Good Stuff, Bad Stuff
Good Stuff
“I learned something about that little voice inside, the one you silence with rationalization or bury with office paperwork. He finds other ways to be subversive. He doesn’t like being kept on the path. That voice is as obstinate as a child, but he’s telling you how to behave like a man.”
NPR: Hotel Maids Challenge the Placebo Effect
They don’t challenge it, they reaffirm it.
Essay on Marcus Aurelius—Matthew Arnold
Bad Stuff
Full Frontal Feminism—Jessica Valenti
Saying that this is an awful book is really unfair because it’s not even a book. It’s a 250 page blog post (that is awful). It is also proof that most bloggers shouldn’t be given publishing deals and that Women’s Studies is without a doubt the least scholarly of all college majors.
Future Shock—Alvin Toffler
In the first wave, power came from violence or force. In the second, the Industrial Revolution, power came from wealth. Today, it comes from knowledge. The battle for the future is going to be over information. Unfortunately, the book takes 500 pages to say that.
Art and Fear–David Bayles
Decent, but not nearly as good as the War of Art.
Full Frontal Feminism is awful, soon after it was assigned I dropped intro to women’s studies. Any class that essentially admits that it will be biased going in is probably going to have some problems.
And about that maid study, I wouldn’t be so sure that “reaffirmed the placebo effect” is the necessarily the right way to put it. It is possible that they actually cleaned in more physically strenuous ways once they realized that they could get exercise from their job. The key difference is whether just thinking of their work as exercise caused them to have lower blood pressure, or whether this thinking caused them to do more physically strenuous activity which would lead anybody to have lower blood pressure over time.