Digital Manticore

New Work, Old Work, What’s the Difference Once Your Head’s Blown Off

Posted on February 13, 2014 by Lindsey

Book review: Makers by Cory Doctorow

Makers book cover Ever since I read Makers: The New Industrial Revolution by Chris Anderson last year, I’ve been captivated by the maker movement. I was going to link to my awesome review about Anderson’s Makers, but then I remembered I didn’t write it (I always want to review everything, but few reviews make it out of my head). I picked up Makers from the library on a whim and thanks to name recognition of Doctrow whose Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom I’d read some years ago on an Amtrak train from Portland to Seattle.

Anyway.

Makers is a near-future/cyberpunk/science-fiction published in 2009 that strikes me as fairly prescient. I mean, I don’t know what the future holds (I hope it’s monstrous alien creatures), but given the state of things, Doctrow’s vision feels on point. The story takes place approximately 20 years from now (by my reckoning), the characters at the intersection of several groups of people coming together in the brave new economy.

The character who most resonated with me (for perhaps obvious reasons) is Suzanne Church, a journalist. She starts the story as a writer with the San Jose Mercury, an actual newspaper. Her coverage of Silicon Valley events leads her to Florida, where she meets tinkerers extraordinaires Perry and Lester. Perry and Lester live in an abandoned mall in Florida, making interesting junk out of the world’s inexhaustible supply of useless crap, utilizing our surplus of Boogie Woogie Elmos. Suzanne begins documenting Perry and Lester’s inspired madness as it gives way to the New Work movement, a sort of maker revolution that, unfortunately, doesn’t quite last for the long term.

I don’t want to summarize this book because that is boring and pointless. Go read the book. I do really like some of the concepts that percolated in my brain while I read this, so I’ll talk about those instead.

First, I liked Suzanne a lot. She quits her stable, grown-up journalism job to follow what she perceives to be the real news of the day. She reports on stuff that is simply too cool to not write about and her readers clearly respond to it, since she manages to stay in business with her site’s ad revenue. That is something I really admire, especially since, regardless of intent, writing seems to be developing into something of a career for me. I don’t think I have the ovaries to up and move to follow a story (maybe I will eventually), but the idea of just taking off after awesome things to chronicle them is fucking cool to me.

In her own way, Suzanne embodies the story’s New Work movement with what she does. Although she isn’t tinkering and creating things or using 3D printers to improve people’s lives, she is creating based on what’s around her. She still makes an important contribution to the movement, especially since it isn’t logistically feasible for everyone to be an engineer. I think the way of the new economy, as Doctorw foretells it, is that everyone is essentially their own business. And honestly, life already feels that way to me a lot right now. Many jobs I consider treat employees as independent contractors. You are a contractor and you are your own brand. So, seeing Suzanne in the novel is like reading about someone who is doing a great job managing her brand and just making her own way, fuck the rest.

Another aspect of this book that I appreciated was the nature of community and how it can be configured using the Web. In the second act of the novel, Perry and Lester’s tinkering results in “the ride.” The ride is a series of scenes composed of bricolage, staged in an abandoned WalMart. Riders upvote or downvote scenes based on whether they like them or think they belong in their personal vision of the ride. Eventually, The Story emerges. Online communities begin discussing and dissecting the story. A segment of the Florida goth community becomes particularly involved after Death Waits (né Darren) gets laid off by Disney World (of course there is Disney, this is a Cory Doctrow novel) and then has the shit kicked out of him. After word of the ride spreads to the Web, rides spring up in other cities, each with its own style and engendering its own community.

Finally, as a novel of things-to-come, I like it. The United States, it is indicated, is essentially a third world country (not hard to predict at this point, to be honest), but people make do. Consider all the empty real estate there will be—it’s put to good use by people creating their own sort of slum towns or filled with things like the ride. 3D printers play a significant role in the economic liberation of these ad hoc communities. By the end of the book, people are even making bicycles with them thanks to tireless tinkering and open-source sharing.

It always feels difficult to review novels because I want to distill my feelings and the new thoughts that I had when my brain interacted with the story. I hope this makes some kind of sense. Doctrow is definitely a prophet of the coming tech age.

Sweet Dreams are Made of Monstrous Alien Creatures

Posted on January 23, 2014 by Lindsey

I think that I normally have shitty dreams. I don’t know this for certain. I cycle through phases of dream-remembering and dream-forgetting. Perhaps it is connected to the waxing and waning moon, for arcane reasons beyond my understanding. I think I have shitty dreams for two reasons. One: I wake up with no memory of my dream self’s actions, but a distinct feeling of emotional shittiness. Two: Kirk tells me that I cry out in the middle of the night. He reported that several nights ago he heard me—while he was in a different room and wearing headphones—shout “I don’t want it!” I can’t imagine that was the function of a dream in which I was suddenly granted my most sincere wishes (unless the genie added ironic consequences, which genies like to do).

This morning I woke up with an unusual sensation: I recalled having a good dream. It was interesting. I was enjoying the dream and I knew that it was a dream at the same time. My brain was telling my sleepy self a story as it ventured out into the dreaming. I felt like I was making friends maybe, but also like I wanted to know the rest of the story.

I am going to describe this dream, but know that I partially don’t want to. You know how dreams are. The image renders beautifully in the mind, but comes out of the mouth like pictures shoved through a speaker.

The other thing you have to know about this dream is that I dreamed I was in the world of a book I recently finished reading. Last week, I read A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge. It’s the second work in the Zones of Thought trilogy. I was engrossed with it last week, probably more so than the first one. It’s a space opera that focuses on two groups of people. There are the Qeng Ho—traders who go spacefaring for the sake of commerce and maintaining relationships with customer civilizations. There are also the aliens of Arachna. Vinge is an amazing sci-fi author because he humanizes his aliens so effectively. He manages to give a slow burn introduction on them, gradually throwing in details that would not make sense were humans being discussed (like referring to a character’s ‘eating hands’). When the true nature of what otherwise might be a monstrosity is revealed, you already love the characters and you don’t care that they are giant spider people. Yes, a race of giant spiders (duh, their planet is Arachna).

Okay, right now you are probably thinking something like get a grip, Lindsey, how did you have a good dream about giant spider people? That’s a valid question. The goodness or badness of dreams seems to be bound to the emotional feel much more than to what actually happens. This had pleasant emotional feel, and I don’t think I can explain it more than that.

Now that you’ve had sufficient preamble, I will relate the tale of my not-shitty dream.

I was hanging out with a spider/person. I knew it was one of the spider aliens and I was in the world of this novel (these spidery aliens are described as being about waist-high and having 10 legs in A Deepness in the Sky). I wasn’t freaked out, as one might expect to be in a world of spidery folk. We were chilling outside and there was a cool view of a mountain. I think my friend (I guess my friend?) was telling me about how to not be an idiot in a realm of spider folk. I imagine I would need a lot of schooling on this issue. This spider friend was wearing a dashing cloak with a fancy cloak pin. Do giant spiders wear cloaks? This one did. Even though I knew I was among spider folk, I was seeing everyone as human people. Why? Who knows. It is a thing of dreams. So, I was going somewhere with my spider buddy and he introduced me to someone he knew. I tried to shake hands, but it was awkward (duh, spiders don’t have hands). Then I realized I was seeing the spider folk as people, not as spiders, so I asked why that was. It turned out my spider buddy was using a device (of science or magic, it is not clear) to make me see human-y people and him see me as a spidery person. He turned it off and we both recoiled. I decided that I was going to need to ease into seeing spider folk as spiders.

Thus did I dream.

Why was this a good dream? I guess everything is relative. I was interested in the story I was apparently living. How did I end up there? Was I a a refugee or a prisoner of war? Was I stranded? Did I go insane? What was going to happen? How will I learn to live with the spider folk?

Maybe the promise of living some crazy, impossible story made this a good dream.

When I woke up, I spent the next few hours in a dreamy haze, pondering the dream that was. Hey, giant spider folk are more interesting than work.

Search Terms

Posted on January 5, 2014 by Lindsey

I was feeding my ego by checking my site stats and I noticed that someone found my blog by searching “lindsey halsell amazon wish list” on Google. I am here to give this mystery person what he or she wants. Here you go: http://amzn.com/w/8WNWZWCLJWKG

the world around us

2014: The Year Ahead

Posted on January 1, 2014 by Lindsey

I genuinely love New Year’s Day. I find that it is a good time to think about the upcoming year and decide what I want to do with it. I’m not talking about resolutions, as you might suppose. I think the concept of New Year’s resolutions is silly because everyone understands that resolutions are just a thing that you do until you get tired of it in the beginning of February. I like to set goals and make plans at the beginning of the year because it gives me something to focus on. Last year some of my goals changed—I had a goal of riding my bike 1,000 miles, for example, but got into running once spring came around. So, my plan changed. That kind of thing may happen this year, too, but it’s good to at least have a plan. Without further ado, here are my 2014 goals.

Books: Read at least 52 books. I only got to 46 last year, but since I’m done with grad school, I should be able to get in a book every week.
Writing: Write one book review every month and start working on researching/writing a book.
Career: Get a library job (I’m actually feeling somewhat optimistic about this at the moment), go to the ALA conference, and build more relevant skills. I’m already signed up for a MOOC (massive open online course) called “Introduction to Databases,” offered by Stanford; it starts next week.
Activities: Do things. Go outside and do all manner of things. This includes general stuff like exercising, but is broad enough to include basically anything outside of my apartment. I plan to work out (gym, run, etc.) twice a week at minimum, but I also want to get into more hiking and camping and I am thinking about doing swing dance (I was considering roller derby, but since I don’t have health insurance … ) and I found Midtown Stomp, which does a Friday swing lesson followed by dancing. I think that sounds dandy.
Food: It seems like everyone has a food-based New Year’s plan, so it seems cliché to say anything about it, but consuming food is a major component of being alive, so I might as well deal with it. I want to cook and eat a lot more vegetables and proteins. I’m planning to start going to the Midtown Farmers Market on Saturdays because I think that will be fun and be a good way to get local, tasty food.

There you have it. What are you planning to do this year?

books

2013: The Year in Books

Posted on December 31, 2013 by Lindsey

It’s new year’s eve and it is time for my annual list of the books I read for the year. I read the entire Wheel of Time series this year, which was really quite time consuming. I read 46 books overall–not quite the 50+ I was shooting for, but I think it is still respectable, all things considered. Nineteen of the books were non-fiction.

The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan 1/20
The Great Hunt by Robert Jordan 2/14
CompTIA A+ Certification All-in-One Exam Guide, 8^th Edition by Michael Meyers 2/18
Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain 2/25
Over the Cliff: How Obama’s Election Drove the American Right Insane by John Amato and David Neiwert 3/1
The Dragon Reborn by Robert Jordan 3/7
The Ordinary Acrobat by Duncan Wall 3/10
The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers & Fathers Are Going Broke by Elizabeth Warren & Amelia Warren Tyagi 3/19
The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr 4/2
Every Day by David Levithan 4/3
Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood and the Prison of Belief by Lawrence Wright 4/9
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander 4/27
Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos Papadimitriou 4/29
Adventures of the Artificial Woman: A Novel by Thomas Berger 5/1
The Shadow Rising by Robert Jordan 6/10
Dreams and Shadows: A Novel by C. Robert Cargill 6/16
Makers: The New Industrial Revolution by Chris Anderson 6/28
We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo 7/2
I Fired God: My Life Inside—and Escape from—the Secret World of the Independent Fundamentalist Baptist Cult by Jocelyn Zichterman 7/4
Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green and David Levithan 7/10
The Unlikely Disciplie: A Sinner’s Semester at America’s Holiest University by Kevin Roose 7/24
Oz Reimagined: New Tales from the Emerald City and Beyond edited by John Joseph Adams & Douglas Cohen 7/30
The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes 8/11
Girls of the Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II by Denise Kernan 8/28
Red Shirts: A Novel with Three Codas by John Scalzi 9/3
The Fires of Heaven by Robert Jordan 9/4
Why Have Kids? A New Mom Explores the Truth about Parenting and Happiness by Jessica Valenti 9/10
Asperger’s on the Job: Must-Have Advice for People with Asperger’s or High Functioning Autism, and their Employers, Educators, and Advocates by Rudy Simone 9/11
Lord of Chaos by Robert Jordan 9/17
Crown of Swords by Robert Jordan 10/2
The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades before Roe v. Wade by Ann Fessler 10/11
The Path of Daggers by Robert Jordan 10/18
The Lost Hero by Rick Riordan 10/23
The Son of Neptune by Rick Riordan 10/24
The Mark of Athena by Rick Riordan 10/25
The House of Hades by Rick Riordan 10/29
Winter’s Heart by Robert Jordan 11/7
Crossroads of Twilight by Robert Jordan 11/24
The New Rules of Lifting for Women: Lift Like a Man, Look Like a Goddess by Lou Schuler, Cassandra Forsthe, Alwyn Cosgrove 11/27
Song of the Vikings: Snorri and the Making of Norse Myths by Nancy Marie Brown 12/2
Just a Geek: Unflinchingly Honest Tales of the Search for Life, Love, and Fulfillment Beyond the Starship Enterprise by Wil Wheaton 12/4
Knife of Dreams by Robert Jordan 12/6
Love Minus Eighty by Will McIntosh 12/8
The Gathering Storm by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson 12/13
Towers of Midnight by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson 12/22
A Memory of Light by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson 12/31

book review

All Hail the All-Father

Posted on December 4, 2013 by Lindsey

Book review Song of the Vikings: Snorri and the Making of Norse Myths by Nancy Marie Brown

So, a few weeks ago we saw the new Loki movie—excuse me—Thor movie and I was like, by Odin’s beard! It has been too long since I read up on Norse mythology (which according to my records was in 2011)! I came home, hopped on to the website for my local library and found this book.

Song of the Vikings is an interesting read because it links a few different vectors of Norse mythology. There is a little bit of the myths themselves (we learn about the time Loki got down with a horse, for example, and why gold is otter’s ransom), but more than the myths, Brown lays down the saga of Snorri Sturluson and how the myths came down from the Vikings to the present. In many ways, this is more instructive than the actual content of the myths.

Snorri Sturluson is one of the most influential dudes you have (probably) never heard of. He is the author of several works: The Prose Edda, Heimskringla, and Egil’s Saga. The Edda is perhaps the most well-known of his works, even though no one knows what an “edda” actually is. Some think it might be “the book of Oddi,” (Oddi being the name of a place Snorri lived), or maybe something like “the art of poetry.” It could possibly even be given the cheeky translation of “the art of great-grandmother’s old-fashioned songs.” The Prose Edda (yes, this is in contrast to another author’s Poetic Edda) is the primary compendium of the stories we recognize as Norse mythology. Not only is this mythology awesome, but it has been called “the deep an ancient wellspring of Western culture.” So, if you are not an uncultured lout, you should listen up and learn yourself some Norse business.

Snorri lived in Iceland during the late 12^th and early 13^th century. Iceland at this time was kind of the way you might imagine it to be. People then and there had plots of land where they might graze cows or goats. There was, of course, a lot of fishing, and exceptionally well-situated landowners might have access to a hot spring. Families were brought together under chieftains, who were not exactly elected, but who could not govern if they did not have the confidence and might of the people behind them. Positions of power were typically cemented through family ties, but people were also respected for being well-versed in the law or for being great poets. Another cultural force at this time was Christianity, which was a surprise to me. There were churches in Iceland during this period and the church was gradually becoming more influential among the people.

In this climate we have Snorri. He was born to a fairly influential family and was a foster son to Jon Loftsson of Oddi, the “uncrowned king of Iceland.” Snorri became educated and grew up to be influential in his own right. He was the chief over some choice chieftaincies and he even became the lawspeaker at the allthing—essentially the most law-knowing and well-versed guy at the annual Icelandic assembly. He was also a great poet and he loved writing about the gods, especially Odin, who was, in Snorri’s opinion, the best god. While most people at the time favored Thor, Snorri seems to have considered him a dumb meat-head, eschewing Thor for Odin and his cleverness and skill in poetry. It should be noted that poetry was not then, as it is today, seen as a sign of femininity. Manly men went on raids and also traded verses to exhibit their keen wit. Vikings love poetry; it is manly business.

Although Iceland was, at this time, an independent commonwealth, the Norwegian king had designs on the land. Snorri, in his quest for more power and influence, spent several seasons at the Norwegian court getting to know the young king and apparently glad-handing with everyone there. Snorri was also semi-obsessed with the concept of kingliness and what it meant to be a king. His first visit to Norway inspired his work Heimskringla, which is a saga about Norwegian kings. Snorri was concerned the Norway’s young king (then 16) was missing out on vital information. He worried that kids these days were losing the ability to understand poetry—that most influential of arts. Heimskringla goes a long way to explain the old stories of the gods; understanding these stories is the key to understanding poetry, and as such, all the important literature of the time. Nordic poetry was fond of kennings, which is basically referring to something by calling it something else. Brown includes this example to illustrate the importance of knowing one’s stories:

“The noble hater of the fire of the sea defends the woman-friend of the enemy of the wolf; prows are set before the step brow of the confidante of the friend of Mimir. The noble, all-powerful one knows how to protect the mother of the attacker of the work; enjoy, enemy of neck-rings, the mother of the troll-wife’s enemy until old age.”

Brown comments “As the translator of this stanza notes, the audience needs to know five myths and the family trees of two gods or it’s nonsense.” The majority of verses were similarly oblique (if the poet had any level of skill).

The main concept I got from Song of the Vikings is that almost everything we know of Norse myth came from one guy: Snorri Sturluson. It seems obvious that Snorri’s personal biases would have been woven into the myth, but I wonder how much? One thing that comes to mind is the duality of fire and ice, which runs through a lot of the myths (the creation myth, for one). Iceland would have been a place where snow and lava clash, but that would not be true of Norway and Sweden, where the myths originated. Did Snorri come up with this imagery himself because he was a storyteller or was this idea already part of the world of myth? I wonder how the myths would be different if not told by Snorri? We know that he was a big fan of Odin. Would we know that Odin traded an eye for wisdom?

The last chapter of the book deals with how Norse mythology became a part of our present culture. For a long time, the stories were essentially lost. After Snorri’s death, Iceland was annexed into Norway, Christianity became more prominent and, you know, paganism was not really on the rise. The church even tried to change the names of the weekdays to silly things like Third Day and Midweek Day (instead of Tyr’s Day and Odin’s Day, also known as Tuesday and Wednesday). I thought it was interesting that the Germans later (by later I mean 1700-1800s) reclaimed Norse mythology as their heritage. They took it up so fiercely that it essentially inspired modern German nationalism. During the early 20^th century, any non-Germans who were interested in Norse myth were suspected to by Nazi sympathizers. Yes, this includes J. R. R. Tolkien, who was hugely influenced by Norse mythology.

Tolkien has probably done more to propel Norse myth into modern Western (American and English, at least) consciousness than anyone. As a professor of English, he started a club to focus on Nordic literature and he fought to get Norse myth into the syllabus. He felt that the Norse mythology was of great import to the English canon than Shakespeare, which is quite the claim.

Now, of course, the Norse gods are very much in pop culture, especially with movies like The Avengers and comics and the rest of it. Although, I think mythology is general is having quite the renaissance. Greek and Roman myth is getting treatment in things like Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson and Camp Halfblood series, as well. I would be interested in see an analysis regarding what draws us to mythology. Is it just that it makes for great storytelling? Is it something more?

I’ll conclude with a quotation from Snorri. He states in the Edda, “But these things [lore] have now to be told to young poets … but these stories are not to be consigned to oblivion.” Thankfully, they were not and it seems like they will not be consigned to oblivion any time too soon.

If you are interested in Norse mythology, here are some suggestions for further reading:

Loki by Mike Vasich is a fantasy novel that retells some of the Norse mythology with a focus on my personal favorite aesir, Loki.
From Asgard to Valhalla: The Remarkable History of the Norse Myths by Heather O’Donoghue is a non-fiction work that focuses on how Norse myth has played out in popular culture over the last several centuries.
Gods and Myths of Northern Europe by H.R. Ellis Davidson is an academic treatment about the Norse gods, what we know about them, etc.

the world around us

Anti-Vaccine Rhetoric Makes Me Want to Smash Things

Posted on November 9, 2013 by Lindsey

Every time I see another argument against the apparent evil that is vaccines, I feel the urge to smash faces or throw heavy things around. Vaccines are widely recognized as being a good thing. But you don’t have to take my word for it, I’ll be referencing peer reviewed research in this post. Everything I have cited here is available for the public to read—nothing is behind a paywall. If you think I have misrepresented a statistic or study, feel free to politely let me know.

This week, I saw this blog post [edit: literally a minute after I posted this, that blog link stopped working. I’m not sure if it will come back up later or not.] from a site called feelguide.com making the rounds. The post claims that the lead developer for the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine, Dr. Diane Harper, regrets her involvement with the vaccine. The author of the posts states:

“Dr. Harper made her surprising confession at the 4th International Converence on Vaccination which took place in Reston, Virginia. Her speech, which was originally intended to promote the benefits of the vaccines, took a 180-degree turn when she chose instead to clean her conscience about the deadly vaccines so she ‘could sleep at night.’”

A deadly vaccine? That sounds pretty alarmist to me. I won’t quote all of the source of this claim at length, but it can be distilled into the allegation that the risk for cervical cancer (which HPV can cause, along with a few other varieties of cancer) is already low, the HPV vaccine is not going to significantly lower the incidence rate of HPV, and that over 15,000 girls have “reported adverse side effects from Garsasil” (Gardisil is one brand of the vaccine).

I would like to take these claims one at a time.

Claim one: The risk for cervical cancer is already extremely low.

My first comment on this issue is that regardless of how infrequent a form of cancer surfaces, it is still a disease that kills people. Why would the scientific community not want to inoculate people against it if they could? Should we rank cancers by order of importance and research only the most prevalent?

Here are some actual statistics. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention reports that in 2010, 11, 818 women in the United States were diagnosed with cervical cancer and 3,939 women died from it. To put that in perspective, the population of the United States is about 317 million. That comes out to about one in 250 people being diagnosed with cervical cancer annually. No, that does not sound like a lot, but it is statistically significant. One in 250 means that, on average, someone you know will be diagnosed with cervical cancer in any given year.

Claim two: The HPV vaccine is not going to lower the prevalence of HPV.

First of all, I think it is important to understand how prevalent HPV is. Human papillomavirus is the most prevalent sexually transmitted infection in the United States according to the CDC. To return to my flippant comment about ranking the most important cancer to research, HPV is actually the biggest STI! And there is a vaccine for it! Why would we not want that? Okay, I know, the claim is that the vaccine is not helping. Fortunately, there has been research done on this.

A study published this year in the Journal of Infectious Disease found that for females aged 14 to 19, the prevalence of HPV dropped from 11.5 percent to 5.1 percent. That means that the rate of HPV was halved! If cutting the prevalence of HPV in half is not statistically significant, I have no idea what would be. Half is huge. Researchers everywhere would make burnt offerings to the gods to get results like this.

Claim three: Thousands of girls have reported adverse side-effects from Gardasil.

This one is tricky to address because to know if thousands is a significant proportion of the girls and women being vaccinated, we have to know how many people were vaccinated in total. Additionally, we do not know what kind of side-effects they allegedly experienced. There is a serious order of magnitude difference between having a vaccine make you feel kind of funky for a few days and a vaccine sending you to the hospital.

I am going to have to go ahead and say that I do not know where this claim originated and that I do not know how to refute it at this time. However, I will say that several studies have found the HPV vaccine to be safe and effective. A study from earlier this year states that “safety monitoring data continue to indicate that HPV4 is safe.”

I have one other comment I would like to add about side-effects. Many people who experience side effects from vaccines are statistical outliers. A lot of the most powerful stories from the anti-vaccine camp are from people who personally experienced problems, but it is important to keep in mind that the vast majority of people who get vaccinated are totally fine. For example, I got the HPV vaccine and had no problems. I didn’t go on to tell people I had no issues because it is a non-story. No problems is what you expect. I also think that having a particular negative reaction to a vaccine means you have to be anti-vaccines. My boyfriend is seriously allergic to penicillin, but he still thinks vaccines that use penicillin are a good plan for other people.

The Origin of the Comments by Dr. Harper

After reading up on some statistics, I wanted to know where these comments from Dr. Harper originated. Like I said, the blog post that ran the story only linked another blog post, which also did not have any proper citations. It seems odd to me that a scientist who works in immunology would turn around and say that the use of the vaccine was keeping her up at night.

It turns out that this story has been making the rounds on the internet for a few years now. The nature of Dr. Harper’s comments seem to be a misquote, at best. ScienceBlogs has an extremely thorough debunking of the issue. If you are interested, it is probably best to read the whole thing, but I will try to faithfully represent the gist of it.

First, the author speaks to the venue where the remarks were made: “What’s not mentioned is that this particular article is that the 4th International Public Conference on Vaccination was a conference held by one of the oldest and most established antivaccine groups, the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC). That’s the group founded by Barbara Loe Fisher, the grande dame of the antivaccine movement, the woman who was antivaccine before it was fashionable to be antivaccine.”

Second, this story started in 2009. It’s 2013 and for unfathomable reasons, it is still going strong.

Third, the author explains that Dr. Harper was “selectively quoted” by a reporter with a known anti-vaccine bias. He also goes on to explain that some of Dr. Harper’s other speculative statements were combined with the primary quotation to create an alarmist tone.

What have we learned?

If you think vaccines are dumb and that science is a bunch of bullshit, then this post probably didn’t change your mind, but hopefully it at least made you think. If you made it this far, I am willing to admit to you that this was primarily written as a cathartic activity; seeing anti-vaccination posts just makes me so mad. There are safe, effective vaccines out there for so many diseases. It is irresponsible to spread misinformation about them. Anti-vaccination rhetoric is actively harmful.

One more quotation on this issue before I let it be. This one is also from the CDC:

“This report shows that HPV vaccine works well, and the report should be a wake-up call to our nation to protect the next generation by increasing HPV vaccination rates,”said CDC Director Tom Frieden, M.D., M.P.H. “Unfortunately only one third of girls aged 13-17 have been fully vaccinated with HPV vaccine. Countries such as Rwanda have vaccinated more than 80 percent of their teen girls. Our low vaccination rates represent 50,000 preventable tragedies – 50,000 girls alive today will develop cervical cancer over their lifetime that would have been prevented if we reach 80 percent vaccination rates. For every year we delay in doing so, another 4,400 girls will develop cervical cancer in their lifetimes.”

50,000 preventable tragedies because of this foolishness. And Rawanda is trouncing us in vaccination coverage. Need I say more? GET VACCINATED!

book review

New Voices from Oz

Posted on August 17, 2013 by Lindsey

Oz Reimagined book cover — Oz Reimagined

Oz Reimagined is a great collection of short stories on the topic of, of course, Oz. There are 15 stories collected from notable writers in science fiction and fantasy, all accompanied by a cool illustration. What I particularly enjoyed about this anthology was that the stories were so diverse. If you enjoy Oz, or re-tellings, or fantasy in general, you should give Oz Reimagined a try (and if you don’t want to commit to all the stories, you can buy them individually on Amazon).

The stories in this collection were all inspired by the original written canon of Oz books (not the movies or subsequent adaptations), so you find characters like Jack (who has a pumpkin head) and Ozma (child queen and erstwhile boy, Tip). Some of the stories deal with Dorothy and her life after her original visit to Oz. Sometimes she is an Ambassador (which is a much less dry story than it sounds), sometimes she returns as an adult. Some of the stories focus on the Wizard and some of them don’t feature Dorothy or Oz the Great and Powerful at all, instead focusing on the people of Oz.

Many of the stories take a darker turn, which I suppose is to be expected when you ask authors to work off a story that is pretty solidly for children. One of the more cynical stories that particularly resonated with me was about Oz’s reality television show Wish. The show was orchestrated by Oz’s witches and the story is told from the perspective of a jeweler. Wish turns out to be the social event of the season and it is revealed that it is actually part of a plan to orchestrate a coup against the Wizard. Another story that hints at the, perhaps, surveillance-state nature of Oz is about a munchkin who works as a window washer in the Emerald City. One of his buddies dies on the job, despite all the safety measures that are in place. When he comments to some friends saying that something about the whole situation seems “off,” a flying monkey he works with brings up the fact that the friend had been working to unionize them.

One of the other stories that I thought was totally unexpected was one called “The Veiled Shanghai.” In this story, Dorothy is a fourteen-year-old Chinese girl (Dorothy is her English school name and she lives on Kansu Road) who unwittingly facilitates the May Fourth movement via her actions in the Veiled Shanghai—a place where carrots are magically sweet and that is ruled by a wicket warlord. What I liked about this story was that it used the Oz mythos to describe real events. The story ascribed a magical impetus for the May Fourth movement. I have to admit that this movement is not something I know much (ahem, anything) about, but I like the concept of using stories like this to explain history.

This collection is full of cool stories, but I don’t want to spoil them all. There is a riff on One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, a cyberpunk version of Dorothy and Oz, a story about a Zeppelin, and one about a young L. Frank Baum meeting the girl who would show him the Kingdom of the Air (which inspired the Oz stories, of course). There were a lot of stories; I enjoyed all of them. They all offered fresh takes on the Oz mythos without overlapping. I think some of the reason for this is that the source material is so vast. The other part of this is that there are so many ways to interpret an older version of Dorothy or to characterized the other denizens of Oz (and there are a lot of them).

I was giving some thought to why the dystopian views of Oz appeal to me so much. I don’t know if it’s simply that our era is so jaded and cynical (is that too much of a generalization?) or if it’s that the original Oz is so squeaky clean that it’s impossible, from a writer’s perspective, to avoid corrupting it in some way. But I think the Oz story was ripe for reconsideration. The way that Oz’s society is set up naturally lends itself (if I may be so presumptuous) to dystopian interpretations: four cultures who all live in their own isolated areas of the country, an autocratic ruler who doesn’t let anyone see him, a capital city that literally shines (seriously, nothing is that clean on its own). And if you think about the movie, you have that road and no one else is travelling on it. What are the people of Oz doing all day? Obviously not traveling. Perhaps, like so many police states, travel is strictly regulated. Okay, I will stop with this line of thinking because I am clearly talking myself into a story of my own!

I’ll end with some book recommendations. I hadn’t heard of a lot of the authors featured in this collection, but at least half of the stories made me want to look them up to see what else they had written. Here are some book selections if you’re looking for something to read after you’ve made it through Oz Reimagined. Oh, and I won’t bother recommending the original Oz stories or Wicked because come on, you can find that in two seconds of Googling.

Rosemary and Rue (October Daye, Book one) by Seanan McGuire has the kind of cover that generally signals something I don’t want to read, but I really liked her story in Oz Reimagined, so I guess I will have to take that advice about not judging books by their covers. This book is billed as urban fantasy and its main character is a half-human, half-fae changeling. So, what could possibly go wrong?
David Farland is the author of a cool cyberpunk story that made it into Oz Reimagined, but it looks like his books are fairly fantasy-based (although he has a lot of books and I can’t promise that I’ve comprehensively gone through them). The Lair of Bones is book one of his Runelords series, and it sounds like some pretty good fantasy.
This recommendation isn’t actually out yet, but it sounds super good and it’s from the author of the Oz has a reality show story. How the World Became Quiet: Myths of the Past Present, and Future by Rachel Swirsky sounds like it is going to be a great read.

short story

Based on a True Story

Posted on August 3, 2013 by Lindsey

The walls here are soft, not like a blanket but like one of those boards that you can stick pieces of felt to for telling stories to children. Maybe one day I’ll stick some felt animals on my wall and tell the story of Noah’s Ark. Their felt figures stacked haphazardly above the boat. Dinosaurs crying for help from the expanse of the soft, grey sea. But maybe kids all have tablets now and they don’t use felt anymore. It doesn’t matter. There are no children here.

Anyway—it is soft. Soft and a muted grey color flecked with whites and reds like a man’s suit, I guess. Not a lot of men here either. Not really anyone in suits. But it’s the kind of thing you can imagine being suiting fabric. Or maybe one day I’ll just tear it down and wrap a soft, grey cloak around myself. It will be a toga or a sari or a cape. You can’t make a suit without needles, scissors, other sharp objects.

Everything is grey here, not just the walls. The only other thing I can really see from my designated space is the ceiling and that’s filled with grey too. Grey tiles with pounding, fluorescent lights interspersed between them, washing out any other colors. At first, the lights made my head hurt, but I guess now my head has grown used to it and doesn’t hurt, or it perpetually hurts and I’ve just accepted this as the new normal. It’s hard to say.

There are other people here too. I can hear them and sometimes they visit them or they visit me and we talk about how grey it is and how you can almost see out the window if you stand in the right spot. There’s a small balcony area, but no one is allowed to go out there. My neighbor said that they are afraid we might jump. She said it like she was joking, but I don’t think she really was. Her eyes weren’t joking.

They give us meaningless work to complete. It piles up and then I look at it and write notes about it. I even call people sometimes. Then I pile it up for someone else. I guess that’s how work works. I didn’t know that before, but here it is true.

It feels like I’ve been here for years, but it’s hard to say at this point. Maybe it was only a week, a day, an hour, a minute. Time is stretching out across the sunny spot on the floor to warm its belly like a housecat.

You know in the movie version of The Wizard of Oz? It starts out in black and white. Being there feels like being stuck on the bleak Kansas prairie. All grey. I understand why Dorothy was glad to leave (but not why she was so eager to go home). When I leave, it’s like I’m suddenly in Oz and like Dorothy, I’m overcome; the color outside is so blinding, so brilliant in comparison to the grey expanse inside.

I head to the restroom and say goodbye to my coworkers. I check my email once more, turn off my computer, and grab my purse. It’s finally 5 o’clock. Work is over for today.

book review

A Cult I Had Never Read about Before: the Independent Fundamental Baptists

Posted on July 13, 2013 by Lindsey

UPDATE MARCH 29, 2023: A lot of people seem to find this post (I assume you’re asking the internet if IFB is a cult) so I am adding a note. If you feel like you are not free to live your life how you want, or if you don’t feel safe where you are, you don’t need a random internet post to tell you whether you should leave. You have the right to feel safe and autonomous. It doesn’t matter if someone calls your organization a “cult” or not. You are allowed to decide for yourself what is right for you.

Book Review: I Fired God: My Life Inside—and Escape from—the Secret World of the Independent Fundamental Baptist Cult by Jocelyn Zichterman

This book has quite the audacious title. How do you fire God? Or, as my boyfriend quipped, “Does she have the authority to do that?” Given the author’s experience with religion, I can definitely appreciate her position. This book is part autobiography and part memoir and part political call to action. Jocelyn Zichterman (neé Janz) recounts her abusive childhood, her attempt to find her place in the world as an adult in the Independent Fundamental Baptist (IFB) church/cult, her subsequent liberation from the IFB, and career as an activist. As someone who just can’t get enough of reading about cults, the people in cults, and people managing their post-cult existence, when I saw this book on the new shelf at the library, I had to check it out.

The opening part of the book deals with Zichterman’s abuse at the hands of her father and, later on, brothers. It is inherently hard to read about abuse for me, especially when it goes into detail about the unpredictable nature of their father, Bart, an IFB pastor and expert misogynist, and the times he tortured animals and beat his children bloody with a dowel. However, I appreciate the impact of these events and how they establish a context for the author’s actions later on. They also make it clear that Zichterman has a real, tangible reason to fear her father, and other people in the IFB who enable his behavior.

I had a hard time getting into the narrative at first because it started out feeling really clunky. The chapters were organized into vignettes and each one had a subheading. It felt more like reading blog posts or journal entries than a cohesive story. But as the narrative progressed, I found my irritation waning. I think that it seemed so difficult to read at the outset because the author was describing events from a time when she didn’t have a full understanding of herself, but the narrative became more confident and mature as the author did. I think it can be difficult to recount events from a time when the mind isn’t fully mature, fully settled. Trying to get into a prior mindset (from childhood, or before a major life change—like leaving your religion-based worldview) makes for awkward tellings, no matter how skilled you are. For comparison, I find that when I try to discuss how I used to feel when I was growing up Mormon, I can’t really articulate myself fully, likely because I have my brain engaged on more levels than I did then.

Zichterman recounts an absurd amount of incidences that indicate that women in the IFB have zero standing. The men who run this cult view women on the same level as children. They also describe the need to keep women under men’s “umbrella of protection,” which means that fathers are responsible for girl-children until they marry, at which point husbands are responsible. The whole cult (I will take Zichterman at her word that it is a cult) seems to be based on giving misogynistic, sociopathic men an outlet for dominating and totally gaslighting women.

The descriptions of how women in the IFB are treated highlight some awful behavior, but the true purpose of this book, and one of the main themes running through it, is that groups like the IFB cultivate an isolationist stance, distancing themselves from government and regulation. This this is a huge detriment to its members and is prohibitive for anyone who wants to leave. Like many religious groups, the IFB does a deplorable job of educating kids. The IFB preaches isolation—public schools will convert your children to Satanists, the government is just waiting to round up fine, Christian folk for execution, and calling the police is a sure way to make God mad—and as such, almost everyone is homeschooled or goes to a private, religious school. Homeschooled kids in this group use study booklets that blatantly ignore basically everything we know about history and science, and instead focus on the fact that the Bible should be our main source of information. Kids are left to work on these booklets independently, with minimal supervision. Sometimes, they aren’t supervised at all, as was the case for Zichterman and her siblings one year.

Another of Zichterman’s main issues with the education system is that these home or private schools feed into IFB “colleges” like Bob Jones University or Northland Baptist Bible College, which Zichterman herself attended. These schools do not have accreditation, so their degrees are literally meaningless. When the author and her husband who had graduate-level degrees from these schools were trying to escape the IFB, they found that her husband couldn’t get a job anywhere because his degrees were unaccredited and completely useless. This means that anyone who wants to educate themselves and get out has essentially no recourse. The cult leaders are actively keeping people ignorant (and making money) by feeding members into this system.

This steady stream of misinformation is, in fact, state-approved. In Wisconsin, where the author grew up, all parents who wanted to homeschool their children had to do was submit a form. These schools and “colleges” also receive federal funding either through voucher programs, or more directly.

Zichterman makes the case that none of this should be legal. I Fired God highlights the profound unfairness of abuse and how it continues to affect the lives of its victims long after the abuse has supposedly ended. Not educating children properly is abusive. It limits their options. Zichterman argues that freedom of religion should also be freedom from religion and it is impossible to free yourself from such a religion when everything you see or do is controlled by it. Everyone should receive an education that enables them to make it on their own if they so choose. Of course, that is what the leaders of cults like this fear. They know that if people were not kept entirely ignorant, they wouldn’t choose to stay in such conditions and live these lives. This book is part of Zichterman’s campaign to fight back.

Ultimately, I did enjoy reading this book. I like getting perspective on how other people live and it is insane to hear about such systemic abuse even within my own country. I really support Zichterman’s cause; I think that having more regulation and robust education for everyone would solve a lot of problems. I sympathize with people in this situation and I hope that change will soon be enacted. If you like reading about fringe religious movements, people breaking out of oppressive systems, or women overcoming hardship and becoming activists, then you will probably enjoy this book.

One other thing that I want to add: if you don’t want to commit to a whole book, this 20/20 episode features Zichterman, her cause, and an expose on the IFB.

What should you read after you’ve finished I Fired God? Here are some things that I’ve read or have been meaning to read that play well with this subject:

Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement by Kathryn Joyce. I read this book a few years ago and really enjoyed it. It deals with the Quiverfull ideology, which stipulates that parents should have a “Quiverfull” of children. That means people shouldn’t use birth control and just accept however many children God wants to give them. The IFB subscribe to this mindset and it is another way in which women are subjugated.
Write These Laws on Your Children: Inside the World of Conservative Christian Homeschooling by Robert Kunzman. I’ve had this book on my radar for a while, but have yet to read it. Now I want to read it a lot more. This book deals with exactly what Zichterman is concerned about: people homeschooling children with little or no oversight.
Escape by Carolyn Jessop. Zichterman recounts seeing an interview on television featuring Carolyn Jessop and realizing, for the first time, that the IFB was a cult. Jessop is a former member of the FLDS (fundamentalist, polygamist Mormons) and her story has a lot of parallels with Zichterman’s. I haven’t read this particular FLDS memoir, but I have read Lost Boy, Favorite Wife: Escape from Polygamy, and Shattered Dreams, which are all written by survivors/escapees from the FLDS sect.