Category: Zombies

Bitch in the House

The Bitch in the House was a bestselling book in hardcover in 2002, and the first shot in one of the many battles in the so-called American culture wars. In the editor’s postscript to the 2003 paperback edition, she professed satisfaction at having had a dialogue with women. Some of the reviews, friendly and hostile, are on the book’s web site. Megan O’Rourke’s review appeared in Slate.

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Made to Stick

Made to Stick, Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die is a pretty good book. It’s marketed as a business book by some major bookstores, but libraries may shelve it under social psychology. The Duke University Business school has promoted it on its web page. Co-author Dan Heath is a consultant in the Duke program. The web site for the book has links to other reviews.
It starts with a retelling of the urban legend of drugged travelers and kidney theft. The authors, the Heath brothers, ask why this story is likely to remembered and repeated. They suggest that the ideas that stick are simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional stories. They work through those 6 concepts, using case studies from business and the general media.
Which corporate mission statements provide a useful framework for decision-making by employees and customers? Southwest Airlines in the low-cost airline. Their customers know it, and the whole organization knows it. The discussion of corporate mission statements is good, and it’s quite funny. The Heath brothers deflate several meaningless and pretentious mission statements, and that has started a sort of buzz on the internet. Their book blog has tracked stories about moronic corporate mission statements.
Remember “where’s the beef”? Remember the urban myth of poisoned halloween candy? Why is sportsmanship a dead idea, and how has the idea of respect for the game replaced it?
The Heath brothers explain why some ideas are believed by some people, and remembered, even if not believed, by most people. They also look at the business end of psychology – which stories get people to buy products, send money to charities, act better, or simplify decisions.
The book provides a good working explanation of the psychology of decision making, which explains why there is more to persuasion than logic. In spite of the bad name given to rhetoric by Aristotle and other classical philosophers, it works.

Dawkins talks nonsense

Last Sunday, I drove to Ladysmith. I have had a cold, and I didn’t have the energy to ride, so I took a short trip up island. On the radio, Michael Enright and The Sunday Edition, with Enright interviewing Richard Dawkins. The interview is accessible as a Real Audio file – it runs to a little over 36 minutes. The interview was mainly devoted to Dawkins’s identity as a public atheist and his arguments against religion, presented in The God Delusion. Enright gave Dawkins a chance to cover the main themes of the book, challenging him mildly on a few points. Dawkins was consistently polite in his tone, but he lived up to his reputation as an intellectual Rottweiler because he just doesn’t back down or let go.

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Are We Happy Yet?

Another new article on happiness studies, linked by AL Daily, from the online magazine Cato Unbound, called Are We Happy Yet? The Cato Institute, from its own Web page, seems to be a libertarian, probably right-wing body, which partially explains their disagreement with Richard Layard’s book Happiness: Lessons from a New Science. Layard is a New Labour academic, whose book advocates the idea “Happiness should become the goal of policy, and the progress of national happiness should be measured and analyzed as closely as the growth of GNP.”

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Zombies

It’s time to shake up the category list. Social Practice becomes Zombies. In the next few weeks Culture will be folded into Zombies. Politics is Liege & Lief, which is obscure but accurate, with an arcane folk music reference. The old names were too formal, and I had too many subcategories. I will phase out some subcategories, add MT tags to my entries and let the tags lay the trail.
Why Zombies?

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I’m So Special

AL Daily had a link to the Detroit Free Press online, which ran David Crary’s AP book review . The book is getting some buzz – this morning CBC news was running an interview with Jean Twenge, the author of Generation Me, Why Today’s Young Americans are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled – and More Miserable than Ever Before. The publisher and the author have done a nice job with this site – a lot of information consolidated in one place. The theme of the book is that all those things that are supposed to boost self-esteem and make kids feel happy about themselves has created a generation of people with a sense of entitlement, persistently dissatisfied. People never feel as happy as they feel entitled to feel.
On that point, AL Daily has been running a link to Michael Shermer’s piece in Scientific American, “(Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” reviewing the more sensible books among the recent books about happiness. Happiness seems to be making publishers and bookstores happy.