Walking on the Moon

Alexandra Petri is fun to follow on twitter and well regarded as a humorist and satirist. Well enough that the Washington Post decided to publish a column written by her regularly. I dipped into her columns in this collection.

These columns are from the early years of the (First?) Trump administration. I think they were good fun at the time, but didn’t age well for me. The details and criticism all are on point, but for me the individual columns were not as distinct as I’d like. There’s a nice twitter snark to them and many a well-turned phrase, but they all seem to blur together after a while.

I wasn’t so much afraid to ask these questions, but didn’t have a lot of Native Americans sitting around to ask. And more to the point, there are a lot of different groups of Indians to ask. Anton Treuer does a fine job addressing a lot of questions I had – and I think many people will have – without oversimplifying.

Most of the answers are, “it depends.” The traditions, preferences, and history of the groups of Natives on the East Coast, The Dakotas, and the West are widely different which informs every answer. That alone is worth the experience of reading it.

Treuer writes clearly and plainly. There are no weasel words here, but a clear description of the state of the world.

Recommended.

I picked up Talk To Me hoping to see what I love about T. Coraghessan Boyle’s writing and I got exactly what I was hoping for. He is a very talented and popular author whose work I really enjoy.

Boyle is a consummate plotter and writes beautifully and expressively. He has a keen sense of humor and a penchant for quirky topics. All of that delights me, but it’s not what fascinates me.

What fascinates me is that he writes with more empathy than almost any author I’ve read. Specifically, he regularly takes a character from the modern zeitgeist who seems heinous and writes about them in a way that makes the reader understand how they could commit the horrible acts that brought them to the public eye. He has a skill for making you understand them without supporting them. It’s a powerful superpower.

In Talk To Me he brings it to bear on a range of characters from chimpanzee language researchers like the folks who claim to have taught a gorilla to communicate with humans using sign language and the sorts of folks in Tiger King. There is all sorts of behavior going on that would be hard to swallow in a headline, but seems natural in Boyle’s hands. It’s also compelling, thought provoking and has a unique vibe.

Strongly Recommended.

You Feel It Just Below The Ribs is a novel set in the Within The Wires world. As I mentioned in my Anthropecene Reviewed review, I tend to prefer podcasts when I have the choice, but I was so impressed by their pre-released excerpt that I ordered the novel. Jeffrey Cranor and Janina Matthewson claim that you don’t need to know anything about the podcast to enjoy the book, and I think that’s probably true. That said, I recommend Within The Wires wholeheartedly; also there’s a lot of Feel It that seems targeted at existing fans. You’ll understand it either way, but how much you enjoy it will depend on how much you like world-building.

While there is a lot of continuity service and world-building in Feel It, there’s plenty of style and substance independent of it. The world is an alternate history of the 20th Century, which lets the authors riff on the nature of human relations, families, and the societies they build. I think they’re very insightful about the world and use the medium effectively in entertaining and provoking thought in the same work.

The balance concerns between entertainment and provocation is possible because they write very effectively. One of the features that drew me into Within The Wires was their ability to creep up on an emotional bombshell while keeping me oblivious to what’s coming and then to drop that bomb in a short, casual phrase. This comes through it Feel It.

The other salient point is that all the Within The Wires stories are framed as found audio and they indulge their writing ability to give each season its own texture. They continue this strategy here, constructing a found autobiography annotated by the academic publisher. That publisher has its own agenda, and the reader is never fully trusting of the text.

Strongly Recommended.

I fell in love with John Green’s Anthropecene Reviewed as a podcast. The podcast is a compelling combination of detailed exploration of seemingly incidental societal artifacts and revealing brave personal essay. This is obviously not for everyone. I loved the writing, research, and perspective he brings to these topics along with the boldness of revealing himself. I like his writing style and delivery as well.

The book is a pretty close transcription of these essays. The advantage is that if podcasts aren’t for you, you can still get to his writing. I personally prefer hearing him read, but you may enjoy reading these in the bathroom.

Either is Strongly Recommended.

One of my friends who is on the more conservative side of my bubble recommended this critique of Climate Science and coverage. Steven Koonin is a physicist and researcher who is well respected in his field. He does have experience as a first-class researcher and scientist as well as experience In politics. He was employed as an Undersecretary for Science in the Department of Energy under President Obama. He worked for BP as a their chief scientist for renewable energy. In short, he’s familiar with the field and qualified as a scientist. He also has identifiable biases.

Given all that, I think the factual questions he raise point to places where the various studies seem reasonable to question. I’m not a climate scientist and not terribly familiar with the studies, so I can’t address the correctness of his factual claims. Nothing he claims is unbelievable to me. I think that models can be sensitive to small perturbations of initial assumptions and that the interpretation does depend on the bias of the interpreters. Scientists have points of view, even when they try to be as objective as possible. Considering that is interpreting any research is important, especially research that is as charged as Climate Science is.

I think these kind of questions represent a healthy tussle about facts. That said, I think that no matter how extreme one finds the bias of climate reporting, there are plenty of problems that are frequently framed as climate problems that I care about regardless. For example, even if renewable energy is completely neutral to the climate, I support adoption and subsidies for plenty of other reasons. I don’t see Koonin’s concerns as significantly changing my policy positions.

If you are curious about critiques of Climate Science and reporting, it’s a well written set of concerns from a prominent scientist. There’s a back and forth about the content, of course. I found it interesting and worth my time, even if I didn’t fundamentally change my worldview.

I wish I enjoyed reading When The Reckoning Comes more. It makes the review frustrating because my analytical self can’t find much to dislike and many things to like. But my more emotional side wasn’t engaged.

I never found myself caring much about LaTanya McQueen’s protagonist. Again, on paper, there are lots of ways she and I should connect. Both from a small town, felt ostracized but were talented enough to get out into the world and lost touch with our origin. Of course, we’re different in the important area of race – he writes knowing that sounds like he’s got no idea of the magnitude of that – and gender – he writes … . But I do connect with other characters from different worlds, so I don’t feel like it’s that simple. It’s just one of those ineffable things, I guess.

The book itself is a well written hybrid of horror, ghost story, and thriller that never settles down into the conventions of any of those genres. The forces haunting the story are literally and figuratively the plantation that holds up the town, the evils done by the family that owned it and enslaved many, and the locals who helped perpetuate and profit from those evils. Of course, those kind of evils and roots reach into today, manifesting as segregation and profound unfairness at most levels of society.

McQueen connects the horrors of the enslavement to the modern white privilege, and never settles into easy answers about which causal or worse. Similarly she never settles into the rythyms of a specific genre. The result is an uneasiness of the reader that helps propel the story as bodies and horrors pile up.

As I say, I like the ideas and the execution, but my investment never materialized.

Recommended.

I like to imagine that most people who enjoy reading have embraced the idea that writing in genre can be a stregth rather than a limitation. I often find it helpful to think of artists primarily being in one of the camps Scott McCloud defines in Understanding Comics. Broadly those are storytellers and commenters on form. Paula McLain is solidly in the first camp. She’s got things to say and is using the mystery/crime fiction genre to structure the story. The result is a page-turning story.

The focus is a cop on a break to deal with trauma cast in the role of of private eye in her home town. “Cop” undersells her skills – she’s an experienced and effective investigator who can’t leave a case in her specialty alone, and picks one up here. This is a fairly common crime fiction setup and Stars mostly follows the conventions from that to a conventional conclusion. I mean if you’ve ever read a mystery, you’ll recognize the beats of the story, but that genre has a rich enough body of beats to choose from that the effect is that I recognized I was hearing salsa and also that I was hearing excellent salsa. McLain’s prose is expressive and her plotting is propulsive. It’s a gripping read.

Her story also lights up a lot of ideas and issues worth thinking about. The investigation is into the disappearance of young girls in rural communities. The setting is Northern California in this case, but I think the ideas are more universal. I think there’s no way to talk about that without talking about the foster case system, personal trauma of the perpetrators, victims, and families, and the effects and support of the communities. McLain doesn’t blink at any of that. She brings solid research, and for all I know experience, to the details of plot, character and setting that elevate Stars from the run-of-the-mill.

She also deftly ties this to a story most Americans will recognize from the headlines, which is a nice subtle way to underscore the point that she’s telling us what headlines obscure about that kind of story.

Strongly recommended.

Genesis is a novel that feels to me like a short story. It’s an SF bottle movie (one location and one topic) with a little twist to it that is smart about its topic, but maybe a little longer than it needs to be.

That topic is Artificial Intelligence (AI) writ large, in the sense of what is a conscious entity and can humans create one. The “will AIs replace replace us” trope appears, too, in kind of an interesting, understated way. Because the story is all told indirectly it did make me engage in the story in some interesting ways. I think it would make a great book club selection for some nerds, in that the questions it raises obliquely are more interesting than the plot on the paper.

There’s some nice writing, and a good engaging structure to the story.

Recommended.

I was attracted to Tom Zoellner’s collection of essays because we share a love for road trips and reflection, though mine had become more sky trips pre-COVID. I love the enforced mindfulness of a long drive and I’ve had many an insight on the highway or airway. Zoellner is a better writer than I am and many of his essays coalesce into the sorts of historical discussions of Americana that I love.

The road is an inspiration we share, but the insights are less universal. That’s probably inescapable. So much of what I love about road trips is the internal and personal reflections. I suspect that Zoellner doesn’t consider as many computer science thesis topics as I did in graduate school, for example.

That said, all of these essays are good, and diverting. But I enjoyed my favorites so much more than the mass of them, the effect raised the bar in hindsight. Worth a read.