Just for the fun of it, what if the immune system has its own interests and sometimes takes more than it needs? There's a known problem that sometimes it overreacts, though I don't know if it helps to model that as somewhat parasitic.
Kyle Harper wrote a terrific book about plague etc in the Roman Empire called the Fate of Rome. The plague of Justinian in particular was an absolute shocker. And (cough, cough) here is a podcast I did with him on the subject. https://www.buzzsprout.com/207869/7554679-the-fate-of-rome-with-kyle-harper
Just 1 out of 17 finalists is female? How much more interesting these books could have been had reviewers looked more closely at authors in the other half of the population.
If there had been only 1 male author I would have been equally wistful about what had been missed. You may have picked bad women authors in the past, what do I know. That has nothing to do with the quality of women authors on average. Extrapolating from your sample is dodgy, I would say. And unless I've missed something, I think it's still true that we humans tend to prefer people who think and talk like us - so not impossible that there is an invisible hand at work here.
> ...and in which the works by women authors could be plausibly argued to not be lower in quality...
While I'm in total agreement with you, quality is subjective.
It could be argued (and, indeed, it is the core paradigm of the Social Justice movement) that the way we we judge the quality of anything, including books, is not objective. Rather, it is an emergent property of our social upbringing. Since all of us, men as well as women, live in a patriarchal society, we will inevitably downgrade the quality of books written by female authors. The only solution is for everyone to flood their reading lists with as many female authors as possible, regardless of perceived quality; this way, our perception of quality will eventually shift to accommodate the female perspective.
Of course, the hidden assumption here is that it is even possible to distinguish male and female authors based on their writing (as opposed to their names and biographies). Seeing as Turing came up with a famous test for just this situation, applying it to literature might be a better bet than aiming for subjective quality.
'humans tend to prefer people who think and talk like us'
I'm a female reader and I really don't feel any preference for female authors, especially in non-fiction. I'm not sure if the existing ones are worse or not, I haven't noticed that either. In fiction, again, I don't feel that men are somehow worse on average. If I strain my memory, I maybe have noticed that the female characters in books by male authors (as opposed to those created by female authors) are less often like actual females so that I can feel similarity or recognize them as someone I know. I suppose this can result from males preferring to write about very unusual women with interesting, "mysterious ways" or not understanding what the women in their lives are feeling inside or something, but I'm not even sure the difference is real.
Out of curiosity, how do you know which authors were male and which were female ? Ok, the obvious answer is, "I looked at their names". However, maybe it's just me, but I tend to just skip over the authors' names in these book review contexts; I honestly couldn't list any of them off the top of my head -- and that's even before throwing pseudonyms and ambiguous names into the mix.
If you were presented with, say, 50 pages of non-fiction prose that are unfamiliar to you, each page written by a different author, could you tell which of them were written by women ? If so, how would you tell ?
I once gave my dad a book by the famous travel writer Jan (formerly James) Morris. When he finished it, he said, "You know, I thought this book was by a man while I was reading it, but when I got to the end, the biography says it was written by a woman. That just goes to show, you never can tell."
As a nonfiction writer, I always pay attention to the names of writers. After awhile, you start to notice patterns. Like, say, an op-ed about how true social justice will never be attained until society pays more attention to my hair is probably by a woman. An article about how some new innovation is baseball statistics proves that Ted Williams was the G.O.A.T. is likely written by a man.
Or to take a mostly male subject: the sportswriter who typically covers golf for the New York Times is a woman. She tends to write about golf slightly more than the average male golf writer from a human interest standpoint -- e.g., how a tour pro feels about his relationship with his father, who is battling cancer -- and slightly less in terms of recounting heroic deeds on the links in tactical detail such as whether he hit a 3 iron or a 4 iron. She likes golfers and wants to help you like them too.
Most people wouldn't notice, but it's not hard to see.
" I think it's still true that we humans tend to prefer people who think and talk like us...."
If I wanted that, I'd stick to reading my own writings, since I am the only cat who really truly thinks and talks like me.
Then again, I don't even think and talk like me all the time, and I don't seek out books by authors who are feral cats or shorthaired tabbies or whatever. In fact, I go out of my way to find authors who don't think and think and talk like me, in hopes that my biases may be disconfirmed, that I may mrrp "and what if he is right?" to myself.
The "voice" of the writing does have a major influence on readers perception of the quality of a book. A book written with the same cultural assumptions as the reader will come across as "better" than one that makes different assumptions (and, thereby, makes the reader feel a little bit uncomfortable every page).
This filter applies at the publisher level, the "bothering to read past the first chapter" level, and again at the "worth a review/recommendation level.
Countering this unconscious bias of ourselves and others requires active and deliberate work.
There is no "neutral" state. Every adult has patterns they are used to, and assumptions they carry, and things that are on their mind regularly. Communicating with a similar person (and reading their writing counts) is easier than communicating with a dissimilar person.
If you were some kind of self-optomizing robot, it would make sense to prefer the most prolific and topic-varied frame, to allow you the most reading pleasure. Right now that is probably USA White Male.
The actual benefit you should be looking for is gleaning insights from works that have a different frame, even though they are less pleasurable.
If there is no "neutral" state, what is the state into which you want people to train themselves - which things do you want people to find uncomfortable? - and why "should" we wish to be in that state?
Counterpoint, for fiction - Three Body Problem and its sequels appealed to me precisely because how alien its cultural assumptions were, to someone raised on contemporary Western sci-fi.
Right. Is Liu Cixin a brilliantly original writer or is he just the only 21st Century Chinese sci-fi writer most of his American readers have read? Beats me ...
"A book written with the same cultural assumptions as the reader will come across as "better" than one that makes different assumptions (and, thereby, makes the reader feel a little bit uncomfortable every page)."
I can recall reading Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations" at age 14 and being awe-struck by how culturally remote it was. I found it very difficult going but also overwhelmingly great.
Shakespeare is many people's only contact with the literary culture of the Renaissance, so he often gets personal credit for what what were cultural commonplaces in 1600.
Who's talking about obligations? Not me. I would just think that if you want to understand the world, you'd want to hear the perspective of the other half of the population.
It would be interesting to make up a list of outstanding non-fiction books that are better for being written by a woman, rather than just outstanding on their own.
For example, I recently read Pauline Kael's famous long New Yorker article about Herman Mankiewicz's script for "Citizen Kane." It was terrific. But ... if it had been written by Paul Kael, I don't see that it would have been all that different.
On the other hand, I suspect that Elizabeth Warren's 2003 book "The Two Income Trap" about the economic issues facing families, while not a great book, is better for having been written by a woman. Women, in part because they aren't as interested as men are in abstract ideologies, have taught me an awful lot of valuable lessons about the practical realities of of life and reproduction.
To start, I'd nominate Camille Paglia's "Sexual Personae."
But it's hard to come up with other extremely high-brow women authors who benefited from being women.
For example, one of the most formidable woman writers and editors of my lifetime was Helen Gurley Brown, author of "Sex and the Single Girl" and editrix of "Cosmopolitan" before it became Woke. Gurley Brown was pretty awesome, a sort of redneck Joan Rivers, but she wasn't high brow.
Just putting a public announcement here: I would like there to be a review of Lost In Math and I think it would be good for the SSC audience. I read it and liked it, but don't feel qualified to comment on it. Maybe if Scott and a physicist teamed up? I'd put $100 in a pot to incentivize this.
Excepting a topic like "my experiences as a (man/woman)", I don't think sex affects the data that can be communicated to me. I.e., reading a mathematics textbook because it's by a woman won't give me any different information than the male-authored textbooks.
I'd push back on that at little - if we're discussing history or sociology or psychology (as many of the books reviewed here have done), it doesn't seem unreasonable to argue that a women may have a different approach to the topic.
I'm hesitant to make the argument though, because it does seem a little sexist to claim that women have this mysterious wisdom that us rational men could benefit from hearing.
The reason you are getting so much pushback is that what you are saying is basically BS.
For most ASX readers, they are reading in what is essentially a perfect double-blind environment. They pick books based on their interests, complete them (or not) based on how well they consider the book to be written, and at essentially no point is there ever a glance at the gender (or even the name) of the author. That's certainly how I operate.
Of course I have a few favorite authors and wait for their next new book, but 90%+ of what I read is based on scanning "title: subtitle <cover art>" hmm, looks interesting, let's try it. And 90% of that is abandoned within 15 minutes as not worth my time in a world of very limited time.
At no point in this procedure do I ever look at (or even care about) the name of the author, let alone the gender, race, sexual orientation or whatever. Certainly I have ZERO idea of who any of the ASX reviewers were, and apart from the famous books, no idea who the authors of the reviewed books were.
This is as close to the perfect meritocracy of authorship as is possible, what you claim you want. If that isn't delivering the results you want, perhaps your basic world view and axioms are flawed?
Where to start? Who has defined the canon that we all read in school? Obviously men, and look at how many men this version sets out? https://www.openculture.com/2014/01/harold-bloom-creates-a-massive-list-of-works-in-the-western-canon.html. Or from a completely different angle, who has to do most of the domestic work in households in addition to holding down jobs, which makes it that much harder find time for thought and research? No bonus points for the right answer.
How much of canon being dominated by males is explained by writing in general being dominated by males for a most of our history?
My intuition is that "almost all of it", but I would not mind to hear an alternative explanation. After all, I have very limited knowledge of western canon - I'm russian and while we read some of western works in school, we mostly read our own writers.
I expect that you resent that state of affairs, which is understandable, but I'm not sure how that is relevant to our times in general, let alone to very small and specific sample of works reviewed here (it's mostly non-fiction about history and economy).
I think that if you can find and prove some systematic bias among modern publishers or editors that discriminates women for being women, I would support your cause to fight that sort if discrimination.
If that discrimination is not there, then what is the problem?
I think you're completely right about the historical canon being dominated by men. Not necessarily all men saying 'women are stupid and can't write very well' but by men (and women) saying that a woman's place is definitely not in higher education and is definitely at home with the kids. That has changed dramatically but there are still lingering effects - the canon is still man-heavy and women still have less time to research/write because of family duties. Yes, by itself this list being 16 male authors would be neither here nor there. But this kind of discrepancy is widespread.
When contemporary feminism came along 50+ years ago, there was a lot of emphasis on rediscovering female writers. But ... they turned out largely to be bestseller authors, such as Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" and (until race came to rule over all) and Margaret Mitchell's "Gone With the Wind" (which is an outstanding book). Zora Neale Hurston's "Their Eyes Were Watching God" is a romance novel, and probably less ambitious artistically than some of her other books.
There wasn't really a lot of esoteric artistic literature by ignored women that was rediscovered by feminist scholars.
The small number of women in that category were already famous: e.g., Elizabeth Taylor won an Academy Award before feminism came back in 1969 for her 1966 movie "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"
Jane Austen would have been hugely famous in her lifetime if she'd lived her three score and ten, but she died at 42. She was already getting fan letters from the Prince Regent. By 70 years after her birth, she had Charles Dickens telling people who asked him how to write novels to read Jane Austen.
In general, women artists tend to have been celebrated in their own time but have had a harder time withstanding the test of time. Austen's huge fame today is due to her being clearly the G.O.A.T. (Greatest of All Time) at writing witting women's novels in English.
This is an excuse to bring up Swastika Night by Katharine Burdekin (1937), a dystopia set centuries after a worldwide victory by the Axis powers. It predicted the holocaust.
And Jubilee by Margaret Walker, which was a bestseller in its time (1966) but which I don't hear much about these days. It runs from 1835 to 1870, has the bestseller nature (good at pulling at least this reader in), and might be the most researched novel I've read-- the food, the soil, the economics.
Also, it has an angle on slavery which isn't the most common-- there's the overwork and the punishments, but there's also an emphasis on slavery making the slaves poor. Detailed descriptions of plenty of food for the white owners, while there's little for the slaves.
I don't think the views about 'books on the bookshelf' is amenable to simple analysis. If you start off with 'structural forces' as the cause (there may be some truth in it) you have to ignore a lot of change and time series data.
Consider a dimension from a Scientific paper, through to a science based trade book, to Science Fiction, Thrillers, Romance and finally Literary Novels.
From my tiny slice of market observations I'd argue that the more 'hard science' works are typically (but not exclusively) written by men, but then the 'softer sciences' have a greater proportion of female authors.
Similarly with fiction... the higher the content of character content the greater proportion of female writers.
Not as hard as a 'rule', but more a mild expectation. But a good book is still a good book no matter who writes it.
In other words, in the sexist 1950s, women made up a quarter of the New York Times bestseller authors, compared to a little under half in the most recent decade.
In general, the past seems more sexist than it was because women were less likely to write enduringly important books. But at the time, women authors were moving a lot of product.
A large percentage of bestseller writers in English over the last 250 or so years have been women. Samuel Johnson in the 1770s was always complaining about women making tons of money off their books but then admitting he had stayed up all night reading the latest page-turner from a famous woman novelist.
Of course, most of the books of the last 250 years that are famous today were written by men, but the reasons for that are probably more interesting than Structural Oppression.
The Achilles desire, to suffer, maybe die young and horribly, but be remembered by history, seems to be a substantially more male trait.
If your goal is to maximize cash from your art, you'll do things one way; if it's to maximize "impact" or "artistic value" or "memorability" or whatever you'll do things a different way.
Don't start that. Next it will be "too many white women and men", then "not enough LGBT" and then we'll have the modern Hugos where a book review must be a review of a book about Bingo Card Oppression Olympics, written by an Oppression Olympian, and reviewed by another Oppression Olympian, and only Oppression Olympians can vote on that while the rest of us keep our gaze firmly on the ground.
I don't want Token Wimmin Authors and you're not doing me, a woman reader, any favours by waving that flag, bunky.
Original comment smacked a bit too much of "let's get some ladies in here, their delicate touch and feminine flair can brighten up this dull room - some chintz, maybe some ruffles, a china figurine or two!"
I don't think I've ever read a book simply because it was by An Authoress; when I've read women writers it's because of good reviews, I already know their work and am assured of the quality of their writing, or it's on a topic I want to know about. I didn't like the "eat your vegetables" Recommended Reading List in SF back in 2015, even if it would have been less like a dose of medicine if phrased differently - 'here's some diverse works that you might like to try alongside your established favourites' - https://the-orbit.net/heinous/2015/02/24/excluding-white-male-authors/ and I'll be danged if I meekly follow along because it would be deemed "how much more interesting".
Put your money where your mouth is, PdC, and list some "more interesting written by women", rather than reclining atop Mount Helicon with a simper of derision.
The world is full of good books written by women. The fact that only one of the authors was a women says to me that the reviewers' sample was skewed. It's not up to me to convince anyone of this or that woman author's value. We all have a limited time on this planet. Even if we read nonstop for the rest of our waking hours on it we wouldn't scratch the surface of history's great books. Why would it make sense to restrict ourselves to a subset of the population?
We humans do a lot of unsatisfactory things by accident / default / due to structural forces beyond our control. It's our job, I think, to try to identify that in advance and correct for it.
>We all have a limited time on this planet. Even if we read nonstop for the rest of our waking hours on it we wouldn't scratch the surface of history's great books
Isn't that exactly why we need you to recommend great books by women, if you're so adamant that we're missing out on them?
No offense, but bullshit. If your premise is "there are lots of great books by women that should have been read and included in this book review contest", and someone questions the existence/quantity/quality of those books, you are absolutely dodging the question by trying to shift the onus of making your argument to your conversation partner.
There's a ton of great books I'll never get to read no matter the sex of the author. There's a ton of books I'm restricted from reading because I don't read the language. To turn it back on you, there are *so many* books out there and limited time, why *wouldn't* I restrict my reading list to "this guy or these people or that genre"?
The books sitting by my bed that I'm reading or intending to read are:
"The Portable Dorothy Parker:" The 1920s New York wit wrote brilliant satires on women putting each other down in polite language. Great stuff objectively, although, to be honest, I'm not that fascinated by women subtly putting knives in each other's backs with ambiguous but cutting remarks.
Henry James' "Washington Square:" a wealthy but homely young lady has a dashing suitor. Are his intentions honorable? It's much more readable than James' late novels, but I may not finish it because I'm not really that interested in social novels about young women.
"1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed" by Eric H. Cline.
"Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell" by Jason Riley
"Evelyn Waugh: The Early Years 1903-1939" by Martin Stannard
"The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together" by Heather McGhee
"Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection" by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy.
I have a broad range of interests, but I'm more likely to finish a book written by a man about a masculine topic. But it doesn't kill me to start a book on a feminine topic. I get a lot out of it even if I feel like I hit diminishing marginal returns part way through.
I just saw somebody else attribute this to Jacques Barzun.
That reminds me that I'm a fast reader so I don't usually read the latter half of words or phrases. Thus I often get confused by text strings that start out the same but only differ at the end. For example, because whooping cranes are famously near extinction, I assumed whooping cough was too, so I was extremely surprised when I had whooping cough because I was sure it was vanishingly rare these days, but then I realized I was thinking about whooping cranes.
(a) Is your stance ("reviewers' sample was skewed") falsifiable? What WOULD persuade you that the outcome is not the result of bias? If your stance is not falsifiable, if you view this as an axiom not as a testable proposition, then the rest of us see no point in wasting time interacting with you, and perhaps a rationalism site is not where you will be happiest?...
(b) Are you willing to at least concede that men and women as they exist today might have different interests? If you concede that, do you claim that it is a bad thing? Do you think men should be *forced* to read romance novels, and women *forced* to read military history?
Fun fact: for the longest time, I thought that Louis McMaster Bujold was male, because I had a male friend named Louis. It didn't occur to me that Louis can also be a female name. Live and learn !
Isn't she Lois not Louis? The feminine of which is Louise 😁
If our pal wants to get outraged over lack of women, then I suggest they turn their attention to the Tiptree Award, which has now been re-baptised as the Otherwise Award.
I think that's a worse decision than any "all your book reviews are books written by men" in the cause of women writers. I think I'd disagree hugely with Alice Sheldon's political and other opinions. But this level of spinelessness, all in the name of "we cherish our disabled readers", is much worse: what, great names can't have done shitty things? women can't have done shitty things? we can't distinguish between the work and the life?
No, great names can't have done shitty things. This means that every author before around the year 2000 is slated for cancellation. The most recent one is Tolkien, who is an evil racist slaveowner, or something, I'm not entirely sure. Bottom line is, he's bad, so he gets to join J.K.Rowling in the re-education camp.
I feel like you might be misreading their comment.
One memoir is autobiographical, but there are also "a couple of pieces" that are not. These pieces are presumable not memoirs, which is why author puts these in a category of their own.
This may or may not be true if expressed as a rationale (it could be industry gatekeeping or the fact that women are more likely to take on domestic roles, he says typing this as his wife makes his son's lunch...). But the pattern seems likely to replicate in studies of specific genera. The only female author I can think of who writes longue durée history for example is Naomi Wolf; all other examples I know of are male (mostly equally sketchy though). I am less aware of popular science, but any author I could name would be male. I don't think this is personal bias, since my knowledge of these fields is from reading others not myself.
Interesting sidenote. Checked with my wife (she's finished the sandwiches if you were concerned) who is a psychologist by training. She agrees most popular books are by male authors (Elizabeth Lofthouse is offered as the exception here), but points out females writemost psychology text books at secondary level.
Naomi Wolf became a celebrity in the wake of the Anita Hill brouhaha in 1991 when the Democrats revived feminism and brought about the 1992 Year of the Woman. She and Susan Faludi were the debut author feminist celebrity writers. Faludi was a not bad writer with some sometimes interesting ideas. Wolf's book "The Beauty Myth" about how it's unfair that society is biased in favor of the beautiful was dumb: in just about every paragraph there was some kind of poor idea. I'm not sure if Wolfe got the joke that her book "The Beauty Myth" was a bestseller in large part because she was, by the standards of writers, beautiful, with a superb head of hair.
On the other hand, since then I've come to rather like her. She has not gotten any smarter, but she still bravely charges into controversies that often expose her various weaknesses. She is very much her own woman, which I wouldn't have expected when she was so fashionable 30 years ago.
Probably best not to put words in PdC's mouth. PdC's only said that we miss things if we don't read women, which isn't quite the same as what you've attributed (e.g. if you're trying to make some kind of grand synthesis by sifting through others' work - and you're amazingly good at said sifting - whether something might have a gem you don't already know is more relevant than its overall quality).
Do you have data on that? And even if it is true, I think it's more interesting to ask what we're missing out on by not having more female brains working on analytical non fiction, and what we should be doing to make it so
Out of interest, would you expect us to be missing out on things due to low rates of female involvement due to a special female perspective or simply due to a smaller field of authors reducing the quality of the output? I'm pretty much ruling out an increase in volume being involved as I suspect increased supply of authors won't affect demand for this type of book here.
I think it's become pretty clear over the last couple of decades that when we leave out the female perspective/participant that data/results are worse for it. Medical studies, investment performance, team performance etc. Why would we expect this to be any different in terms of quality of literary output? I'm not saying a female Daniel Kahneman is going to be necessarily better or worse than the (clearly excellent) male version. But on average they're going to come up with different ideas that make the whole more interesting.
Successful Silicon Valley start-ups in this century have overwhelmingly had a majority of male founders, with a few husband-wife teams split equally.
The reason Theranos elicited so much good will from society was that America was rooting for a woman, Elizabeth Holmes, to become the first female founder billionaire.
I'm not disagreeing with that, which seems logically consistent (although my natural scepticism is on full as I'm in a thread about overarching historical theories, so I will note that we have a theoretical not a proven agreement on this point). My question was more about why you think this might be the case?
> when we leave out the female perspective/participant that data/results are worse for it. Medical studies, investment performance, team performance etc.
I'd like this to be true, but in the current political/cultural climate even a suggestion that this narrative might be false would mark anybody as a knuckle-dragging caveman at the very least, and narratives that go unopposed in polite society don't inspire confidence. And even if good faith inquires were permitted, I doubt that there exists enough good quality data from which one might be able to infer such conclusions.
I feel some elaboration of "narratives that go unopposed in polite society don't inspire confidence" is worthwhile.
Between The Truth and public gestalt knowledge of "the science", there are several filters. One is the researcher, via experimenter effect (which can include fraud, but can also be more subtle; P-hacking, motivated exclusion of outliers, and so on). One is the journal publishing the researcher's work (as they don't just publish everything, there is therefore the potential for publication bias). One is the media's signal-boosting of journal articles that they think are important.
It should be obvious how this can stop a truth society doesn't want to hear from reaching it. Less obvious is how it can allow a falsehood society *does* want to hear to gain the seal of scientific approval. So, let's go back to P-values. P < 0.05 is the classic test of a significant result, and it means "if there's no real effect, this result is less than a 1/20 chance". Except that there are more than 20 studies on things that are thought to be of high social importance, and so there'll always be a number of false positives from pure chance (in addition to any from fraud, P-hacking, etc.). If the suppression of true negatives by the above three mechanisms is large enough, the false positives will accrete, Frankenstein-style into a false "scientific consensus".
This isn't me saying "all apparently-scientifically-proven things that are politically convenient are just made-up". It's me saying "some apparently-scientifically-proven things that are politically convenient are just made-up*, and I don't know how many or which ones".
*Proof by examples: Lysenkoism, race science in the 19th/early 20th century (or, if you think the latter's correct, race science since; at least one of them has to be a politically-constructed Frankenstein since they contradict each other).
"But on average they're going to come up with different ideas that make the whole more interesting."
Sez who? "Different" perhaps, "more interesting" remains to be proven. Different does not necessarily mean more interesting; "novel" (where eight books peddle the same well-worn line and the nine strikes out on a fresh line) may be "more interesting", or it may be "more interesting" the way a motorway pile-up is more interesting: so bad that it is gruesomely fascinating.
"The Angel In The Home" doesn't work any better when you sit the Angel down at a word processor.
Female perspectives on topics that women find interesting are often highly helpful.
On the other hand, the range of topics that women find fascinating is narrower. For example, Jane Austen remains an almost living presence in women's literature today, because her topics, such as husband-hunting, remain so relevant to women. Very seldom do women carve out a new field, the way that, say, Bill James turned baseball statistics analysis into a huge hobby that attracted a remarkable amount of male talent since 1975. Generally, women devote their intellectual passions to more personally relevant areas.
You are arguing the Gadamerean "fusion of horizons" theory, which is that each demographic brings their own perspective to the text (text being anything that can be interpreted), which may or may not add value to the group's understanding of said text.
Here are new books I've reviewed in 2021 in my column in Taki's Magazine (in reverse chronological order) by the sex of the author:
Charles Murray's "Facing Reality:" I could imagine Heather Mac Donald or Amy Wax writing, but male datanauts are more common than female.
Blake Bailey's "Philip Roth" literary biography -- Mr. Roth picked out Mr. Bailey to be his authorized biographer because they were so much on the same wavelength than Bailey's biography got cancelled within weeks of publication for him being a Roth-style horn dog. I'm sure there will be future books about Roth from women (some of whom would likely have slept with Roth if they'd known him in his prime), some appalled, others intrigued.
Hermione Lee's authorized biography of "Tom Stoppard" -- Sir Tom picked out Ms. Lee to write a well-researched but rather decorous life of the great playwright. It's not as fun of a read as "Philip Roth," and being written by a woman might have contributed to that, but it won't get the still living Stoppard cancelled.
Walter Isaacson's biography+: "The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race." Isaacson's an eminent biographer (he had an immense bestseller in 2011 with "Steve Jobs") so this is a good book. But, he doesn't really make CRISPR co-discoverer Jennifer Doudna's private life come alive. A woman author might have figured out to get her to spill the beans on why, say, her first marriage ended in divorce. The most memorable character in Isaacson's book is not Doudna but Doudna's old mentor, the nonagenarian internally-exiled James D. Watson.
"Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters" by Abigail Shrier, a wise Jewish mom focuses on adolescent girls.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali: "Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women’s Rights"
Both of these books on women's topics are better for being written by women.
So, I'd say, looking at this sample size of six new books I've read, that the cross-sex biographies (Walter Isaacson on Jennifer Doudna and Hermione Lee on Tom Stoppard) are slightly less insightful due to being written by a member of the opposite sex. On the other hand, Philip Roth chose Blake Bailey to write his posthumous biography specifically because Bailey identified with Roth and sees him as the hero, which makes the Roth biography more insightful but also more biased.
For the three social problem books I reviewed, a man (Murray) wrote about a male topic (crime) and a mixed topic (IQ) well, while a woman (Hirsi Ali) wrote well about Muslim men harassing women on the street in Europe and a woman (Shrier) wrote about why adolescent girls fall so hard for the transgender fad. Interestingly, on the last topic, I have always been more interested in the Promethean M to F ex-men, the high achievers like Jenner, McCloskey, Morris, etc. As a woman, Shrier isn't very interested in them, perhaps rightly thinking of them as less relevant to the big new social problem of adolescent girls demanding to be neutered.
So, in general, the different sexes have somewhat different interests and strengths as authors.
Evolutionary psychology is a field that is traditionally split fairly equally among men and women academics, which makes a lot of sense because half the human race is male and half is female. For example, I am currently rereading "Mother Love" by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, an anthropologist and orchard keeper, who has brilliant insights into why mothers can get more chores done around the farm by a daughter when she's 11 than when she's 15. I can't imagine many straight men having the quantity and quality of insights into mother-daughter relations that Blaffer Hrdy has (although a few gay men might).
Women often have better ideas about real estate-related topics than men do. Jane Jacobs understood what makes a good neighborhood better than Le Corbusier did.
Le Corbusier, whose style was adapted, with disastrous results, in many postwar American public housing projects, was a classic example of a masculine mind projecting his rather abstract ideas onto the world.
I think this is an interesting point, but I think it says more about how few women write the kind of books that have been reviewed. By all means, recommend some books by women that we're missing out on!
Yes, I guess it's possible that no one reading these comments might be motivated to seek out more women authors in the future. But I hope that's not the case.
Sorry, but you seem to recommend "hypothetical books" by "hypothetical female auhtors" that would be on average equally good and interesting as the books now reviewed, that must necessarily exist because of why exactly? Can we deduce some sort of a priori equality between male and female researching and writing skills? What observations would make you change your mind?
Sorry, what? Maybe I'm too tired this morning but are you just saying that you're not sure women and men can research, analyse and write equally well on average?
No, that's not what I am saying. More generally, "average writing skills" are not per se what you are looking for, since the kind of books reviewed here are written by people at the extremes of the distribution. It could be that the average is the same, but the distribution is different.
I am also not claiming there is *per se* a biological reason for anything, there could be economic and cultural explanations for such a difference.
More generally, I am not really making any confident claim at all. It just seems that PdC assumes that there is a world of undiscovered gems written by female authors, for which they refuse to give examples. Given that most books popping up in contests like this, or in "great books lists" it could also be that there are, for whatever reasons, just less good books written by women. I wonder why that claim is instantly dismissed. What is the positive evidence for books written by women being equally good?
I'm not sure that this new not-so-confident claim does you any more favours: that the smartest men are better writers than the smartest women? And then you come back to maybe women write 'less good books'? (or do you mean that there have been fewer books written by women in the past, so of course there will be fewer good books in there than by men?). Even if that's the case, that doesn't justify not seeking out a handful from the thousands that do exist.
Your null hypothesis here then is that there is a notable and substantive difference between the ability of men and women to research and write? There seems likely to be reasons why there are less female authors of suitable works, but I'm not sure differing levels of intellectual capability across genders is one that's going to be widely accepted.
Writing book is a costly signal of wealth and intelligence. You must be smart enough to write a great book, and you must have enough resources so that you can spend a lot of time writing the book (not just literally writing, but also researching, editing, etc.).
I suppose it makes more sense for men than for women to go into greater extremes to signal wealth and intelligence.
I'm not saying it's your job, I'm just interested in the books that you're apparently so passionate about! It is interesting how few (non-fiction) books by women I read, although I do listen to a lot of podcasts by women (and I listen more than read these days so that must count for something). I just think that if you'd suggested a couple of books, your comment would have come across as less antagonistic.
In the interests of a productive discussion, I'd like to read The Scout Mindset by Julia Galef and Count Down by Shanna Swan, I've listened to both of them discuss their books and I definitely found them interesting. One's on rationality, and the other is on fertility, both seem like very important topics to learn more about.
An interesting book I actually read (by a black woman! double score!) was "Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race", which was an exploration of race within the United Kingdom. I probably wouldn't recommend it to an American, but it was useful for understanding the situation in my own country a little better, too often people just import the racial narratives wholesale from the USA, but Reni Eddo-Lodge manages to avoid that. I don't agree with all of her conclusions but I still think she offers a different perspective and that's what I look for in fiction.
Here's a small selection that 30 seconds of Googling threw up, from a German source lest we focus too much on the Ango world! https://twitter.com/simultorian/status/1195004078935461888/photo/1. But focusing mostly on non-fiction: how about Hanna Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Virginia Woolf, Susan Sontag, Barbara Tuchman, Toni Morisson, Rebecca Solnit, Mary Beard, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Doris Lessing, Anne Frank, Joan Didion, Rachel Carson, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Gaskell...the list goes on. I haven't read anywhere near all of their books but that none of them made this list makes the list poorer for it. And let's not get started on fiction by women authors that is worth reviewing...
I like Simone de Beauvoir's writing even if I don't always agree with it. Mary Beard as a historian rubs me up the wrong way as Simon Schama - their pop history gigs on TV have gone to their head.
But this was "review a book you like", not "review this list of selected titles". You're going to get different results for those. Maybe we're all poor wretched sinners mired in the swamp of misogyny - or maybe we just recommend books we really liked regardless of who wrote them?
So, merely recommending great books written by women is too much work for you, and you are not going to do it unless it is literally your job, which it isn't.
However, it is okay for you to request that someone else review those books. Because reading a book and writing a review is so much less work than merely mentioning the title of the book.
(Assuming you even have a specific book in mind. You might also be generally criticizing people for not knowing something that you don't know either. Like, maybe such books are genuinely rare.)
Karen Armstrong - a history of god or the great transformation, to name two examples that would fit here (yes I should now go write those two reviews, both awesome books in my opinion, but don’t think I have the time).
A History of God is exactly the kind of book I'd be interested in reading.
Would you recommend her books on Islam? I feel like I don't understand the world's second biggest religion well enough, if I like A History of God I'm wondering which of her works to read next.
I do recommend her "Islam: a short history". Its a much easier read than the other two books but still quite good. I found it very balanced - respectful of its subject in a way that is rare/difficult for a Western book about Islam.
I'd be interested in a review of a Karen Armstrong book because I dislike her intensely and would be glad to get stuck into one of her books. However, I'm not sure that is what PdC wants, as the impression I get (and I may well be mistaken) is that they want uncritical purring over how wonderful this book by this wonderful lady author is.
As for genres of works - taking a very small sub-set of nine books on a particular historical topic I wanted to read up on, there are three male authors and two female authors. The best book is by a male author, who is a heavyweight historian. I'd put the two women next, and the remaining male authors last (one of them very last as he was very disappointing).
Were I going to write a review on one book, I'd do the Number One author who happens to be male. This says nothing about other books I've read being by men, women, or tree sloths. And I am certainly not going to pick a book to review solely on grounds "the author has lady bits" because then we get into "the author's skin colour", the exact shade of the author's skin colour (seems like Lin-Manuel Miranda got a dose of criticism for not having enough dark brown people in his movie "In The Heights" https://www.vox.com/culture/22535040/in-the-heights-casting-backlash-colorism-representation), their gender, their sexual orientation, are they left-handed, etc.
I want to know if a book by A.N. Other is a good book. I don't care if A.N. Other is a neurodivergent, physically disabled, trans, poly, non-binary, two-spirit, multi-racial, Indigenous person otherkin. Do they know their stuff and can they write?
As I said above, under the Social Justice paradigm there's no such thing as "a good book". The quality of a book is subjective, and thus it depends on the sociopolitical upbringing of the person who is evaluating the book; and thus female authors will always be undervalued (since we live in a patriarchy). To put it another way, when you say "X is a good book", what you really mean is "X is a [straight white] male book"; and this holds regardless of your own gender.
The only way to combat this is, obviously, to drop the subjective notion of "quality" which only serves to reinforce harmful social norms; and instead to choose books based on the demographic categories of the authors.
“The Riddle of the Labyrinth” by Margalit Fox is a great account of the deciphering of Linear B.
The mysterious script of ancient Crete was largely revealed by the efforts of another woman, Alice Kober, a Classics professor who picked at the problem at her kitchen table for close to two decades. Unfortunately Kober died just as her efforts seemed about to come to fruition. She did get considerable recognition in her own lifetime, but ultimately the credit for deciphering Linear B went to a young male prodigy named Michael Ventris, who referred heavily to her exhaustive work. Kober (among others) was largely forgotten until Fox’s book.
Fox wrote obituaries in the NYT for years before tackling a book. It’s worth noting that we’re all probably reading a lot more content by women than we know, since there are lots of female copywriters and marketing people shaping our ideas through their words but who don’t get a byline or real inclusion in the idea of authorship.
I noticed when I got started in the opinion writing business 30 years ago that most of the people who really wanted to grab the world by the lapels and tell it what's on their minds are men while a large fraction of the opinion editors who picked which men get published were women.
I just took a random sample of 17 of the ~4200 books on my shelves, and _not one_ of them was by a female author. (And a few more; it seems like 1/17 is in fact fairly typical.)
It's possible that I am somehow biased towards male authors, but I think a simpler explanation is that, of notable books on topics interesting to this audience, a large majority are written by men.
It is of course possible -- I would say almost certainly true -- that a large part of _that_ is because of sexism, historical and/or present. Mostly historical in this case -- few of the books in this series of reviews are very recent. But I bet the way it operates is almost entirely by making women less likely to be in a position to write those books. Several of the books reviewed are by eminent academics (Robert Ellickson, professor at Yale; Frans de Waal, professor at Emory; Peter Brown, professor at Princeton; Joseph Tainter, professor at Utah State; William McNeil, professor at Harvard; also our one woman, Natasha Dow Schuell, who not coincidentally is decades younger than all the others and presently "only" an associate professor); _right now_ (I think I remember reading) more women than men are being appointed to senior academic positions but until recently the reverse was very much the case. Several are by eminent journalists with decades-long careers behind them (Robert Wright, Charles Mann, Robert Caro); I'm not sure of the current state of journalism but I'm pretty sure that not so long ago it was dominated by men. Some are from long enough ago that men were dominating _every_ field (Galen, probably Henry George). Then there are Peter Zeitan (military analyst) and John Storrs-Hall (nanotechnologist); I bet that even now those fields are male-dominated. Nicholson Baker and George Orwell, though, "could equally have been female", so to speak.
Again, to be clear, the point of that last paragraph isn't that it's _perfectly OK_ that most of the people writing this sort of book are men. It's not perfectly OK; very likely most of the reason why it's so is, or derives from, sexism. It's that, whatever the cause (sexism! men and women having different interests! men and women having different abilities! mere path-dependent randomness!), the shortage of women is _already there in the books_ rather than being an artefact of _how the books were selected_.
Suppose reviewers had been aware of this and attempted to apply a compensating 16:1 bias in favour of books written by women. There'd be a gain from increased diversity. There'd be a loss from picking from a much smaller field; if 16/17 books of some kind are written by men, then the best, most interesting, most ACX-aligned one _written by a woman_ is likely less good / less interesting / less ACX-aligned than the best/... _overall_.
It's not obvious to me that, simply from the point of view of trying to write interesting book reviews, the gain would outweigh the loss.
English women were writing a large fraction of bestselling fiction by the latter 18th century. Women wrote a lot of celebrated books in the 19th Century, including in economics-oriented titles, such as by Maria Edgeworth and Harriet Martineau.
But there's probably a bias in favor of male writers in terms of what goes down in history because men tend to be more history-oriented while women are more interested in fashion and the new.
In my review of Charles Murray's "Human Accomplishment," I pointed out an example of bias:
"Still, Murray’s rankings may be slightly unfair to female artists because they are less likely to have brilliant followers. My wife, for example, was incensed that Jane Austen finished behind the lumbering Theodore Dreiser and the flashy Ezra Pound. Yet, these men probably did have more influence on other major writers. That’s because subsequent famous authors were mostly male and thus less interested than the female half of the human race in Austen’s topics, such as finding a husband."
I'd add that several heavyweight novelists, such as Charles Dickens and Henry James, extolled Austen as the model for how to write a novel. But, Ezra Pound had a direct influence on Hemingway, whom he employed, and Eliot, whom he edited, who each had massive influence on subsequent male authors (e.g., Stoppard). So men tend to be more influential on other major writers just by being men.
If I look only at fiction, the fraction of women on my shelf is about 1/3. Looking at nonfiction, it's about 1/17. (This is a slightly more careful estimate than my earlier one.)
It looks to me as if reviewers in this series have cared more about the books themselves than about subsequent influence. But of course subsequent influence makes a difference to how _available for consideration_ a book is.
I don't think it's obvious that if Dreiser and Pound had more influence than Austen it's because her _topics_ were less interesting to male writers. That could well be true, but it seems to me there are plenty of other possible explanations (maybe some of those male writers were just sexists, perhaps only in the fairly weak sense of being more likely to pay attention to other writers more like themselves; maybe something about Austen's _style_ is less attention-grabbing).
It also seems to me that there are plenty of other possible explanations for the relative ranking of Austen, Dreiser and Pound besides greater influence from the latter two. E.g., I suspect some recency bias in Murray's sources (actually, not just _bias_ but also greater _variance_ for more recent people, so probably some recent people are overrated and some underrated) and again maybe some of those sources have sexist biases.
If it's true (I'm not convinced it is) that men are more interested in history and women are more interested in new things, that seems just as likely to produce a bias in favour of women as one in favour of men in "what goes down in history", assuming that by that you mean "what books become historically important" rather than "what happens in the field of history". But, I repeat, I'm not convinced. Continuing to use the books I have for sampling (which of course introduces all sorts of biases, but it's what I can most easily choose things at random from), here are a few random nonfiction books by female authors. "Gardening made easy" by Jane Fearnley-Whittingstall; not exactly intellectual stuff but a fairly timeless topic. "Passions of the mind", a book of essays on literary topics by A S Byatt; a mix of historical and recent. A work of biblical commentary by Margaret Thrall; far more historical than fashionable. Temple Grandin's "Animals in translation", which claims to tell us about the nature of animals, a thing that presumably hasn't changed much over the centuries. Elisabeth Murray's book about her grandfather and his work on the Oxford English Dictionary; at least historical-ish. An encylopaedia of architecture by Doreen Yarwood; definitely historical. (Though I note that she has also written a book about fashion!) I'm just not seeing the novelty/fashion bias you claim. Maybe this just reflects my own interests (and my wife's, but most of our nonfiction books were bought by me), but pending more evidence I'm definitely unconvinced.
Men tend to be more interested than women in greatness. Guys are always making up Top Ten lists. How often do women get into arguments about the GOAT (Greatest Of All Time)? This sex divergence is partly because men are more interested in personally irrelevant stuff than women are in general, but it's also because men have bigger top of the pyramid payoffs than women do: Genghis Khan (a strong contender for the GOAT of conquerors) fathered a lot more children than any woman ever gave birth to.
It might be true that men are more interested in top-tens and GOATs and the like, but I don't think it has much bearing on the discussion above. It might help explain why Murray, a man, wrote the book he did, but beyond that? Maybe it would make it slightly more likely for Murray's sources to be mostly written by men, but I'm pretty sure everyone reading this would already have bet pretty heavily on that being so. And I don't see any way to get from "men tend to be more interested than women in other people's greatness" to "men will tend to make greater things" or "men will tend to rate other men, rather than women, as great".
It could well be true that men are, on the whole, (1) more interested in others' greatness and (2) more interested in _their own_ greatness, and that #2 means that men tend more strongly motivated to make an extraordinary effort to do great things, which could certainly produce an excess of men among those with great accomplishments. But if that was what you meant, why bring top ten lists and GOAT arguments into it?
It might be possible to assess how strong this sort of effect is by looking to see whether the Great Men : Great Women ratio is higher in domains where effort is the main thing that matters (rather than innate talent, recognition from others, etc.). At least some other possible causes of imbalance wouldn't have that characteristic -- explanations of the shape "men are better than women" or "men are more variable than women" will likely have most impact on things that are primarily talent, explanations in terms of others' sexism will likely affect everything equally or have most effect on things where there's a strong element of recognition from other people.
Unfortunately, determining how far a particular sort of visible-greatness is caused by talent, effort, others' recognition, etc., is an extremely hard problem.
The most objective lists we have of greatness by sex are in Charles Murray's 2003 book "Human Accomplishment."
Women, for instance, account for merely 2 percent of the 4,002 eminent personages. They are strongest in Japanese literature, with 8 percent of the significant names, including the third-ranked Japanese writer, Lady Murasaki Shikibu, author of the thousand-year-old proto-novel The Tale of Genji.
Women are particularly insignificant in composing classical music (0.2 percent) and inventing technology (0.0 percent).
Is this changing much? Murray unofficially glanced at who “flourished” after 1950 (depressingly to me, he assumes careers peak at age 40) and found female accomplishment to be up sharply only in literature. In fact, the percentage of Nobel Prizes won by women fell from 4 percent in the first half of the 20th century to 3 percent in the second.
Still, Murray’s rankings may be slightly unfair to female artists because they are less likely to have brilliant followers. My wife, for example, was incensed that Jane Austen finished behind the lumbering Theodore Dreiser and the flashy Ezra Pound. Yet, these men probably did have more influence on other major writers. [Dreiser was hugely influential on H.L. Mencken, the most influential public intellectual of the 1920s and Pound employed the young Ernest Hemingway and edited T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land."]
That’s because subsequent famous authors were mostly male and thus less interested than the female half of the human race in Austen’s topics, such as finding a husband.
Dead white European males dominate his inventories, despite Murray reserving eight of his 21 categories (including Arabic literature, Indian philosophy, and Chinese visual art) for non-Western arts. Murray, who was a Peace Corp volunteer in Thailand and has half-Asian children, began this project wanting to devote even more attention to Asian accomplishments but found he couldn’t justify his predisposition.
In the sciences, 97 percent of the significant figures and events turned out to be Western. Is this merely Eurocentric bias? Of the 36 science reference books he drew upon, 28 were published after 1980, by which time historians were desperately searching for non-Westerners to praise. Only in this decade has the most advanced non-Western country, Japan, begun to win science Nobels regularly.
If this isn't the place for cynical takes on things, what is?
I've seen evolutionary arguments that seem to add up to that the purpose of life for men is competing with other men for sex with women.
I see ignoring or opposing women's accomplishments following from this premise. After all, competing with women doesn't attract women, and supporting women's accomplishments just adds to the competition (fewer places for men at the top).
This doesn't mean I think the premise is sound, it's just that I've seen enough men talk as though it's true for them (sorry, no cites) that I wonder whether there's some truth in it.
For what it's worth, when I hear men talk about sex being the most important thing, I ask about spectator sports (watching football games doesn't attract women in the long or short run) and get brushed off.
Based on your responses later in this thread (in particular, "It's not my job. Please do your own research." - are you here to earnestly address a problem you've identified or merely to scold people and move on?), I think we have fairly different outlooks on the world. Still, I'd like to make the case for your point.
There's no doubt that the long, widespread, and continuing subjugation of women has caused a situation where a disproportionately large output of writing is by male authors, who were disproportionately afforded the opportunities and cultural expectations and such to become writers. So it is reasonable to point out that, assuming equal writing ability between men and women and no ongoing discrimination (which of course there is, but I don't accuse Scott or the reviewers of such), you will still observe more good books by male authors than female authors, and hence more discussion surrounding books by male authors, and probably a tradition of evaluating writing by comparing it to other "good" writing, which was mostly done by males. And on and on.
And if we don't make at least somewhat of an effort to go out of our way and break the cycle by giving more consideration to women writers than many of us otherwise feel inclined to, these consequences of past discrimination will be perpetuated, and the culture will continue to elevate a distorted sample of humanity's best writing on that basis. Having only 1 of the 17 finalists be reviewing books by female authors makes it pretty clear that Scott and/or the reviewers didn't go out of their way at all, as they maybe should have.
With that said, one should also consider the very real possibility that there exist actual differences in writing inclination (and even ability) between genders, and that that could better explain more of the imbalance that we observe. If that were the case, I don't think it would be worth the effort to go out of one's way to find underrepresented female authors. I don't believe there's any *intrinsic* good in equality on arbitrary measures like which groups write the most acclaimed books.
I do find it a teensy bit ugly that only 1 of the 17 finalist authors were female, given that I suspect that if we *could* magically remove all the effects of past discrimination and whatnot (what do I even mean by this?), the ratio would be more even. I'm pretty sure men don't write 17 times as many reviewable books as women in a world devoid of any misogyny or history of it. Perhaps I'll add a book by a female author to my reading list to try and do something about this.
"There's no doubt that the long, widespread, and continuing subjugation of women has caused a situation where a disproportionately large output of writing is by male authors, who were disproportionately afforded the opportunities and cultural expectations and such to become writers."
Actually ... lots of women have made lots of money over the centuries as writers.
On the other hand, women are less common in golf course architecture, but certainly Pete Dye's wife Alice had some influence on his hugely influential designs of the 1960s-1990. Golf course architect Tom Doak, a former Dye assistant, says the Dye's well-regarded Citrus course at La Quinta in the Palms Springs area was more or less wholly designed by Alice.
Also, Torrey Pines in La Jolla, site of yesterday's U.S. Open golf championship, was perhaps routed by official architect's William Bell the Younger's mom:
Torrey Pines South is notoriously not an ideal routing (Torrey Pines North is better). On the other hand, its debut as a U.S. Open course in 2008, won by Tiger Woods on a broken leg he suffered during his amazing attempt to become a Navy SEAL, was perhaps the most memorable US Open ever. And its 2021 version won by Jon Rahm by sinking three long puts on the last three holes was pretty great too.
I clearly never said lots of women haven't made lots of money over the centuries as writers. What I said was that men historically were *disproportionately* granted the opportunities and such to become writers.
That golf course knowledge was an interesting digression, thanks.
I will recommend a book by a woman author, eminently suitable for reviewing here. It's just that I'm not likely to get around to it though I hope someone else does.
_Betrayal Trauma_ by Jennifer Freyd-- it's about the premise that people are less likely to remember abuse by those they're dependent on. It's full of lots of chewy research on memory and trauma.
The one thing I don't trust about it is that I suspect the author started with a premise and looked for evidence to support it. However, it's amazing how much trauma can fuck with memory in general.
As for you, PdC, I see you're expecting other people to do your work for you.
Every reviewer is female according to my use of the female voice in my text to speech app. It's genuinely weird to me that it would even occur to someone to tally the gender of people who produce pseudo-anonymous all text content. I much prefer the internet where no one knows you're a dog.
Books by women that I'd like to see a review of in a future contest:
"Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Trip through Yugoslavia" by Rebecca West
"Sexual Personae" by Camille Paglia
A collection of Pauline Kael's film reviews
A Barbara Tuchman history like "Guns of August"
What are some other suggestions of nonfiction by women very near the top of their fields writing about topics of interest to both sexes? I look up lists of nonfiction by women online and mostly get books of primarily interest to women, such as dieting for lesbians of color or whatever.
I haven't yet found a list of nonfiction by women that smart guys would like, although there is probably one or two out there.
One of the reasons I asked for recommendations was exactly this - if you search for "books by women" you often get "books about women" and that's not exactly what I'm looking for. I mean, I'm sure there are interesting books on the subject I could read, but I tend to want books that are a little more specific than that.
I'm expanding the question to non-fiction by women which I would expect to be of interest here and which could lead to good book reviews. I don't think all the book reviews were of books by authors at the top of their fields, though many were.
While I don't approve of gender-counting, it's also true that women and men might have somewhat different areas of interest so that you get a wider range of subjects if you make a point to include women.
Hillary Mantel's books about Cromwell.
Doubt by Jennifer Michael Hecht, which is a history of the philosophy about the limits to knowledge.
A Feeling for the Organism by Evelyn Keller. Of interest because it's about Barbara McClintock, a biologist who was looking at whole organisms (specifically corn) at a time when looking at genes was more mainstream. There's sexism involved, but McClintock also had a difficult writing style as well as an unfashionable area of interest.
The Frailty Myth by Colette Dowling. I hope that "of interest to both men and women" isn't equivalent to "not about women". This one is a history of efforts to keep women out of sports. I don't think it's correct that all women would like to be athletic if it weren't for social pressure against it, but the history is interesting. I'm also not sure than men and women's abilities are equal if you correct for size.
Ada Palmer's non-fiction (mostly at exurbe.com) hasn't been collected into a book, but it's definitely ACX fodder. This is the same Ada Palmer who wrote Too Like the Lightning, and lately she's been working on a history of censorship with Cory Doctorow. She's been doing past censorship and he's been doing modern censorship.
The Pleasant Profession of Robert Heinlein by Farah Mendlesohn, looking at Heinlein's ideas through his fiction. Pulls out some threads I didn't expect, like that even though Heinlein was in favor of personal weapons, they're used very little in his books. Heinlein is called an individualist, but his happy endings are almost all about people finding a place in society. There's a surprising amount about wanting to be a woman.
Mother Nature by Sarah Hrdy. A look at how mothers balance the competing demands of themselves and their various offspring.
Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez-- how women aren't generally considered in the way things are designed.
The Fabric of Civilization by Virgina Postrel-- history of fabric from both the technical and economic angle.
Galileo's Daughter, by Dava Sobel, is a highly informative and deeply moving look at the lives and studies of the father and daughter. Her book Longitude is also a good read.
"In her new book Expecting Better, economist and new mom Emily Oster parses the evidence behind all the recommendations given to pregnant women. She argues that, as an economist, she's trained to both examine evidence and think about trade-offs."
Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly
"The Descent Of Woman" By Elaine Morgan.
Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly
Alma Mater by
Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz is a look at the history of US women's colleges which uses design and architecture as a lens.
Kara Cooney: The Cost of Death, The Woman Who Would be King, When Women Ruled the World, Coffin Commerce
Anything by Mary Roach. "Packing for Mars" was a Hugo nominee in best related work. I loved "Bonk," which is about sex, including Roach's adventures having sex in an MRI tube. (Mary Roach got more than one recommendation.)
Data Feminism by D'Ignazio and Klein and Automating Inequality by Eubanks
Pauline Kael
MY STROKE OF INSIGHT by Jill Bolte Taylor
_Harmful to Minors: the Perils of Protecting Children from Sex_ by Judith Levine
_Dying to Live: Near Death Experiences_ by Susan Blackmore
_The Meme Machine_ by Susan Blackmore
_Why We Love_ by Helen Fisher
The Sixth Extinction., by Elizabeth Kolbert.
Elaine Showalter does well-informed and careful cultural analysis. My favorite is *Hystories*; I often disagreed with her conclusions, but I always enjoyed and learned from how she gets there.
Another good feminist cultural critic is Barbara Ehrenreich, especially her *Bright-Sided*, about the cultural emphasis on (almost demand for) always being upbeat.
Journalist Laurie Garrett: Her big books *The Coming Plague* and *Betrayal of Trust* can be overwhelming, but the material is fascinating. He book on the WWI flu is disappointing, though.
Rebecca Skloot's *The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks* is both great science and a very personal, touching story of communication across racial & cultural barriers.
*Doing Harm*, by Maya Dusenbery, is a very accessible study of how medical science is biased towards studying men, to the detriment of women.
And Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's work on homosexuality and homosocial relationships is excellent literary criticism with many important real-world/political concerns. (I felt I had to put in something that doesn't have to do with medical science.)
Pamela McCorduck’s Machines who Think. It came out in 1979. I had Pamela when she taught at Pitt. Then she didn’t get tenure so she went west and had a brilliant academic career.
Jill Lepore’s These Truths is about us, especially about our Constitution & government.
Klein's /The Shock Doctrine,/ and Solnit's /A Paradise Built in Hell./
Thinking in Bets, by Annie Duke
The Scout Mindset, by Julia Galef
Galileo's Middle Finger, Alice Draeger
Medical Apartheid, by Harriet Washington
Also: _The Score_ by Faye Flam, an evo psych-based look at why men and women's mating strategies tend to differ. And anything by Helen Pluckrose, managing editor of _Areo_, is probably good, although so far I've only read essays by her.
Thanks, I shall order "The Pleasant Profession of Robert Heinlein" by Farah Mendlesohn.
"There's a surprising amount about wanting to be a woman." Transgenderism, time travel, and Heinlein's solipsism combine brilliantly in his 1958 short story "All You Zombies." I don't know whether Heinlein had transgender leanings personally or whether he merely recognized it as being a Thing in the sci-fi community. (E.g., the guy I went to business school with who is now said to be "America's highest paid female executive" told me his plan was to get rich off outer space, which he then did. He later made a second fortune by inventing a treatment for the rare disease of one of the children he had fathered. He's like a Heinlein hero come to life.)
I would go with at least mild personal leanings, enough to make the writing vivid. I don't think Heinlein ever wrote about wanting to have a male body.
I think the words "had reviewers looked more closely at authors in the other half of the population" make it very clear that indeed PdC is talking about the authors, not the reviewers.
"Once societies reached a density threshold to harbor viruses, customs and religions practices evolved to help control the spread. "
I recall hearing that one of the two socio-subconscious reasons behind near-Eastern religions' prohibition against pork is the ease of viral zoonotic transmission from pigs and their capacity as reservoirs while sharing close proximity with humans (the other is association of pork eating to cannibalism, a history all humans share).
Really makes you think about the whole bat soup/pangolin/wet markets/maybe-don't-play-with-viral-protein-coats-for-fun-and-prizes in a new but simultaneously old way.
2) The *reason* pig zoonoses jump easily is because pigs eat basically the same stuff humans do (grains/fruits/nuts/carrion). But that immediately creates a problem - if you have to feed your pigs edible food, then keeping them is a net drain on how much food you have (unlike cows/sheep/goats/horses/camels/donkeys/llamas/alpacas/yaks, which all can digest cellulose). In some places, there's stuff that humans don't want to eat that you can feed to pigs, but in others they're just a waste.
See, I've also heard that described as a just-so story (Mark Essig has a book on pigs, interview here https://gastropod.com/the-whole-hog/), and it's much more likely that people just found pigs disgusting. They're not particularly attractive animals (apologies to any pigs reading this, but it's true), and they eat things that we find disgusting, like garbage and faeces, so any culture concerned with purity would want to rule them out. Pigs are also very cheap to raise so it may have also been a class issue. Most of the weird laws in Leviticus seem more concerned with a certain kind of aesthetic logic than with hygiene. The danger of pig diseases is probably a side-benefit and may have helped the rule to stick around, but I don't think it's the real origin.
"Cheap to raise" is of course relative to other animals, but I believe that fattening a pig was the kind of thing even fairly poor farmers could afford. My understanding was that you can feed them primarily on waste, and surplus (apparently they used to be raised on dairy farms since they ate excess milk), but you wouldn't get a great amount of meat from an animal fed on that diet so there would need to be some expenditure of edible food.
My point of comparison here is, indeed, other animals - in particular, grass-eaters, since grass is not nutritive to humans and will grow without human effort (vermin-eaters are second-best, since vermin are omnipresent and hard to harvest - hence chickens/ducks/cats - but pigs aren't especially adept at hunting vermin on their own TTBOMK).
The issue with feeding pigs on surplus is that you must *have* a surplus of edible food (even milk is only limited by transport when fresh; you can make it into yoghurt or cheese or butter which last longer, and pastoralists universally had at least one means of doing this). Times of plenty certainly existed pre-modern, but they weren't the rule; populations were limited by food. And, well, a religion is not an especially-high-bandwidth or flexible instrument for keeping society on the straight and narrow; if doing something is catastrophic 10% of the time, it goes.
Using a historical example from the United States, it was common for poor families in Appalachia to keep pigs. This is because feeding them was essentially free: they foraged in the woods for an abundance of chestnuts. With the extinction of the American chestnut tree, this was much less sustainable and pig keeping plummeted as a result.
I expect the cheapest animal to raise in a given location to be the animal which has a suitable forage location nearby: pigs -> woods; sheep/cattle/horses -> pastures; etc.
In my country, pigs are raised in small rural households, mostly on household waste. Peel a potato? The rind goes to the pigs. Moldy or hard-dried bread? Spoiled fruit? Funky-smelling meat? Bones from last night's barbecue go to the dogs, but otherwise.. Even the water from washing dishes, assuming you didn't use soap or detergents. Nor do they shy from the occasional careless stray rat. They'll get fat on anything, and I find they turn out quite delicious.
They do get specialized feed, too, especially nowadays. But there's no household that doesn't generate significant amounts of waste products, and pre-industrial waste is 100% pig food.
Are you Polish by any chance? My parents spoke about this when they visited my Opa's village, that every household had a pig that they would raise on scraps and eat at some point during the winter.
Personally, we have chickens that we feed almost entirely on leftovers, and it's surprising how much edible waste a household can produce, even when not taking advantage of modern over-abundance of food.
There were indeed ritual/religious bans on pigs and the study goes into "where did the pigs come from, why did they decline?" but the points I want to pick out to address the points you raise are the following. You're talking about "what do you feed pigs?" and my sense is that they're scavengers. I think you have an image of modern intensive pig-rearing farms, or the notion of pig-pens on older farms, but swineherding traditionally was exactly that - turning out herds of pigs to graze, like goats, sheep or cattle. Letting pigs feed on acorns in forests, because pigs can eat acorns without harm, is called "pannage" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pannage
It seems that it wasn't until the enclosure of common lands in the 16th and 17th centuries that European pig rearing turned to farmers keeping pigs in styes. Human faeces as pig food? Where are you getting that from?
Going back to our Palestinian pigs:
"The pig, wild and domestic, has been an indigenous part of the wildlife of the Middle East for millennia. Moreover, the hog is recognized worldwide as a productive resource, since it couples rapid rates of growth and reproduction with a tractable nature into a suitable package for both small and large scale husbandry.
...Agricultural.-A central problem of husbandry is balancing the needs of the animals with those of agriculture. Feed must be provided either through shifting potential cropland to pastureland or through the processing of agricultural byproducts. As agriculture intensifies, the first option becomes less attractive. Pork production, however, will continue to flourish as long as the crops selected are those which produce abundances of plant refuse. However, as those crops (basically the grains) are replaced by those with smaller refuse fractions, pork production becomes marginally less efficient compared to the husbanding of other animals such as sheep and goats at a distance, in pastures inaccessible to pigs either because of the difficulty in herding large numbers of them or the quality of the terrain. This economic reality may underlie Coon's (1958) suggestion that an emphasis on olive and vine production will depress pork production (see the discussion of agricultural byproducts in Prestonet af. (1985) and Sansoucy (1985»). Since Palestinian agricultural production evolved and specialized in those directions with geographically diversified emphases (Stager 1985), we may hypothesize that animal husbandries responded to the changes in a like manner.
...Successful swineherding is associated with rainfall or moist ground, the presence of mixed deciduous forest, and the availability of reserve fodder collected from agricultural activities. It is thus clear that evaluating the potential for pork production in various parts of Palestine will require a knowledge of the history of local environmental conditions and crop choices, a subject just beginning to be broadly undertaken."
So why pigs? They're easy to breed and rear until you build up enough of a pig herd that you can then switch to sheep or cattle. You can turn them loose on pastureland to graze and forage, and feed them by-products of cereal raising. Keeping one or a few pigs in a sty, you can feed them on domestic scraps as well.
Fattening a pig being something even poor farmers could afford - definitely. Raising pigs for slaughter and sale was part of Irish rural life, the pig being known as "the little gentleman that pays the rent" as you could kill the pig and sell the pork products in time to pay the twice-yearly rent (in addition to whatever other money you had). Pigs could be raised on potatoes and buttermilk (a by-product of dairy production) as easily as the human inhabitants: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pork_in_Ireland
No idea how common it was outside of China, I only mentioned it as a demonstration that pigs will eat pretty much anything, which is their main advantage over cattle, but it's probably also why they're regarded as unclean by squeamish religious authorities.
New York City had feral pigs roaming the streets well into the 19th century. Repeated efforts to ban and remove them were stymied by outcry from the urban poor, who relied on them for both trash removal and as a source of food. People in a certain house or street called dibs on a cluster of pigs and fed them their scraps until the porker was big enough to catch and divvy up among the neighbors.
Thanks for that; I knew there were some things pigs eat that humans don't/can't but some clear examples like acorns make that a lot more concrete.
I wasn't thinking of high-intensity farming so much as grazing (indeed, high-intensity farming cattle uses farmed feed as well); I was mostly getting at "there are lots of places with grass (including the steppe, which will essentially *only* grow grass), and essentially everywhere has worms, but places you can just turn pigs loose and have them eat random valueless stuff aren't as plentiful".
(I did need a reminder that they exist, though; I knew that but I'd gotten carried away.)
The claim Joseph Henrich makes in "The Secret of Our Success" is that most of these cultural adaptations don't *arise* because they're helpful - but they *stick around* because they are. Who knows why someone first banned pigs - but if that ban was helpful in that environment, then the surviving cultures will have it.
If we're discussing why the prohibition stuck around then perhaps it does have an health advantage, but still think it has more to do with aesthetics than hygiene - there's no need for it to actually be helpful to stick around, signalling has its own value. There are passages in Maccabees that describe Jews preferring to die rather then eat pork (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woman_with_seven_sons), obviously very few people would go that far but it definitely seems like avoiding pork became a way to demonstrate membership to the Jewish religion and community.
I read some of the behavior of governments during the pandemic as more parasitic rather than less, unlike the author. For instance, it's not clear to me that enforced shutdowns of many of the things that were shutdown were really helpful when you compare across European countries or various US states with different policies. Further, when you consider the predicted tax shortfalls in states not actually happening, it seems less like intentionally counteracting the macroparasitic paradigm to counterbalance the microparasitic one. Finally, I would note that the macroparasitic oscillations in the supply chains and things that make it hard, for instance, for me to get to buy materials to build a garage means that the story of the pandemic is only partially over in the way McNeill would analyze such things.
Increasing power from shutdown orders, increasing expectation that all decisions should follow increasingly incoherent CDC recommendations that contradict one another on a weekly if not daily basis and finally from a public choice perspective, increasing ability to point to the other party or a state run by the other party (CA v TX or NY v FL) as the source of all ills in the world.
It's unclear - the state demonstrated power, but presumably they always had that power and all they were doing were exercising it. I don't think there were any legal changes as a result of Covid-19, and it's unclear if this will make it easier or harder to do the same thing again in the future. I'd err more on the side of precedent making this easier in future, so I think I'd say that Covid-19 has increased government power.
Some people seem to have this model of politicians as constantly striving to gain ever great control over the public, and while I'm sure there are a few like that I think most of them just want to get re-elected, so I'm not too worried about the question of whether lockdowns and social distancing establish a dangerous precedent.
This does indeed sound like a very 70s book - the general tenor of the times was looking for a gloomy way to forecast the end of civilisation in the near future.
It seems to be somewhat plausible, but there's a bit of a stretch when he makes the analogy between micro- and macro-parasites. Thuggish soldiers beating up sickly farmers to take their crops as taxes may be a beguiling notion, but those soldiers were often recruited from farming villages themselves, so not *everybody* could have been fluke-ridden.
And there are diseases that seem to mysteriously pop up then disappear again, like the sweating sickness in England (bad enough that Thomas Cromwell went to work in the morning while his wife felt a bit under the weather, then he was notified that evening she was dead): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweating_sickness
Or leprosy in mediaeval times, which seems to really have been Hansen's Disease. Nevertheless, enough people got it to have leper hospitals built to quarantine them from the rest of society and for places in Ireland to get names derived from "Lepers Town". Yet somehow the European variant didn't thrive after a few centuries? There's some speculation as to "improved resistance in the population" but that doesn't really explain why leprosy continued in other countries, surely their populations too would become resistant? https://www.livescience.com/37424-history-of-leprosy-bacterium.html
The point is that it was big in the Middle Ages but not so much in later centuries, well before the invention of penicillin.
Although the caveat is that we mean a very specific disease by "Leprosy", whereas the term in the past reffered to basically any gross skin condition, not all of which were actually contagious - but better safe than sorry before penicillin was discovered!
(I recommend searching the page for the word "leprosy".)
The gist of it is that the authors of medieval medical texts were vague on what leprosy was, but practicing physicians of the time did mean the same specific disease that we use the word for today.
And even more interestingly, the criteria the books provide seem like they would misdiagnose a lot, but it turns out that this didn't happen in practice.
Does not quarantine explain these diseases not thriving?
If you effectively isolate people suffering from these conditions from the rest of the population, why would the disease thrive?
Unfortunately, I don't know much about history of that condition in general, let alone about differences in policies around it in various countries, but that's the first thing I'd look at if I cared.
Quarantine and how very low-contagious leprosy is - I believe there's a case from Devil's Island where someone was chained to a fellow prisoner with leprosy for 17 years without catching it.
That guy was my college's mascot until just a few years ago. We since ditched him. I thought the current take on this was that we think he tried it, and that there was a smallpox outbreak in the targeted population afterward, but we’re not sure if it was the blankets or one of the regularly occurring outbreaks that had already been happening.
Yep, I completely agree with that. If "blankets" is removed from "The way that Europeans decimated Native Americans with smallpox blankets has been a key driver in ancient civilization expansion," it becomes a true statement.
Well, L'Ouverture's strategy in the Haitian Uprising was to get colonial armies marching into the hinterlands of Haiti, and let the mosquitos and diseases do his work for him.
It worked, and he saw off the French, British and Spanish armies.
The rats don't spread the plague by being eaten (not that rat is a popular European cuisine), but instead via parasites that suck their blood.
Marvin Harris had a theory about pork taboos in "Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches". The Yanomamo reject his theories of an economic reason for why they go to war (they told Napoleon Chagnon they fight over women instead), but his Marxist materialism is preferable to some of the woolier anti-scientific varieties of cultural anthropology one is apt to encounter nowadays.
As for whether our customs actually inhibit the spread of disease, it's worth linking to this again:
Kings presumably didn't start wars over women too often, but for peasants that actually fought them this probably provided not insignificant part of motivation.
Polygamy and violence blah blah blah (being a shortcut for 'we all know this one', in the spirit of the review which started that way, which I quite liked)
Women as a reproductive resource are an economic resource, as a means of "we beat you in a war of expansion, killed all the men, and took all the women, so now our kids are being born instead of your kids so we hold this territory".
The Iliad is allegedly about "going to war over a woman" but of course it's not just that; there's the economic basis of 'who controls access to trade routes at this important choke point' and the wider question of if you're a king, you don't let somebody run off with your wife like that. It shows weakness. It invites internal rivals and external enemies to try and exploit this, and replace you or conquer your country. You have to seek revenge and restore your lost honour, because if your peers, your allies, and your enemies consider you a worthless weakling, you're not going to survive long.
I don't recall any discussion over trade routes in The Illiad. Of course, The Illiad doesn't even contain Helen's arrival at Troy, and the dispute over a women involves one of Achilles' captives being stolen by Agamemnon to replace a woman he sacrificed.
"India has ten times less of a death rate than the United States, to which a Mayo Clinic Professor recently pondered “cross reactive immunity from prior corona virus and other infections” as a main reason."
It's obvious undercounting. There seems to be a sharp break between lower middle income countries and upper middle income countries (around the income level of Peru or Ukraine) in the ability or will to accurately count COVID deaths. It's mostly non-democracies that undercount (for obvious reasons), which suggests a high level of corruption in India.
I would also include that many of the US fatalities came from early treatments being less-than-ideal protocols, like ventilation. The overall death rate of the elderly fell pretty far after a few months of protocol improvement. India could be benefiting marginally from that sort of thing as well.
I have an impression that a variant of type 2 which isn't related to obesity is common, and that obesity can actually be a protective response to diabetes by getting sugar out of the bloodstream.
Just for the fun of it, what if the immune system has its own interests and sometimes takes more than it needs? There's a known problem that sometimes it overreacts, though I don't know if it helps to model that as somewhat parasitic.
Kyle Harper wrote a terrific book about plague etc in the Roman Empire called the Fate of Rome. The plague of Justinian in particular was an absolute shocker. And (cough, cough) here is a podcast I did with him on the subject. https://www.buzzsprout.com/207869/7554679-the-fate-of-rome-with-kyle-harper
Needs a joke about "stationary bandits" becoming "viral macro-bandits"! :)
Just 1 out of 17 finalists is female? How much more interesting these books could have been had reviewers looked more closely at authors in the other half of the population.
If there had been only 1 male author I would have been equally wistful about what had been missed. You may have picked bad women authors in the past, what do I know. That has nothing to do with the quality of women authors on average. Extrapolating from your sample is dodgy, I would say. And unless I've missed something, I think it's still true that we humans tend to prefer people who think and talk like us - so not impossible that there is an invisible hand at work here.
> ...and in which the works by women authors could be plausibly argued to not be lower in quality...
While I'm in total agreement with you, quality is subjective.
It could be argued (and, indeed, it is the core paradigm of the Social Justice movement) that the way we we judge the quality of anything, including books, is not objective. Rather, it is an emergent property of our social upbringing. Since all of us, men as well as women, live in a patriarchal society, we will inevitably downgrade the quality of books written by female authors. The only solution is for everyone to flood their reading lists with as many female authors as possible, regardless of perceived quality; this way, our perception of quality will eventually shift to accommodate the female perspective.
Of course, the hidden assumption here is that it is even possible to distinguish male and female authors based on their writing (as opposed to their names and biographies). Seeing as Turing came up with a famous test for just this situation, applying it to literature might be a better bet than aiming for subjective quality.
Given the history of the human race so far, never :-(
'humans tend to prefer people who think and talk like us'
I'm a female reader and I really don't feel any preference for female authors, especially in non-fiction. I'm not sure if the existing ones are worse or not, I haven't noticed that either. In fiction, again, I don't feel that men are somehow worse on average. If I strain my memory, I maybe have noticed that the female characters in books by male authors (as opposed to those created by female authors) are less often like actual females so that I can feel similarity or recognize them as someone I know. I suppose this can result from males preferring to write about very unusual women with interesting, "mysterious ways" or not understanding what the women in their lives are feeling inside or something, but I'm not even sure the difference is real.
Out of curiosity, how do you know which authors were male and which were female ? Ok, the obvious answer is, "I looked at their names". However, maybe it's just me, but I tend to just skip over the authors' names in these book review contexts; I honestly couldn't list any of them off the top of my head -- and that's even before throwing pseudonyms and ambiguous names into the mix.
If you were presented with, say, 50 pages of non-fiction prose that are unfamiliar to you, each page written by a different author, could you tell which of them were written by women ? If so, how would you tell ?
I once gave my dad a book by the famous travel writer Jan (formerly James) Morris. When he finished it, he said, "You know, I thought this book was by a man while I was reading it, but when I got to the end, the biography says it was written by a woman. That just goes to show, you never can tell."
As a nonfiction writer, I always pay attention to the names of writers. After awhile, you start to notice patterns. Like, say, an op-ed about how true social justice will never be attained until society pays more attention to my hair is probably by a woman. An article about how some new innovation is baseball statistics proves that Ted Williams was the G.O.A.T. is likely written by a man.
Or to take a mostly male subject: the sportswriter who typically covers golf for the New York Times is a woman. She tends to write about golf slightly more than the average male golf writer from a human interest standpoint -- e.g., how a tour pro feels about his relationship with his father, who is battling cancer -- and slightly less in terms of recounting heroic deeds on the links in tactical detail such as whether he hit a 3 iron or a 4 iron. She likes golfers and wants to help you like them too.
Most people wouldn't notice, but it's not hard to see.
" I think it's still true that we humans tend to prefer people who think and talk like us...."
If I wanted that, I'd stick to reading my own writings, since I am the only cat who really truly thinks and talks like me.
Then again, I don't even think and talk like me all the time, and I don't seek out books by authors who are feral cats or shorthaired tabbies or whatever. In fact, I go out of my way to find authors who don't think and think and talk like me, in hopes that my biases may be disconfirmed, that I may mrrp "and what if he is right?" to myself.
The "voice" of the writing does have a major influence on readers perception of the quality of a book. A book written with the same cultural assumptions as the reader will come across as "better" than one that makes different assumptions (and, thereby, makes the reader feel a little bit uncomfortable every page).
This filter applies at the publisher level, the "bothering to read past the first chapter" level, and again at the "worth a review/recommendation level.
Countering this unconscious bias of ourselves and others requires active and deliberate work.
1) Does there exist an "uncultured" state in which this effect no longer applies, or is it only possible to change what one finds uncomfortable?
2) Is there some benefit to changing one's mind (literally) on what makes for good literature?
There is no "neutral" state. Every adult has patterns they are used to, and assumptions they carry, and things that are on their mind regularly. Communicating with a similar person (and reading their writing counts) is easier than communicating with a dissimilar person.
If you were some kind of self-optomizing robot, it would make sense to prefer the most prolific and topic-varied frame, to allow you the most reading pleasure. Right now that is probably USA White Male.
The actual benefit you should be looking for is gleaning insights from works that have a different frame, even though they are less pleasurable.
If there is no "neutral" state, what is the state into which you want people to train themselves - which things do you want people to find uncomfortable? - and why "should" we wish to be in that state?
Counterpoint, for fiction - Three Body Problem and its sequels appealed to me precisely because how alien its cultural assumptions were, to someone raised on contemporary Western sci-fi.
Right. Is Liu Cixin a brilliantly original writer or is he just the only 21st Century Chinese sci-fi writer most of his American readers have read? Beats me ...
+1
"A book written with the same cultural assumptions as the reader will come across as "better" than one that makes different assumptions (and, thereby, makes the reader feel a little bit uncomfortable every page)."
I can recall reading Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations" at age 14 and being awe-struck by how culturally remote it was. I found it very difficult going but also overwhelmingly great.
Shakespeare is many people's only contact with the literary culture of the Renaissance, so he often gets personal credit for what what were cultural commonplaces in 1600.
So you discount the structural forces that lead to vastly more men than women appear on our proverbial bookshelves?
Who's talking about obligations? Not me. I would just think that if you want to understand the world, you'd want to hear the perspective of the other half of the population.
It would be interesting to make up a list of outstanding non-fiction books that are better for being written by a woman, rather than just outstanding on their own.
For example, I recently read Pauline Kael's famous long New Yorker article about Herman Mankiewicz's script for "Citizen Kane." It was terrific. But ... if it had been written by Paul Kael, I don't see that it would have been all that different.
On the other hand, I suspect that Elizabeth Warren's 2003 book "The Two Income Trap" about the economic issues facing families, while not a great book, is better for having been written by a woman. Women, in part because they aren't as interested as men are in abstract ideologies, have taught me an awful lot of valuable lessons about the practical realities of of life and reproduction.
To start, I'd nominate Camille Paglia's "Sexual Personae."
But it's hard to come up with other extremely high-brow women authors who benefited from being women.
For example, one of the most formidable woman writers and editors of my lifetime was Helen Gurley Brown, author of "Sex and the Single Girl" and editrix of "Cosmopolitan" before it became Woke. Gurley Brown was pretty awesome, a sort of redneck Joan Rivers, but she wasn't high brow.
Just putting a public announcement here: I would like there to be a review of Lost In Math and I think it would be good for the SSC audience. I read it and liked it, but don't feel qualified to comment on it. Maybe if Scott and a physicist teamed up? I'd put $100 in a pot to incentivize this.
Excepting a topic like "my experiences as a (man/woman)", I don't think sex affects the data that can be communicated to me. I.e., reading a mathematics textbook because it's by a woman won't give me any different information than the male-authored textbooks.
I'd push back on that at little - if we're discussing history or sociology or psychology (as many of the books reviewed here have done), it doesn't seem unreasonable to argue that a women may have a different approach to the topic.
I'm hesitant to make the argument though, because it does seem a little sexist to claim that women have this mysterious wisdom that us rational men could benefit from hearing.
The reason you are getting so much pushback is that what you are saying is basically BS.
For most ASX readers, they are reading in what is essentially a perfect double-blind environment. They pick books based on their interests, complete them (or not) based on how well they consider the book to be written, and at essentially no point is there ever a glance at the gender (or even the name) of the author. That's certainly how I operate.
Of course I have a few favorite authors and wait for their next new book, but 90%+ of what I read is based on scanning "title: subtitle <cover art>" hmm, looks interesting, let's try it. And 90% of that is abandoned within 15 minutes as not worth my time in a world of very limited time.
At no point in this procedure do I ever look at (or even care about) the name of the author, let alone the gender, race, sexual orientation or whatever. Certainly I have ZERO idea of who any of the ASX reviewers were, and apart from the famous books, no idea who the authors of the reviewed books were.
This is as close to the perfect meritocracy of authorship as is possible, what you claim you want. If that isn't delivering the results you want, perhaps your basic world view and axioms are flawed?
What structural forces lead to that result?
Where to start? Who has defined the canon that we all read in school? Obviously men, and look at how many men this version sets out? https://www.openculture.com/2014/01/harold-bloom-creates-a-massive-list-of-works-in-the-western-canon.html. Or from a completely different angle, who has to do most of the domestic work in households in addition to holding down jobs, which makes it that much harder find time for thought and research? No bonus points for the right answer.
How much of canon being dominated by males is explained by writing in general being dominated by males for a most of our history?
My intuition is that "almost all of it", but I would not mind to hear an alternative explanation. After all, I have very limited knowledge of western canon - I'm russian and while we read some of western works in school, we mostly read our own writers.
I expect that you resent that state of affairs, which is understandable, but I'm not sure how that is relevant to our times in general, let alone to very small and specific sample of works reviewed here (it's mostly non-fiction about history and economy).
I think that if you can find and prove some systematic bias among modern publishers or editors that discriminates women for being women, I would support your cause to fight that sort if discrimination.
If that discrimination is not there, then what is the problem?
I think you're completely right about the historical canon being dominated by men. Not necessarily all men saying 'women are stupid and can't write very well' but by men (and women) saying that a woman's place is definitely not in higher education and is definitely at home with the kids. That has changed dramatically but there are still lingering effects - the canon is still man-heavy and women still have less time to research/write because of family duties. Yes, by itself this list being 16 male authors would be neither here nor there. But this kind of discrepancy is widespread.
Men tend to be more ambitious than women. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Nabokov ... these guys wanted to be the G.O.A.T.
Women tend to want to outdo their female contemporaries, but they generally don't get worked up over taking on Homer and Shakespeare and Tolstoy.
When contemporary feminism came along 50+ years ago, there was a lot of emphasis on rediscovering female writers. But ... they turned out largely to be bestseller authors, such as Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" and (until race came to rule over all) and Margaret Mitchell's "Gone With the Wind" (which is an outstanding book). Zora Neale Hurston's "Their Eyes Were Watching God" is a romance novel, and probably less ambitious artistically than some of her other books.
There wasn't really a lot of esoteric artistic literature by ignored women that was rediscovered by feminist scholars.
The small number of women in that category were already famous: e.g., Elizabeth Taylor won an Academy Award before feminism came back in 1969 for her 1966 movie "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"
Jane Austen would have been hugely famous in her lifetime if she'd lived her three score and ten, but she died at 42. She was already getting fan letters from the Prince Regent. By 70 years after her birth, she had Charles Dickens telling people who asked him how to write novels to read Jane Austen.
In general, women artists tend to have been celebrated in their own time but have had a harder time withstanding the test of time. Austen's huge fame today is due to her being clearly the G.O.A.T. (Greatest of All Time) at writing witting women's novels in English.
This is an excuse to bring up Swastika Night by Katharine Burdekin (1937), a dystopia set centuries after a worldwide victory by the Axis powers. It predicted the holocaust.
And Jubilee by Margaret Walker, which was a bestseller in its time (1966) but which I don't hear much about these days. It runs from 1835 to 1870, has the bestseller nature (good at pulling at least this reader in), and might be the most researched novel I've read-- the food, the soil, the economics.
Also, it has an angle on slavery which isn't the most common-- there's the overwork and the punishments, but there's also an emphasis on slavery making the slaves poor. Detailed descriptions of plenty of food for the white owners, while there's little for the slaves.
Here's an analysis of the American market:
https://pudding.cool/2017/06/best-sellers/
I don't think the views about 'books on the bookshelf' is amenable to simple analysis. If you start off with 'structural forces' as the cause (there may be some truth in it) you have to ignore a lot of change and time series data.
I think this is more evident in non-fiction, which I understood we're talking about here
Consider a dimension from a Scientific paper, through to a science based trade book, to Science Fiction, Thrillers, Romance and finally Literary Novels.
From my tiny slice of market observations I'd argue that the more 'hard science' works are typically (but not exclusively) written by men, but then the 'softer sciences' have a greater proportion of female authors.
Similarly with fiction... the higher the content of character content the greater proportion of female writers.
Not as hard as a 'rule', but more a mild expectation. But a good book is still a good book no matter who writes it.
In other words, in the sexist 1950s, women made up a quarter of the New York Times bestseller authors, compared to a little under half in the most recent decade.
In general, the past seems more sexist than it was because women were less likely to write enduringly important books. But at the time, women authors were moving a lot of product.
The only structural forces I care about in regard to bookshelves are "will these hold up under all the books I'm piling on them?"
Have you been to a bookstore lately?
A large percentage of bestseller writers in English over the last 250 or so years have been women. Samuel Johnson in the 1770s was always complaining about women making tons of money off their books but then admitting he had stayed up all night reading the latest page-turner from a famous woman novelist.
Of course, most of the books of the last 250 years that are famous today were written by men, but the reasons for that are probably more interesting than Structural Oppression.
It may be that women are better than men at making money from writing.
Or that they have different incentives?
The Achilles desire, to suffer, maybe die young and horribly, but be remembered by history, seems to be a substantially more male trait.
If your goal is to maximize cash from your art, you'll do things one way; if it's to maximize "impact" or "artistic value" or "memorability" or whatever you'll do things a different way.
There are quite a few male writers who are trying to maximize their income.
Don't start that. Next it will be "too many white women and men", then "not enough LGBT" and then we'll have the modern Hugos where a book review must be a review of a book about Bingo Card Oppression Olympics, written by an Oppression Olympian, and reviewed by another Oppression Olympian, and only Oppression Olympians can vote on that while the rest of us keep our gaze firmly on the ground.
I don't want Token Wimmin Authors and you're not doing me, a woman reader, any favours by waving that flag, bunky.
Graphomania is mostly a male disease, to be fair.
Original comment smacked a bit too much of "let's get some ladies in here, their delicate touch and feminine flair can brighten up this dull room - some chintz, maybe some ruffles, a china figurine or two!"
I don't think I've ever read a book simply because it was by An Authoress; when I've read women writers it's because of good reviews, I already know their work and am assured of the quality of their writing, or it's on a topic I want to know about. I didn't like the "eat your vegetables" Recommended Reading List in SF back in 2015, even if it would have been less like a dose of medicine if phrased differently - 'here's some diverse works that you might like to try alongside your established favourites' - https://the-orbit.net/heinous/2015/02/24/excluding-white-male-authors/ and I'll be danged if I meekly follow along because it would be deemed "how much more interesting".
Put your money where your mouth is, PdC, and list some "more interesting written by women", rather than reclining atop Mount Helicon with a simper of derision.
The world is full of good books written by women. The fact that only one of the authors was a women says to me that the reviewers' sample was skewed. It's not up to me to convince anyone of this or that woman author's value. We all have a limited time on this planet. Even if we read nonstop for the rest of our waking hours on it we wouldn't scratch the surface of history's great books. Why would it make sense to restrict ourselves to a subset of the population?
Do you think reviewer specifically selected for authors gender when they were choosing books?
If the answer is yes, then I'd like to know, why do you think that.
If the answer is no, then I don't see your point.
We humans do a lot of unsatisfactory things by accident / default / due to structural forces beyond our control. It's our job, I think, to try to identify that in advance and correct for it.
I feel like you have not answered my question, which is unfortunate.
The answer you gave is so general, that I do agree, but I feel like we might have quite a few meaningful disagreements if we go over specifics.
Get lost.
>We all have a limited time on this planet. Even if we read nonstop for the rest of our waking hours on it we wouldn't scratch the surface of history's great books
Isn't that exactly why we need you to recommend great books by women, if you're so adamant that we're missing out on them?
see comments below
You mean this one?
> Not my job. Please do your own research. _-PdC_
No offense, but bullshit. If your premise is "there are lots of great books by women that should have been read and included in this book review contest", and someone questions the existence/quantity/quality of those books, you are absolutely dodging the question by trying to shift the onus of making your argument to your conversation partner.
There's a ton of great books I'll never get to read no matter the sex of the author. There's a ton of books I'm restricted from reading because I don't read the language. To turn it back on you, there are *so many* books out there and limited time, why *wouldn't* I restrict my reading list to "this guy or these people or that genre"?
The books sitting by my bed that I'm reading or intending to read are:
"The Portable Dorothy Parker:" The 1920s New York wit wrote brilliant satires on women putting each other down in polite language. Great stuff objectively, although, to be honest, I'm not that fascinated by women subtly putting knives in each other's backs with ambiguous but cutting remarks.
Henry James' "Washington Square:" a wealthy but homely young lady has a dashing suitor. Are his intentions honorable? It's much more readable than James' late novels, but I may not finish it because I'm not really that interested in social novels about young women.
"1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed" by Eric H. Cline.
"Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell" by Jason Riley
"Evelyn Waugh: The Early Years 1903-1939" by Martin Stannard
"The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together" by Heather McGhee
"Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection" by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy.
I have a broad range of interests, but I'm more likely to finish a book written by a man about a masculine topic. But it doesn't kill me to start a book on a feminine topic. I get a lot out of it even if I feel like I hit diminishing marginal returns part way through.
I like Jacques Derrida's comment to an interviewer who saw his extensive bookcase:
Interviewer: "You have read all of these books?"
Derrida: No, but the ones that I have read I have read well.
I just saw somebody else attribute this to Jacques Barzun.
That reminds me that I'm a fast reader so I don't usually read the latter half of words or phrases. Thus I often get confused by text strings that start out the same but only differ at the end. For example, because whooping cranes are famously near extinction, I assumed whooping cough was too, so I was extremely surprised when I had whooping cough because I was sure it was vanishingly rare these days, but then I realized I was thinking about whooping cranes.
Really?
It says to me that writing reviews may be a more male thing, and that reading ASX may be a more male thing.
We have the numbers for SSC readership as of 2019 -- 11% female.
https://slatestarcodex.com/blog_images/2019%20SSC%20Survey.html
(a) Is your stance ("reviewers' sample was skewed") falsifiable? What WOULD persuade you that the outcome is not the result of bias? If your stance is not falsifiable, if you view this as an axiom not as a testable proposition, then the rest of us see no point in wasting time interacting with you, and perhaps a rationalism site is not where you will be happiest?...
(b) Are you willing to at least concede that men and women as they exist today might have different interests? If you concede that, do you claim that it is a bad thing? Do you think men should be *forced* to read romance novels, and women *forced* to read military history?
Fun fact: for the longest time, I thought that Louis McMaster Bujold was male, because I had a male friend named Louis. It didn't occur to me that Louis can also be a female name. Live and learn !
Isn't she Lois not Louis? The feminine of which is Louise 😁
If our pal wants to get outraged over lack of women, then I suggest they turn their attention to the Tiptree Award, which has now been re-baptised as the Otherwise Award.
Because an award named after the nom-de-plume of a very noted and famous woman writer in SF had to be washed of all dubious associations https://otherwiseaward.org/2019/10/from-tiptree-to-otherwise#name
I think that's a worse decision than any "all your book reviews are books written by men" in the cause of women writers. I think I'd disagree hugely with Alice Sheldon's political and other opinions. But this level of spinelessness, all in the name of "we cherish our disabled readers", is much worse: what, great names can't have done shitty things? women can't have done shitty things? we can't distinguish between the work and the life?
No, great names can't have done shitty things. This means that every author before around the year 2000 is slated for cancellation. The most recent one is Tolkien, who is an evil racist slaveowner, or something, I'm not entirely sure. Bottom line is, he's bad, so he gets to join J.K.Rowling in the re-education camp.
And yeah, it's "Lois", but in Russian the spelling is the same...
I get uneasy in the absence of graph paper. Been known to gin some of my own in AutoCAD in a pinch.
How many of the 17 books reviewed are fiction?
Women tend to prefer fiction (and memoirs and advice) over the kind of analytical nonfiction favored by participants in this contest.
There are no fiction books reviewed.
There's one memoir, one advice, and a couple of pieces that are somewhat biographical (but not autobiographical)
How are memoirs not autobiographical?
I feel like you might be misreading their comment.
One memoir is autobiographical, but there are also "a couple of pieces" that are not. These pieces are presumable not memoirs, which is why author puts these in a category of their own.
Indeed.
This may or may not be true if expressed as a rationale (it could be industry gatekeeping or the fact that women are more likely to take on domestic roles, he says typing this as his wife makes his son's lunch...). But the pattern seems likely to replicate in studies of specific genera. The only female author I can think of who writes longue durée history for example is Naomi Wolf; all other examples I know of are male (mostly equally sketchy though). I am less aware of popular science, but any author I could name would be male. I don't think this is personal bias, since my knowledge of these fields is from reading others not myself.
Interesting sidenote. Checked with my wife (she's finished the sandwiches if you were concerned) who is a psychologist by training. She agrees most popular books are by male authors (Elizabeth Lofthouse is offered as the exception here), but points out females writemost psychology text books at secondary level.
Naomi Wolf is a bad example for history, given the clangers she has dropped https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/feb/08/naomi-wolf-accused-of-confusing-child-abuse-with-gay-persecution-in-outrages
I never said she was a good historian. In my view she's an embarrassment to the profession, but she does write books with big-picture ideas.
I greatly fear that is what PdC wants, unless they explain themselves a little better.
"Here, review this book by Naomi Wolf".
"Okay, here's my review: this sucks".
"You can't say that! She's a Woman Author! You have to say it's better than the book on the same topic written by a guy!"
"But the book on the same topic written by a guy was way better!"
"Noooooo! Bad think! Wrong think! Woman always better because more interesting!"
"Whatever. I'll be over here reading the actually good book, you can - I dunno, use the Wolf one as fire lighters?"
Naomi Wolf became a celebrity in the wake of the Anita Hill brouhaha in 1991 when the Democrats revived feminism and brought about the 1992 Year of the Woman. She and Susan Faludi were the debut author feminist celebrity writers. Faludi was a not bad writer with some sometimes interesting ideas. Wolf's book "The Beauty Myth" about how it's unfair that society is biased in favor of the beautiful was dumb: in just about every paragraph there was some kind of poor idea. I'm not sure if Wolfe got the joke that her book "The Beauty Myth" was a bestseller in large part because she was, by the standards of writers, beautiful, with a superb head of hair.
On the other hand, since then I've come to rather like her. She has not gotten any smarter, but she still bravely charges into controversies that often expose her various weaknesses. She is very much her own woman, which I wouldn't have expected when she was so fashionable 30 years ago.
Probably best not to put words in PdC's mouth. PdC's only said that we miss things if we don't read women, which isn't quite the same as what you've attributed (e.g. if you're trying to make some kind of grand synthesis by sifting through others' work - and you're amazingly good at said sifting - whether something might have a gem you don't already know is more relevant than its overall quality).
Do you have data on that? And even if it is true, I think it's more interesting to ask what we're missing out on by not having more female brains working on analytical non fiction, and what we should be doing to make it so
Out of interest, would you expect us to be missing out on things due to low rates of female involvement due to a special female perspective or simply due to a smaller field of authors reducing the quality of the output? I'm pretty much ruling out an increase in volume being involved as I suspect increased supply of authors won't affect demand for this type of book here.
I think it's become pretty clear over the last couple of decades that when we leave out the female perspective/participant that data/results are worse for it. Medical studies, investment performance, team performance etc. Why would we expect this to be any different in terms of quality of literary output? I'm not saying a female Daniel Kahneman is going to be necessarily better or worse than the (clearly excellent) male version. But on average they're going to come up with different ideas that make the whole more interesting.
Successful Silicon Valley start-ups in this century have overwhelmingly had a majority of male founders, with a few husband-wife teams split equally.
The reason Theranos elicited so much good will from society was that America was rooting for a woman, Elizabeth Holmes, to become the first female founder billionaire.
I'm not disagreeing with that, which seems logically consistent (although my natural scepticism is on full as I'm in a thread about overarching historical theories, so I will note that we have a theoretical not a proven agreement on this point). My question was more about why you think this might be the case?
> when we leave out the female perspective/participant that data/results are worse for it. Medical studies, investment performance, team performance etc.
I'd like this to be true, but in the current political/cultural climate even a suggestion that this narrative might be false would mark anybody as a knuckle-dragging caveman at the very least, and narratives that go unopposed in polite society don't inspire confidence. And even if good faith inquires were permitted, I doubt that there exists enough good quality data from which one might be able to infer such conclusions.
I feel some elaboration of "narratives that go unopposed in polite society don't inspire confidence" is worthwhile.
Between The Truth and public gestalt knowledge of "the science", there are several filters. One is the researcher, via experimenter effect (which can include fraud, but can also be more subtle; P-hacking, motivated exclusion of outliers, and so on). One is the journal publishing the researcher's work (as they don't just publish everything, there is therefore the potential for publication bias). One is the media's signal-boosting of journal articles that they think are important.
It should be obvious how this can stop a truth society doesn't want to hear from reaching it. Less obvious is how it can allow a falsehood society *does* want to hear to gain the seal of scientific approval. So, let's go back to P-values. P < 0.05 is the classic test of a significant result, and it means "if there's no real effect, this result is less than a 1/20 chance". Except that there are more than 20 studies on things that are thought to be of high social importance, and so there'll always be a number of false positives from pure chance (in addition to any from fraud, P-hacking, etc.). If the suppression of true negatives by the above three mechanisms is large enough, the false positives will accrete, Frankenstein-style into a false "scientific consensus".
This isn't me saying "all apparently-scientifically-proven things that are politically convenient are just made-up". It's me saying "some apparently-scientifically-proven things that are politically convenient are just made-up*, and I don't know how many or which ones".
*Proof by examples: Lysenkoism, race science in the 19th/early 20th century (or, if you think the latter's correct, race science since; at least one of them has to be a politically-constructed Frankenstein since they contradict each other).
Any version of feminism I profess is the very old-school kind, so let me tell you that this is just another form of the old problem of "putting women on a pedestal", something that feminism has critiqued. https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2016/03/23/my-feminism-will-be-pro-sex-work-or-it-will-be-bullshit/
"But on average they're going to come up with different ideas that make the whole more interesting."
Sez who? "Different" perhaps, "more interesting" remains to be proven. Different does not necessarily mean more interesting; "novel" (where eight books peddle the same well-worn line and the nine strikes out on a fresh line) may be "more interesting", or it may be "more interesting" the way a motorway pile-up is more interesting: so bad that it is gruesomely fascinating.
"The Angel In The Home" doesn't work any better when you sit the Angel down at a word processor.
Female perspectives on topics that women find interesting are often highly helpful.
On the other hand, the range of topics that women find fascinating is narrower. For example, Jane Austen remains an almost living presence in women's literature today, because her topics, such as husband-hunting, remain so relevant to women. Very seldom do women carve out a new field, the way that, say, Bill James turned baseball statistics analysis into a huge hobby that attracted a remarkable amount of male talent since 1975. Generally, women devote their intellectual passions to more personally relevant areas.
You are arguing the Gadamerean "fusion of horizons" theory, which is that each demographic brings their own perspective to the text (text being anything that can be interpreted), which may or may not add value to the group's understanding of said text.
Here are new books I've reviewed in 2021 in my column in Taki's Magazine (in reverse chronological order) by the sex of the author:
Charles Murray's "Facing Reality:" I could imagine Heather Mac Donald or Amy Wax writing, but male datanauts are more common than female.
Blake Bailey's "Philip Roth" literary biography -- Mr. Roth picked out Mr. Bailey to be his authorized biographer because they were so much on the same wavelength than Bailey's biography got cancelled within weeks of publication for him being a Roth-style horn dog. I'm sure there will be future books about Roth from women (some of whom would likely have slept with Roth if they'd known him in his prime), some appalled, others intrigued.
Hermione Lee's authorized biography of "Tom Stoppard" -- Sir Tom picked out Ms. Lee to write a well-researched but rather decorous life of the great playwright. It's not as fun of a read as "Philip Roth," and being written by a woman might have contributed to that, but it won't get the still living Stoppard cancelled.
Walter Isaacson's biography+: "The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race." Isaacson's an eminent biographer (he had an immense bestseller in 2011 with "Steve Jobs") so this is a good book. But, he doesn't really make CRISPR co-discoverer Jennifer Doudna's private life come alive. A woman author might have figured out to get her to spill the beans on why, say, her first marriage ended in divorce. The most memorable character in Isaacson's book is not Doudna but Doudna's old mentor, the nonagenarian internally-exiled James D. Watson.
"Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters" by Abigail Shrier, a wise Jewish mom focuses on adolescent girls.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali: "Prey: Immigration, Islam, and the Erosion of Women’s Rights"
Both of these books on women's topics are better for being written by women.
So, I'd say, looking at this sample size of six new books I've read, that the cross-sex biographies (Walter Isaacson on Jennifer Doudna and Hermione Lee on Tom Stoppard) are slightly less insightful due to being written by a member of the opposite sex. On the other hand, Philip Roth chose Blake Bailey to write his posthumous biography specifically because Bailey identified with Roth and sees him as the hero, which makes the Roth biography more insightful but also more biased.
For the three social problem books I reviewed, a man (Murray) wrote about a male topic (crime) and a mixed topic (IQ) well, while a woman (Hirsi Ali) wrote well about Muslim men harassing women on the street in Europe and a woman (Shrier) wrote about why adolescent girls fall so hard for the transgender fad. Interestingly, on the last topic, I have always been more interested in the Promethean M to F ex-men, the high achievers like Jenner, McCloskey, Morris, etc. As a woman, Shrier isn't very interested in them, perhaps rightly thinking of them as less relevant to the big new social problem of adolescent girls demanding to be neutered.
So, in general, the different sexes have somewhat different interests and strengths as authors.
Evolutionary psychology is a field that is traditionally split fairly equally among men and women academics, which makes a lot of sense because half the human race is male and half is female. For example, I am currently rereading "Mother Love" by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, an anthropologist and orchard keeper, who has brilliant insights into why mothers can get more chores done around the farm by a daughter when she's 11 than when she's 15. I can't imagine many straight men having the quantity and quality of insights into mother-daughter relations that Blaffer Hrdy has (although a few gay men might).
On the other hand, I've never read a book on baseball statistics or golf course architecture by a woman.
On the other other hand, Jane Leavy has carved out a good career as a biographer of baseball heroes like Sandy Koufax.
"The Death and Life of Great American Cities" is a 1961 book by Jane Jacobs.
This was a hugely influential book by a woman, which I read in 1976, although that was likely too young for me to fully understand it.
Women often have better ideas about real estate-related topics than men do. Jane Jacobs understood what makes a good neighborhood better than Le Corbusier did.
Le Corbusier, whose style was adapted, with disastrous results, in many postwar American public housing projects, was a classic example of a masculine mind projecting his rather abstract ideas onto the world.
I think this is an interesting point, but I think it says more about how few women write the kind of books that have been reviewed. By all means, recommend some books by women that we're missing out on!
Not my job. Please do your own research.
So your job is just to complain about the problem, while refusing to do anything constructive that would ameliorate the problem?
Yes, I guess it's possible that no one reading these comments might be motivated to seek out more women authors in the future. But I hope that's not the case.
Your base assumption seems to be that none of us are already reading women authors. How about getting some data on that before crying Virginia Woolf?
Sorry, but you seem to recommend "hypothetical books" by "hypothetical female auhtors" that would be on average equally good and interesting as the books now reviewed, that must necessarily exist because of why exactly? Can we deduce some sort of a priori equality between male and female researching and writing skills? What observations would make you change your mind?
Sorry, what? Maybe I'm too tired this morning but are you just saying that you're not sure women and men can research, analyse and write equally well on average?
No, that's not what I am saying. More generally, "average writing skills" are not per se what you are looking for, since the kind of books reviewed here are written by people at the extremes of the distribution. It could be that the average is the same, but the distribution is different.
I am also not claiming there is *per se* a biological reason for anything, there could be economic and cultural explanations for such a difference.
More generally, I am not really making any confident claim at all. It just seems that PdC assumes that there is a world of undiscovered gems written by female authors, for which they refuse to give examples. Given that most books popping up in contests like this, or in "great books lists" it could also be that there are, for whatever reasons, just less good books written by women. I wonder why that claim is instantly dismissed. What is the positive evidence for books written by women being equally good?
I'm not sure that this new not-so-confident claim does you any more favours: that the smartest men are better writers than the smartest women? And then you come back to maybe women write 'less good books'? (or do you mean that there have been fewer books written by women in the past, so of course there will be fewer good books in there than by men?). Even if that's the case, that doesn't justify not seeking out a handful from the thousands that do exist.
Your null hypothesis here then is that there is a notable and substantive difference between the ability of men and women to research and write? There seems likely to be reasons why there are less female authors of suitable works, but I'm not sure differing levels of intellectual capability across genders is one that's going to be widely accepted.
Writing book is a costly signal of wealth and intelligence. You must be smart enough to write a great book, and you must have enough resources so that you can spend a lot of time writing the book (not just literally writing, but also researching, editing, etc.).
I suppose it makes more sense for men than for women to go into greater extremes to signal wealth and intelligence.
I'm not saying it's your job, I'm just interested in the books that you're apparently so passionate about! It is interesting how few (non-fiction) books by women I read, although I do listen to a lot of podcasts by women (and I listen more than read these days so that must count for something). I just think that if you'd suggested a couple of books, your comment would have come across as less antagonistic.
In the interests of a productive discussion, I'd like to read The Scout Mindset by Julia Galef and Count Down by Shanna Swan, I've listened to both of them discuss their books and I definitely found them interesting. One's on rationality, and the other is on fertility, both seem like very important topics to learn more about.
An interesting book I actually read (by a black woman! double score!) was "Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race", which was an exploration of race within the United Kingdom. I probably wouldn't recommend it to an American, but it was useful for understanding the situation in my own country a little better, too often people just import the racial narratives wholesale from the USA, but Reni Eddo-Lodge manages to avoid that. I don't agree with all of her conclusions but I still think she offers a different perspective and that's what I look for in fiction.
Here's a small selection that 30 seconds of Googling threw up, from a German source lest we focus too much on the Ango world! https://twitter.com/simultorian/status/1195004078935461888/photo/1. But focusing mostly on non-fiction: how about Hanna Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Virginia Woolf, Susan Sontag, Barbara Tuchman, Toni Morisson, Rebecca Solnit, Mary Beard, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Doris Lessing, Anne Frank, Joan Didion, Rachel Carson, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Gaskell...the list goes on. I haven't read anywhere near all of their books but that none of them made this list makes the list poorer for it. And let's not get started on fiction by women authors that is worth reviewing...
I have read many of these writers. I think Joan Didion is over-rated, Toni Morrison is uninteresting to me, and aren't you aware that Ms. Adichie is currently a fighter in the Culture Wars being mauled for being Problematic? https://www.vox.com/22537261/chimamanda-ngozi-adichie-transphobia-cancel-culture-jk-rowling-akwaeke-emezi-olutimehin-adegbeye
I like Simone de Beauvoir's writing even if I don't always agree with it. Mary Beard as a historian rubs me up the wrong way as Simon Schama - their pop history gigs on TV have gone to their head.
But this was "review a book you like", not "review this list of selected titles". You're going to get different results for those. Maybe we're all poor wretched sinners mired in the swamp of misogyny - or maybe we just recommend books we really liked regardless of who wrote them?
It damn well *is* your job when you swan in here and sneer about "how much more interesting", you little weasel. Put up or shut up.
That's some nice division of labor you propose!
So, merely recommending great books written by women is too much work for you, and you are not going to do it unless it is literally your job, which it isn't.
However, it is okay for you to request that someone else review those books. Because reading a book and writing a review is so much less work than merely mentioning the title of the book.
(Assuming you even have a specific book in mind. You might also be generally criticizing people for not knowing something that you don't know either. Like, maybe such books are genuinely rare.)
Karen Armstrong - a history of god or the great transformation, to name two examples that would fit here (yes I should now go write those two reviews, both awesome books in my opinion, but don’t think I have the time).
A History of God is exactly the kind of book I'd be interested in reading.
Would you recommend her books on Islam? I feel like I don't understand the world's second biggest religion well enough, if I like A History of God I'm wondering which of her works to read next.
I do recommend her "Islam: a short history". Its a much easier read than the other two books but still quite good. I found it very balanced - respectful of its subject in a way that is rare/difficult for a Western book about Islam.
I'd be interested in a review of a Karen Armstrong book because I dislike her intensely and would be glad to get stuck into one of her books. However, I'm not sure that is what PdC wants, as the impression I get (and I may well be mistaken) is that they want uncritical purring over how wonderful this book by this wonderful lady author is.
As for genres of works - taking a very small sub-set of nine books on a particular historical topic I wanted to read up on, there are three male authors and two female authors. The best book is by a male author, who is a heavyweight historian. I'd put the two women next, and the remaining male authors last (one of them very last as he was very disappointing).
Were I going to write a review on one book, I'd do the Number One author who happens to be male. This says nothing about other books I've read being by men, women, or tree sloths. And I am certainly not going to pick a book to review solely on grounds "the author has lady bits" because then we get into "the author's skin colour", the exact shade of the author's skin colour (seems like Lin-Manuel Miranda got a dose of criticism for not having enough dark brown people in his movie "In The Heights" https://www.vox.com/culture/22535040/in-the-heights-casting-backlash-colorism-representation), their gender, their sexual orientation, are they left-handed, etc.
I want to know if a book by A.N. Other is a good book. I don't care if A.N. Other is a neurodivergent, physically disabled, trans, poly, non-binary, two-spirit, multi-racial, Indigenous person otherkin. Do they know their stuff and can they write?
As I said above, under the Social Justice paradigm there's no such thing as "a good book". The quality of a book is subjective, and thus it depends on the sociopolitical upbringing of the person who is evaluating the book; and thus female authors will always be undervalued (since we live in a patriarchy). To put it another way, when you say "X is a good book", what you really mean is "X is a [straight white] male book"; and this holds regardless of your own gender.
The only way to combat this is, obviously, to drop the subjective notion of "quality" which only serves to reinforce harmful social norms; and instead to choose books based on the demographic categories of the authors.
“The Riddle of the Labyrinth” by Margalit Fox is a great account of the deciphering of Linear B.
The mysterious script of ancient Crete was largely revealed by the efforts of another woman, Alice Kober, a Classics professor who picked at the problem at her kitchen table for close to two decades. Unfortunately Kober died just as her efforts seemed about to come to fruition. She did get considerable recognition in her own lifetime, but ultimately the credit for deciphering Linear B went to a young male prodigy named Michael Ventris, who referred heavily to her exhaustive work. Kober (among others) was largely forgotten until Fox’s book.
Fox wrote obituaries in the NYT for years before tackling a book. It’s worth noting that we’re all probably reading a lot more content by women than we know, since there are lots of female copywriters and marketing people shaping our ideas through their words but who don’t get a byline or real inclusion in the idea of authorship.
I noticed when I got started in the opinion writing business 30 years ago that most of the people who really wanted to grab the world by the lapels and tell it what's on their minds are men while a large fraction of the opinion editors who picked which men get published were women.
I just took a random sample of 17 of the ~4200 books on my shelves, and _not one_ of them was by a female author. (And a few more; it seems like 1/17 is in fact fairly typical.)
It's possible that I am somehow biased towards male authors, but I think a simpler explanation is that, of notable books on topics interesting to this audience, a large majority are written by men.
It is of course possible -- I would say almost certainly true -- that a large part of _that_ is because of sexism, historical and/or present. Mostly historical in this case -- few of the books in this series of reviews are very recent. But I bet the way it operates is almost entirely by making women less likely to be in a position to write those books. Several of the books reviewed are by eminent academics (Robert Ellickson, professor at Yale; Frans de Waal, professor at Emory; Peter Brown, professor at Princeton; Joseph Tainter, professor at Utah State; William McNeil, professor at Harvard; also our one woman, Natasha Dow Schuell, who not coincidentally is decades younger than all the others and presently "only" an associate professor); _right now_ (I think I remember reading) more women than men are being appointed to senior academic positions but until recently the reverse was very much the case. Several are by eminent journalists with decades-long careers behind them (Robert Wright, Charles Mann, Robert Caro); I'm not sure of the current state of journalism but I'm pretty sure that not so long ago it was dominated by men. Some are from long enough ago that men were dominating _every_ field (Galen, probably Henry George). Then there are Peter Zeitan (military analyst) and John Storrs-Hall (nanotechnologist); I bet that even now those fields are male-dominated. Nicholson Baker and George Orwell, though, "could equally have been female", so to speak.
Again, to be clear, the point of that last paragraph isn't that it's _perfectly OK_ that most of the people writing this sort of book are men. It's not perfectly OK; very likely most of the reason why it's so is, or derives from, sexism. It's that, whatever the cause (sexism! men and women having different interests! men and women having different abilities! mere path-dependent randomness!), the shortage of women is _already there in the books_ rather than being an artefact of _how the books were selected_.
Suppose reviewers had been aware of this and attempted to apply a compensating 16:1 bias in favour of books written by women. There'd be a gain from increased diversity. There'd be a loss from picking from a much smaller field; if 16/17 books of some kind are written by men, then the best, most interesting, most ACX-aligned one _written by a woman_ is likely less good / less interesting / less ACX-aligned than the best/... _overall_.
It's not obvious to me that, simply from the point of view of trying to write interesting book reviews, the gain would outweigh the loss.
English women were writing a large fraction of bestselling fiction by the latter 18th century. Women wrote a lot of celebrated books in the 19th Century, including in economics-oriented titles, such as by Maria Edgeworth and Harriet Martineau.
But there's probably a bias in favor of male writers in terms of what goes down in history because men tend to be more history-oriented while women are more interested in fashion and the new.
In my review of Charles Murray's "Human Accomplishment," I pointed out an example of bias:
"Still, Murray’s rankings may be slightly unfair to female artists because they are less likely to have brilliant followers. My wife, for example, was incensed that Jane Austen finished behind the lumbering Theodore Dreiser and the flashy Ezra Pound. Yet, these men probably did have more influence on other major writers. That’s because subsequent famous authors were mostly male and thus less interested than the female half of the human race in Austen’s topics, such as finding a husband."
I'd add that several heavyweight novelists, such as Charles Dickens and Henry James, extolled Austen as the model for how to write a novel. But, Ezra Pound had a direct influence on Hemingway, whom he employed, and Eliot, whom he edited, who each had massive influence on subsequent male authors (e.g., Stoppard). So men tend to be more influential on other major writers just by being men.
If I look only at fiction, the fraction of women on my shelf is about 1/3. Looking at nonfiction, it's about 1/17. (This is a slightly more careful estimate than my earlier one.)
It looks to me as if reviewers in this series have cared more about the books themselves than about subsequent influence. But of course subsequent influence makes a difference to how _available for consideration_ a book is.
I don't think it's obvious that if Dreiser and Pound had more influence than Austen it's because her _topics_ were less interesting to male writers. That could well be true, but it seems to me there are plenty of other possible explanations (maybe some of those male writers were just sexists, perhaps only in the fairly weak sense of being more likely to pay attention to other writers more like themselves; maybe something about Austen's _style_ is less attention-grabbing).
It also seems to me that there are plenty of other possible explanations for the relative ranking of Austen, Dreiser and Pound besides greater influence from the latter two. E.g., I suspect some recency bias in Murray's sources (actually, not just _bias_ but also greater _variance_ for more recent people, so probably some recent people are overrated and some underrated) and again maybe some of those sources have sexist biases.
If it's true (I'm not convinced it is) that men are more interested in history and women are more interested in new things, that seems just as likely to produce a bias in favour of women as one in favour of men in "what goes down in history", assuming that by that you mean "what books become historically important" rather than "what happens in the field of history". But, I repeat, I'm not convinced. Continuing to use the books I have for sampling (which of course introduces all sorts of biases, but it's what I can most easily choose things at random from), here are a few random nonfiction books by female authors. "Gardening made easy" by Jane Fearnley-Whittingstall; not exactly intellectual stuff but a fairly timeless topic. "Passions of the mind", a book of essays on literary topics by A S Byatt; a mix of historical and recent. A work of biblical commentary by Margaret Thrall; far more historical than fashionable. Temple Grandin's "Animals in translation", which claims to tell us about the nature of animals, a thing that presumably hasn't changed much over the centuries. Elisabeth Murray's book about her grandfather and his work on the Oxford English Dictionary; at least historical-ish. An encylopaedia of architecture by Doreen Yarwood; definitely historical. (Though I note that she has also written a book about fashion!) I'm just not seeing the novelty/fashion bias you claim. Maybe this just reflects my own interests (and my wife's, but most of our nonfiction books were bought by me), but pending more evidence I'm definitely unconvinced.
Men tend to be more interested than women in greatness. Guys are always making up Top Ten lists. How often do women get into arguments about the GOAT (Greatest Of All Time)? This sex divergence is partly because men are more interested in personally irrelevant stuff than women are in general, but it's also because men have bigger top of the pyramid payoffs than women do: Genghis Khan (a strong contender for the GOAT of conquerors) fathered a lot more children than any woman ever gave birth to.
It might be true that men are more interested in top-tens and GOATs and the like, but I don't think it has much bearing on the discussion above. It might help explain why Murray, a man, wrote the book he did, but beyond that? Maybe it would make it slightly more likely for Murray's sources to be mostly written by men, but I'm pretty sure everyone reading this would already have bet pretty heavily on that being so. And I don't see any way to get from "men tend to be more interested than women in other people's greatness" to "men will tend to make greater things" or "men will tend to rate other men, rather than women, as great".
It could well be true that men are, on the whole, (1) more interested in others' greatness and (2) more interested in _their own_ greatness, and that #2 means that men tend more strongly motivated to make an extraordinary effort to do great things, which could certainly produce an excess of men among those with great accomplishments. But if that was what you meant, why bring top ten lists and GOAT arguments into it?
It might be possible to assess how strong this sort of effect is by looking to see whether the Great Men : Great Women ratio is higher in domains where effort is the main thing that matters (rather than innate talent, recognition from others, etc.). At least some other possible causes of imbalance wouldn't have that characteristic -- explanations of the shape "men are better than women" or "men are more variable than women" will likely have most impact on things that are primarily talent, explanations in terms of others' sexism will likely affect everything equally or have most effect on things where there's a strong element of recognition from other people.
Unfortunately, determining how far a particular sort of visible-greatness is caused by talent, effort, others' recognition, etc., is an extremely hard problem.
The most objective lists we have of greatness by sex are in Charles Murray's 2003 book "Human Accomplishment."
Women, for instance, account for merely 2 percent of the 4,002 eminent personages. They are strongest in Japanese literature, with 8 percent of the significant names, including the third-ranked Japanese writer, Lady Murasaki Shikibu, author of the thousand-year-old proto-novel The Tale of Genji.
Women are particularly insignificant in composing classical music (0.2 percent) and inventing technology (0.0 percent).
Is this changing much? Murray unofficially glanced at who “flourished” after 1950 (depressingly to me, he assumes careers peak at age 40) and found female accomplishment to be up sharply only in literature. In fact, the percentage of Nobel Prizes won by women fell from 4 percent in the first half of the 20th century to 3 percent in the second.
Still, Murray’s rankings may be slightly unfair to female artists because they are less likely to have brilliant followers. My wife, for example, was incensed that Jane Austen finished behind the lumbering Theodore Dreiser and the flashy Ezra Pound. Yet, these men probably did have more influence on other major writers. [Dreiser was hugely influential on H.L. Mencken, the most influential public intellectual of the 1920s and Pound employed the young Ernest Hemingway and edited T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land."]
That’s because subsequent famous authors were mostly male and thus less interested than the female half of the human race in Austen’s topics, such as finding a husband.
Dead white European males dominate his inventories, despite Murray reserving eight of his 21 categories (including Arabic literature, Indian philosophy, and Chinese visual art) for non-Western arts. Murray, who was a Peace Corp volunteer in Thailand and has half-Asian children, began this project wanting to devote even more attention to Asian accomplishments but found he couldn’t justify his predisposition.
In the sciences, 97 percent of the significant figures and events turned out to be Western. Is this merely Eurocentric bias? Of the 36 science reference books he drew upon, 28 were published after 1980, by which time historians were desperately searching for non-Westerners to praise. Only in this decade has the most advanced non-Western country, Japan, begun to win science Nobels regularly.
If this isn't the place for cynical takes on things, what is?
I've seen evolutionary arguments that seem to add up to that the purpose of life for men is competing with other men for sex with women.
I see ignoring or opposing women's accomplishments following from this premise. After all, competing with women doesn't attract women, and supporting women's accomplishments just adds to the competition (fewer places for men at the top).
This doesn't mean I think the premise is sound, it's just that I've seen enough men talk as though it's true for them (sorry, no cites) that I wonder whether there's some truth in it.
For what it's worth, when I hear men talk about sex being the most important thing, I ask about spectator sports (watching football games doesn't attract women in the long or short run) and get brushed off.
Did you submit a review?
This is the proper solution. It costs nothing to heckle from the crowd without doing the hard work of righting the problem.
Based on your responses later in this thread (in particular, "It's not my job. Please do your own research." - are you here to earnestly address a problem you've identified or merely to scold people and move on?), I think we have fairly different outlooks on the world. Still, I'd like to make the case for your point.
There's no doubt that the long, widespread, and continuing subjugation of women has caused a situation where a disproportionately large output of writing is by male authors, who were disproportionately afforded the opportunities and cultural expectations and such to become writers. So it is reasonable to point out that, assuming equal writing ability between men and women and no ongoing discrimination (which of course there is, but I don't accuse Scott or the reviewers of such), you will still observe more good books by male authors than female authors, and hence more discussion surrounding books by male authors, and probably a tradition of evaluating writing by comparing it to other "good" writing, which was mostly done by males. And on and on.
And if we don't make at least somewhat of an effort to go out of our way and break the cycle by giving more consideration to women writers than many of us otherwise feel inclined to, these consequences of past discrimination will be perpetuated, and the culture will continue to elevate a distorted sample of humanity's best writing on that basis. Having only 1 of the 17 finalists be reviewing books by female authors makes it pretty clear that Scott and/or the reviewers didn't go out of their way at all, as they maybe should have.
With that said, one should also consider the very real possibility that there exist actual differences in writing inclination (and even ability) between genders, and that that could better explain more of the imbalance that we observe. If that were the case, I don't think it would be worth the effort to go out of one's way to find underrepresented female authors. I don't believe there's any *intrinsic* good in equality on arbitrary measures like which groups write the most acclaimed books.
I do find it a teensy bit ugly that only 1 of the 17 finalist authors were female, given that I suspect that if we *could* magically remove all the effects of past discrimination and whatnot (what do I even mean by this?), the ratio would be more even. I'm pretty sure men don't write 17 times as many reviewable books as women in a world devoid of any misogyny or history of it. Perhaps I'll add a book by a female author to my reading list to try and do something about this.
"There's no doubt that the long, widespread, and continuing subjugation of women has caused a situation where a disproportionately large output of writing is by male authors, who were disproportionately afforded the opportunities and cultural expectations and such to become writers."
Actually ... lots of women have made lots of money over the centuries as writers.
On the other hand, women are less common in golf course architecture, but certainly Pete Dye's wife Alice had some influence on his hugely influential designs of the 1960s-1990. Golf course architect Tom Doak, a former Dye assistant, says the Dye's well-regarded Citrus course at La Quinta in the Palms Springs area was more or less wholly designed by Alice.
Also, Torrey Pines in La Jolla, site of yesterday's U.S. Open golf championship, was perhaps routed by official architect's William Bell the Younger's mom:
https://www.si.com/golf/travel/bells-ring-true-at-torrey-pines
Torrey Pines South is notoriously not an ideal routing (Torrey Pines North is better). On the other hand, its debut as a U.S. Open course in 2008, won by Tiger Woods on a broken leg he suffered during his amazing attempt to become a Navy SEAL, was perhaps the most memorable US Open ever. And its 2021 version won by Jon Rahm by sinking three long puts on the last three holes was pretty great too.
I clearly never said lots of women haven't made lots of money over the centuries as writers. What I said was that men historically were *disproportionately* granted the opportunities and such to become writers.
That golf course knowledge was an interesting digression, thanks.
I will recommend a book by a woman author, eminently suitable for reviewing here. It's just that I'm not likely to get around to it though I hope someone else does.
_Betrayal Trauma_ by Jennifer Freyd-- it's about the premise that people are less likely to remember abuse by those they're dependent on. It's full of lots of chewy research on memory and trauma.
The one thing I don't trust about it is that I suspect the author started with a premise and looked for evidence to support it. However, it's amazing how much trauma can fuck with memory in general.
As for you, PdC, I see you're expecting other people to do your work for you.
Every reviewer is female according to my use of the female voice in my text to speech app. It's genuinely weird to me that it would even occur to someone to tally the gender of people who produce pseudo-anonymous all text content. I much prefer the internet where no one knows you're a dog.
The point was about the writers of the books, not the writers of the reviews.
I made the same effort to determine the reproductive organs of the reviewers are the writer's of their subject.
Books by women that I'd like to see a review of in a future contest:
"Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Trip through Yugoslavia" by Rebecca West
"Sexual Personae" by Camille Paglia
A collection of Pauline Kael's film reviews
A Barbara Tuchman history like "Guns of August"
What are some other suggestions of nonfiction by women very near the top of their fields writing about topics of interest to both sexes? I look up lists of nonfiction by women online and mostly get books of primarily interest to women, such as dieting for lesbians of color or whatever.
I haven't yet found a list of nonfiction by women that smart guys would like, although there is probably one or two out there.
One of the reasons I asked for recommendations was exactly this - if you search for "books by women" you often get "books about women" and that's not exactly what I'm looking for. I mean, I'm sure there are interesting books on the subject I could read, but I tend to want books that are a little more specific than that.
I'm expanding the question to non-fiction by women which I would expect to be of interest here and which could lead to good book reviews. I don't think all the book reviews were of books by authors at the top of their fields, though many were.
While I don't approve of gender-counting, it's also true that women and men might have somewhat different areas of interest so that you get a wider range of subjects if you make a point to include women.
Hillary Mantel's books about Cromwell.
Doubt by Jennifer Michael Hecht, which is a history of the philosophy about the limits to knowledge.
A Feeling for the Organism by Evelyn Keller. Of interest because it's about Barbara McClintock, a biologist who was looking at whole organisms (specifically corn) at a time when looking at genes was more mainstream. There's sexism involved, but McClintock also had a difficult writing style as well as an unfashionable area of interest.
The Frailty Myth by Colette Dowling. I hope that "of interest to both men and women" isn't equivalent to "not about women". This one is a history of efforts to keep women out of sports. I don't think it's correct that all women would like to be athletic if it weren't for social pressure against it, but the history is interesting. I'm also not sure than men and women's abilities are equal if you correct for size.
Ada Palmer's non-fiction (mostly at exurbe.com) hasn't been collected into a book, but it's definitely ACX fodder. This is the same Ada Palmer who wrote Too Like the Lightning, and lately she's been working on a history of censorship with Cory Doctorow. She's been doing past censorship and he's been doing modern censorship.
The Pleasant Profession of Robert Heinlein by Farah Mendlesohn, looking at Heinlein's ideas through his fiction. Pulls out some threads I didn't expect, like that even though Heinlein was in favor of personal weapons, they're used very little in his books. Heinlein is called an individualist, but his happy endings are almost all about people finding a place in society. There's a surprising amount about wanting to be a woman.
Mother Nature by Sarah Hrdy. A look at how mothers balance the competing demands of themselves and their various offspring.
Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez-- how women aren't generally considered in the way things are designed.
The Fabric of Civilization by Virgina Postrel-- history of fabric from both the technical and economic angle.
I asked on facebook for more book suggestions.
https://www.facebook.com/nancy.lebovitz/posts/10220870749260977?comment_id=10220871631723038&reply_comment_id=10220871665123873¬if_id=1624106011058340¬if_t=feed_comment&ref=notif
Jenny Uglow & Amanda Vickery
Galileo's Daughter, by Dava Sobel, is a highly informative and deeply moving look at the lives and studies of the father and daughter. Her book Longitude is also a good read.
"In her new book Expecting Better, economist and new mom Emily Oster parses the evidence behind all the recommendations given to pregnant women. She argues that, as an economist, she's trained to both examine evidence and think about trade-offs."
Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly
"The Descent Of Woman" By Elaine Morgan.
Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly
Alma Mater by
Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz is a look at the history of US women's colleges which uses design and architecture as a lens.
Kara Cooney: The Cost of Death, The Woman Who Would be King, When Women Ruled the World, Coffin Commerce
Anything by Mary Roach. "Packing for Mars" was a Hugo nominee in best related work. I loved "Bonk," which is about sex, including Roach's adventures having sex in an MRI tube. (Mary Roach got more than one recommendation.)
Data Feminism by D'Ignazio and Klein and Automating Inequality by Eubanks
Pauline Kael
MY STROKE OF INSIGHT by Jill Bolte Taylor
_Harmful to Minors: the Perils of Protecting Children from Sex_ by Judith Levine
_Dying to Live: Near Death Experiences_ by Susan Blackmore
_The Meme Machine_ by Susan Blackmore
_Why We Love_ by Helen Fisher
The Sixth Extinction., by Elizabeth Kolbert.
Elaine Showalter does well-informed and careful cultural analysis. My favorite is *Hystories*; I often disagreed with her conclusions, but I always enjoyed and learned from how she gets there.
Another good feminist cultural critic is Barbara Ehrenreich, especially her *Bright-Sided*, about the cultural emphasis on (almost demand for) always being upbeat.
Journalist Laurie Garrett: Her big books *The Coming Plague* and *Betrayal of Trust* can be overwhelming, but the material is fascinating. He book on the WWI flu is disappointing, though.
Rebecca Skloot's *The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks* is both great science and a very personal, touching story of communication across racial & cultural barriers.
*Doing Harm*, by Maya Dusenbery, is a very accessible study of how medical science is biased towards studying men, to the detriment of women.
And Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's work on homosexuality and homosocial relationships is excellent literary criticism with many important real-world/political concerns. (I felt I had to put in something that doesn't have to do with medical science.)
Pamela McCorduck’s Machines who Think. It came out in 1979. I had Pamela when she taught at Pitt. Then she didn’t get tenure so she went west and had a brilliant academic career.
Jill Lepore’s These Truths is about us, especially about our Constitution & government.
Klein's /The Shock Doctrine,/ and Solnit's /A Paradise Built in Hell./
Thinking in Bets, by Annie Duke
The Scout Mindset, by Julia Galef
Galileo's Middle Finger, Alice Draeger
Medical Apartheid, by Harriet Washington
Also: _The Score_ by Faye Flam, an evo psych-based look at why men and women's mating strategies tend to differ. And anything by Helen Pluckrose, managing editor of _Areo_, is probably good, although so far I've only read essays by her.
I liked Elaine Showalter's "Hystories." I reviewed it for National Review in 1997:
https://www.amazon.com/Hystories-Hysterical-Epidemics-Showalter-1997-03-15/dp/B01FIY8YPK
I'm pretty sure she was wrong about chronic fatigue and Gulf War Syndrome being public hysteria.
Thanks, I shall order "The Pleasant Profession of Robert Heinlein" by Farah Mendlesohn.
"There's a surprising amount about wanting to be a woman." Transgenderism, time travel, and Heinlein's solipsism combine brilliantly in his 1958 short story "All You Zombies." I don't know whether Heinlein had transgender leanings personally or whether he merely recognized it as being a Thing in the sci-fi community. (E.g., the guy I went to business school with who is now said to be "America's highest paid female executive" told me his plan was to get rich off outer space, which he then did. He later made a second fortune by inventing a treatment for the rare disease of one of the children he had fathered. He's like a Heinlein hero come to life.)
I would go with at least mild personal leanings, enough to make the writing vivid. I don't think Heinlein ever wrote about wanting to have a male body.
Your wording is pretty sloppy given that all the finalists are anonymous. I assume you're talking about the authors?
I think the words "had reviewers looked more closely at authors in the other half of the population" make it very clear that indeed PdC is talking about the authors, not the reviewers.
:eyeroll:
"Once societies reached a density threshold to harbor viruses, customs and religions practices evolved to help control the spread. "
I recall hearing that one of the two socio-subconscious reasons behind near-Eastern religions' prohibition against pork is the ease of viral zoonotic transmission from pigs and their capacity as reservoirs while sharing close proximity with humans (the other is association of pork eating to cannibalism, a history all humans share).
Really makes you think about the whole bat soup/pangolin/wet markets/maybe-don't-play-with-viral-protein-coats-for-fun-and-prizes in a new but simultaneously old way.
There are two intertwined problems with pigs.
1) Pig zoonoses jump easily.
2) The *reason* pig zoonoses jump easily is because pigs eat basically the same stuff humans do (grains/fruits/nuts/carrion). But that immediately creates a problem - if you have to feed your pigs edible food, then keeping them is a net drain on how much food you have (unlike cows/sheep/goats/horses/camels/donkeys/llamas/alpacas/yaks, which all can digest cellulose). In some places, there's stuff that humans don't want to eat that you can feed to pigs, but in others they're just a waste.
See, I've also heard that described as a just-so story (Mark Essig has a book on pigs, interview here https://gastropod.com/the-whole-hog/), and it's much more likely that people just found pigs disgusting. They're not particularly attractive animals (apologies to any pigs reading this, but it's true), and they eat things that we find disgusting, like garbage and faeces, so any culture concerned with purity would want to rule them out. Pigs are also very cheap to raise so it may have also been a class issue. Most of the weird laws in Leviticus seem more concerned with a certain kind of aesthetic logic than with hygiene. The danger of pig diseases is probably a side-benefit and may have helped the rule to stick around, but I don't think it's the real origin.
How are pigs "very cheap to raise"? What are you feeding them that is cheap in a pre-modern society?
(Human faeces, sure, that's free - but AIUI pigs can't live solely on that and it's not enough to provide for a decent amount of pigs anyway.)
"Cheap to raise" is of course relative to other animals, but I believe that fattening a pig was the kind of thing even fairly poor farmers could afford. My understanding was that you can feed them primarily on waste, and surplus (apparently they used to be raised on dairy farms since they ate excess milk), but you wouldn't get a great amount of meat from an animal fed on that diet so there would need to be some expenditure of edible food.
My point of comparison here is, indeed, other animals - in particular, grass-eaters, since grass is not nutritive to humans and will grow without human effort (vermin-eaters are second-best, since vermin are omnipresent and hard to harvest - hence chickens/ducks/cats - but pigs aren't especially adept at hunting vermin on their own TTBOMK).
The issue with feeding pigs on surplus is that you must *have* a surplus of edible food (even milk is only limited by transport when fresh; you can make it into yoghurt or cheese or butter which last longer, and pastoralists universally had at least one means of doing this). Times of plenty certainly existed pre-modern, but they weren't the rule; populations were limited by food. And, well, a religion is not an especially-high-bandwidth or flexible instrument for keeping society on the straight and narrow; if doing something is catastrophic 10% of the time, it goes.
Using a historical example from the United States, it was common for poor families in Appalachia to keep pigs. This is because feeding them was essentially free: they foraged in the woods for an abundance of chestnuts. With the extinction of the American chestnut tree, this was much less sustainable and pig keeping plummeted as a result.
I expect the cheapest animal to raise in a given location to be the animal which has a suitable forage location nearby: pigs -> woods; sheep/cattle/horses -> pastures; etc.
In my country, pigs are raised in small rural households, mostly on household waste. Peel a potato? The rind goes to the pigs. Moldy or hard-dried bread? Spoiled fruit? Funky-smelling meat? Bones from last night's barbecue go to the dogs, but otherwise.. Even the water from washing dishes, assuming you didn't use soap or detergents. Nor do they shy from the occasional careless stray rat. They'll get fat on anything, and I find they turn out quite delicious.
They do get specialized feed, too, especially nowadays. But there's no household that doesn't generate significant amounts of waste products, and pre-industrial waste is 100% pig food.
Are you Polish by any chance? My parents spoke about this when they visited my Opa's village, that every household had a pig that they would raise on scraps and eat at some point during the winter.
Personally, we have chickens that we feed almost entirely on leftovers, and it's surprising how much edible waste a household can produce, even when not taking advantage of modern over-abundance of food.
Okay, this sent me down the by-ways of first of all the Gadarene swine and then pig raising in ancient times. Pigs (wild and domesticated) were around in Palestine, here's a paper on it: https://ethnobiology.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/JoE/10-2/Hesse.pdf
There were indeed ritual/religious bans on pigs and the study goes into "where did the pigs come from, why did they decline?" but the points I want to pick out to address the points you raise are the following. You're talking about "what do you feed pigs?" and my sense is that they're scavengers. I think you have an image of modern intensive pig-rearing farms, or the notion of pig-pens on older farms, but swineherding traditionally was exactly that - turning out herds of pigs to graze, like goats, sheep or cattle. Letting pigs feed on acorns in forests, because pigs can eat acorns without harm, is called "pannage" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pannage
It seems that it wasn't until the enclosure of common lands in the 16th and 17th centuries that European pig rearing turned to farmers keeping pigs in styes. Human faeces as pig food? Where are you getting that from?
Going back to our Palestinian pigs:
"The pig, wild and domestic, has been an indigenous part of the wildlife of the Middle East for millennia. Moreover, the hog is recognized worldwide as a productive resource, since it couples rapid rates of growth and reproduction with a tractable nature into a suitable package for both small and large scale husbandry.
...Agricultural.-A central problem of husbandry is balancing the needs of the animals with those of agriculture. Feed must be provided either through shifting potential cropland to pastureland or through the processing of agricultural byproducts. As agriculture intensifies, the first option becomes less attractive. Pork production, however, will continue to flourish as long as the crops selected are those which produce abundances of plant refuse. However, as those crops (basically the grains) are replaced by those with smaller refuse fractions, pork production becomes marginally less efficient compared to the husbanding of other animals such as sheep and goats at a distance, in pastures inaccessible to pigs either because of the difficulty in herding large numbers of them or the quality of the terrain. This economic reality may underlie Coon's (1958) suggestion that an emphasis on olive and vine production will depress pork production (see the discussion of agricultural byproducts in Prestonet af. (1985) and Sansoucy (1985»). Since Palestinian agricultural production evolved and specialized in those directions with geographically diversified emphases (Stager 1985), we may hypothesize that animal husbandries responded to the changes in a like manner.
...Successful swineherding is associated with rainfall or moist ground, the presence of mixed deciduous forest, and the availability of reserve fodder collected from agricultural activities. It is thus clear that evaluating the potential for pork production in various parts of Palestine will require a knowledge of the history of local environmental conditions and crop choices, a subject just beginning to be broadly undertaken."
So why pigs? They're easy to breed and rear until you build up enough of a pig herd that you can then switch to sheep or cattle. You can turn them loose on pastureland to graze and forage, and feed them by-products of cereal raising. Keeping one or a few pigs in a sty, you can feed them on domestic scraps as well.
Fattening a pig being something even poor farmers could afford - definitely. Raising pigs for slaughter and sale was part of Irish rural life, the pig being known as "the little gentleman that pays the rent" as you could kill the pig and sell the pork products in time to pay the twice-yearly rent (in addition to whatever other money you had). Pigs could be raised on potatoes and buttermilk (a by-product of dairy production) as easily as the human inhabitants: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pork_in_Ireland
Thanks for the in depth information, you're clearly well read on pigs.
However, for your edification and enlightenment, I give you the proof that pigs eat shit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_toilet
No idea how common it was outside of China, I only mentioned it as a demonstration that pigs will eat pretty much anything, which is their main advantage over cattle, but it's probably also why they're regarded as unclean by squeamish religious authorities.
New York City had feral pigs roaming the streets well into the 19th century. Repeated efforts to ban and remove them were stymied by outcry from the urban poor, who relied on them for both trash removal and as a source of food. People in a certain house or street called dibs on a cluster of pigs and fed them their scraps until the porker was big enough to catch and divvy up among the neighbors.
Thanks for that; I knew there were some things pigs eat that humans don't/can't but some clear examples like acorns make that a lot more concrete.
I wasn't thinking of high-intensity farming so much as grazing (indeed, high-intensity farming cattle uses farmed feed as well); I was mostly getting at "there are lots of places with grass (including the steppe, which will essentially *only* grow grass), and essentially everywhere has worms, but places you can just turn pigs loose and have them eat random valueless stuff aren't as plentiful".
(I did need a reminder that they exist, though; I knew that but I'd gotten carried away.)
The claim Joseph Henrich makes in "The Secret of Our Success" is that most of these cultural adaptations don't *arise* because they're helpful - but they *stick around* because they are. Who knows why someone first banned pigs - but if that ban was helpful in that environment, then the surviving cultures will have it.
If we're discussing why the prohibition stuck around then perhaps it does have an health advantage, but still think it has more to do with aesthetics than hygiene - there's no need for it to actually be helpful to stick around, signalling has its own value. There are passages in Maccabees that describe Jews preferring to die rather then eat pork (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woman_with_seven_sons), obviously very few people would go that far but it definitely seems like avoiding pork became a way to demonstrate membership to the Jewish religion and community.
My guess is that pigs need a lot of water to cool themselves, so not the best in the middle east.
I read some of the behavior of governments during the pandemic as more parasitic rather than less, unlike the author. For instance, it's not clear to me that enforced shutdowns of many of the things that were shutdown were really helpful when you compare across European countries or various US states with different policies. Further, when you consider the predicted tax shortfalls in states not actually happening, it seems less like intentionally counteracting the macroparasitic paradigm to counterbalance the microparasitic one. Finally, I would note that the macroparasitic oscillations in the supply chains and things that make it hard, for instance, for me to get to buy materials to build a garage means that the story of the pandemic is only partially over in the way McNeill would analyze such things.
A parasite is something that gains at the expense of its host. What did governments gain from shutdowns?
Increasing power from shutdown orders, increasing expectation that all decisions should follow increasingly incoherent CDC recommendations that contradict one another on a weekly if not daily basis and finally from a public choice perspective, increasing ability to point to the other party or a state run by the other party (CA v TX or NY v FL) as the source of all ills in the world.
Didn't the states end up losing much of their power as a result of the shutdowns? I don't know of any that gained power.
It's unclear - the state demonstrated power, but presumably they always had that power and all they were doing were exercising it. I don't think there were any legal changes as a result of Covid-19, and it's unclear if this will make it easier or harder to do the same thing again in the future. I'd err more on the side of precedent making this easier in future, so I think I'd say that Covid-19 has increased government power.
Some people seem to have this model of politicians as constantly striving to gain ever great control over the public, and while I'm sure there are a few like that I think most of them just want to get re-elected, so I'm not too worried about the question of whether lockdowns and social distancing establish a dangerous precedent.
This does indeed sound like a very 70s book - the general tenor of the times was looking for a gloomy way to forecast the end of civilisation in the near future.
It seems to be somewhat plausible, but there's a bit of a stretch when he makes the analogy between micro- and macro-parasites. Thuggish soldiers beating up sickly farmers to take their crops as taxes may be a beguiling notion, but those soldiers were often recruited from farming villages themselves, so not *everybody* could have been fluke-ridden.
And there are diseases that seem to mysteriously pop up then disappear again, like the sweating sickness in England (bad enough that Thomas Cromwell went to work in the morning while his wife felt a bit under the weather, then he was notified that evening she was dead): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweating_sickness
Or leprosy in mediaeval times, which seems to really have been Hansen's Disease. Nevertheless, enough people got it to have leper hospitals built to quarantine them from the rest of society and for places in Ireland to get names derived from "Lepers Town". Yet somehow the European variant didn't thrive after a few centuries? There's some speculation as to "improved resistance in the population" but that doesn't really explain why leprosy continued in other countries, surely their populations too would become resistant? https://www.livescience.com/37424-history-of-leprosy-bacterium.html
Leprosy was cured by penicillin.
The point is that it was big in the Middle Ages but not so much in later centuries, well before the invention of penicillin.
Although the caveat is that we mean a very specific disease by "Leprosy", whereas the term in the past reffered to basically any gross skin condition, not all of which were actually contagious - but better safe than sorry before penicillin was discovered!
There's a discussion of medieval diagnoses of leprosy here: https://acoup.blog/2021/05/20/meet-a-historian-robin-s-reich-on-making-sense-of-medieval-medicine-humors-weird-animal-parts-and-experiential-knowledge/
(I recommend searching the page for the word "leprosy".)
The gist of it is that the authors of medieval medical texts were vague on what leprosy was, but practicing physicians of the time did mean the same specific disease that we use the word for today.
And even more interestingly, the criteria the books provide seem like they would misdiagnose a lot, but it turns out that this didn't happen in practice.
Does not quarantine explain these diseases not thriving?
If you effectively isolate people suffering from these conditions from the rest of the population, why would the disease thrive?
Unfortunately, I don't know much about history of that condition in general, let alone about differences in policies around it in various countries, but that's the first thing I'd look at if I cared.
Quarantine and how very low-contagious leprosy is - I believe there's a case from Devil's Island where someone was chained to a fellow prisoner with leprosy for 17 years without catching it.
"The way that Europeans decimated Native Americans with smallpox blankets" -- wait, I thought that was debunked. I mean, they tried, but it didn't work. https://www.history.com/news/colonists-native-americans-smallpox-blankets
Or more accurately, one guy thought about it one time and may or may not have actually attempted it.
That guy was my college's mascot until just a few years ago. We since ditched him. I thought the current take on this was that we think he tried it, and that there was a smallpox outbreak in the targeted population afterward, but we’re not sure if it was the blankets or one of the regularly occurring outbreaks that had already been happening.
Even if that specific scenario didn't happen, Europeans still killed massive amounts of Natives with disease, even if accidentally.
Yep, I completely agree with that. If "blankets" is removed from "The way that Europeans decimated Native Americans with smallpox blankets has been a key driver in ancient civilization expansion," it becomes a true statement.
Well, L'Ouverture's strategy in the Haitian Uprising was to get colonial armies marching into the hinterlands of Haiti, and let the mosquitos and diseases do his work for him.
It worked, and he saw off the French, British and Spanish armies.
A relevant Wikipedia entry is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Fort_Pitt , where it was tried, with 2 blankets; but no one knows if it had any effect.
I read the book a decade ago & blogged about it here:
https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/?s=%22plagues+and+peoples%22
The rats don't spread the plague by being eaten (not that rat is a popular European cuisine), but instead via parasites that suck their blood.
Marvin Harris had a theory about pork taboos in "Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches". The Yanomamo reject his theories of an economic reason for why they go to war (they told Napoleon Chagnon they fight over women instead), but his Marxist materialism is preferable to some of the woolier anti-scientific varieties of cultural anthropology one is apt to encounter nowadays.
As for whether our customs actually inhibit the spread of disease, it's worth linking to this again:
https://traditionsofconflict.com/blog/2021/2/5/the-limits-of-the-proposed-behavioral-immune-system
"Eventually collaboration- collective acceptance of human rights or wearing masks- is more important than the newest technology"
For COVID-19, vaccines >>>>>>>>>>>>> masks.
Going to war over women seems much more plausible to me than going to war for economic reasons. The things we do for love/propagating our genes!
Kings presumably didn't start wars over women too often, but for peasants that actually fought them this probably provided not insignificant part of motivation.
Polygamy and violence blah blah blah (being a shortcut for 'we all know this one', in the spirit of the review which started that way, which I quite liked)
Women as a reproductive resource are an economic resource, as a means of "we beat you in a war of expansion, killed all the men, and took all the women, so now our kids are being born instead of your kids so we hold this territory".
The Iliad is allegedly about "going to war over a woman" but of course it's not just that; there's the economic basis of 'who controls access to trade routes at this important choke point' and the wider question of if you're a king, you don't let somebody run off with your wife like that. It shows weakness. It invites internal rivals and external enemies to try and exploit this, and replace you or conquer your country. You have to seek revenge and restore your lost honour, because if your peers, your allies, and your enemies consider you a worthless weakling, you're not going to survive long.
I don't recall any discussion over trade routes in The Illiad. Of course, The Illiad doesn't even contain Helen's arrival at Troy, and the dispute over a women involves one of Achilles' captives being stolen by Agamemnon to replace a woman he sacrificed.
Presumably Troy was wealthy because of its location on a major trade route. I doubt Agamemnon cared *why* it was wealthy.
"India has ten times less of a death rate than the United States, to which a Mayo Clinic Professor recently pondered “cross reactive immunity from prior corona virus and other infections” as a main reason."
It's obvious undercounting. There seems to be a sharp break between lower middle income countries and upper middle income countries (around the income level of Peru or Ukraine) in the ability or will to accurately count COVID deaths. It's mostly non-democracies that undercount (for obvious reasons), which suggests a high level of corruption in India.
I would also include that many of the US fatalities came from early treatments being less-than-ideal protocols, like ventilation. The overall death rate of the elderly fell pretty far after a few months of protocol improvement. India could be benefiting marginally from that sort of thing as well.
There's a good bit of diabetes in India. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diabetes_in_India
I have an impression that a variant of type 2 which isn't related to obesity is common, and that obesity can actually be a protective response to diabetes by getting sugar out of the bloodstream.