Bookish Thoughts

I don't think I ever would have picked up this book on my own. But the point of a book club is to get outside your comfort zone a little bit. To give a fair chance to books you might not otherwise look twice at. So I picked it up and read it. Honestly, I found most of this book to be incredibly frustrating. Gladwell opens with the confrontation between Sandra Bland, the black woman who was arrested on a traffic violation and subsequently found dead by apparent suicide in her jail cell, and Brian Encinia, the cop who arrested her. There is video of the incident, so we can all see exactly what happened. But the video lacks most of the context. So Gladwell went in search of that context, which he presents in this book as an extended inquiry into what exactly happened between Bland and Encinia. Most of the book is focused on a person's ability to sift lies from the truth. Gladwell argues that we default to believing that people are telling us the truth. That it takes a great deal o...

In Modern Romance , comedian Aziz Ansari teams up with sociologist Eric Klinenberg to investigate the ways dating has changed in modern times, with shifting social mores and advancing technology. We have more choices than ever before and more time before we're expected to settle down, which means that our goals have changed, as well as how we pursue those goals. All in all, this book made me glad that I'm happily married. Ansari's life sounds exhausting, and not just the dating aspect of it. He's so determined to have the best of everything that he invests most of his energy into researching options. If it takes him most of a day to decide where to go get lunch (only to discover that his restaurant of choice is closed) you can only imagine how frustrating and unsatisfying his dating life must be. There was some interesting information in this book, and Ansari definitely has a gift for presenting it in an interesting way. Reading this book was a lot of fun. But mostl...

I got really excited about this book from the second I heard about it. Big Data is everywhere these days, and it's something I've been working on, adjacently or directly, for years. The data I'm working with now isn't included in the scope of Christian Rudder's work, which focuses on applications in the fields of sociology and psychology. But there was a time when I almost broke into this world. There are even some projects he talks about in this book that I was involved in or hearing really cool talks about. Alas, I never quite broke into it in the way I wanted to. I've remained interested in this field, though. We're experiencing what will be the beginning of an absolute golden age for sociology and psychology. Data is available in unprecedented amounts and ways. It's not only that you can finally look at the behaviors of literally millions of people, but free from a lab those behaviors are far more natural than in any hitherto performed...

It's been a while since I read a non-fiction book. I sort of go through phases where I read them a little more often. But as this blog clearly documents, it's been at least 2 and a half years (probably more) since I last picked one up. It really just depends on something actually catching my attention. And when I started to see references to Cordelia Fine's Delusions of Gender it definitely caught my attention. This book is essentially an extended literature review. Fine looks at countless studies the claim to get at the differences between men and women and makes quick work eviscerating all of the supposedly proven biological differences. She talks about how soon in life we are bombarded with gendered information, really from the moment we're born. Or even before. She points out the over-reliance on correlation used to imply causation For example, testosterone levels in the womb are thought to be responsible for fundamental differences in male and femal...