps he is simply an “apologist” for the current “system of exploitation,” as Perkins asserts.

The more pressing concern, in my mind, is that readers have no real reason to believe that anything Perkins’ says is true; he could, by all rights, be lecturing that the moon landings were faked, the president is a robot, or the world exists on the back of a giant turtle. The only way you would be likelt to accept it as gospel is if it feels true, and Perkins makes every attempt to write the book that way. He cakes on the liberal guilt, spending a lot of time in each new locale ruminating about how much he hates himself for ostensibly cheating the poor and the innocent, ruining the environment, or participating in the sort of brutish cultural and economic imperialism that would raise Noam Chomsky’s hackles. It’s a simplistic binary system: the poor are always innocent and downtrodden, and the rich are always part of oligopolies, corrupt governments, and shadowy corporatocracies whose fat, suited leaders smoke cigars in back rooms and laugh big booming laughs about grinding the impoverished masses under their boot-heel in order to make a few more dollars. To whatever extent such characterizations are true, Perkins stresses them in order to fan the flames of his readers’ paranoia, but he also fails to place any sort of logical limit on corruption. One half-expects him to bellow a cry for class warfare and call for Dick Cheney to be roasted like a suckling pig.

Confessions of an Economic Hitman has a kernel of truth to it, somewhere, but it ultimately falls victim to its own excesses, wallowing in likely exaggeration and embellishment. I wouldn’t go quite so far as to call Perkins a “a vainglorious peddler of nonsense” like Mallaby does, but there’s definitely dimensions to his story that make me uncomfortable—and not in the way he intends.

The Guinea Pig Diaries by A.J. Jacobs

I became a fan of A.J. Jacobs when I read his debut book, The Know-It-All. The idea of reading the entire encyclopedia was a bit preposterous, but overshadowed by the sheer joy of trivia; I never really thought of it as an experiment per se. Things changed a bit with The Year of Living Biblically, which was a genuine life experiment for Jacobs, and one that sometimes put him in awkward positions. If you read my reviews, you’ll find that I enjoyed both, but found the latter somewhat cloying at times; Jacobs has a tendency to profess life-altering revelations or profundities which, if they are true, make him naïve, and if they are false, making him disingenuous.

I confess to being underinformed about the nature of The Guinea Pig Diaries. Rather than being a single, year-long experiment (e.g. living biblically), it’s a series of short experiments. One about outsourcing his life to India I recall as a magazine piece he did for Esquire; another tells a story from 1997 or so, very early in his tenure with the magazine. The pieces in the book seem sequential, however; that is, each successive experiment has the knowledge of the previous experiment, and and one point Jacobs makes reference to a meta-experiment, namely a year of small-scale experiments. I am unsure, therefore, if The Guinea Pig Diaries is a synthesis of recollection and the choicest bits from his meta-experiment, or perhaps nothing more than a collated version of his essays for Esquire with brief codas after each.

Jacobs begins with his experiment to help his young, attractive babysitter find a new boyfriend via online dating websites. Using her supplied photos and input, Jacobs takes over most of the responsibility for fielding emails from prospective suitors. His findings include the typical sort of trash you might find on such websites—ridiculous bootlickers/asskissers, married men unashamedly looking for extramarital fun, and swaggering cowboys—but he is ultimately surprised by the (apparently) genuine neediness of most of the would-be suitors. This, he posits, finally occurs to him because he is now wielding the staggering power of femininity: attractive women can pick and choose their rewards, and he finds this power intoxicating and a little frightening.

Or, consider Jacobs’ experiment with Radical Honesty, in which he attempts to wean himself off white lies. The most fun this essay has is the author’s conversations with the founder of Radical Honesty, who—honestly—counters Jacobs’ protestations about white lies by calling him a manipulative son of a bitch (and so forth). This is the most one-sided of Jacobs’ experiments: armed with the story of a recently-widowed acquaintance, he concludes that Radical Honesty, while interesting in its concepts, is an impractical form of communication. Though Radical Honesty allows “kind of authentic sharing that creates the possibility of love and intimacy” because “lying and protecting your image takes a heavy toll on your health and relationships,” it falls apart because honesty requires not simply the guts to tell the truth (easy) but the guts to hear it (not so easy). The difference between open communication and self-destruction is a universal acknowledgment—Jacobs notes with some concern that the crux of his essay was already covered, if somewhat spastically, in Liar, Liar.

The most well-known of the included essays is Jacobs’ attempt to outsource the drudgework of his life to India, hiring two different companies to handle his work (research for articles, etc.) and his personal life (social secretarial work, basically). This essay is the sort that bothers me most about Jacobs’ writing, however; there seems a disparity between the sort of conclusion we would expect and the conclusion he lets us see. At one point, he writes, he assigned his social secretary to “argue” with his wife with some degree of success, which is an absurd sequence of events that either did not happen as he reported them, or happened only because the participants were aware of the context. If Jacobs’ wife Julie accepted the argument-by-proxy only because she understood its role in Jacobs’ work, does that count as a meaningful result of the “experiment”? I would argue that this essay, like most of Jacobs’ work, comprises a textual (and more cerebral) equivalent to reality television: the premise promises an experiment wherein a—wacky—variable skews the results of his life; during the course of it, he will crack jokes, and in the end he will wax philosophical, but we as readers have no reason to believe that the data was not coerced. Jacobs’, after all, serves as his own editor, splicing the footage for dramatic effect. And the participants, insofar as they know of the experiment, will likely give answered which are informed by that knowledge. The result is far less a work of biography; in fact, it teeters on the edge of becoming a creative biographical fiction, the sort which Dave Eggers has tended to write lately.

If I find the works somewhat perfunctory, perhaps it is because Jacobs’ simply isn’t well-suited to the short form: The Year of Living Biblically, while occasionally insipid, was much more meaningfully tied into Jacobs’ life: he and his wife’s hope for a baby girl (and guilty disappointment at more boys) was one of the truly touching parts of a book made wacky by Hebrew haircuts and self-admitted sanctimony. The essays in The Guinea Pig Diaries, perhaps because they require so much less investment from Jacobs or his wife, seem more impersonal: the author can hold them at arms length, dash out 4500 words, and proceed living a life that doesn’t make his wife want to throttle him. In the meantime, the readers get articles that are more along the lines of Jacobs’ mental_floss contributions: a small, digestible bolus of trivia which, while interesting, does not ask for personal investment or deliver much erudition. These are not bad—I like mental_floss, after all—but I know that Jacobs is capable of so much more.

The Science of Fear by Daniel Gardner

I hadn’t predicted, when I picked up Daniel Gardner’s The Science of Fear and Richard Mullen’s Physics For Future Presidents, that there would be so much overlap between the two. I suppose, ultimately, it was inevitably: Mullen’s book, by title and design, covered those areas of science which are the most politically and socially relevant. As is so often the case with complicated issues with big numbers, these situations have the ability to frighten people who can’t keep a level head: consider, if you will, the fear, antipathy, and abject horror that most people have for nuclear energy after the events of Three Mile Island and —even worse in the sense that it actually caused deaths—Chernobyl.

Enter The Science of Fear, Daniel Gardner’s (a Canadian journalist) to both explain and debunk the fear that tends to grip most people when it comes to vaguely menacing concepts.

Like Mullen, one of Gardner’s opening stories is about 9/11, one of the most vivid collective cultural memories of recent history. To illustrate the destructive power of fear, Gardner shows how the hijacking of three planes—something which is now an almost impossible occurrence—caused a dramatic decrease in airline travel and equivalent increase in automobile traffic as people chose to drive instead of fly. Given the relatively high rate of highway fatalities compared to that of air travel, Gardner estimates that the increase caused an additional 6,000 deaths. This simple exercise in probability illustrates not only that we are susceptible to irrational (though not unwarranted) fear, but that it actively hurts us, and that the people who should know better and tell us as much so rarely do. Gardner notes that one of the few politicians to ever point out that relative safety of airline travel even post-9/11 was John McCain, but he did it in the form of a 2003 book as opposed to speaking his mind where people might actually hear him. George W. Bush, for all the flak he caught for his encouragement for America to shop, was doing the right thing in telling us to continue about our business; unfortunately, he spent the rest of his presidency beating the “Fear!” horse to death. Republicans tend to play this card heavily; since their platform doesn’t offer many points besides cutting back on everything but defense spending, it was a decent way to get Americans to color their ballots red; Democrats did some of it, too, though I don’t think I need to explain how much doom and gloom the GOP platform contains.

Fear is difficult, Gardner explains. That’s because it’s not a reaction that easily listens to facts or rational arguments. Gardner’s surrogates for human impulse is the Head and the Gut; the head is good at figuring out the logical side, but it takes time and energy; the Gut, meanwhile, is our primitive survival mechanism which finds shallow patterns and reacts to them in a way that attempts to assure self-preservation. In doing so, it falls prey to every statistical bias that we’ve catalogued: those which give the most influence to events which happen recently, those which give the most influence to events which happen to us in particular; those which reinforce our existing beliefs; et cetera ad infinitem.

Downplaying the likelihood of our being killed or hurt by most of the newsworthy bogeymen (dirty bombs, nuclear explosions/meltdowns, terrorists, anthrax) is an academic exercise, since it’s relatively easy to calculate the probabilities based on past history. The conclusion—as you might guess—is of course that we are far more likely to be hurt by everyday occurrences, such as our morning commute or an Egg McMuffin™, than by any spectacular event. But this knowledge doesn’t sell advertising space, it doesn’t keep our interest, and it actually forces us to accept responsibility for things instead of asking the government to legislate away our problems or simply blame it on evildoing third parties.

The title is a bit misleading; though Gardner covers some of the basic psychology that causes us to fear the way we do—including the Head/Gut dichotomy—this really isn’t about the “science” of fear so much as a point-counterpoint: choosing from the long list of bogeymen, Gardner undermines our fear of them, outs their abusers in the political or commercial sphere, and occasionally uses them to make larger points about social or political currents. By the end, the book has drifted dangerously close to repetition, as there are only so many times that the author can loop back to his original point before it becomes tiresome. On the whole, however, it is a well-constructed book, and Gardner has even more rhetorical skill than I expected when I began.

Made in America by Bill Bryson

There are few things I like better than a good book about linguistics or etymology. The only thing, I think, that could possibly make one any better is if it’s written by one of my favorite authors—namely Bill Bryson.

In fact, Made in America was my introduction to Bryson: I purchased the book (a mint-condition hardcover) for $0.25 at the library and absolutely devoured it. Not only did the book initiate a long and storied appreciation of Bryson’s writing, but I think I can honestly credit the book with inspiring my lifelong love of language.

It’s important to note that this isn’t a book like, say, Pinker’s The Language Instinct; there’s no talk of deep grammars. It isn’t even really like Baugh’s A History of the English Language. It’s really blending of etymology and anecdote, the latter of which seems to be the quality which distinguishes it from its competitors. Bryson’s continued fascination with all things interesting—his quest for peculiar miscellany or errata seems unending—is woven into the book.

Then, too, Made in America isn’t a holistic look at the English language. It doesn’t touch on its Anglo-Saxon origins, its influence from Norman French, or the introduction (perhaps “invasion” is more accurate) of Nordic elements. It doesn’t mention how we construct phonemes, or any of the grammatical fabric that underlies the language. Rather, it’s a book about vocabulary. Sure, the first bits of the book, detailing the arrival of the first pilgrims, dealt with some of the differences in pronunciation, and the historical legacy of Shakespeare and Chaucer. But soon after, American English forks, becoming its own entity, and the structure of the language itself flattens out, ceasing the rapid change that it embodied for several hundred years.

American English is notable, then, for several reasons: first, we quickly became a world leader in, well, everything, and so cultural events which spawned new words and phrases (cars, for instance), tended to come from the United States. For this reason, Bryson generally divides the chapters up by subject matter, rather than a strictly chronological list of American neologisms. There are chapters on travel (cars, hotels, interstates, Burma-Shave billboards), on food (McDonalds, burger joints, fast food), on media (television, radio, prime-time, commercials), and anything else tied to Americana. Reading the book now, I can’t help but feel a little disappointed that it was printed in 1991, since it’s therefore missing that last 18 years of linguistic innovation, especially with regard to computers and technology.

The study of American English, then, is less linguistics and more anthropology, and Made in America like an informal cultural history of the United States, emphasizing throughout how these cultural trends gave birth to new words or whole areas of news words. It is, in short, fascinating, aided by Bryson’s utterly delightful writing and dry wit. The book remains one of my favorites by him, and I recommend it heartily to just about anyone.