Braun has a particular fondness for debunking headline-making research that is not supported by following studies or where the headline soundbite misses important qualifying aspects of the research (perspective is applied to the factoids “alcohol kills brain cells,” and “red wine reduces risk of heart disease,” for instance).

On a personal note, I’m entering day six of my attempt to ratchet down my own caffeine consumption. A key fact from Braun’s book that the “half-life” of caffeine in the body is roughly 5 hours has helped me establish my transitional caffeine schedule.

One caveat: Buzz was published in 1996 and has not been revised; I’m certainly not qualified to assess how scientific understanding has changed in the intervening years.

Dept.-of-neither-here-nor-there: Buzz is the first book I’ve noticed that is available for the nook but not the Kindle, but it’s a whopping forty-one bucks in Barnes and Noble’s e-book format. Can you say “hello, library!”? I can.

needs more demons? Not really, but a glossary might not have been amiss for readers who (like me) have a smidge of trouble keeping receptors and organic compounds straight after a while.

It mixes critical discussion of the albums music and lyrics with an exploration of “dangerous” music as a tool for coping with adolescence.

I’d never actually listened to Master of Reality before — the only song I knew from it was “Sweet Leaf,” not my favorite Sabbath tune by a long shot. Turns out it’s a pretty fantastically weird record. It delivers a lot of what you might expect from Black Sabbath — some of this record is so proto-Metallica it’s almost spooky. But it also contains some positively pastoral moments (flute? flute!) and, the opening love song to Mary Jane aside, you could more-or-less label it Christian Rock.

Darnielle is a perfectly suited writer to delve into these seeming contradictions, and he’s found a wonderfully authentic voice to use. Very, very, cool.

(I’m hardly the first person to draw a line between Master of Reality and “Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton” but John Darnielle says I’m wrong, in a very nice, but spoileriffic, piece at Nerve.)

needs more demons? nuh uh.

• When Pierson’s characters talk about bands, the made up names, e.g., The Boy Who Cried Sparrow, sound so believable I had to use Google to make sure they weren’t real.
• This book has the most realistic depiction ever of a high school friendship between two ubernerds. I say this as a “co-author” of a comic apocalyptic “novel” that shamelessly ripped off “Hitchhickers’ Guide” and Tolkein metal and whatever else my ubernerd pal and I were reading/listening to, and which was not utterly unlike Darren and Eric’s TimeBlaze project.
• Darren’s voice, holy crap. The Boy Who Couldn’t Sleep and Never Had To is the first book I read beginning to end on an e-reader device, and I set bookmarks on pages with passages that made me really want to read them aloud to anyone in range, and there were, like, a dozen. Here’s one:
  

  When I get up to my room I take my shirt off and look into the mirror for a while, not in a vain way, just to see what the fuck is going on with my torso, scrawny and fat at the same time, has to be the worst torso for miles. Then I might turn on MTV, again not because I like what’s going on there but simply to gape in wonder at what the fuck is wrong with everybody, and occasionally there’ll be some stupidly hot girl on, writhing around on the top of a car.

  and here’s another:

  Basically something I think I believed without ever having thought about it is that part of being smart is not being able to start a sentence with a subject and then end that sentence by saying that subject is a good thing and actually mean it.

  Darren usually opts for flat, uncomplicated language like this, but if it’s low on frills, it possesses a distinctive rhythm, and it feels so completely authentic that I sometimes feel as if Pierson must have rooted around in my own high school-era cranium.

• The title of this blog alludes to the fact that strictly naturalistic fiction, with no speculative or fantastic elements, sometimes leaves me feeling like there’s something missing. The Boy Who Couldn’t Sleep and Never Had To does have speculative/fantastic aspects, but it’s a measure of how resonant that I found it that I almost wished it hadn’t. I was so interested in what was going on between Darren, Eric (and other characters I won’t mention to avoid spoilers) that sometimes the fantasy elements felt almost intrusive. Coming from me this is high, if a bit left-handed, praise. (I wouldn’t go so far as to say there’s textual evidence that Darren is delusional and that the novel’s fantastic events didn’t “really” happen, but it’s at least hinted at that fantasy worlds are one of Darren’s coping mechanisms for dealing with the messy emotional business of the real world and real people; once or twice I even had the sense that it might have been a distancing technique for Pierson — that maybe he didn’t think he could make the story compelling without the sci-fi twist. The irony here is that I think would have found it compelling, but I might never have thought to pick it up without that hook to draw me in.)

One thing I didn’t love quite so much — the ending works thematically, but it seemed a bit rushed. It leads into the prologue –but that prologue feels almost like it belongs to a different novel entirely. Maybe a sequel is in the offing. But whether Pierson revisits Darren, Eric, et al in future fiction or not, I eagerly await his next book, no matter what genre labels might apply to it.

needs more demons? Absolutely not.

“The United States of Huck” was written as introduction to Huckleberry Finn, but it goes beyond insight into Twain’s controversial classic (Saunders in particular has some very interesting thoughts about the novel’s problematic conclusion). It’s also a heartfelt plea for us all to be our best selves, to be Huck Finn rather than Tom Sawyer.

“The Great Divider” also made me want to stand up and cheer. It’s about tension along the Mexican border and the vigilante border patrol groups who call themselves The Minutemen, and it’s written with the verve and snap that characterizes Saunder’s fiction. It’s clear where Saunders’ own sympathies lie, but Saunders doesn’t demonize anyone in the essay — he struggles, as does the reader, with the essential contradictions of the circumstances. If these are basically decent people, why are they doing this? Why are they so much more rational in one-on-one conversation? (I had the fortune to read “The Great Divider” shortly after seeing the stunning documentary 9500 Liberty, which deals with some similar issues, and which I also unhesitatingly recommend).

* and, I’d quibble, two short pieces that are really epistolary fiction

needs more demons? no way.

And I was right — The Book of Lost Things is vastly better. Its themes are better supported, the protagonist’s character is more developed, and the prose is richer. I still didn’t like it very much, but I don’t think it’s a bad book.

Bookish young David already shows burgeoning signs of mental illness at the onset of the novel. Within the first chapter or two, his mother dies, his father remarries, and he is burdened with a step-brother. David’s progress through the grieving progress is arrested, and his resentment of his step-family is considerable (the ongoing assault of Hitler’s forces on London and its environs only adds to his stress).

After a real-world incident that clearly affords opportunities for head trauma, David hears his mother’s voice calling him to rescue her. He follows the voice and finds — or seems to find — himself in another world, where he has a series of episodic adventures and undertakes a quest to find rescue his mother and return home.

One of my two big issues with the novel is that Connolly tips his hand. Crucially, unlike Oz, Middle Earth, Narnia, Wonderland, or countless other fantasy worlds, the place David finds himself doesn’t even have a name. When David and one of his traveling companions run into a band of harpies, David recognizes them from mythology books, and is aware of the discontinuity of finding them in the standard thinly-drawn, vaguely feudal setting. David had earlier stumbled through Browning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” (in my favorite scene of the novel, David echoed my own childhood frustration that the darned thing ends just when it seems like it’s about to get good) and so of course he encounters an itinerant knight named Roland.

My other problem is that the book isn’t appropriate for young readers, but not sufficiently deep for adult readers. The Book of Lost Thing’s plot isn’t any more complex or surprising than any of Baum’s Oz books; I found myself growing tired of the episodic sequences and impatient for the resolution of the primary narrative arc. But although the novel is structured like a children’s book (and for the most part uses a vocabulary appropriate to one) it emphatically isn’t. Connolly reworks several standard fairytale plots for his episodes, but out-grims the Brothers Grimm, not only with graphic descriptions of torture and carnage, but also by injecting themes of sexual anxiety, with a special emphasis on child abuse. I found some of Connolly’s fairytale inversions mordantly funny, but many just struck me as unpleasant, without being particularly inventive, or even interesting.

Part of my less than enthusiastic reaction to the novel may be that I don’t care for its message — admittedly an extremely subjective criticism. It looks like a work of escapist fiction, but it’s really almost anti-escapist. Candide’s “We must cultivate our garden,” strikes me as ultimately less bleak and defeatist than The Book of Lost Things.

Sometimes I hear a piece of music and think that it would be more interesting to play the piece than to actually listen to it. The Book of Lost Things leaves me with a similar impression: I’m tempted to wonder if writing it was a more satisfying — maybe even therapeutic — experience than reading it.

needs more demons? Not exactly. Needs a little something.

The other thing that holds the novel together despite its changing mood and tone is the emotional core of the story. Briar Wilkes and her son Zeke have a lot of issues and history to work through. Wilkes is the widow and daughter of two notorious men. Their legacy casts a shadow over her life and Zeke’s. Wilkes has avoided many of Zeke’s questions about his father, grandfather, and the events that triggered Seattle’s zombie infestation. You could probably read much of the novel’s plot as an externalization of their respective struggles to overcome the barriers to clear and open communication between them.

In the universe of Boneshaker people are zombified by exposure to a toxic substance referred to as the Blight. Maybe it’s a stretch to think of the Blight as a metaphor for heroin, which was first synthesized at roughly the same time as Priest’s characters encountered the Blight. Priest lives in Seattle, so she might prefer not to reinforce any connection in the popular consciousness between her city and heroin. But I found it interesting to think about.

Priest apparently has additional novels set in the same overall milieu (but not direct sequels). I’m impatient for them.

needs more demons? nope, Boneshaker’s people are well supplied with personal demons.

This sort of gender role reversal has long been a staple of science fiction and fantasy, but Spencer handles it with an unusually light touch. She eschews the common device of a viewpoint character outside the culture or even especially critical of it. Instead, she focuses on the plot — which is fueled by palace intrigue on the verge of boiling into outright rebellion, affording ample opportunities for derring-do and hanky-panky. The protagonists are likable, the antagonists quite despicable, and it had me turning pages way too fast to notice any nits of copy editing that might have been present. And really, there should be more action-adventure featuring paddle wheel steamers. Who doesn’t love paddle wheel steamers?

I have to say, though, that although I enjoyed this book a lot, the very last sentence squicked me out a little bit.

needs more demons? nuh-uh.

The dénouement, though, is a real drag: an overfamiliar put-the-protagonist-in-personal-peril (at the expense of violating the character’s integrity) twist leads into a laboriously-blocked (but nonetheless unconvincing) fight scene.

needs more demons? needs a better ending

surprise benefits of pseudo-vegetarianism

I’ve been reading Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink in fits and starts over the past two months — it’s on the library’s short-term loan list, so I request it, read as much as I can before it’s due, return it, and repeat. I don’t think it’s a bad way to read such an information-dense book; it provides opportunities to digest and reflect on Gladwell’s theses.

I don’t think he delivers on the implicit promise that has made his books bestsellers among business readers. The Tipping Point provides tools for understanding why some messages — like teen anti-smoking campaigns — don’t “stick.” But it doesn’t provide tools for making messages stick. I think that’s because societies’ response to stimuli is fundamentally chaotic. Ensuring any particular meme spreads is impossible. Even Steven Spielberg directed an unequivocal flop once.*

Blink suffers from a similar problem: it identifies situations in which rapid intuitive assessments — “thin-slicing,” in Gladwall’s parlance — are invaluable, and other situations in which they’re extremely harmful. It doesn’t provide foolproof guidelines for distinguishing “good” thin-slicing from “bad.” Again, I don’t think it’s a soluble problem.

I’m not an expert on cognition; I’m a lay person with probably just enough information to be dangerous. But I think a major component of what makes for human intelligence is that our brains are abstract pattern-recognition machines. The engine that recognizes individual human faces is the same engine that sees animal shapes in clouds and inkblots. I think it’s always going to be subject to errors, particularly in high-stakes situations that require snap judgments: “He’s drawing a gun!” versus “He’s pulling out his wallet.”

Even if I don’t think Gladwell’s books quite live up to their hype, they’re informative, provocative, fascinating, and lucidly written.

For instance, his account of Sheena Iyengar’s research on consumer choice provided insight into something that’s intrigued me for the past decade. Iyengar found that customers given an opportunity to taste 6 jams in a store were far more likely to make a purchase than customers who had a chance to taste 24 different jams.

I’m a pseudo-vegetarian. This generally makes dining out straightforward: most of the menu is automatically excluded from consideration. I usually pick from the small set of available options rapidly and without much conscious deliberation. When I dine at a vegetarian or seafood specialty restaurant, I have a larger field to winnow. My selection process is radically different (and much slower). I typically try to find the entrée that maximizes features I like: the one with the ginger, tofu, and straw mushrooms. Sometimes I experience a kind of stress that’s unusual for me: no dish has the poblano pepper sauce, guacamole, and melted jack cheese; I can only get different combinations of two of those ingredients. Then I feel vaguely dissatisfied with a meal that I would unhesitatingly and happily choose if I had fewer options.

Iyengar’s research suggests that this behavior isn’t just me-being-weird. Gladwell’s synthesis provides a framework for understanding it: I “thin-slice” among a few choices, but not among a dozen.

*Of course, Gladwell has certainly “tipped” his own books, so maybe, just maybe, he knows something about hidden marketing levers that he’s not sharing.

the warren harding error error

In Blink, Gladwell devotes a chapter to exploring what he calls the “Warren Harding error.” He contends that the primary reason for Harding’s political success was that the man looked presidential.

Gladwell doesn’t apply this line of reasoning to politicians of the current era (although later he does quote Paul Ekman — who, with Wallace Friesen, assembled the “Facial Action Coding System — claiming that in 1992 he saw Clinton’s tendency for marital indiscretions literally written on his face.)

Whatever I thought of his policies or the abilities he brought to the job, I think I have to concede that Ronald Reagan looked presidential (at least some of the time). He was certainly always too much the gunslinger for my taste. But he could be dignified without entirely losing the humanizing mischievous twinkle in his eyes. If he’d been an actor cast in the role of the president, I think I could have bought it.

The real mystery is the election — twice, yet — of George Walker Bush. The presidential debates of 2004 crystallized this for me. John Kerry with his imposing height and resonant voice, looked and sounded presidential. His opponent looked like a used-car salesman by comparison: shifty-eyed, almost sneering, his voice often distinctly petulant if not actually whining.

And yet he won. Where are you now, oh Warren Harding error? Come back. We need you.

In other news, I took a few of the Implicit Association Tests Gladwell describes in the same chapter (it’s essentially the “be careful about judging books by their covers” segment of the book). Gladwell (and Greenwald, Banaji and Nosek, who developed the tool) claim that the test design is effective even when you know you’re being tested (unlike many sociological tests).

I’m not convinced. I took a test designed to identify an “implicit association” (e.g., an ingrained unconscious bias, more or less) for males/sciences and females/liberal arts. I was prompted by the survey I took beforehand to think fleetingly of famous scientists like Ada Lovelace and Marie Curie, and famous creative types like Julio Cortàazar and Pablo Picasso. My biggest problem was that every time I was shown the words “history” and “philosophy” I had to consciously think “soft science? or liberal art?” But taking the test to the best of my ability still produced outlying data.

Then I took a test to identify implicit associations between ethnic groups and positive and negative concepts. When I was told I was supposed to associate images of caucasian men with negative concepts and images of black men with positive concepts, I muttered “black, good; white, evil” under my breath. No sweat.

deli slices of security

I was initially critical of Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink for not delivering on its implied promises, but I’ve revised my opinion of it substantially. It’s had a real impact on the way I think about certain types of situations. I still don’t think it provides a foolproof method for applying its principles, but it does offer tools for identifying problematic patterns in processes. As one example, it provides a framework for examining my misgivings about approaches to security in the post-September 2001 United States.

The administration argues that the lack of major terrorist incidents within the US demonstrates the effectiveness of the Homeland Security and Transportation Safety initiatives. This argument is obviously specious. The lack of a major incident in the first half of 2001 scarcely proved that the US was well-protected from a terrorist attack in the second half of the year. And the penetration of the new system by the “shoe bomber” and razor-blade-toting blog readers (for example) makes a strong case that the new system is not necessarily more effective at threat identification than the old system.

Back when the major concerns of airport security were preventing the influx of drugs and illegal (but peaceable) aliens, I was involved with a competitive bid to develop training for the Immigration and Naturalization Service. As part of the effort, members of our team accompanied INS personnel on airport security details and took some of the courses given to the agents. (For the record: all of the material I was exposed to was unclassified.) It was obvious that the most effective agents relied heavily on the sort of intuitive assessments Gladwell describes in Blink. In particular, they were very good at identifying people who had something to hide. Other people have written about the hazards of inexperienced personnel and over-reliance on trickable technology. But I wonder: does a process that makes all passengers nervous and uncomfortable make it fundamentally easier for people with malicious intent to slip through?

As part of my ongoing research on improving MBTA usability, I’ve been listening to the chatter between MBTA dispatchers, bus drivers, train operators, station managers, and other staff. Shortly before Christmas, toward the end of evening rush hour, I heard an exchange that that went like this:

We have an incident of an unattended package that has been sighted on the east platform of [station name].

About half a minute later, I heard the following reply:

A passenger forgot her package. She’s on her way back to the platform to retrieve it now. Please just let her get her bag.

In Gladwell’s parlance, I felt that I had ample opportunity to “thin slice” the conversation. The first speaker was officious, with a pseudo-military quality that verged on pompous. He used the passive voice and awkward, redundant, and jargon-y terminology.

The second speaker was clearly fed up with the first speaker. I had the distinct impression it wasn’t the first such conversation. The tone of voice — and the word “please” — suggested that the speaker thought it was unlikely that the woman would be allowed to get her bag back without additional hassle.

The second speaker had a good opportunity to make a realistic assessment of how likely the passenger was to pose a terrorist threat. The second speaker implied face-to-face contact with the passenger — who was probably cramming in last-minute shopping on the way home from work, and carrying one package too many. The first speaker was making decisions on the basis of a blurry picture on a monitor and (I suspect) a procedural manual revised in the wake of September 2001.

I’ve spent much of my career working on training products for state and federal agencies, and I think it’s likely that the new rule book specifies that any unattended package must got through the full threat evaluation procedure, no matter what the station manager recommends. After all, there’s always a chance that the station manager has somehow been coerced into making a false statement.

The problem is, this approach just doesn’t work. Being on high-alert forever is the same as not being on alert at all — people aren’t wired to maintain peak vigilance indefinitely. Procedures that are excessively cumbersome will eventually be disregarded. And while I understand that discounting the judgment of those closest to a potential threat situation may protect the MBTA from liability, I’m far from convinced that it’s the best way to actually increase the overall safety of the system.

Needs More Demons? No. I’m not even going to make a corny joke about devils in details.