A new Publishers Weekly salary survey of people in the publishing industry is being used to confirm the narrative of the gender pay gap. But if you scratch below the surface, what it really reveals is that—even though they dominate (~70%) non-managerial jobs more than they dominate (51%) management—women in publishing actually get paid and promoted more for their experience and commitment than men do.
How so? Continue reading
I’ve been relatively quiet during Banned Books Week, but here are a few cool literary bits and pieces I’ve found for you guys.
Stephen King argues that books—by which he means paper codices—are going to be around for a long time, and I agree with him.
Script Shadow asks: What makes a good story idea? Also, what makes a bad idea? And, can you make a bad idea good?
The movement to make scientific publishing more open to the public is on! But, can it work, realistically? Let’s hope so.
Now, if you want to know why I’m no fan of Banned Books Week, keep reading. Continue reading
I understand that Amazon’s size is a problem for the marketplace. I am a strong antitrust advocate.
However, I also understand being the biggest guy in a fight doesn’t categorically make you the bad guy. Most importantly, I understand that spreading lies and logical fallacies, however well-intentioned, is toxic to the integrity of public discourse and therefore hurts everyone in the long run.
A lot of Amazon’s critics don’t seem to understand those last two critical facts.
For example, thriller writer Lee Child has been getting a lot of press lately for a BBC Newsnight interview in which he tries to dismantle Amazon’s position in their dispute with contract-fumbling, deadline-bumbling Hachette. But, when you take a close look at his logic, if you can call it that, not only does it fall apart but it displays a remarkable lack of basic knowledge and reasoning.
Specifically addressing Amazon’s arguments about the economic efficiency of selling ebooks at lower prices, Child calls Amazon’s claims “disingenuous,” then sneers:
There is a very specialized branch of science that you can examine these propositions with. It’s called arithmetic.
Let’s remember that Child is invoking disingenuousness and arithmetic. They’re the ropes with which he’ll hang himself. Continue reading
There’s an all-out reactionary assault against the evil leviathan Amazon which, unfortunately, is manifesting itself as a foolish defense of the greater evils of incompetence and irrationality.
Galley Cat and the New York Times are mistakenly puffed up about the idea that Amazon misinterpreted George Orwell by quoting him out of context, ignoring the fact that the full quote not only says essentially what Amazon said it did—that “Orwell was suggesting collusion” (if only sarcastically). Check it out for yourself. It’s incredible how invested partisanship can blind you to what’s right in front of your eyes. And, NYT’s in-depth analysis of Orwell’s position on paperbacks, showing that he believed they would hurt publishing as a whole, was proved wrong by history.
Quite ironically, Amazon’s bashers accuse the company of behaving like Orwell’s Ministry of Truth simply because Amazon uses technology (Did these people even read Ninety-Eighty Four?) while they mimic MiniTruth’s tactics, tacitly rewriting inconvenient history by not pointing out how low-cost paperbacks actually made books available to a broader spectrum of readers and amenable to many more reading opportunities than hardbacks. Orwell’s sarcasm about collusion was more on-point than his economics.
But, never mind all that when you can shout “gotcha!” and pretend you caught Amazon with their pants down.
Inveterate Amazon-basher Melville House is reduced to truly desperate attempts to deny the complexity of the situation, boldly claiming that “everything else is irrelevant” when compared to Amazon’s profits and power. I agree that Amazon’s dominance is problematic, but when you have to suppress or misrepresent the other side’s evidence and arguments, it’s pretty much a confession that you don’t have a logical leg to stand on.
Which nicely segues into the most egregiously inane slash-piece against Amazon lately, a quasi-viral piece in the Los Angeles Times, wherein Carolyn Kellogg punches her way through a squad of straw men while pretending to pick apart Amazon’s position.
The July-August issue of Discover tackles the current, confusing naming convention for planets outside our solar system. They go through the pros and cons of several possible plans for the future, including the existing scientific designations, various mythologies, a taxonomical method, and a sort of popularity contest model where the public votes on names. You can see a little taste of the article online but you need a subscription (or a paper copy) to read the entire piece.
However, after review, I have to say that none of the plans outlined in Discover is as simple, comprehensive, or sustainable as my “Proposal for the Naming and Reference of Extrasolar Planets.” They all like a familiar, intuitive means of specifying planets, and those that have layman-friendly names run the risk of being unsustainable. Take a look at my plan and let me know what you think.
“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).”
– Mark Twain, Notebook, 1904
When I first heard of Amazon’s “bullying” tactics against Hachette, I was shouting angrily right along with the herd … I mean crowd.
Actually, no. I mean herd.
Taking Twain’s advice, I looked a little deeper into my knee-jerk alignment with the majority. You don’t have to look deeper, now, because the tawdry timeline has been laid out in the letter Amazon sent to writers and lit agents a few days back. Skip to the bottom to read the full letter; I’ve put the timeline in bold.
The allegations there include Hachette stumbling their way past the expiration of their contract with Amazon, ignoring attempts by Amazon to behave like a responsible and professional partner by dealing with that expiration before it happened, taking months to respond to business correspondence from Amazon, failing to keep their word on providing a timely counteroffer, and failure to diligently and promptly represent the best interests of their authors and customers.
As I pointed out earlier, Hachette’s response really doesn’t do much to refute the allegations. In one particularly bizarre response, Hachette characterized Amazon not honoring the contract Hachette allowed to expire as imposing “sanctions” on Hachette books. Do they understand how business works?
Is Amazon’s economic scale a problem? Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. But that doesn’t mean the entitled oafishness of publishers like Hachette should simply be ignored. The cultural malaise of traditional publishers is far more problematic for authors and readers than the sheer immensity of Amazon. And, the absurdity only gets worse… Continue reading
Something odd occurred to me this morning concerning the concept of grammatical number.
Languages have singular forms and plural forms: dog vs. dogs. Some languages have collective words from which the singular (here called “singulative”) can be derived: Arabic baqar “cattle” vs. baqarah “cow.” Some languages even have dual and trial forms for specifically two or three things. And, some languages have a “paucal” form to distinguish a few of something from many.
But what about zero things? Continue reading
Sometimes, the underdog is the bad guy. I know, I know this is anathema to American sentiments. But sometimes, every now and then, the little guy is the greater of two evils who deserves what the Big Bad Tough dishes out.
So, let’s talk about Hachette v. Amazon.
It seems these days like Amazon is the tall poppy everyone is eager to take a whack at. And, I’m no fan of the near-monopoly power enjoyed by giants like Amazon, Walmart, Google, etc. in a what should be a merit-rewarding, competitive market economy. Amazon’s god-like reach is indisputably problematic.
But, there’s something to be said about the indispensable power of sheer power to sweep out poor practices.
Consider the latest uproar over Amazon’s offer—widely dismissed as a PR stunt—to give Hachette authors 100 percent of ebook sales until the current pricing dispute is settled. Actually, don’t consider the uproar or the offer. Consider instead the allegations of bumbling and stalling that Amazon has levied against Hachette, and Hachette’s ironically confessional reaction to them. Continue reading
It has recently occurred to me that, while tyranny and oppression can be understood through literature, they cannot be effectively opposed through literature. Stories like Orwell’s classics Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, or Kurt Vonnegut’s most excellent “Harrison Bergeron,” outline rather brilliantly the dangers of authoritarian politics, yet people who are familiar with these literary warnings don’t heed them.
This is largely due to partisanship. Folks on the Right see clearly the Orwellian implications of explicitly discriminatory laws that are defended in the name of “equality” while folks on the Left are abundantly aware of the Orwellian nature of giving up civil liberties in the name of “freedom.”
But, dear reader, if you fall into one of those two camps, I bet you bristled at half of the above paragraph. It’s not Us, it’s Them! Of course it is. It’s always Them.
It is illustrative to remember that, even as they were herding Jews into death camps, Aryanists were convinced that it was the Jews who were conspiring to exterminate Germans. Their aggression (whether real or imagined) is a “conspiracy” while Ours is a “solution.” The Dolchstoβ talking point also allowed the Nazis to ignore the fact that over half a million Jews died fighting for Germany during World War I, at rates comparable to non-Jews, a fact integral to my treatment of Golem.
But, who needs facts that inconveniently exculpate the Other when We have an enabling threat myth? The Other is always comfortingly Other, while facts can be stubbornly against Us, a reality that equally stubborn Patriots had to be reminded of during the embarrassing trial that ensued after the so-called Boston Massacre.*
Understanding how this phenomenon works, the partisan capacity to short-circuit cognitive dissonance, we need look no further than Orwell himself, who described the process of “doublethink” in Nineteen Eighty-Four:
To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it … to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself—that was the ultimate subtlety; consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word ‘doublethink’ involved the use of doublethink … [T]o deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies—all this is indispensably necessary.
Those who believe that burning books, banning books, or attacking them as “offensive” (thus effectively burning them from serious consideration) is necessary for establishing tyrannous politics are mistaken. People can read about Vonnegut’s Handicapper General and still promote an equivalent legal regime using ideological handicaps rather than physical ones. People can know full well the absurdity of “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others” yet still act on it, either in regard to civil rights politics or free market economics.
The bonfires are utterly unnecessary. The human mind can simply burn away the logic that ties those ideas to their external expression.
_
* I am reminded of the exceptional line given to John Adams in HBO’s remarkable series (a line I’m not sure he ever actually uttered in real life) in response to Sam Adams’s demand to declare which side he was on after John took the Boston Massacre case in defense of the British: “I am for the law, cousin. Is there another side?”
Or, as Herman Melville put it: “One who desires to be impartially just in the expression of his views, moves as among sword-points presented on every side.”
There’s a new push toward completing the promise of the American revolution, No Taxation Without Representation. Residents of the District of Columbia pay federal taxes, yet have no vote in either house of Congress. There are two ways to remedy this long-standing oversight: grant the District immunity from federal taxes, or grant it statehood.
This most recent effort, which surprisingly has the support of nearly a fifth of the Senate, suffers from one silly flaw. It seeks to rename DC “New Columbia.” To distinguish it, you know, from Columbia.
There’s really no need to change the name at all. As I’ve said before, to be a state doesn’t require you call yourself a state. Virginia, Kentucky, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania do just fine with the official title of “Commonwealth” while other states go with the conventional “State of Such-and-Such” moniker. “The District of Columbia” would do just as well as “The Commonwealth of Virginia” as the official name of a state. The only real changes needed would be in emphasis: use Columbia as a stand-alone default name, demote Washington to a city government under the larger state government, refer to residents as Columbians (rather than Washingtonians), and be a little more rigorous in pronouncing the round Spanish “o” in Colombia.
Most of us pronounce the “o” in Columbia like another short “u” anyway.
But, the last thing we need is something cutesy to make the whole thing look like an easily dismissed stunt. No new name, no “New Columbia.” Just start acting like a state and demand to be treated like one.
