Category: book reviews

Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a quick-reading tale about trying to fight the High Frequency Trader (HFT) powers that be, which have succeeded in doing the seemingly impossible: made Wall Street more unfair. If you’ve seen Kevin Slavin’s TED talk on how algorithms literally shape our world (http://www.ted.com/talks/kevin_slavin…), then you know part of the story already. Where Michael Lewis takes it is a thorough play-by-play history of how IEX (Investory’s Exchange) set about creating a stock exchange that controlled for the speed advantage that HFT have to re-empower investors to make trades when and how they wanted to without being outrun and priced up by HFT. It’s a story of personalities, brusque Wall Street types and technologists, who are tried of people getting screwed by the new system.

It’s a pretty eye-opening read with regard to how Wall Street now works. I was thoroughly disillusioned as someone counting on the stock market to help finance my retirement. I couldn’t believe how many ways there were of extracting value from my money, without creating any actual value, that were built into the system. This form of capitalism as actually anti-capitalistic; it’s perverse. What was even more gobsmacking was the story of Serge Aleynikov. A programmer who ends up convicted of corporate espionage for saving open source code repositories that he worked with while at Goldman Sachs. For anyone connected to the open source software community, the story of how Goldman Sachs regularly strips off the open source licenses of code that they add to their own codebase and then refuse to let programmers contribute back to the OSS projects modifications or even save any of that code themselves is horrendous.

If you take away one thing, it’s that Wall Street might be the most paranoid and cutthroat corporate environment to work in. The money is attractive but the culture is hostile; it’s a miracle that IEX was created in the first place, let alone still exists! Michael Lewis does an amazing job of keeping the pages turning quickly with lots of dialogue from a cast of colorful characters. Definitely a fun and informative and depressing read.

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Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman by James Gleick

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I could read biographies like this all day long, everyday. And I certainly tried to do that with James Gleick’s Genius. It’s not just that it’s written well and thoroughly researched with great details, anecdotes, and quotes. It’s that the character at the center—Richard Feynman—is so compelling. As Gleick shows, Feynman worked hard to make himself into the iconoclastically interesting person he was. He held on to his roots as a bit of a bumpkin, growing up just beyond the edges of New York City. He hated most music but loved rhythm and became an accomplished bongos player. And as a scientist, he refused to follow anything that looked “fashionable.” I loved the quotes from Feynman where he states his role as a scientist isn’t to explain how other physicists solved a problem, it was to go and actually solve problems. He claimed to only read contemporary journal articles in physics so far as he could understand the problem, then he would go off and try to solve it himself using his own methods.

Gleick attempts to draw out larger lessons in the book about the nature of genius and creativity. This was the only disjointed part of the book I thought. The sub-chapter on genius seems like a standalone essay dropped in to justify the title of the book or to reuse material to fill out the biography. That said, one of the key reflections on Feynman’s approach, supported by accounts from his peers, was his willful ignorance of scholarship in his field at multiple points in his career. He seemed to actively avoid it, and through that naiveté perhaps cultivate the opportunity for original thought. This is a pretty profound insight, especially to an academic like me who is expected to know the field as part of the job. But knowing too much can be a recipe for stagnation as everything appears to have been solved or understood already, or new problems simply require someone else’s method rather than a novel one. I’m going to be thinking about this idea for a long time.

This biography does a great job of offering context from the era of physics and especially the role of the Manhattan Project, which really changed the course of science and the careers of Feynman and his contemporaries. Gleick offers mini-biographies of many of these contemporaries who most closely worked and/or competed with Feynman on the central discoveries of quantum physics: notably Julian Schwinger and Murray Gell-Mann. And letters and interviews fill out how his peers saw him and how he engaged with his mentors, which I always find fascinating. With the end of this book, I’m hungry for more historical and biographical texts of this calibre, and will probably need to pick up Gleick’s earlier work: Chaos.

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The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This classic holds up astonishingly well after 53 years. Jane Jacobs identifies or predicts problems that continue to affect cities like San Francisco, LA, Philadelphia, and most notably Detroit. The contributions here are historical, sociological, and theoretical. It’s great to see how much of her sentiment, spirit, and insight are now a part of city planning, but we miss larger lessons still about the level of complexity and the need for greater interdepartmental and interdisciplinary collaboration to handle the unique problems cities pose.

Smart Cities are meant to be one answer to this, but they quickly fall afoul of Jacobs’ concerns about the then new approaches to cities looking for averages from data on population, geography, income, etc. These are important for planning but don’t handle complexity around residents’ behavior, especially behaviors hard to quantify at all. Reading this in association with Jan Gehl’s How to Study Public Life, which was directly inspired by Jacobs’ insights, was really helpful and recommended to others.

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Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas by Natasha Dow Schüll

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is an amazing work of anthropology. The amount and quality of research poured into the author’s study of machine gambling makes for a convincing account of how the casino and gambling machine industries continue to refine and perfect slot machines, video poker machines, and other electronic gambling devices in order to keep gamblers in their stools and feeding money into the machine. The odds are stacked against the average gambler in many ways beyond simply the random number generators powering the spins of reels and deals of cards. Not only does the author give us this view into the industry through technical and anecdotal details, but also offers an overview of local, national, and multi-national regulatory frameworks governing the industry: their complexity and ultimately their limitations. The discussion of lobbying activities by the industry to focus the point of responsibility for gambling on the individual using arguments from neo-liberalism and funding research to build up analysis about problem gambler’s individual psychology and predisposition rather than the role of the machines was fascinating.

The larger takeaway from the field of science, technology, and society is the revelations around how problem gambling is a co-construction between the machines and their human users. The author offers heartbreaking accounts of gamblers who can’t stop gambling, who have structured their lives around the practice, and hurt themselves and their families in the process. We readers see what it means to be truly addicted to something. The effect is a deeply humanizing account of gambling addicts.

One advisory for potential readers: this is a piece of rigorous academic scholarship, whose audience may include lay readers and policymakers, but is definitely meant for other anthropologists and science, technology, and society scholars. There are many references to philosophers and sociologists like Erving Goffman, Gilles Deleuze, Bruno Latour, and others. This makes the book a very dense read. I appreciate the situation of the work in the academic literature but it definitely raises barriers to a broader audience. That said, the author does an excellent job of constructing a road map through the work and helping readers keep track of where they are in her argument and where threads are coming together, which really helps the accessibility. Overall, I highly recommend Addiction by Design.

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It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens by danah boyd

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I really enjoyed danah’s book. Although I was already familiar with most of the research leading into it, I felt like I took away more insights through reflection and connection across the themes and findings. One thing that I was particularly struck by was how eager I feel to recommend the book to others in my life, others who are definitely not academics like myself, and that’s thanks to its well-thought-out structure and editing.

danah has worked hard to write a book that is not just a summary and synthesis of her research but also a resource for a multiple audiences. There is a lot of depth below the surface, but the surface is perfectly accessible. I may be biased, since I’m well-versed in the research and know danah personally, but the book seems to achieve her goal in appealing to a wide audience. And the structure of the book as a resource, which can be referenced by chapter and in many cases by sub-chapter, makes it very handy.

I believe the new takeaways from her research for me were a result of its accessible, resource-like approach. I was coaxed out of my academic shoes and into those of someone who hopes to be a parent in the not too distant future. danah’s central argument is that a lot of youth practices remain the same as previous generations even though they appear different, due to the fact that they take place through new digital media and networked publics. The most important chapter in my opinion, setting stage for this point, is the one on privacy. On page 76, danah writes, “Privacy is valuable because it is critical for personal development. As teenagers are coming of age, they want to feel as though they matter.” This speaks to me on multiple levels: scholar, future parent, and designer of civic technologies for adults and youth.

Lastly, in case it’s not obvious, “it’s complicated” is more than a reference to the nature of the networked teens’ social lives, it represents danah’s approach to the topic and goal: complicate your view of contemporary teen sociality. And she does this with quotes like the one above, wherein she offers advice through insight. Those looking for prescriptions for policy and parenting won’t find it here. Rather, the book is an invitation to improve our understanding and relationships with teens through powerful anecdotes and reflections that challenge our assumptions and current practices. Share widely!

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