Reading – Page 2 – Christopher Wink

Appeal to the “movable middle,” says Human Rights Watch veteran leader

Shame the extremes with facts, not name calling or exaggeration. Appeal to the “movable middle.” Document. Build coalition methodically.

That’s the playbook outlined in Kenneth Roth’s new memoirs called Righting Wrongs: Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments. It’s drawn from his nearly 30-years as executive director of Human Rights Watch. He is someone I deeply admire.

The book offers an insider’s perspective on the organization’s strategies to expose and combat human rights abuses worldwide. Central themes include the use of “naming and shaming” to hold perpetrators accountable and the challenges of advocating for human rights in a complex geopolitical landscape.

Below I share notes for future reference.

The Message by Ta Nehisi Coates

Every story is imbued with the biographies of those who hear and repeat it. And so each story gets distorted some. We can lose the author’s original intent.

It’s fitting then that I came to assume that Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new collection of essays published in the fall — one year after the Hamas attack on Israel — was exclusively about the Israeli-Palestine conflict. Notably including a CBS Morning interview, what I heard about the book was centered on the conflict.

Instead “The Message” is a curated archive of private reflections and political commentary informed by short trips Coates took to several locations to reflect on race, justice and U.S. foreign policy. Just the final chapter features a few days he spent in Israel and Palestine. The book’s overall message is less about any single conflict and more what he describes as a moral responsibility of the writer to speak plainly in moments of great public consequence.

Below my notes.

The electability of female candidates and other “collective illusions”

Most Americans report no real difference in how likely they’d be to support a female candidate over a similar male one. The difference is that more Americans think that other Americans would be less likely to support a female candidate. They believe others believe something.

That’s an example of what some researchers call “pluralistic ignorance,” and comes from Collective Illusions: Conformity, Complicity, and the Science of Why We Make Bad Decisions, a February 2022 book by Todd Rose, who leads a nonprofit polling and think tank. As the title implies he calls these examples “collective illusions,” and there are many.

Most Americans still identify as patriot; bad actors really do use bots to amplify otherwise unpopular extremist political views and we really did create a toilet paper shortage during the covid-19 pandemic. As Rose puts it: “When individuals conform to what they think the group wants, they can end up doing what nobody wants.”

This is especially true about bad, or simply incorrect, ideas we hear again and again: “Like a glitch in our biological software, repetition has no logical connection to truth. Yet it has somehow become a trap door to our beliefs.”

Rose’s book is sharp, thoughtful and interesting. I recommend it.

Below I share my notes for future reference.

How to hide an empire

In 1916, the United Kingdom and the United States both formally commemorated new holidays. The British crown introduced Empire Day; For the Americans, it was Flag Day.

That distinction between the reigning world superpower and its quickly rising successor says a lot. Once, empire was a point of pride, a signal of strength and responsibility, but as the United States established itself as the global leader, that changed. In 1940, 1 in 3 people in the world lived in a self-described empire. By 1965, that total was 1 in 50, and falling. Though the United States hasn’t used the term, a growing body of research argues historians should.

That’s from “How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States,” a 2019 book written by historian Daniel Immerwahr. It is a kind of global version of the influential “A People’s History of the United States,” Howard Zinn’s classic from 1980 that was updated in 2003 (the version I read as an undergrad).

Immerwahr argues the American empire looks different, based less on large swaths of land and more on strategic ports. This was made easier still as American science introduced a growing number of synthetic replacements for physical goods, such as synthetic fertilizers and rubber replacements (The United States “replaced colonies with chemistry”). Nonetheless, that American flag waved over a growing number of points in the world — with similar problems that are familiar to any previous empire.

American leaders faced a “trilemma,” as Immerwahr puts it. They’ve had to choose between Republicanism, overseas expansion and white supremacy, but can only achieve two. Rather than drop white supremacy, the United States cut the Republicanism, thereby overseeing the Philippines in the past and currently maintaining Puerto Rico, Guam the US Virgin Islands and other inconsistently administered territories without full nationhood. The book is challenging and worth grappling with, regardless of your own take on it all. I recommend it.

Below my notes for future reference.

Book of The Dead by Richard Dawkins

Science enhances our experience with the world, rather than diminishes it.

For example, by understanding genes, we better understand that all of us are a kind of palimpest, messages layered up ones before us. This is the beginning thrust of Book of The Dead, written by eminent science thinker Richard Dawkins last year.

I didn’t finish this. It didn’t capture me but I respect Dawkins. Below some notes for my future reference.

Patriot by Alexi Navalny

We must separate “a good people with a bad state.”

The defining representation of this is Alexi Navalny, the Russian lawyer turned good-government advocate that stood, and died, as the world’s most prominent anti-authoritarian activist — and foil to Russian despot Vladimir Putin.

In Patriot, his posthumous memoir that was published last fall, Navalny’s charm and commitment shone through. I admire him greatly. The book is rich with anecdotes about growing up under late-stage Soviet Communism, some of his tactics and his hopeful worldview.

“My family had a deep love of our country and was exceedingly patriotic,” he wrote. “Nobody however had any time for the state, which was regarded as a kind of annoying mistake — one we ourselves had made, but a mistake nevertheless.”

More broadly, as the book cover itself aptly puts it:: “Life works in such a way that social progress and a better future can only be achieved if a certain number of people are willing to pay the price for their right to have their own beliefs. The more of them there are, the less everyone has to pay.”

Below my notes for future reference.

The science behind storytelling

Any given musical note gets its meaning from those before and after it, as French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941) introduced: “the invisible progress of the past gnawing into the future,” which he called “duree.”

That insight from a book review reminded me of the role storytelling plays in the human experience. As universal as storytelling is, it is often overlooked.

“The antagonism toward storytelling may have reached a peak in the twentieth century with the determined effort to reduce all knowledge to analytical propositions and ultimately physics or mathematics,” as one academic put it in in 2001. “I found that the resistance to rethinking the role of storytelling was considerable,”

That reference is from Kendall Haven’s 2007 book “Story Proof: The Science Behind the Startling Power of Story,” which I recently completed. It’s part of my long-love of understanding the science of story, which coincided with my own contribution to the cause. Haven’s short book boasts 120 credible studies and references to more than 800 to argue it plainly: information structured in story form are received and retained more effectively. Haven was a science researcher in oceanography in the 1990s before leaving to argue science and story are compatible.

Many of these books don’t make a clear line between whether the story is from real life or fabricated because our brains make no such distinction. Nonfiction gives a truth; fiction creates a truth, goes the thinking. Elsewhere though I’ve seen it’s less about the category than the approach. Still, we do open our minds wider in a fictional landscape.

My notes below for future reference.

Slow Productivity by Cal Newport

The trouble is that the attention knowledge workers spend isn’t on “the execution of discrete tasks, but instead interactions with others about these tasks.”

Knowledge workers also are granted more independence than those working a more traditional factory line. This means it’s up to knowledge workers to improve their effectiveness to keep up.

A whole genre of books, blogs and podcasts are dedicated to this. Last year, writer Cal Newport contributed Slow Productivity. To sum it all up: Do fewer things, work at a natural pace and obsess over quality.

But don’t confuse “do fewer things” with “accomplish fewer things,” he writes. Instead, we need to avoid “task engines,” like hosting events — which spin off many overlooked tasks — unless we mean it. He recommends no more than three missions at a time.

(My three missions at the moment: To be a committed parent and husband; To run a profitable and impactful news orgs; To be an active journalist who encourages people to appreciate a complex world. That means I should limit everything outside of those) .

To get there, he recommends setting 5-year goals, doubling initial timelines when estimating any given project and using as many recurring systems as possible (morning meetings; afternoon calls; limited 1:1s; no-meeting Fridays)

Below I share my notes for future reference.

Tits Up: notes on women’s liberation

In 1998, the Women’s Health and Cancer Rights Act (WHCRA) was passed in the United States.

This federal law mandated that most group health plans covering mastectomies must also cover breast reconstruction surgery and related benefits, including prostheses. No such protections have come, for example, to public breastfeeding.

In this way, American women got the right to fake tits but not a fundamental human act.

That’s from “Tits Up: The Top Half of Women’s Liberation”, a new book from sociologist Sarah Thornton. Using an array of settings where women’s breasts are on display (from a strip club to milk banks to a plastic surgeon), the writer gives an approachable journey through the cultural invention of the “erotic breast” and the especially American complex relationship with women’s breasts: We love them but must control them.

It’s the patriarchy’s fault, she argues, but mistakes have been made too. As she wrote: “American feminism has foregrounded the right not to have children, rather than the rights of women once they’ve had them.”

Below I share my notes for future reference.

Revenge of the Tipping Point

Out of more than 100,000 American pharmaceutical prescribers, just 2,500 or so are responsible for the opioid addiction crisis that killed a million or more. All told, then, most in the medical community acted responsibly. Unfortunately systems commonly have such “superspreaders” and “small-area variation” is common.

That’s the close of Revenge of the Tipping Point, celebrity intellectual-journalist Malcolm Gladwell’s book marking the 25th anniversary of his first bestseller with a new approach. Gladwell is a victim of his own popularity. But I respect him for developing, popularizing and mastering the form of narrative reporting that makes light-reading of seemingly dense subject matter.

Though the opioid crisis is his grand finale, the book’s theme is actually about how narrative shapes our understanding of ourselves, and of a place. He calls these “overstories,” or broad geographic identifiers that shape behaviors and culture.

“Overstories matter. You can create them. They can spread. They are powerful,” he wrote. “And they can endure for decades.”

Below my notes for future reference.