WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency by Micah Sifry

WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency
By Micah L. Sifry
2011

This is a fascinating read which is correctly introduced as being a presentation on information transparency from a guy with a highly pro-transparency bias. It’s not a manifesto, per se, but there’s no real attempt to present a balanced discussion of the issues or present even a straw target of the counter arguments. Instead, there are a lot of examples of both successful and failed attempts to achieve transparency in government and reporting. Examples come from the United Kingdom, the United States, various countries in Africa and in Europe.

Sifry is describing the world of information and of government responsibility as he sees it and I think it’s a very useful perspective to understand. I even agree with him to a large extent. Not completely though.

The title is also a bit misleading. I had originally intended to read it to gain an understanding of WikiLeaks specifically. I’d only vaguely followed the WikiLeaks situation in the news and want to know more. In this eight-chapter book, however, only the first and last chapters are actually about WikiLeaks. The majority of the book provides a much broader presentation on information transparency in general.

It was an engaging and informative read. I recommend it to anyone who is interested in politics, or journalism, or just information issues in general. It is, however, very subject specific so if you aren’t interested in the subject, it’s unlikely to transcend that disinterest. Since I find the subject fascinating, it was a good book and well worth reading.

Required Reading

Sep3 by Kinsey

In the comment section of Rebecca’s post on 40 Modern Nonfiction Books Everyone Should Read, she and Anna and I got into a discussion about the list of books she was reviewing. I said that I thought the list was dull. Most of the books on it are self-help or management books, which may be informative but aren’t particularly interesting or inspiring. (To me at least–maybe you find The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People riveting!) Of course, the guy who wrote that list didn’t call it the Most Exciting Nonfiction Books Everyone Should Read, but I like to think that if I were giving people a list of books they should read, those books would be entertaining as well as useful. I made a couple of suggestions along those lines in the comments, and was then challenged to write a post on it.

So I made a list of the eight books I think everyone should read–the eight that immediately jumped to mind as the ones that have most powerfully influenced how I live my life. As I said to Anna and Rebecca in the comments, these aren’t necessarily books that are going to help anyone get a job or buy a house or whatever, but they are the books that I find myself going back to again and again for advice on how to function in the world.

1) The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin
This is the book that has had the greatest impact on my day-to-day life. It’s half general ideas and research about happiness and half practical advice. The book is based on Rubin’s super-popular blog and in some ways the daily reinforcement of the blog is probably more powerful, but the book is very good. I have given stacks of these as gifts.

2) This is Water by David Foster Wallace
Wallace’s commencement speech at, I think, Kenyon College, used to be available out there on the internet, but then someone decided to publish it in book form and make people take down the free versions. But it’s well worth buying (and hard to begrudge his family the money). It presents a very kind, thoughtful, gentle way of moving through the world. Good advice for new graduates, good advice for those of us who graduated long, long ago.

3) Take the Cannoli by Sarah Vowell
I first heard Sarah Vowel on This American Life and of late she’s published a great string of books on American history, but my favorite work of hers is still these essays. There’s one, in particular, where she talks about how she doesn’t believe in God, but she does believe in all these other things, that I really love.

4) Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed
A newcomer to the list! This collection of Strayed’s Dear Sugar advice column for the Rumpus just came out, but it’s a powerful one. These aren’t your standard requests for advice and they’re not your standard responses. I read this in a restaurant, while I was out of town on a business trip, and it made me cry in public.

5) Paula Spencer by Roddy Doyle
The only fiction on the list, even though I wasn’t really thinking about that when I made the list. This is an odd sort of stream of consciousness story about an Irish woman who is, well, living her life. It’s about how she makes it through the day and tries to relate to her kids and tries to improve her lot. The style, and the Irish vocabulary, can be a bit challenging, but for me this reads like a handbook on how to find joy and satisfaction in everyday life.

6) The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman
The amazingly detailed, thoughtful story of a young Hmong girl with epilepsy and the challenges that meshing traditional Hmong beliefs with modern medicine created for the girl’s family and her doctors. This one story was the best explanation I have ever read of cross-cultural communication issues, and just in general shows how well-meaning people with the same goal can still have to work terribly hard to understand each other.

7) Operating Instructions by Anne Lamott
Lamott can be a little Jesus-y for me sometimes, but this journal of the first year of her son’s life, where she tells the story of being a scared single mom barely hanging on to sobriety and sanity, is a wonderful example of faith.

8) In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan
The politics of food and eating are so fraught and political I hate to even include this, but I did find it really useful, so it goes on the list. Michael Pollan can be awfully preachy and kind of oblivious to some of the baggage that food carries for many people, but this book presents an extremely straightforward, simple, actionable philosophy of how to eat. If you want something similar but with more of a narrative story and a call to action, you could also read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver.

And an honorable mention, although I know I’ve mentioned it on the blog before, The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane. This is such a powerful, heart-breaking book that I think everyone should read it as a personal version of the psychopath test–if you can read this without crying, you should probably do something to address your lack of a soul.

The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin

Aug29 by Rebecca

The Art of Learning: A Journey in the Pursuit of Excellence
by Josh Waitzkin
2007

I’m still working my way through some of the books on that list of 40 suggestions and at the moment I’m feeling a bit like Goldilocks, because I recently started three, dropped two and absolutely loved one.

I read the first eight pages of Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi and stopped because it made me think the author was an asshole. The introduction was essentially: here’s how I inserted myself into rich people’s lives and made good off of their connections while mocking anyone who took those connections for granted.

Then I read the first twelve pages of Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki and stopped because it made me think that I was an asshole. The text is very traditional zen discussion and I’m wondering how much is real and how much is playing to a stereotype, concentrating less on the actual concepts as I am on the meta relationship of author to publisher to readership.

Then I started The Art of Learning: A Journey in the Pursuit of Excellence by Josh Waitzkin and continued to the end because it was just right. No really. It really was just right and I actually plan on purchasing a copy so that I have it on hand to reread at times, focusing on learning the methods discussed in certain chapters.

First, about the author: Waitzkin was a chess prodigy and national champion as a child and he has since gone on to become a Tai Chi world champion as an adult. Plus he’s a good writer and appears to be a nice guy, too, which is actually kind of irritating because surely people that good at multiple things should have a few fatal flaws.

But anyway, the book is essentially an autobiography but it shows his life by means of his training and development from a highly theoretical perspective. He picks apart how he learned and and improved his various skills, looking at both successes and failures, evaluating the advice and assistance from academic studies and training centers, and discussing his role models, as well.

Keep in mind that I like strategy games, I like martial arts, and I like theoretical discussions, so this book fits my tastes perfectly. I am willing to acknowledge that other people may not like it as much, but I still strongly recommend it to basically everyone ever. It’s a fun read and it has some really important lessons about how to think about learning.

Live With A Man and Love It

Aug28 by Anna

By Anne Fisher

Live With A Man and Love It, published in 1937, is a small red book that Thomas and I ran across several years ago at the Boulder library sale. We bought it for a dollar to have a laugh, and then promptly forgot about it.* I was additionally a little charmed by the author’s acknowledgement that one wouldn’t naturally and automatically love living with a man.

When I finally cracked open my copy, I found several pages have some disconcerting rust-colored stains, hinting at the possibility that at least one reader decided not to learn to love living with a man, and chose a more violent solution.

Anyway, Live With A Man and Love It unfortunately falls in sort of a murky area between being hilariously out-of-touch and being an actually useful relationship guide. I was surprised how modern some of the advice seemed to be:

“During the first year have a monthly check-up in which you both agree to be perfectly honest and frank, and tell the other fellow about the things he does that are irritating. Promise not to get sore, but endeavor if possible to change the faults.”

Seriously, that’s not bad advice at all (though probably easier said than done). But before I could get too impressed she would bust out some shockingly dated language:

“Urge him to see other people once in a while. He won’t get that love-strangled feeling and he’ll come into the noose without knowing it’s tightening!”

My favorite part of the book is getting a peek into life and marriage in the 1930s, like spending evenings visiting friends and neighbors, playing bridge and handing out calling cards. That is so different from my own life that it blows my mind! It sounds like it could be kind of nice, actually.

The book also brings up a personal rant of mine, so I’m going to take the opportunity to share it here: Rule 11 in the book is “Never Go to Sleep With a Quarrel.” I think that rule is just the worst and was probably invented by a divorce lawyer. Just keep staying up later and later, while you both get increasingly tired and cranky, until you both dissolve into crying and screaming barely coherent insults? Seriously, just go to bed! You’ll be amazed at how much less you care about whatever you were fighting about once you get a good night’s sleep. So, there’s my relationship advice for you: always go to sleep (actually that’s sort of my general advice for most things in life).

*I had a little daydream that perhaps this overlooked little book would be a rare antique, but no luck.

—Anna

Management of the Absurd by Richard Farson

Aug19 by Rebecca

Management of the Absurd: Paradoxes in Leadership
by Richard Farson
1996

This was one of the books from the list of 40 that I posted about previously. It is essentially 33 quite short essays regarding some counterintuitive issues in management. I have mixed feelings about it.

On the one hand, I liked it a lot better than any of the other management books I’ve had to read. In some ways, it is very much a response to other management books, even. I’m not sure it would even stand alone very well if you haven’t already read others, since so much of the time it is pointing out flaws in common management techniques. It does give some background for the points it makes, so maybe it could stand alone. I’m just not sure. But anyway, I believed a much larger percentage of this book than I did any of the other management books I’ve read.

The main piece of advice that the book gives is that managers should treat people as people and give them some respect. Human interactions are complex and most people will react badly to managerial manipulation. This is a conclusion that I appreciate a great deal.

On the other hand, the book is more a series of philosophical discourses rather than any specific advice, and a lot of the examples the author uses are rather dated. Farson comes across as a bit of a technophobe with too much nostalgia for ‘the good old days.’ (And the fact a book published in 1996 comes across as dated makes me kind of depressed. I’m getting old! 1996 wasn’t that long ago, surely?) He also really likes the words “absurd” and “paradox,” using them whenever he possibly can.

Anyway, I would say that this is not an inherently good book, so I don’t recommend it as such. But, if you’ve read a lot of management books or are interested in management, this is a very useful book to give you an alternative perspective from the standard ones and I highly recommend considering that alternative.

40 Modern Nonfiction Books Everyone Should Read

Aug13 by Rebecca

40 Modern Nonfiction Books Everyone Should Read
by Marc, of Marc and Angel Hack Life: Practical Tips for Productive Living
2009

I have, of course, read nonfiction books for classes, but I don’t tend to read them for pleasure. There are a few exceptions, but not many, and they certainly don’t include self-help books.

However, I was recently sent a link for this list of 40 Modern Nonfiction Books Everyone Should Read, all of them self-help oriented, and I was actually pretty impressed.

I started skimming the list, wondering if I had been assigned to read any of them and how much I had (or would have) disliked them. Instead, I was actually kind of impressed by the collection. Several of the titles and descriptions popped up as ones that I really should read.

There are four that I am actively excited to read. I checked that my library has them and I am looking forward to reading self-help nonfiction.

There are more about which I agree with the author of the article, that it would probably do me good to read, and not just in a putting-serious-effort-into-picking-out-some-small-amount-of-wheat-from-the-chaff type of good that I mostly see in self-help books. There are an additional ten of the books that I plan to check out and see if they live up to Marc’s descriptions. Because I think they might do me good without being too painful.

Of course, there’s also the other 26 books that I have no intention of reading, either due to disinterest or out-right dislike, but I still feel that, given a list of 40 books in a genre I don’t read, having a third of them look good is an amazing percentage and deserves some kudos.

I’m not going to list out here which books I thought were appealing and which I didn’t* because I think it’s well worth your time to skim the list yourself and see which ones you think sound interesting or useful for you.

So check it out and see what you think.

* There will be reviews here in the relatively near future of the some of the books I thought looked good as I go through the ones that I liked.

The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande

Jul21 by Rebecca

The Checklist Manifesto: How to get things right
By Atul Gawande
2009

To start off, this is a really excellent book and I recommend it to everyone. I’ve reviewed a few management books in the past, but this one is by far the best one, in part because it’s less about managing people in specific scenarios and more about managing complex situations in general, and in part because it’s focused on a single recommendation and discusses how and why that recommendation is important. As the title says, the book is about the importance of checklists.

As a manifesto, it set out to convince me of its premise: that checklists can be used to great effect. It succeeds. I am thoroughly convinced and now think you should be convinced, too.

A lot of jobs today are incredibly complex and only getting more so as time goes by. Checklists can go a long ways towards helping to compensate for this extreme complexity. The examples Gawande uses are surgery (Gawande himself is a surgeon), aviation, building construction, investment analysis, and cooking.

Historically, these jobs were all performed by individuals relying solely on personal experience and instinct. Now, these jobs are most often performed by teams of experts with access to vast quantities of research in addition to their own personal knowledge. This is an improvement, of course, but it also introduces problems of complexity in having to coordinate with multiple people and incorporate excessive amounts of information.

In performing these jobs, the professionals need to know and be able to instantly recall more detailed information than is really possible and they need to be able to trust that their teammates are performing equally super-human mental tasks as well. Such trust is often a mistake. When dealing with extremely complex tasks, professionals will sometimes focus so much on the difficult or tricky portions of their tasks that they forget to perform the basic preliminary steps. Even the best and most experienced experts in their fields are still just human. Checklists, however, can supplement memory to ensure that everyone remembers the basic steps, while at the same time running through a checklist as a group can ensure that everyone on a team is on the same page.

I would love to go through each of Gawande’s examples and explanations because the examples were all so interesting and the explanations were all so useful. For example, the discussion of how airplane pilots came to use checklists and why they go through some every single time they fly, no matter how experienced they are, is fascinating. Equally fascinating is the interview with Boeing’s master checklist writer regarding what defines a good or bad checklist. The whole book is both interesting and useful and I could burble on about each of the stories or arguments or lessons, but really, it’s probably better if you just go and read the book.

Author Unknown

Jul1 by Rebecca

Author Unknown: On the Trail of Anonymous
Don Foster
2000

I like books and I like reading but, while I am capable enough of literary analysis to have graduated from high school, I admit to a somewhat patronizing attitude regarding the field. My reaction opinion has generally been: well, if you want your life’s work to be looking for “hidden meaning” in texts, go for it, but really, what’s the point?

In Author Unknown, Don Foster answers that (rhetorical) question with six anecdotes about the real-world application of literary analysis.

A couple of the chapters support (in my opinion) my previous stance of: who cares? It was interesting to see how Foster investigated the authorship of a particular poem written centuries ago, but in the end, what does it matter?

However, other chapters demonstrated much more immediate relevance: Tracking down the authors of terrorist manifestos can save lives. Proving the authorship of witness tampering documents in the White House can threaten administrations.

Each chapter describes the process of literary investigation and analysis, of a piece of writing with the intend to prove or disprove the authorship of the piece, relying on internal evidence. While Foster does look for external evidence as well (could the author have known of events the piece is discussing?), the investigations in this book are all focused on internal evidence (what person would have written these words in this way?) The way Foster comes to his conclusions and the evidence he looks at is pretty fascinating. Each chapter can also be read alone, as an individual story.

Chapter 5, Wanda, the Fort Bragg Bag Lady, is my favorite of the stories. It may not demonstrate a great deal of real-world impact but it does present a real-world black-humor farce, involving multiple anonymous authors, obsessions, murders, suicides, Hells Angels, bad poetry, good poetry, beat poetry, and a complete absence of bag ladies.

Over all, the book is fun and Foster has a lightly humorous way of writing even as he delves into close readings of archaic documents. For anyone who has doubted the importance of literary analysis: read this. I feel a nice combination of convinced that literary analysis is important after all while still vindicated that a lot of the use it’s put to is pretty darn silly.

Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea; Shenzhen: A Travelogue from China

Jun11 by Anna

By Guy Delisle

Kinsey, these may be the comic books for people who don’t really like comic books. They are really more travel journals that use the illustrated panels to give atmosphere in a way written descriptions can’t quite capture.

The author is an animator who gets sent to various sites to oversee the outsourced animation, so in addition to the interesting locales, he also throws in a few details about the animation business, which is equally interesting to me.

Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea was published in 2005. A couple of pages in, I realize that this is Eloise for adults! He lives out of a hotel for the entire trip, and has a guide and translator who serve as nannies for him, escorting him anywhere he travels outside of the hotel. The atmosphere he describes in North Korea also sounds very similar to that in Eloise in Moscow, first published in 1959.

Shenzhen: A Travelogue from China, published in 2006, is a disconcerting contrast to Pyongyang, still very foreign, but in an almost diametrically opposite way. After being immersed in the very communist North Korea, every mention of Rolexes and Gold’s Gyms comes as a bit of a shock.

At the beginning of Shenzhen, Delisle says that he has trouble starting the writing/drawing process, and I have to say that it shows. It is much more a collection of vignettes and is a little disconcertingly random, while Pyongyang has a much tighter story narrative. I think that Delisle found his stay in Pyongyang not more enjoyable, exactly, but more interesting, just due to the foreignness of it all. He finds Shenzhen a bit of a grind, and it shows. I would recommend reading both back to back like I did, since I think they are good companion pieces, but if you are only going to read one, go with Pyongyang.

(From my quick amazon.com research, he has also done graphic chronicles of Jerusalem and Burma, both of which I very much look forward to reading.)

Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime

Apr29 by Anna

By John Heilemann and Mark Halperin

I know I haven’t posted in a while, and it is because I’ve been hauling my way through a large and very unusual book for me—political nonfiction—so I’m writing a very long post to compensate.

I checked this book out from the library the day after seeing the HBO movie of the same name, which was just a narrow slice of the full scope of the book*. I enjoyed the movie; I knew all the public politics already, but it was fascinating seeing all the behind-the-scenes shuffling, like peering backstage at a show. I wanted to know more about it, so I checked out the book.

And very quickly realized that I did not want to know more about it. Politics isn’t a Broadway show, it’s a sausage factory**, and if I wanted to still enjoy sausage, I damn sure didn’t want to see how it is made. Now, I’m a democrat and the book reads somewhat democrat-leaning, though the authors are political correspondents and journalists who I am sure pride themselves on their unbiased stance. However, every single person comes across as single-mindedly, self-centeredly ambitious in a microcosm of politics that not only doesn’t seem to have much relevance to the rest of the nation, but seems to disdain the rest of the nation a bit. So, I guess that, at least, is something bipartisan.

I will give Game Change this: it is so minutely, exhaustively researched that it sort of boggles the mind. It is written in a narrative structure, following the various candidates like protagonists in a story. When tracking Obama in 2006, well before he was in the national consciousness, they extrapolate his frame of mind from a note he passed to another senator in a committee meeting and a hand gesture (not the one you are thinking of right now) he made in the hallway of the Capitol. I imagine the two authors scouring every building he ever set foot in and asking everybody and anybody there, “Did you ever see President Obama? What was he doing? Did he say anything—anything at all?!”

The best part is reading about the events that I actually remember from the race, but reading them in context with everything else that came between. The oddest part, though, is reading about pivotal, influential events about which I had no idea here in the midlands of America. (ex. Apparently, Maureen Dowd wrote an article in which she interviewed David Geffen about his disillusionment with the Clintons? It was a big moment where democrats felt free to criticize the Clintons and support Obama instead? I mean, I know who Maureen Dowd is, though I’ve never read anything by her. I initially thought David Geffen might be Liza Minnelli’s most recent husband, until it quickly became clear that wasn’t right.)

I guess I can kind of see where politicians get their contempt for all the rest of us, but I think that contempt comes from a very ignorant place—they have no idea how we think and how we make decisions. And because they don’t understand it, they disdain it. I imagine that it is stories like my own that drive politicians crazy: I saw the campaign ads, read articles, and still couldn’t make up my mind between Clinton and Obama. Then, I read a post on a small blog that I regularly check out where the author commented that if Clinton gets elected, two families would have been running the White House for 24 years and that is some disconcerting dynasty-building right there. And that’s what did it for me—that one post made my decision.

Later, it occurred to me that this phenomena kind of highlights how insular the political world is, at least for the active players. For myself, only the largest of political events break into my brain space that is otherwise occupied with my daily office work, what I’m making for dinner, how to balance this month’s budget, etc. For the people in this book, though, this is their entire life.

When the HBO movie came out, Palin understandable objected to it, and HBO tried to argue that it wasn’t necessarily an unflattering portrait, which of course it is. The book is not truly flattering either, but it is a lot more balanced in assigning blame equally on McCain’s people.

The vast majority of the book is spent on the democratic primaries, to the point where it gets a little bogged down, but then it rushes through the general race at breakneck speed, making me feel like I was missing things that they simply weren’t discussing.

This is perhaps the best compliment: Game Change already has me looking at the 2012 race in a different light.

A couple of random concluding thoughts:

The book does a great job of humanizing the politicians. It is a little embarrassing to admit, but it had not occurred to me that politicians could actually be sad or get their feelings hurt while on the campaign. I guess I just thought that so much of the discourse was overblown wind-bagging, that it all was. I was kind of shocked how many of them break down into tears at one point or another.
Hillary Clinton’s political career so far could almost be a Greek play (I’m not sure yet whether a tragedy or comedy): her husband is the one that initially gives her the political clout and name-recognition to run for president, but he was also her biggest obstacle in the campaign and probably the strongest reason she lost.