Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman (reread)

            I decided to reread Amusing Ourselves to Death, which I ranked as the third-best book I read in 2023. I thought it was similarly amazing this time around. Above all, re-reading Amusing Ourselves to Death made me think of the modern era as an age of performance. It’s not a direct conclusion from the book itself, which is focused on the negative effects of TV on public discourse, but I was trying to think of how this book would be updated for the modern era, as I do for all the media books, and what I landed on is that the era we live in is dominated by is a need to perform. That contrasts with Postman’s analysis in the 1980s because he was focused on the negative effects of consumption, but I think the bigger issue today is the effect that constant content creation has on its creators.

            As many of the authors I have read in the “media” unit have detailed, the rise of writing created much more discourse, and the rise of typography amplified it. Postman detailed how the telegraph flooded the world with information, and like Baudrillard in Simulacra and Simulation, discussed how the ratio between information and meaning was becoming bigger and bigger. With the development of photography, it became possible to capture an image, and by the twentieth century, it was possible to capture so many images that people created illusions of moving images: film. By the end of the twentieth century, digital cameras proliferated, and editing tools developed to the point that Hollywood editors could create whole narratives without writers, leading to the development of reality TV. In the last 20 years, two developments have brought us to the present day: the rise of cell phones that place a video camera in everyone’s pocket, and the rise of social media, which gives everyone the ability to access whoever the algorithms let them reach.

            The result is that by 2025, people are performing more than ever. “Performing” is what happens when someone is in front of strangers, and is aware that the stranger’s attention is on them, especially their eyes. In a pre-writing world, occasions to perform would have been rare relative to today, and held by few people. While the average person living 6,000 years ago in modern-day Kansa probably interacted with lots of strangers, those performances were live, and could only be transmitted by word of mouth to others. Basically, if you slipped on a pile of camel shit in ancient Sumeria, nobody saw it but the people who laid eyes on it. Nobody heard about it except the people they knew, and who they knew, and who they knew and so on until everyone lost interest. Today, a video of that could be seen by a billion people in days.

            With the invention of writing, more things could be recorded, but the effect was minimal on the average person’s performance. The greatest effect of writing on performance was for the writer, and that author’s performance was minimal. No one could see him or her in the act of writing or editing, and the reader could only get the thoughts the writer put down to paper, parchment, or papyrus. Few were readers, and few were writers. The printing press enhanced this effect, but writing was and is hardly ever a performance. Reading aloud certainly was, and it was a more formalized act.

            With the rise of film, some people took on the job of performer, and became actors on screen, not just on stage. But with the rise of video, especially the video that can be shot and posted in seconds on social media, all of us have become amateur performers. Photos are a lesser form of video. Right now, millions of people are swiping right and left on apps in which they are judged by their photographs they’ve taken of themselves. For the first time ever, individuals are being viewed by thousands, if not millions, and we are all aware of it. We are surrounded by phone cameras, security cameras, and all the little sensors and X-rays and body scanners that may not see us, but know we are there. The people most embodying this social change are reality stars and influencers who, if they were credited in a film, would “act” as themselves in each performance.

            The result is that we are all learning that what is not written or caught on camera is not real, and so we all learn to perform. “Pics or it didn’t happen.” Now that we are all performing, we are more obsessed than ever with people who do it professionally, and rightly so. Professional actors and influencers and content creators are the only people who get the ultimate validation from their performance—not just the likes and comments of friends, family, and connections, but followings. Their ratios of following to followers are evidence of their value, and can even be how they make their money.

            On the other hand, the internet allows people to live out who they genuinely are like never before. Thanks to the interconnection of people around the globe, people can learn that they aren’t alone in their thoughts that would have once made them unique, if not a pariah, in a small disconnected community years ago. The biggest example of this is probably with sexual orientation, where people have been exposed to the alternative point of view—that it’s okay to be gay—that was suppressed for centuries in most places. Yet even when people are able to be their genuine selves, there is always a background understanding that they have to perform their identity. Just look at people on the internet who criticize bisexual women in relationships with men, because they are not “performing” their sexuality, or at someone who listens to Nirvana grilling someone else on their favorite album to prove they’re properly performing their fandom.

            What is the effect of this performance on all of us? First of all, it creates anxiety. The consequences of our actions are greater than ever. In a pre-industrial world, the average person lived in a community, which had a local sanction and forgiveness for misconduct. Today we live in a society where it is necessary to record individuals’ actions on a permanent record, a no-fly list, or a background check. Now, mistakes are permanent, and accessible by all. Individuals have more life choices than ever thanks to capitalism, and thanks to social media, the outcomes of those choices are broadcastable to the entire world. Now, your social position isn’t just decided by your choices (for better and for worse), but the outcome is more public than ever before. I can go look up anyone from high school to see where they work on LinkedIn (or if they even have a LinkedIn), and that search result reveals whatever they perform on the website.

            Additionally, constant performing requires little lies: smiling for a photo when you weren’t really happy, editing pictures on social media to look a certain way, saying things on dating apps that you would never say to someone face-to-face. There are more job interviews now than 100 years ago—people interview for many jobs and interview several rounds for the same job. At some point, these little lies obscure the truth not only to the audience of this performance but to the performers themselves. Combine this with modern social mobility, and contrast with the life of the medieval peasant. The peasant’s life was materially much worse than almost anyone’s life in modern-day America. But the peasant knew who he was. The modern person may know who they are, but they may not. It is pretty damn common to hear about a “journey of self-discovery,” which often involves a phone detox, or travel to somewhere else. Self-discovery requires a detox from performance. Because the performer who acts every day can’t be sure where the role ends and their true identity begins.

            Performance also leads to a degradation of social trust, because all of us performers can’t be sure how much everyone else is performing. Do we actually like that movie? Or that song? Or that drink? Or are they performing? This line is especially blurred in product placement advertising on podcasts and social media, where influencers hawk a product as a part of their normal influencing. But in our daily lives, we also wonder, “am I enjoying this restaurant because the food tastes good, or am I enjoying it because the reviews were good and the prices were high?” “Am I experiencing pleasure, or performing the experience of pleasure?”

            Performance becomes a necessary adaptation to the mediated world we live in. Modern people are exposed to more stimuli than any humans who ever lived, and our performances in response to those stimuli determine our social relationships. We must have responses to pieces of news, new movies, and college football scores. In the non-social media world, everyone forms their social identity by telling others how they don’t like Kanye West because of his anti-Semitic remarks, or how they vape because they don’t care about the health warnings from the CDC. This helps form social identity. But the same performances also become necessary on social media, where everyone is open to criticism for what they say and don’t say by large groups. To speak is to open yourself up to criticism for what you say, and to not speak is to open yourself up to criticism for what you didn’t say. “Your silence is deafening.” The expectation to perform means that everyone is now expected to have an opinion on the latest conflict in the Middle East. And whereas it used to be in bad taste to offer an uninformed opinion, silence is more likely to be construed in the harshest way possible.

            Anyway, after that rant, I’ll talk about the book itself and what I picked up the second time around.

            I really got a lot out of the focus on the different between a world of the word and world of the image this time around, maybe because I’ve read McLuhan. I thought it was interesting that when Judaism pioneered monotheism, God was a God of the Word, and the religion was especially hostile toward idol worship, iconography based on the image. That’s a pretty fundamental idea: that we should worship words not images. And it is interesting that that ideal is under threat today as society turns more and more towards the image and away from the word. But the image isn’t all bad is Postman’s view. He argues, citing McLuhan, that the television is not good for spreading hate. And there is some vague correlation immediately obvious there. I can think that the TV was at its greatest power in the USA from the 1950s until the 2000s, which was a relatively must more domestically peaceful time than before or after. There were obviously a lot of virulent political debates, but it seems like the polarization that was already growing in the 1990s really took off during the Obama presidency.

            I like the paragraph where Postman writes, citing Richard Hofstadter, that “America was founded by intellectuals,” and is unique among states for being founded by intellectuals. I like that because there’s a lot of talk about how America has an anti-intellectual current, and while that may be true, the origins of the Constitution are definitely in intellectuals. As Hofstadter wrote, “The Founding Fathers were sages, scientists, men of broad cultivation, many of them apt in classical learning, who used their wide reading in history, politics and law to solve the exigent problems of their time.”

            Despite enjoying the pro-intellectual take, I think that the book takes on a pretentious, elitist tone at times. Postman is really scolding people for watching the news, seeing it as a less-valuable medium. And while I basically agree with him, I think he is a little overly harsh. He recounts the story of the Lincoln-Douglas debate to chide modern-day Americans for not having the attention span to sit through eight hours of debate. And while I agree that the modern presidential debate is pathetic by comparison, I also think there are a lot more entertaining things to do today than there were in 1854 Peoria, Illinois, and that level of attention span will never return. That said, it is fascinating to think that they just went all day long. Something interesting that Postman didn’t live to see was the rise of the podcast. That shows that there is still an audience for long form discussion, just not on TV. People will listen to podcasts for hours, and that is probably the basis of a new Lincoln-Douglas debate. Even better, podcasts are now videotaped, not for TV, but for short reels of seconds to a couple of minutes. People will watch several of these, and then often download the podcast. I don’t think most people are watching the whole videos, but the videos serve as a way to tease the podcast content. I am optimistic that podcasts are a sort of “cure” to the dumbing down of TV discourse, where thinking on camera doesn’t make for good TV.

            I continue to find Postman’s analysis of typography versus telegraphy really interesting Typography increased mankind’s ability to analyze information, since people could write, publish, and disseminate long treatises about topics with type. And without having to be a town crier, they could have a crowd focus on just their words, while the rhetorician had to perform his craft. Typography increased analysis relative to information, while telegraphy did the opposite. The telegraph was for short messages delivered fast, which could only be used for the news, not deep analysis of the news.

            Something interesting that Postman says about TV is that it has become a “command center” medium, determining which other media we would consume. That is to say, in 1985, when Postman wrote the book, people would decide what books to read and what music to listen to based on what they saw on TV. The same would be true today of social media/the internet. TV retains some relevance, but the most relevant medium is the internet, in no small part because it determines what other media users consume. Another way the internet has assumed the role of TV is in the way it fulfils Postman’s first commandment of TV: “Thou shalt have no prerequisites.” To go viral, just like to get on TV, a video needs to obtain a wide audience. That means it can’t rely on any base level of knowledge except the lowest common denominator. Of course, the most ad money goes to what is most viral, so, just like on TV, it is most profitable to serve the lowest common denominator.

            One last note that I don’t recall thinking so much of last time is on educational TV. Postman is very critical of educational TV such as Sesame Street because in his view, it seeks to answer, “what would look good on TV?” before answering “what do children need to learn?” It’s just like in schools. Teachers and professors, in order to keep the attention of their classes, try to teach them things that are amusing¸ rather than things that are entertaining. That’s how little kids end up learning so much about dinosaurs, which is all totally useless knowledge. Topics like marine biology are interesting to kids, but not that useful, and are mainly taught as a form of entertainment rather than learning. On the other hand, there is a lot of time in life to be bored, and I can’t be too mad about things being entertaining.

Miscellaneous:

• One of my favorite passages of the book is this one, which is one big reason why I love books:

Imagine what you would think of me, and this book, if I were to pause here, tell you that I will return to my discussion in a moment, and then proceed to write a few words on behalf of United Airlines or the Chase Manhattan Bank. You would rightly think that I had no respect for you and certainly, no respect for the subject.

• “There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies.” – Walter Lippmann

Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard, translated by Sheila Faria Glaser

    Another challenging book. I had originally planned to read this in French, but after failing miserably with Society and the Spectacle in French, I figured English was better for this. That was a good choice because I could barely read this in English. 

    Here is what I think I understand. Simulation is getting more and more important these days (1980 when the book was written). Simulation is different from dissimulation. Dissimulation hides something that is there, while simulation creates something that is not there. Simulation is different from representation. In representation, the sign/symbol is equal to the real thing. Simulation negates the sign as having any value. I don't really know what they means, but it creates four phases of "the image."

• The image is the reflection of a profound reality;
• The image masks and denatures a profound reality;
• The image masks the absence of a profound reality;
• The image has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum.

And once again, I am winging this and did not understand this, but I think that those four things, in order, are representation, dissimulation, simulation, and simulacrum. I found an example on the internet that may or may not be accurate:

My understanding is that Baudrillard is identifying a way that society is becoming more and more rootless and alienated from reality. The modern world is a fake world where we have fewer and fewer real, personal experiences, and more and more mediated experiences: mediated through technology. Right there in the name social media you can see it: our socialization is not personal, but is mediated by both the hardware of the phone/computer and the software of the app used for socialization. While in the 1800s the media was a letter, today it is facetime. We might be getting better ways to mediate social interaction, but the result has been an increase in mediated social interaction, and an increase in the tolerable distance for people to live apart from each other. I think it is sort of the opposite of what McLuhan said about an implosion when it comes to close relations. Technology has imploded the world into close interaction through social media, but exploded close relations into living further apart and interacting less than ever. I have no doubt that the average person today lives way further than the average person in 1425 from their friends, family, and loved ones than ever before, and yet it able to interact over social media with people on different continents. This is one part of what Trow was saying in Within the Context of No Context, about how the medium space has disappeared. That also interacts with the Bowling Alone and "third place" discourse.

    Something very interesting is that Baudrillard mentioned the Loud family from the show American Family, which I learned about in the Emily Nussbaum book, Cue the Sun. This unit on the media has been my first real success on these reading units. It feels like one cohesive course as each book references the others previously published. In the same vein, Baudrillard says that we are no longer the "society of the spectacle," thanks to reality TV--now there is a feedback loop. The result, as I understand it, of the advent of reality TV is that there is no more distinction between the real and the fake in the world of art. The participation of the audience is huge now--someone who watches Survivor becomes a contestant on Survivor, bringing their experiences as a viewer to their experience as a contestant performing the art. Then, that same person goes back to being a viewer of the show, but now viewing the art form with the experience of the contestant. Then, the same person starts a podcast, a new art form in a different media, where they criticize and comment on the next season of Survivor, as other viewers/listeners take in that new content, and perhaps become contestants themselves. At this point, can anyone really say that Survivor is just the show that airs on Wednesdays at 8pm Eastern on CBS? I would say that the fandom is now just as big a part of the show as the contestants themselves, because there is no way to separate the two. The same goes for the writing of TV shows and movie series. George RR Martin can sit on the internet and hear all the fan theories about the next Song of Ice and Fire book before he has finished it. He has been able to see the mass reaction to the end of the TV show that adapted his book, and change the ending of the book if he wants to. The artist-to-viewer/reader/listener feedback loop moves faster now than the actual publication of the art.

    

    One other concept I thought was interesting from the book is the discussion of surveillance. Baudrillard writes that surveillance cameras on the wall don't just surveil by videotaping, but surveil by signaling to the shopper at the supermarket that she is being videotaped, even if she is not. Some stores go even further (and I am doubtful this existed in 1980) by videotaping the entrance of the store and showing the captured footage in real time on a TV screen, so a shopper can see herself being taped. Moreover, Baudrillard writes that billboards and ads surveil their viewers, because even though they don't record anything, they inform the viewer that she is not the only viewer, and that she is in a public space, where this ad is meant to reach others. Today it goes even further. Ads have entered the personal sphere, making it a less private one, even more than in Baudrillard's day. Today, the majority of ads we see are on our phones, the most intimate personal objects we have, that we interact with every day. Advertisers are able to send us ads even there, reminding us that nowhere are we truly private or out of the reach of capitalist forces, which need advertising to convince people to buy things they never needed. But on the other hand, lots of the products being advertised are very useful!

    So that's the good part of the book. Then it gets very weird. Just like Society and the Spectacle, it gets all into Marxism that makes no sense whatsoever to me. There is also a CRAZY chapter about a book called Crash, which is apparently all about people who get off on car crashes. That chapter came out of nowhere. I was appalled. He just heavily quoted the book and it was the nastiest stuff I have ever read. Ever. It read like Baudrillard read that shit and now he was making us read it too. I guess it made some impact on him. I could not make heads or tails of it except that it was shocking and gross. A masterwork of nasty work.

    I'll end by saying this was an interesting book. It was short, but could have been shorter without all the weird stuff in the end. It made me think though, so in my mind, that's a good book.

Miscellaneous:

• This line cracked me up, this drama queen: "The contrast with the absolute solitude of the parking lot--a veritable concentration camp--is total." That's somebody who has lost his car in the lot and spent hours looking for it lol.

 

 

Spring Snow by Yukio Mishima, translated by Michael Gallagher

    This was sort of a random book I picked and it was very interesting. I started it and absolutely loved it and then I looked up the author and I just thought what the heck. This guy was a psycho. He tried to stage a coup and committed seppuku? It sounds like he went insane at the end of his life with radical nationalism and this book was a part of it, letting him imagine a time at the height of imperial reverence in Japan. He was also apparently a closeted homosexual, something that is clear from his descriptions of men in the books.

    But he has a really beautiful way of writing, and clearly likes to write about beautiful things and beautiful people. Here are a couple passages I liked from the book:

The butler came in to announce that the carriage was waiting. The horses neighed and their breath flared white from their nostrils, to swirl up into the black, wintry sky. Kiyoaki enjoyed seeing horses proudly displaying their strength in winter, when their usual musky smell was fainter and their hooves rang clearly on the frozen ground. On a warm spring day, a galloping horse was only too clearly a sweating animal of flesh and blood. But a horseracing through a snowstorm became one with the very elements; wrapped in the whirling blast of the north wind, the beast embodied the icy breath of winter.

Iinuma had plenty of time to reflect later, but very often a man's whole life alters course because of a moment's hesitation. That instant is like a fold made down the middle of a sheet of paper. In it, the underside becomes the upmost, and what was once visible is hidden forever.

One hot sultry night, as Kiyoaki was settling into an uneasy sleep, he began to dream. It was quite unlike his previous experiences. If one flounders in the shallows of sleep, wading where the water is tepid and full of all sorts of flotsam that has come in from deeper water to pile up with the land debris in a tangled heap, one is liable to slash one's feet.

Her lovely white hand grew more and more emaciated until she could no longer move it. It lay there as cold and still as a single moonbeam coming in through a window.

    Maybe the biggest theme in the book is the contrast of the East and West, with Japanese embrace of the West usually being considered as an indication of decadence or weakness. In this book all about aristocrats, the best things are the Japanese things. I think that when Mishima writes his flowery descriptions, he focuses them on aspects of Japanese culture and Japanese people's thoughts, usually using Westernness just as a marker of someone's personality. Our principal characters in the book, Kiyoaki and Satoko, don't really do the Western imitation thing that other aristocrats do in the book. Similarly, devotion to the Emperor is a huge theme. All the characters are totally dedicated to protecting the Emperor, even if it means hiding things from the Imperial Family, because it is better to hide the truth from them so that scandal never touches them.

    One thought I had reading about Mishima is that he must have regretted not serving in the Japanese military in World War Two. I read that he faked Typhus to get out of it, and this book makes me think he regretted it, since Kiyoaki, the protagonist, also fakes illness at one point, and looks wistfully at the soldiers he sees. And then Mishima became an ultranationalist later in his life and then committed seppuku. If Kiyoaki is autobiographical, Mishima doesn't seem like a pleasant guy. The protagonist is conniving, cynical, and cruel. 

 

The Jews of Poland Between Two World Wars, edited by Yisrael Gutman, Ezra Mendelsohn, Jehuda Reinharz, and Chone Shmeruk

I am too busy to properly reflect on this book. 

Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan

    I found this book a lot more readable than The Gutenberg Galaxy. Gutenberg had way too many literary references, and this one had them too, but it was more of what I was looking for. That said, between these two books, I feel like I've read half of Finnegan's Wake. 

    McLuhan starts by telling us that "After three thousand years of explosion, by means of fragmentary and mechanical technologies, the Western world is imploding." Electricity, writes McLuhan, has brought the world closer together than ever and will only continue to do so. The electric age's implosion is in conflict with the explosion and expansion of the mechanical age. But one of McLuhan's precepts is that technologies stack on top of each other, and don't really fully replace each other. So there isn't a complete implosion. Something interesting about McLuhan's perspective in 1964 and mine today is that he sees electricity as necessarily imploding the world and forcing us to all live in close proximity. However, today, the internet allows us to all ignore each other better, being siloed into political bubbles. I also find the idea that most previous inventions, like the wheel, were "explosive." McLuhan calls Roman roads explosive inventions, but Roman roads carried barbarians in just as well as they brought Romans out.

    One principle that I didn't understand before or after reading the book was the idea of hot and cold media. I understand that hot media are supposed to engage one sense in high definition and require focus and cool media are more passive, but I don't really think these ideas match with the technologies he describes as being hot and cold. Radio is hot, but the telephone is cold. Movies are hot, but TV is cold. But today I can listen to the radio on my phone or watch a movie on my TV. So I don't really understand what these mean. Cool media, like oral speech, have more gaps to be filled in by the listener, while hot media fill everything in for the listener. Who knows why a film does that but a TV show doesn't. Hot forms allow less participation, and exclude, while cool media require more participation from the audience and includes. I don't know.

    One important concept from the book, that is shared in The Gutenberg Galaxy, is that Western culture is built on the written word, and that the rise of electrical communication will threaten that by focusing more on oral communication. The ear is rising back up to challenge the eye. But McLuhan, who sees a possible panic about this, views the transition with optimism. He suggests that, if we see the American flag, we get a lot more symbolic value out of it than if we read the written words "American flag." The transition from that written word to more pictures in the form of TV and movies and sounds in the form of radio increases instances of seeing the genuine article, the flag, and not just reading the words. But I am not really convinced of any clear outcome from this like McLuhan is.

    Something else that was interesting from the book was that in the age of the manuscript, authorship of a text was less important. People didn't "express themselves" in books as much as they wrote something that was more universal or copied it without attributing the text, sometimes adding their own flourishes. But with typography, when one could speak to the world rather than just whoever was literally holding or copying your book, people expressed themselves more. People could be more personal when they could write for a broad audience instead of just the individuals who could actually get a hold of their book and its few copies.

    Here are two semi-predictions that McLuhan makes that I think are coming true. McLuhan writes that privacy is "unknown" in tribal societies, which would fit well the idea that electricity is making us a more tribal society, since we are definitely losing privacy. He also writes that alcohol is a social bond in an individualist and fragmented world, but is a destructive force in a close-knit tribal society. On the other hand, gambling is viewed more favorably in tribal societies than in individualist societies. Gambling is up among young people and drinking is down, so maybe that is some indication of America becoming a more tribal, less individualistic society.

Miscellaneous:

• This was interesting: after the rise of Islam, Romans were cut off from their papyrus supply in Egypt. Byzantium relied instead on parchment, but it was more expensive of a material. It was paper, brought all the way from China, that accelerated education and commerce and provided the basis for prints to set off the Renaissance.
• Until 1700, more than 50% of all printed books were either ancient or medieval.
• McLuhan writes that "In America, people can tolerate their images in mirror or photo, but they are made uncomfortable by the recorded sound of their own voices." Is this really different in other countries?
• Something interesting that McLuhan writes about politics is that the advantage of the legislative branch is its ability to dive into "unsavory subjects." While the executive has to project all the good things, the legislative can get into the bad stuff, which is more interesting to most people. It can use its investigative powers to outrage people.
• I loved this line on cars: "In the 1930s, when millions of comic books were inundating the young with gore, nobody seemed to notice that emotionally the violence of millions of cars in our streets was incomparable more hysterical than anything that could ever be printed. All the rhinos and hippos and elephants in the world, if gathered in one city, could not begin to create the menace and explosive intensity of the hourly and daily experience of the internal-combustion engine."
• Once again, McLuhan's generalizations about nationalities are so ridiculous. He even says Germans don't count as Westerners in this book.
• "Had TV occurred on a large scale during Hitler's reign he would have vanished quickly. Had TV come first there would have been no Hitler at all." Very hot take. Crazy person talk.
• I'm pretty sure this book coined the term media fallout.

Cue the Sun! The Invention of Reality TV by Emily Nussbaum

    Reality TV doesn't get a lot of respect, which makes this book a really interesting take on it. Nussbaum treats reality TV like a true art form, and really elevates it in that way. She shows how the development of reality TV in the 90s and 2000s actually has deep roots. That aspect of the book, probably the most important in terms of a contribution to thinking, is also the least interesting to me. I picked the book up to read about Survivor, not Candid Camera. But it was a good inclusion (if a little long). 

    My read on reality TV is that is came about in the 90s from an amalgamation of three categories of unscripted television: game shows, clip shows, and documentaries. Game shows like The Newlyweds Game brought the competition element. Clip shows like America's Funniest Home Videos brought real-life to TV and also encouraged audience participation to get clips. And documentary-style shows ("dirty documentary" in Nussbaum's words) like An American Family or Cops just tried to capture something from real life. All of those genres of reality TV still exist on their own in the present day. But Survivor and Big Brother are probably the first shows to combine them all in one. The combination of all three elements creates reality TV and there is some amount that each one on their own can be reality TV. Something critical about the 90s, when reality TV could start to take off, is advances in editing. On The Real World, they shot tons and tons of hours of boring content. It was the editors who made the show interesting by using clever cuts and music to create a narrative. I'm not sure if the confessionals were a part of the real world, but that would also become a huge tool for the editors.

    The only reality TV show I have watched in any serious way is Survivor, so that was the most interesting part of the book to me. I learned a lot, like, for example, Jeff Probst, the host, was only hired in the last minute, after the rest of the crew. Apparently, Probst sent in a goofy audition video, had a bad interview, and ended up sending a "letter in a bottle" to Mark Burnett and Ghen Maynard, the producers, which was stuffed with fake newspaper articles praising him as the super-likeable host of the show. Jeff Probst ended up becoming the guiding visionary of the show over Mark Burnett, who turned to producing The Apprentice. 

    The final thing I think that is really interesting about reality TV is the new era that began within a couple seasons of shows like Survivor, The Amazing Race, Big Brother, etc. getting big. In the earlier years, a big part of the shows was that they were more "dirty documentary," filled with naive people who were showing you a more real snapshot of who they were. By 2025, that element of reality TV is almost completely gone. Today, reality TV is dominated by people who want to be on TV, who are fans of the shows they participate on. That completely changes the dynamic for viewers, and helps their popularity, since of the early concerns in reality TV was that the shows were mean-spirited, taking advantage of people, and publicizing their failings.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• Richard Lewis was pranked as a teenager on candid camera, where he was one of many high school students given aptitude tests, and the results told them they should be bricklayers.
• As I read, I recognized from the book I read on The Office that Randall Einhorn came from the reality TV world of Survivor to start directing scripted shows like The Office and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
• During the Iraq War, ABC reality shows about the military got better access in the Pentagon than ABC News got, and they lodged an official complaint.

The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk

    This was a great book. I'm a little busy these days and having trouble dedicating the mental energy to this post that it deserves, but The Caine Mutiny was a thought-provoking book. It is driven by interesting characters, who are all flawed in different ways. Queeg is especially interesting, especially towards the end of the book. Also a cool picture of naval justice in World War Two.

The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man by Marshall McLuhan

    The Gutenberg Galaxy is a classic in the study of the media or communication, but for being a book about communication it was really hard to understand. McLuhan writes it in the "mosaic" style, which is nice because of the short chapters with pithy titles like "Civilization gives the barbarian or tribal man an eye for an ear and is now at odds with the electronic world." But he assumes a really deep knowledge of academic and classical literature that I just do not have. References to Shakespeare, Joyce, and Pope just went over my head. Another criticism I have is that the book is not very empirical and generalizes a lot about different countries, and usually just determines everyone is in a preliterate, oral culture unless they're in New York of London basically. The man says that Russa, Ireland, the Old South are oral cultures I mean come on. And he says that "The miseries of conflict between the Eastern and Roman churches, for example, are a merely obvious instance of the type of opposition between the oral and visual cultures." What the hell are you talking about man? That is not obvious to me at all.

    The book is a classic for introducing concepts still used today, like "surfing," which became used for surfing the web, the "global village," and the idea of "the age of information." I found the most engaging parts of the books to be the ones where he talks about unique aspects of writing and reading in how they impact our thinking through the way we gather information through our senses. McLuhan goes in depth on the difference between hearing information and seeing it on the page, and between seeing it handwritten on the page versus typed on the page. He discusses four eras, which layer over one another: oral, handwritten, typed, and electronic. No one era replaces the others, but adds a new way for humans to consume information. 

    McLuhan quotes extensively from other authors to make his points. From J.C. Carothers, writing in Psychiatry (1959), McLuhan pulls that 

When words are written, they become, of course, a part of the visual world. Like most of the elements of the visual world, thy become static things and lose, as such, the dynamism which is so characteristic of the auditory world in general, and of the spoken word in particular. They lose much of the personal element, in the sense that the heard word is most commonly directed at oneself, whereas the seen word most commonly is not, and can be read or not as one dictates.

I thought that was interesting, because when people now take in more information from reading, we read things that are not usually letters directed to us. Rather, most of what we read is in newspapers or books, in which the authors did not intend for any specific individual to read what is written, rather a large audience. In the pre-print or really the pre-manuscript era, most of what an individual heard was directed at them, or a group of limited size in which the speaker could see every individual they spoke to, and likely knew them. It would be on rare occasions when someone would attend an event at which a speaker could address a large enough crowd for the speech to be impersonal in the pre-writing era.

    McLuhan points out that many individuals of the classical era, who lived in largely illiterate societies, did not choose to write things even if they, individually, could write. Socrates wrote nothing, and the "Middle Ages regarded Plato as the mere scribe or amaneusis of Socrates. And Aquinas considered that neither Socrates nor Our Lord committed their teaching to writing because the kind of interplay of minds that is in teaching is not possible by means of writing." I gather that McLuhan views speech as a more direct form of communication, since "speech is an outering (utterance) of all our senses at once," whereas "writing abstracts from speech."

    Part of that abstraction is the idea that (and I haven't heard this elsewhere) people used to read aloud in the age of the manuscript before type became popular. Apparently medieval manuscripts were written without spaces or punctuation, so it was necessary to read aloud to get a feel for what was being said. Moreover, that is why medieval monks had cells--so that they could read aloud without disturbing one another. I am a little skeptical, but that is very interesting if that is the case. The result would be that we remember words on the page thinking of what we have seen, whereas the manuscript reader would have an oral or aural memory of what they read aloud.

    Something I thought about is that maybe the printing press is to Catholicism as the internet is to Evangelicalism. The printing press had a massive influence on Catholicism by bringing the gospel into the vernaculars of Europe, the result being a huge rebellion against the Catholic Church and the rise of Protestantism. I wonder how the rise of electronic media and social media will affect religions today. To me, electronic media seems likely to rapidly diffuse "control" over religious texts, allowing laypeople to interpret them in diverse ways and "influence" others with new and divergent interpretations. McLuhan talks about how type created new religious emphasis on literalism, and a willingness to put faith not in "experts" who could interpret the holy book, but in the book itself. For the reader of the Bible in AD 1000, it would feel more human than the reader of the typed Bible 500 years later. The AD 1000 reader could see the strokes of the quill that wrote the manuscript, the spilled ink, and the human elements. But the reader in the age of the Reformation would see something mass produced and put more faith in the specific words that became authoritative. McLuhan writes that

The new homogeneity of the printed page seemed to inspire a subliminal faith in the validity of the printed Bible as bypassing the traditional oral authority of the Church, on one hand, and the need for rational critical scholarship on the other. It was as if print, uniform and repeatable commodity that it was, had the power of creating a new hypnotic superstition of the book as an independent of and uncontaminated by human agency. Nobody who read manuscripts could achieve this state of mind concerning the nature of the written word.

McLuhan continues to say that that very reproducibility of printed text would become responsible for everything that makes the West the West.

    Something else interesting that the book brings up is perspective, in an artistic sense. Really, this book is an art history book in many ways, and spends a lot of time talking about art. One big part talks about the revolution in perspective, which is, for McLuhan, a result of type. In the manuscript age, the audile-tactile culture did not imagine that art should be seen from one specific point of view. They had already mastered sculpture, music, and architecture, but painting and the visual arts did not reach their modern form because the audience was meant to be able to look at art from different places. In the Renaissance, artists pioneered the vanishing point, and created two-dimensional art that required the viewer to see it only from the front.

    McLuhan also says that print bears significant responsibility for the rise of nationalism "because by print a people sees itself for the first time. The vernacular in appearing in high visual definition affords a glimpse of social unity co-extensive with vernacular boundaries. And more people have experienced this visual unity of their native tongues via the newspaper than through the book." Print also encouraged people to write more in their vernaculars than in the Latin lingua franca. Print exposed to Renaissance humanists how far their own Latin was from classical precedent, and then decided to teach Latin through the written page rather than by speaking Latin. As teachers abandoned teaching in spoken Latin, pupils grew up only with a knowledge of written Latin, and did not speak it to each other. Once people no longer spoke to one another in Latin, it became superfluous to write in Latin, and the language was allowed to die. With this, vernaculars proliferated, and would end up having the above effect on building national linguistic boundaries.

    McLuhan finishes the book by telling us that print "is a delirium. It is a transforming and metamorphosing drug that has the power of imposing its assumptions upon every level of consciousness. But for us in the 1960's, print has much of the quaint receding character of the movie and the railway train." But that the modern technologies of TV and radio will not be possible to fully understand until their era has passed. "A few decades hence it will be easy to describe the revolution in human perception and motivation that resulted from beholding the new mosaic mesh of the TV image. Today it is futile to discuss it at all."

Miscellaneous:

• I guess I've got to read some Harold Innis because McLuhan is obsessed with him. He says stuff like, "The present volume to this point [400 pages in] might be regarded as a gloss on a single text of Harold Innis" LOL.

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin, translated by J.A. Underwood

    I don't usually include essays on here, but I read this as a way to kick off a unit on media studies. It was a little tough to understand, but a very thought-provoking piece written in the mid-1930s about how photography, film, and recorded sound were changing the nature of art at that time. I think it is extremely interesting to read today, as the internet and social media continue to change the nature of art in such different ways. The essay is densely packed with important ideas that I'll discuss below.

    Aura refers to the uniqueness of art in its place and sort of its genuineness, as I understand it. So, something that "art" needs to deal with in the age of mechanical reproduction is that when a photo is printed twenty times, no individual print is more "genuine" than the others, whereas a great painting, copied by another artist, retains an aura of authenticity. Art was also originally "embedded in the context of tradition" through worship. So, art wasn't always for another person's viewing. Art originated to fulfill spiritual needs. A caveman drawing an elk on the wall might show it to his friends, but he also expected that spirits might see it. Or a medieval craftsman carving details high up on a cathedral would know that no passerby would see them, but that God would. With the advent of perfectly reproduceable art, with no "aura" to distinguish the original or the genuine piece, art is thrown into a crisis, illustrated by disputes about whether or not photography is art. But, writes Benjamin, the question is not whether photography is art, but how it changes the nature of art. In the modern era, writes Benjamin, art is underpinned not by ritual, as in the past, but by politics.

    Religious art was viewed for the purposes of provoking a spiritual experience, and therefore was not to be taken lightly. Statues of the Madonna, for example, would only be revealed at certain times, and some works of art were only allowed to be seen by certain people, like the Ark of the Covenant. But with religious ritual removed from art, opportunities for displaying art proliferated. 

    Benjamin writes that fascism allows the masses to express themselves through the spectacle without actually having their needs or wants addressed. The mass protest or rally is best captured through photography, and especially in the bird's eye view, which normal people rarely experience. With the advent of aerial photography, or just tall enough buildings, it makes more sense to hold mass rallies and have them photographed to show the popularity of certain ideas. Moreover, fascism seeks to grant the masses a spectacle to serve as a sort of distraction from real needs. It uses art as a way to divert attention. Communism, on the other hand, rather than aestheticising politics, politicizes aesthetics. Benjamin doesn't elaborate too much on that, but I take it to mean that Communists instead assert control over artistic media to turn them into propaganda.

    One thing that Benjamin notes in a footnote is from Aldous Huxley's Beyond the Mexique Bay, in which Huxley uses some rough math to assert that there is a proliferation of art in the modern era, but that the bad art has increased more than the good art. The media have allowed for the creation of more art, but only allowed for a creation of talented people to a lesser extent. I am not sure that is true. In my experience the current era (90ish years later) is full of bad and good art, but above all is characterized by individual art. Art is so commodified now that we don't even refer to people as artists so much as they are "content creators." We have sort of tacitly acknowledged that whatever it is people are doing on Vine, Tiktok, Instagram, etc. is not art, but "content." However, it is getting more reach than art ever was. It is normal for a ten second video made by some random person to get millions of views--this happens to different videos every day. More people are seeing this "content" than ever saw the Mona Lisa for the first hundred years after it was painted. So this "content" is going to be more influential than any "art" ever was. I think that has changed the nature of art. Whereas photography forced the world to expand the definition of art, social media has narrowed the definition, turning art into something more purposeful and thought provoking, and separating mere diversion into a separate category of content for the masses. 

    When we watch this "content," I would say most people are of the opinion that we are not doing ourselves any favors. You hear people call it rotting, or refer to it as screen time, which we use apps on our phones to try to diminish. People try to keep their kids from having too much screen time, which usually doesn't even refer to TVs but just to social media and games on smartphones and tablets. But it is so attractive, like junk food but for attention. What will the result be? I think the aggregate result of the proliferation of accessible information consumption and creation will be more trash creation and consumption in the short term, but over decades, people are becoming more knowledgeable, getting good and bad information the would have never had before. Now, the problem is not being uninformed, but misinformed. We can take for granted that there is now a constant stream of information being consumed by billions of people all the time through their social media.

    I wonder whether AI will alter this trend. Before AI, the trend for information was for a reduction in the influence of experts and an increase in the amount of non-experts' influence. Knowledge was becoming decentralized--anyone could create a video or a post and have it go viral, and the cause of virality was rarely whether the information provided was true or thoughtful, but whether it spawned engagement. To go viral, a post only needs to get engagement, which it can get by being entertaining, outrageously wrong, controversial, or extremely negative. However, with AI, I wonder whether people will just turn to asking Claude or ChatGPT their important questions about history, science, etc., and therefore we would see a return to the influence of experts whose data was harvested by LLMs. 

    Maybe AI will lead to a divergence in knowledge or information like "content creation" has split art from content. People will use AI seemingly more like they would use a Google search, and consume content more for entertainment purposes. But maybe that entertainment will also misinform people who will never actually consult their AI tools for an answer. The result then would just be more general misinformation and an overall lowering of the quality of information, as the creators of content become the ones in control over public knowledge. This democratization probably leads to a flattening of knowledge. With experts unable to serve as gatekeepers of knowledge, more information and misinformation spreads around, bringing up the general knowledge level of the people who were the least informed while reducing the knowledge level of those who were most informed. Now that you can find anyone on the internet to agree with you on any given thing, people can connect with each other over shared interests, but those connections are mediated by machines. Like how Benjamin talks about the actor and the audience versus the actor and the camera and the audience, the more people will socialize through the internet, the more that real-life connections will diminish. We will end up adapting to an "internet society," and lose physical connections. 

    I think that this will also lead to a flattening of the quality of communication. In-person communication is the most effective way to communicate. It would be at the top of a metaphorical ladder, followed by videochatting, phone calls, emails, etc. When people can communicate through other media more, that increases the amount of total communication, but it also transfers some part of the real-life communication to a lower form of communication. So communication is increased, but high-quality communication is somewhat diminished. With everything getting flatter, our social structures will probably also get more democratic. It will be harder for "experts" or the rich or the powerful to rule over a population that is better informed than they were before because the top 10% of society will also be worse informed than they were before. It will be harder for people in the halls of power to rule over the people who aren't because people will have fewer conversations in those halls of power while people outside will have more communication with one another through media. Those forms of communication, which can be forms of organization, will flatten power relationships as the upper rungs of society diminish in the qualities that make them the upper rungs of society while the bottom rungs get access to the same sources of information and means of communication they have.

    Okay, that was a big rant that I wrote out all at once. No clue if it makes sense. Not reading it back, but clicking "publish."

Games Criminals Play: How You Can Profit by Knowing them by Bud Allen and Diana Bosta

    This was a pretty interesting book all about lessons that should be learned if you are ever going to work in a prison. I don't plan on doing that, but in the criminal justice system, many people become prisoners, so it's interesting to read about. The book mainly talks about schemes that prisoners use to try to "down a duck," which I guess is 80's terminology for finding a correctional officer to manipulate into bringing contraband into the prison. Mostly, the lessons are to keep things professional, and to keep things in the open. No secrets. Interesting book, but it felt a little dated in its terminology and language.

Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder

    Bloodlands is an important book, and Timothy Snyder obviously knew it was important when he was writing it. The book contextualizes the Holocaust, WWII, and the Great Purge in the USSR to show how the same people perpetrated and suffered from the same horrors in the "Bloodlands," roughly the area stretching from the older version of Poland up through the Baltics to Tallinn and Petrograd/St. Petersburg, and East through Ukraine. Today, It's mainly Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia, with some of Russia. This is the region where, in the late 1930s and the 1940s, people had to choose between Hitler's Germany or Stalin's Russia. 

    After World War One, the three powers that partitioned Poland in 1795, Austria-Hungary, Prussia/The Second German Empire, and Russia, had all collapsed, allowing Poland to re-emerge. Poland was in a weird situation since it had been ceded by Tsarist Russia to the Germans, but then the Germans fell, and it came under threat from revolutionary Russia. It defeated the USSR in a war from 1919-20, led by Joseph Pilsudski, and ensured its independence, whereas Ukraine and Belarus were conquered. But over the 1920s, Poland was destined to grow relatively weaker than Russia and Germany. There was really nothing the Poles could do. They were smaller than both countries, less technologically advanced, and also dealt with the fact that, like the Germans, they were stuck in the middle of Europe, surrounded by other states that would be happy to take pieces off of Poland. The only policy available to Polish leaders was to use alliances to obtain non-aggression pacts with their neighbors. They got one with the USSR in 1932, which allowed Stalin more room to maneuver in his own western borderlands, where he was putting down rebellion against failed agricultural collectivization and "de-kulakization" that was starving the citizens of the USSR. I noticed that in the chapter, "The Soviet Famines," Snyder gives particular attention to Ukraine, without using the term Holodomor. I'm interested in that because it shows a sort of dissenting position against what had been official Ukrainian rhetoric on Stalin's starvation policies, while also paying particular attention to Ukraine. In Stalin, Stephen Kotkin specifically argued that Ukraine was not particularly targeted by collectivization, and that per capita deaths were actually higher in Kazakhstan than in Ukraine. However, since Snyder focuses on the "Bloodlands" that do not include Kazakhstan, and since Ukraine had the highest number of total deaths, I think his focus still makes sense.

    As collectivization ended and Stalin began the Great Purge, to find people to blame for the millions of failures of collectivization, the Nazis took power and opened the first concentration camps, which primarily focused on killing the physically and mentally handicapped. They opened camps at Dachau and Lichtenberg in 1933, Sachsenhausen in 1936, Buchenwald in 1937, and Flossenberg in 1938. When taking relative populations sizes into account, the Soviet Gulag system was still 25 times bigger than the German concentration camp system at this point. The Nazis were nowhere close. What becomes clear is that the two terrors of Stalinism and Nazism differed in their approach. Stalinist terror was at its worst in peacetime, when he had total control of his people. Hitler's terror was worst in wartime, when expediency created a twisted logic of killing, in which it made sense to enact the Final Solution during, not after the war. These opposite approaches to killing are illustrated by the fact that in 1937 and 1938, 267 people were sentenced to death in Germany, whereas 378,326 were sentenced to death in the kulak operation alone in the Soviet Union. The USSR's killing was more legalistic than the Nazi killing. But like Nazi terror, Stalinst terror was largely national. Chapter 2 of the book largely focuses on anti-Ukrainian terror and chapter 3 on anti-Polish terror.

    When the Germans invaded Poland, they invaded the most Jewish country in the world, and added massive numbers of Jews to their empire. He tripled the number of Jews in Germany from a little over 330,000 to nearly a million, and if you counted the Jews of the occupied General Government, there were another 1.5 million Jews. Lodz alone had 233,000 Jews, more than Berlin (82,788) and Vienna (91,480) combined. Warsaw had more Jews than all of Germany combined. But the Germans weren't the only ones to invade Poland in 1939, the USSR also did so simultaneously. The Soviets quickly began a "lesser Terror," killing 21,892 Polish citizens, 8% of whom were Jews, and deporting tens of thousands more to Kazakhstan before the winter of 1939-40. In June of 1940, the Soviets deported another 78,339 people from Poland, 84% of whom were Jewish. Jews were caught in the middle of this massive clash of ideologies and empires, one of which wanted to wipe the Jewish people off the map, and the other of which wanted to erase Jewish identity from people's minds. The Poles were also caught in the middle, and the two major powers both targeted Polish leaders for destruction. Snyder writes:

In eastern Europe the pride of societies was the 'intelligentsia,' the educated classes who saw themselves as leading the nation, especially during periods of statelessness and hardship, and preserving national culture in their writing, speech, and behavior. The German language has the same word, with the same meaning; Hitler ordered quite precisely the 'extermination of the Polish intelligentsia.' ... It was the intelligentsia who was thought to embody this civilization, and to manifest this special way of thinking. [para. break] Its mass murder by the two occupiers was a tragic sign that the Polish intelligentsia had fulfilled its historical mission.

    June 22, 1941, is the beginning of the worst phase of the calamity that should really be considered as an eastern European apocalypse. On that day, the Germans invaded the USSR, and that invasion would result in tens of millions dead. Snyder points out that from 1933-38, the Soviets did almost all the killing in the Bloodlands, and that from 1939-41 it was balanced. But from 1941-45, it would be "the Germans who were responsible for almost all of the political murder."

    Germany, in World War One, tried to challenge Britain, for control of the seas. Seeing the Kaiser's failure, in World War Two, Hitler tried to challenge Russia for control of the vast lands that would become the Bloodlands. Hitler saw them as a frontier for his empire, necessary not to compete with Britain for control of Europe, but to compete with America for control of the world. If Hitler's aim had been to rule Europe, it would have been best achieved by waiting. Germany needed only to stay united to become the richest and most powerful country on the continent. But his goal was world hegemony, and he saw that the country most likely to assume world hegemony, the United States, had done it thanks to an enormous frontier that it could fill. Hitler wanted to do to the Jews and the Slavs what the Americans had done to the Native Americans, but he lacked the diseases to do so. Instead, his plan for the Final Solution began as a plan for a reservation in Eastern Poland, the Lublin Plan, which was abandoned by November 1939 as too complicated. It transformed three more times. The next was a consensual plan to send the Jews to the Soviet Union, which Stalin rejected in February 1940. Then the plan was to deport the Jews to Madagascar, but that required British cooperation, and the British fought Germany after Poland's conquest. Finally, after invading the Soviet Union, the plan became to exterminate the Jews, and then the Slavs, by starvation. By the end of 1941, no government in history had ever ruled over so many Jews as Germany. It's plans for eastward expansion to match American westward expansion a century prior required the same extermination of the people already living there, and the only plan going into the invasion of the Soviet Union in summer 1941 was starvation. However, once Operation Barbarossa began, the Germans began an improvised extermination: first with bullets, then with vans that put exhaust back into their passenger compartments, then with stationary vans with exhaust into rooms filled with Jews, and then with gas chambers, using a pesticide known as Zyklon B.

    Under the Nazi regime, there could be three places Jews would go: ghettos, concentration camps, and death camps. Ghettos locked Jews into specific blocks of cities and could put Jews to work. They largely characterized the first year or two after the Germans invaded Poland. Concentration camps came about quickly as work camps designed to produce munitions and other goods for Germany. And death camps were extermination centers. Auschwitz was a rare combination of the two that is well known for its concentration/work camp side. Few of the death camps are well remembered because they were all liberated by the USSR, which suppressed the Jewish-specific parts of WWII historical memory, and because there were so few survivors of the death camps to tell their story (at Treblinka, only 50 survived while 780,863 were murdered). Six major facilities were established and functioned from December 1941 until November 1944: Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek, and Auschwitz. West of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line, the core of the killing was done in Operation Reinhard, gassing 1.3 million Polish Jews in 1942. It ended with Auschwitz, where two hundred thousand Polish Jews and seven hundred thousand other European Jews were gassed, mostly in 1943 and 1944. Gassing was chosen as the best way to exterminate Jews once deportation was understood to be impossible. East of Molotov-Ribbentrop, mass shooting was more common.

    One of the social phenomena that made gassing millions of Jews possible was the division of society throughout the war. Obviously, national and religious divisions were paramount, isolating Jews from Poles, Catholics from Atheists and Russian Orthodox. But within the ghettos, the Germans also made use of Jewish police forces, and divided those who could work from those who could not. This way, even after it became clear that the Germans were exterminating Jews, once already completely under the Germans' control, Jews vied to be kept alive for labor at selections. This created a social division between those Jews who had papers and those who did not. People believed that their families could remain in the ghetto with the right work papers, and much energy was spent in the hunt for the right documents instead of on resistance. In most ghettos, people wouldn't come together en masse until it was clear that the ghetto would be liquidated, and then everyone, knowing that they all shared the same fate, would rise up. But even then, ghetto uprisings were never successful in preventing a ghetto's liquidation, merely delaying liquidation a few days and merely guaranteeing a different type of mass murder on a different day.

    One really interesting aspect of this book is that, like how it combines its analysis of both German and Soviet conquest and occupation, it also extends its analysis past the Second World War. The ethnic cleansing continues as the Germans and Poles are both forced by the Soviets to the west, into a reduced Germany and a shifted Poland. For the Germans, it was new, and for the Poles, it was just a continuation of what they'd already been facing during the war. Snyder ends the books with a really interesting historiographical discussion of his influences, Hannah Arendt and Vasily Grossman, and of the errors in the popular imagination of the Holocaust. He reminds the reader that the majority of those killed never saw a gas chamber, and that Auschwitz is really primarily known due to being the furthest west of the death camps and the fact that it had a work camp attached to it, where a lot of people survived to tell their story. Now that the iron curtain has fallen, it is important to unite the "Bloodlands" into the historical understanding of the Holocaust, because that story was not well-known before the 1990s. This book is an incredibly important work in bringing that story out.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• In German prisoner-of-war camps for Red Army soldiers, the death rate over the course of the war was 57.5%, whereas the death rate in POW camps for western soldiers was less than 5%.
• Snyder writes that on any given day in the second half of 1941, the Germans shot more Jews than had been killed by pogroms in the entire history of the Russian empire.
• The Soviets paused their advance just east of the Vistula river from early August 1944 until January 1945. This doomed Polish resistance fighters and Jews alike by design. Stalin wanted the Polish resistance to be killed so that they couldn't resist him later on. Once they restarted the offensive in January, it only took two weeks to liberate Lodz and Auschwitz.

 

 

Un verdor terrible por Benjamín Labatut

    Un verdor terrible explora la historia de la ciencia y como se alterna en sus capacidades de promover y extinguir la vida. Labatut muestra como el mismo hombre puede inventar el gas de cloro, que mata a miles durante la Primera Guerra Mundial, y tambien el fertilizador con nitrogeno, que salva las vidas de milliones. Y como el mismo compuesto químico se usa para crear ambos el Zyklon B y el azul de prusia, amado de los pintores. Labatut usa las vidas personales de cientifícos para dramatizar al narrativo, y no pude resistir en pensar como Thomas Kuhn disentiría de este narrativo basado en la epifanía.

    El libro se acaba con un anecdota de como los árboles limones mueren. En su última cosecha, el limón pare una sobreabundancia de limónes, hasta que se rompen las ramas de estar sobrepesadas. Me parece que el propósito de esta anecdota es argumentar que el florecimiento de las ciencias en el siglo XX es una subreabundancia, que otorga mucho, pero que también presagia el fin de todo.

Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson

    This is the first book that I've ever listened to, instead of read. Abundance is a very popular book right now for the challenge that it offers to liberals while offering an olive branch to conservatives. Klein and Thompson put forward ideas that seek to diminish economic inequalities by expanding the pie, rather than dividing it up differently. Left-wing critics will say that it fails to actually diminish inequality, and right-wing critics will say that the solutions really only apply to major cities, but I think that the "Abundance agenda" is a lot more positive than negative. It is important for the country to be able to build, whether in manufacturing, housing, transportation, or whatever is needed. I like that the book has an optimistic feel, and I've become a really big fan of Ezra Klein this year.

    I liked the audiobook as a format for the same reason I like podcasts, but I have to say that it is far inferior to reading a book and being able to take notes on it. I don't remember nearly as much of this as I would if it were a book that I could revisit. I will also say I far preferred Klein's parts of the book that he read to the ones that Thompson read. Thompson sounded patronizing to me. Anyway, it was a really good book, and regardless of their voices, I thought they put forth good ideas and a good new way of thinking about how we should evaluate ideas. The country will be better off if we embrace an abundance mentality than a scarcity mentality.

Maus by Art Spiegelman (The Complete Maus Vol. 1 & 2) (Re-read)

    I don't normally read graphic novels, but Maus is a special book. Art Spiegelman's relationship with his father reminds me of my own father's relationship with his father, also a Holocaust survivor. Maus really grippingly tells the story of the Holocaust and of interviewing a survivor of the Holocaust, and uses different animals to depict the Germans, Poles, Jews, Americans, etc. The animal metaphor is controversial, but I think it works very well, and is especially useful when depicting Jews (mice), who wear the masks of pigs (Poles) to blend in. 

    I remembered a good amount about the book, but not much since I last read it probably around the age of ten. I specifically recalled a scene early in Volume 1 where Art's father, Vladek, conscripted into the Polish Army, is not shooting at the oncoming Germans, afraid. A Polish NCO comes over, feels the coldness of his rifle, and reprimands him for not shooting. Then he does shoot, kills a German soldier, and when the Germans win the battle and take him prisoner, they shout at him for having a hot barrel, having shot. There was no winning, and I think that was very emblematic maybe not of the precise situation, but the general feeling of living through the Holocaust, when a Jew couldn't really ever make a "correct" choice. 

    Something I didn't remember so much was the information about Anja, Art's mother and Vladek's wife, who took her own life in 1968. That was a really tragic part of the whole book that I'd forgotten. I also took note of how different Vladek's Holocaust experience was than my grandfathers. My grandpa was in a ghetto for almost all of the war, working, while Vladek at times worked, at times faked his papers and pretended to be a Pole, at times was in hiding, and then ended up being sent to Auschwitz. It made me think of how diverse the experiences of the Holocaust could be. Maus is a very sad book, but it's a very beautiful book. It's just very real about difficult relationships between people, difficult choices, and above all love. One of the best books ever.

The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy

    Another heavy book by Corman McCarthy. When I set out to read more literature this year, I specifically wanted to avoid heavy books like this, but he is so damn good at writing. I definitely didn't think I would want to read Westerns, but my friend Frank kept mentioning how good Cormac McCarthy is, so I gave All the Pretty Horses a try and now I'm hooked. The Crossing is the sequel to that book, and the second book of The Border Trilogy, but follows a completely different character. But like the protagonist in All the Pretty Horses, Billy Parham makes multiple trips down to Mexico, fails to achieve his goals there, and finds death instead, but also the wisdom and kindness of strangers. Now that I've read two McCarthy books, I notice some trends. The obvious one is not much punctuation. Another one is that the characters in these books inhabit our world, but it's not our world. People in these books are wiser, and kinder, but they're also capable of more cruelty. Most characters that we meet are strangers on the road or in small towns or haciendas, who usually show kindness either by sharing food or a story or wisdom. Some others we meet are pure evil, who commit cruelty for cruelty's sake. And a very small number are benign, usually working for some cruel overlord, but willing to be merciful; or they are a person with no reason to harm out characters, but admit to their indifference to human suffering. Spoilers ahead. McCarthy also uses his books to draw big contrasts between the United States and Mexico, and to use Mexico as almost a time warp, where we hear stories going back to the Mexican Revolution and see poverty that would suggest the Stone Age. And then the characters return north of the border and confront modernity in the form of cars, war, and diners.

    The book, I would say, is dominated by three big stories in each part. The first is Billy Parham's search for the she-wolf terrorizing the cattle of the land, finding her, and trying to bring her back to Mexico. The second is Billy and his brother Boyd as they try to find the men who killed their parents and stole their horses. And the third is Billy returning to Mexico to find his brother Boyd. All of the stories deal with cruelty, and all these missions end in failure. When Billy tries to join the Army for World War Two its a failure. Failure is just an all-pervading theme of this book. Another one is truth. Throughout the book, we hear people saying things that are false, and we hear stories emerge out of nothing, or take a kernel of truth and turn it into something else entirely.

    McCarthy loves a sensitive cowboy. He loves how they love their horses, and he loves to think about the thoughts they think while they sit alone on the range at night, or atop a horse in the morning. He loves to write about them crying over horses they've lost, and in this book, he writes about an inverted scene, a pregnant wolf that Billy Parham loses. One other thing he likes to write about is a wound that lasts. In this book, the dog's throat gets cut, rendering it mute, the boys cause the death of a one-armed man, and Billy meets a blind man who tells him his story. I think surviving with wounds or with disabilities is important to McCarthy.

    I love McCarthy's writing and I've really never read anything else like it, so I wanted to just throw a few examples in here that stood out to me while I was reading. This first one is long, but I really didn't expect him to jump into the mind and the whole backstory of a wolf:

THE WOLF had crossed the international boundary line at about the point where it intersected the thirtieth minute of the one hundred and eighth meridian and she had crossed the old Nations road a mile north of the boundary and followed Whitewater Creek west up into the San Luis Mountains and crossed through the gap north to the Animas range and then crossed the Animas Valley and on into the Peloncillos as told. She carried a scabbedover wound on her hip where her mate had bitten her two weeks before somewhere in the mountains of Sonora. He’d bitten her because she would not leave him. Standing with one forefoot in the jaws of a steeltrap and snarling at her to drive her off where she lay just beyond the reach of the chain. She’d flattened her ears and whined and she would not leave. In the morning they came on horses. She watched from a slope a hundred yards away as he stood up to meet them.

She wandered the eastern slopes of the Sierra de la Madera for a week. Her ancestors had hunted camels and primitive toy horses on these grounds. She found little to eat. Most of the game was slaughtered out of the country. Most of the forest cut to feed the boilers of the stampmills at the mines. The wolves in that country had been killing cattle for a long time but the ignorance of the animals was a puzzle to them. The cows bellowing and bleeding and stumbling through the mountain meadows with their shovel feet and their confusion, bawling and floundering through the fences and dragging posts and wires behind. The ranchers said they brutalized the cattle in a way they did not the wild game. As if the cows evoked in them some anger. As if they were offended by some violation of an old order. Old ceremonies. Old protocols.

She crossed the Bavispe River and moved north. She was carrying her first litter and she had no way to know the trouble she was in. She was moving out of the country not because the game was gone but because the wolves were and she needed them. When she pulled down the veal calf in the snow at the head of Foster Draw in the Peloncillo Mountains of New Mexico she had eaten little but carrion for two weeks and she wore a haunted look and she’d found no trace of wolves at all. She ate and rested and ate again. She ate till her belly dragged and she did not go back. She would not return to a kill. She would not cross a road or a rail line in daylight. She would not cross under a wire fence twice in the same place. These were the new protocols. Strictures that had not existed before. Now they did.

She ranged west into Cochise County in the state of Arizona, across the south fork of Skeleton Creek and west to the head of Starvation Canyon and south to Hog Canyon Springs. Then east again to the high country between Clanton and Foster draws. At night she would go down onto the Animas Plains and drive the wild antelope, watching them flow and turn in the dust of their own passage where it rose like smoke off the basin floor, watching the precisely indexed articulation of their limbs and the rocking movements of their heads and the slow bunching and the slow extension of their running, looking for anything at all among them that would name to her her quarry.

At this season the does were already carrying calves and as they commonly aborted long before term the one least favored so twice she found these pale unborn still warm and gawking on the ground, milkblue and near translucent in the dawn like beings miscarried from another world entire. She ate even their bones where they lay blind and dying in the snow. Before sunrise she was off the plain and she would raise her muzzle where she stood on some low promontory or rock overlooking the valley and howl and howl again into that terrible silence. She might have left the country altogether if she had not come upon the scent of a wolf just below the high pass west of Black Point. She stopped as if she’d walked into a wall.

She circled the set for the better part of an hour sorting and indexing the varied scents and ordering their sequences in an effort to reconstruct the events that had taken place here. When she left she went down through the pass south following the tracks of the horses now thirty-six hours old.

By evening she’d found all eight of the sets and she was back at the gap of the mountain again where she circled the trap whining. Then she began to dig. She dug a hole alongside the trap until the caving dirt fell away to reveal the trap’s jaw. She stood looking at it. She dug again. When she left the set the trap was sitting naked on the ground with only a handful of dirt over the waxed paper covering the pan and when the boy and his father rode through the gap the following morning that was what they found.

Just a good quote that illustrates the type of words McCarthy puts into unnamed strangers' mouths:

    The boy didnt know if he understood or not. The old man went on to say that the hunter was a different thing than men supposed. He said that men believe the blood of the slain to be of no consequence but that the wolf knows better. He said that the wolf is a being of great order and that it knows what men do not: that there is no order in the world save that which death has put there. Finally he said that if men drink the blood of God yet they do not understand the seriousness of what they do. He said that men wish to be serious but they do not understand how to be so. Between their acts and their ceremonies lies the world and in this world the storms blow and the trees twist in the wind and all the animals that God has made go to and fro yet this world men do not see. They see the acts of their own hands or they see that which they name and call out to one another but the world between is invisible to them.

More wisdom from strangers, who predict the future or understand what has happened far away, which is that Billy's parents have been murdered.

He told the boy that although he was huérfano still he must cease his wanderings and make for himself some place in the world because to wander in this way would become for him a passion and by this passion he would become estranged from men and so ultimately from himself. He said that the world could only be known as it existed in men’s hearts. For while it seemed a place which contained men it was in reality a place contained within them and therefore to know it one must look there and come to know those hearts and to do this one must live with men and not simply pass among them. He said that while the huérfano might feel that he no longer belonged among men he must set this feeling aside for he contained within him a largeness of spirit which men could see and that men would wish to know him and that the world would need him even as he needed the world for they were one. Lastly he said that while this itself was a good thing like all good things it was also a danger. Then he removed his hands from the boy’s saddle and stepped away and stood. The boy thanked him for his words but he said that he was in fact not an orphan and then he thanked the women standing there and turned the horse and rode out. They stood watching him go. As he passed the last of the brush wickiups he turned and looked back and as he did so the old man called out to him. Eres, he said. Eres huérfano. But the boy only raised one hand and touched his hat and rode on.

Sometimes, you can't be sure who exactly is talking, thanks to the lack of punctuation. The result is to be unsure if we are hearing narration or Billy Parham's thoughts. This is one such example of that, which also serves as an example of the theme of simple kindness of strangers:

He went back to the kitchen and looked for something with which to write. In the end he dusted flour from the bowl on the sideboard over the wooden table and wrote his thanks in that and went out and got his horse and led it afoot down the zaguán and out through the portal. Behind in the patio the little mule turned the pugmill tirelessly. He mounted up and rode out down the little dusty street nodding to those he passed on his way. Riding like a young squire for all his rags. Carrying in his belly the gift of the meal he’d received which both sustained him and laid claim upon him. For the sharing of bread is not such a simple thing nor is its acknowledgement. Whatever thanks be given, however spoke or written down.

And this is just a bizarre example of the needless cruelty that is so common in McCarthy's writing. It makes you wonder what happened to him. And by the way, I looked it up, and this is not humanly possible:

The German then did something very strange. He smiled and licked the man’s spittle from about his mouth. He was a very large man with enormous hands and he reached and seized the young captive’s head in both these hands and bent as if to kiss him. But it was no kiss. He seized him by the face and it may well have looked to others that he bent to kiss him on each cheek perhaps in the military manner of the French but what he did instead with a great caving of his cheeks was to suck each in turn the man’s eyes from his head and spit them out again and leave them dangling by their cords wet and strange and wobbling on his cheeks.

And here is another example of the types of conversations people have in these books. Just one of many:

The man sat his horse and weighed this soberly. As if there might be some deeper substrate to this reflection with which he must reckon. He said that men believe death’s elections to be a thing inscrutable yet every act invites the act which follows and to the extent that men put one foot before the other they are accomplices in their own deaths as in all such facts of destiny. He said that moreover it could not be otherwise that men’s ends are dictated at their birth and that they will seek their deaths in the face of every obstacle. He said that both views were one view and that while men may meet with death in strange and obscure places which they might well have avoided it was more correct to say that no matter how hidden or crooked the path to their destruction yet they would seek it out. He smiled. He spoke as one who seemed to understand that death was the condition of existence and life but an emanation thereof.

Qué piensa usted? he said. Billy said that he had no opinion beyond the one he’d given. He said that whether a man’s life was writ in a book someplace or whether it took its form day by day was one and the same for it had but one reality and that was the living of it. He said that while it was true that men shape their own lives it was also true that they could have no shape other for what then would that shape be?

Bien dicho, the man said. He looked across the country. He said that he could read men’s thoughts. Billy didnt point out to him that he’d already asked him twice for his. He asked the man could he tell what he was thinking now but the man only said that their thoughts were one and the same. Then he said he harbored no grudge toward any man over a woman for they were only property afoot to be confiscated and that it was no more than a game and not to be taken seriously by real men. He said that he had no very high opinion of men who killed over whores. In any case, he said, the bitch was dead, the world rolled on.

He smiled again. He had something in his mouth and he rolled it to one side and sucked at his teeth and rolled it back. He touched his hat.

Bueno, he said. El camino espera.

The Life of Jews in Poland before the Holocaust: A Memoir by Ben-Zion Gold

    I was looking for a book that might give me some idea of my grandfather's experience in the Holocaust, and I found this beautiful memoir of a man born the same year as my grandpa, also in Poland, 100 miles away. However, Ben-Zion Gold was much more religious than my grandfather's family, and a lot of his reminisces are about religious life at cheder and yeshiva. I know that like Gold, my grandpa had to worry about being attacked on the street for being Jewish, even before the war. Gold writes that of the three and a half million Jews living in Poland in the 20s and 30s, less than a third were religious. The majority were attracted to different Jewish ideas, like Zionism or the Jewish Socialist Bund, or to Communism.

    This book is especially good because Gold writes with immense wisdom as an octogenarian. He can look back on his childhood and understand better not just his own feelings, but the feelings and thoughts of the other children around him. With age, he is more accepting and forgiving of everyone, and I think he also feels nostalgic for everything, even what was bad, because it came from a world and a people destroyed by the Holocaust.