Gladwell is fond of quirky factors. The unexpectedness of his explanations often disguises their banality or their error. In his new book, he is particularly interested in examining the amount of time that must be spent honing a skill or a craft, although his larger point is that society frequently plays a role in providing people with the opportunity to do so. “The idea that excellence at performing a complex task requires a critical minimum level of practice surfaces again and again in studies of expertise,” Gladwell reports. (I hope those studies did not cost too much.)

[..]

Gladwell’s overarching thesis in Outliers is so obviously correct that it hardly merits discussion. “The people we surround ourselves with have a profound effect on who we are.” Also, tomorrow is the beginning of the rest of your life. Gladwell writes as if he is the only person in the world in possession of this platitudinous wisdom. The central irony of Outliers is that, Gladwell’s discomfort with the self-help genre notwithstanding, he has written a book that conforms to it perfectly. This is a motivational manual. It is larded with inspirational stories, and with interactive games to capture the reader’s attention–with handy charts and portentous graphs.

- Isaac Chotiner, reviewing Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers

In Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies, everyone is made pretty at age 16. Not just beautiful, but far beyond, to the point implied by our evolutionary origins. A point where you look both vulnerable, healthy, wise and attractive. Pretty to a degree not possible by random mutation.

As a minor side effect, the operation turns you into a happy, empty-headed party animal – unless your job requires otherwise. Somebody has to make all the toys work.

Yes, we’re in a dissonant utopia here. Everything is perfect, except it isn’t. There is no overt oppression in this world of happy, shiny people. You rarely see the Secret Police. But when you do, you obey instinctively, because they have had plastic surgery too, and their beauty is a cruel beauty, the kind that inspires awe and fear.

The story is about Tally, a young “ugly” (ie. pre-operation) girl, who gets involved with freethinkers who want to live normally, like in the old days. It’s similar to Tripods and Fahrenheit 451, and the result is very enjoyable.

The Uglies novels are written for the young adult market, which means they are short and easy to read. Isn’t it funny how often good writing overlaps with enjoyable writing? You can’t be self-indulgent when you’re writing for teenagers. Actually, Westerfeld’s adult Succession novels were succinct too. The main difference is that Uglies doesn’t feel as crammed full of ideas as Succession did, and it is better for it.

David Denby aims too carelessly in Snark, his attack on the cheap sarcasm he believes dominates our media culture. Snark is an empty, angry attempt at wit, told in the knowing voice of us vs them. It’s so easy that everybody can do it, and everybody does. You don’t need to know anything, or have any ideas, or stand for anything – in fact it is better if you don’t. All you need is a target and the ability to sneer.

Snark, Denby argues, enforces mediocricity, becoming a philistine outlet for resentment against anyone who dares to achieve or believe in anything. Snark embraces the reader. “You and me, we know everything. Everybody else sucks.” No wonder it’s popular.

Unfortunately, Denby’s choice of examples is an EPIC FAIL!! (Uhm, sorry.) He selects Wonkette for particular scorn, but gets all the facts wrong. Besides, I rather like Wonkette’s “proudly idiotic” style. If this is snark, I’m not entirely against it.

Tom Wolfe is an even more baffling example. Why him? Even if one could detect snark in his writings, he is not a good representative of the style. Denby seems anxious to select examples many people know about, thus missing the point. The best examples of ugly snark are all to be found below the top tier of writers. The essence of snark is how easy it is to write.

That said, I believe Denby’s analysis is correct and valuable. Also, he deserves sympathy for volunteering as the perfect snark bait.

I’m not a libertarian, but I like libertarians, and I listen to them. My best counterargument is often just a sheepish “people would never accept it”. I think big government fulfills a desire in people, like religion. If we got rid of it, it would just be reinvented, and who knows in what form? I’m just happy my government isn’t trying to kill me, and is run on well-meaning principles. That is rare enough.

Brian Doherty’s Radicals for Capitalism – A Freewheeling History of the American Libertarian Movement surveys the libertarian landscape, highlighting its fascinating thinkers and characters, from near-respectable economists to mystics and hippies. He paints the picture of a movement that is as infuriatingly impractical and stubbornly fractured as communism was, – except not evil, and never in power.

Radicals for Capitalism has only one dark chapter, the story of how Objectivism turned into a cult. Radicals for equality have killed people by the thousands and millions. The worst libertarianism has done is turn bright young people into assholes.

My favourite libertarian thinker remains Friedrich Hayek, whose pragmatic approach makes him relevant to all ideologies. (It also makes him repelling to purist libertarians). It’s bad enough that mainstream parties want the government to be involved in everything, but if they read Hayek (and Hazlitt) they might do it more efficiently.

(Correction: I have just been informed that libertarianism is Dead, because it’s to blame for all the banks and governments behaving like idiots. Never mind the above, then. Now how about a blogger bailout?)

Some would call this a stack of books. It’s really a queue. New books go in at the bottom, and they’re read from the top. I’ve learned that when you tend to have 20 unread books lying around at any time, you need to organize your reading.

I used to follow the “just put them wherever and pick them up from wherever” system, but it was too stressful. I’d begin on one book, but then a more interesting book would arrive in the mail, and I’d begin on that one too, meaning to go back to the first one later. But then a third book would arrive, and so on. So I ended up with a lot of half-read books that I meant to finish some day, and really felt I ought to. Reading stopped being fun.

The queue solved everything. I either finish the book at the top, or give it up, and put it away for good. I might put it back in the queue later, but I don’t keep half-read books lying around. One book at a time. Finish it or stop. Goto next.

I try not to reorganize the queue, but I do make exceptions. Right now, the bottom of the queue is a bit heavy on fantasy, quite by accident. I’ll probably thin it out with a different kind of book, to create variety. The point is to make it fun.

What, you don’t have fun when you’re reading? Well there’s your problem right there.

One hears – often – that [Atlas Shrugged] changed a reader’s life; yet you can also hear of people, upon discovering a copy in a loved one’s room, throwing it out of a window “for their own good” – and someone in the yard, seeing what the offending book was, running over it again and again with a lawnmower, shredding it, ensuring that this copy at least could wreak no more harm, pollute no more minds.

[..]

[When Henry Hazlitt] intimated that “I do not pretend to agree with you in every point and in every statement; I do not imagine that you expect that kind of agreement”, the libertarian newsman was merely advertising his lack of imagination. Isabel Paterson responded that “it isn’t a question of agreement” with [God of the Machine]. “I tried to set forth axioms, principles, facts and deductions of a logical nature. They are either true or not true, but they don’t depend on agreement; they are so per se. Do you ‘agree’ with Euclid’s statement that a ‘straight line is the shortest distance between two points?'”

[..]

Tom Marshall ultimately embraced an even more radical and individualistic version of the Preform idea, which he dubbed Vonu – an invented word meaning a life outside the reach of any who could oppress you. In practice, it meant hiding in the woods of Oregon, where he managed to disappear from the sight or knowledge of anyone who ever knew him – his ultimate fate is unknown.

- Brian Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism

In Grown Up Digital, Don Tapscott defines the Net Generation as people born between 1977 and 1997. That would be me, then, (barely), and, after years of research, Tapscott has discovered that I’m awesome. Research shows computer games have made me smart, and, although research also shows I’m no better at multitasking than older people, it sure would make sense if I were, now wouldn’t it? And just look at the online services I use. I’m on the Facebook and the YouTube and the Wikipedia, interacting with my peers in a paradigm shift of empowerment. I’m grrrrreat.

Why, thank you, mr. Tapscott. There’s always a market for telling your readers how smart they are. Malcom Gladwell’s latest book explained that to become an expert you need to practice for 10 000 hours. Want to bet it’s being recommended by people who have been doing their job or hobby for more than 10 000 hours?

In defining the “Net Gen”, Tapscott gives us valuable (and, from my perspective, fairly correct) insights into the values and habits of people who have grown up with the internet. He has done research, and that’s more than most who have commented on the subject.

On top of those insights, he builds a cloud of feelgood fluff that begs for a game of buzzword bingo. You had better not flinch at words like engage, mesh, web 2.0, revolutionize, paradigm, wisdom of crowds, and empower, because he uses them on every single page. The 120 pages I read, anyway.

AK-47, The Story of the People’s Gun is a biography of the Kalashnikov assault rifle. It’s not a history. That would require a lot more than 200 pages. There are perhaps 100 million Kalashnikovs today, and they’ve killed millions of people all over the world. A history of the AK-47 is a history of the second half of the 20th century. Michael Hodges has instead tried to capture the soul of the AK-47, through stories that illustrate it as a weapon and as an icon:

AK-47, the Soviet gun. Made after the Second World War in preparation for the Third, designed to be simple and durable enough to hand out to millions of poorly trained conscripts.

AK-47, the anti-imperialist gun. Symbol of third world revolution. Picked up by American soldiers in Vietnam because their M-16s were sensitive to the climate.

AK-47, the terrorist gun. For some, a tool for killing, as in Munich in 1972. For modern Islamists, a symbol, a brand they’ve appropriated. The anti-Coca Cola.

Hodges argues that the Kalashnikov is in itself a cause of many conflicts. Once you’ve dropped a few million into an area, they remain for decades, long after the original conflict is over, encouraging people to solve their conflicts with violence. You can’t enforce law and order in a Kalashnikov culture.

There’s probably something to this. But removing cheap weapons is perhaps not a practical road to world peace.

And Mikhail Kalashnikov, the inventor? He’s still alive, and has his own vodka brand. Not quite the Nobel road.

Jerusalem Commands is the third novel in Michael Moorcock’s Pyat Quartet. It opens with Pyat, or “Max Peters”, as a star of silent movies in Hollywood, and takes him through gruesome adventures in North Africa. As always there are two stories, the one Pyat tells us, and the truth. The difference is not always one of facts, but of interpretation. What makes Pyat contemptible is not only his actions, but which events he chooses to emphasize, and which to do away with in a few shockingly unemotional sentences.

Pyat always insists on his own brilliance, dignity and innocence in whatever he does, but his words betray him. He is a pitiable human, a grotesquely tragicomic character: Both a Jew and an anti-semite, both a victim and a friend of great tyrants. A believer in chivalry who betrays his friends, a visionary engineer whose inventions never work. He fears Islam as a great enemy of Christianity, but worships Allah when expedient. And he hints at even darker memories than the ones he is willing to share.

Pyat is a glorious hypocrite, but, for all his contradictions, he is a coherent character. He lives. He strides through the 1920s like he owns the place. He is the perfect man to represent the era.

As the novel ends, it is October 1929. We know that Pyat is headed for close friendship with Goering. We also know he’ll end up in a concentration camp, a yellow star on his clothes. The fourth novel will close the story.

I’ve tried to read Theodore Sturgeon’s 1953 short story collection E Pluribus Unicorn several times since I bought it in 1998. I didn’t get further than a quarter of the way. This may be because some of the stories are unpleasant, but more likely I just got distracted.

I’ve gotten better at organizing my reading: One book at a time, from the top of the stack, with new books going to the bottom. I finish the top book or put it away, but I only read one at a time. Multiple open books is a leading cause of bibliophilic stress disorder. With one book, I can focus.

Focus is necessary to appreciate a finely crafted short story. Earlier, I missed the details, and didn’t quite get the point. Now I do.

The stories in E Pluribus Unicorn aren’t all good, and there are some awkward twists. But most of them are memorable. Many take place in the crossroads between romanticism and horror, and succeed in being truly disturbing. Others deal with themes of love and loneliness, the best of which is A Saucer of Loneliness. Some are realistic, including my overall favourite Die, Maestro, Die! – where the only magic is the magic of jazz. A Way of Thinking also stands out.

These are the kinds of stories that give you a sense of what SF can accomplish. It was other authors like Ray Bradbury who perfected this genre-bending approach to SF, but they were walking in Sturgeon’s footsteps.