Steinbeck met photographer Robert Capa and together they decided to take a trip to the Soviet Union. They sought to discover the people of the Soviet Steinbeck met photographer Robert Capa and together they decided to take a trip to the Soviet Union. They sought to discover the people of the Soviet Union not in the way that the popular, prejudiced, propaganda-heavy media had done and were doing (this was right at the cusp of the Cold War), but through their own eyes—to portray the truth of how ordinary people live, as Steinbeck puts it. In A Russian Journal, published in 1948, Steinbeck recounts, chronologically, his trip with Capa and the various people and places they encountered as they made their way through the Soviet Union—from Moscow to Kiev, and from Stalingrad to Georgia. The result is not the 'truth', which is, of course, impossible, but at least an honest and fair account of both the bad and the good among the Russians, the latter being significantly more numerous and the first being no worse than what one may find among Americans. This conclusion is ultimately reached through Steinbeck's storytelling—fortified and made more compelling by his idiosyncratic wit and humor—as well as through the inclusion of Capa's wonderful photographs....more
"The secret language of statistics, so appealing in a fact-minded culture, is employed to sensationalize, inflate, confuse, and oversimplify. Statisti
"The secret language of statistics, so appealing in a fact-minded culture, is employed to sensationalize, inflate, confuse, and oversimplify. Statistical methods and statistical terms are necessary in reporting the mass data of social and economic trends, business conditions, 'opinion polls', the census. But without writers who use the words with honesty and understanding and readers who know what they mean, the result can only be semantic nonsense… This book is a sort of primer in ways to use statistics to deceive. It may seem altogether too much like a manual for swindlers. Perhaps I can justify it in the manner of the retired burglar whose published reminiscences amounted to a graduate course in how to pick a lock and muffle a footfall: The crooks already know these tricks; honest men must learn them in self-defense." (10-11)
I never cared much for statistics; I slid through Methods & Statistics 1, 2, and 3 relatively untouched, until the first time I did my own research and had to analyze the data I had so diligently collected. That was the point at which statistical analyses became meaningful to me—I had a theory and I was looking to see whether there was any evidence for it. The data itself means nothing, of course. Numbers do not mean anything on their own. What you do with the numbers, how you expose (non-)relationships between them, is when things get interesting. And tricky—as this little book sets out to show.
Huff uses humor to show a variety of ways in which statistics may be – and examples of how they have been – misleading. The book is dated by now, basing its examples mostly on stuff from the '20s through to the '50s. This did not really bother me, however, nor did I feel it detracted from the main points—if anything, it makes the book feel quaint while at the same time highlighting the fact that little has changed in how statistics are (ab)used in contemporary society. If you have a background in statistics, How to Lie is unlikely to teach you anything new about them. However, it is still worth reading if only to underscore the need to pay attention to the pervasive presence and use of statistics.
I, as someone trained in psychology, like to think that they are mostly used for good. Much knowledge has surely been gained thanks to the insights that increasingly sophisticated statistical analyses have offered. But an analysis is only as good as the way in which it is conducted, and results only as good as the way in which they are conveyed.
Huff closes his book on a more serious note, abandoning the burglar-revealing-his-trade spiel with five questions to ask when encountering statistical information (but don't worry, the chapter is still titled How to Talk Back to Statistics). They are worth listing and remembering:
1] Who says so? Look for bias: who has an interest in the statistic? 2] How does he know? Watch out for a biased/limited sample. 3] What's missing? The absence of information, like the number of cases or which kind of average was used, can render a statistic virtually meaningless. 4] Did Somebody Change the Subject? Make sure that the conclusion follows from the type of raw data that was collected. 5] Does It Make Sense? Think about what the statistic is supposed to mean/tell you, and ask whether it makes sense....more
"Salesman or leader or neither or both, the final paradox – the really tiny central one, way down deep inside all the other campaign puzzles' spinn
"Salesman or leader or neither or both, the final paradox – the really tiny central one, way down deep inside all the other campaign puzzles' spinning boxes and squares that layer McCain – is that whether he's truly 'for real' now depends less on what is in his heart than on what might be in yours."
Although McCain has by now (2016) largely receded into history's shadows, the campaign trail of 2000 as recounted by DFW is still relevant. This is because DFW, as is his wont, asks the perennial questions that lie behind the shifting images of current – in this case political – events. Reflections on political cynicism versus idealism lie as much at the heart of his work, commissioned by Rolling Stone magazine, as the particular manifestations and vicissitudes of McCain's (ultimately unsuccessful) campaign trail.
I did not know about the specifics of McCain's capture in Vietnam; DFW rightly and rather poignantly draws attention to both the immense amount he must have suffered, and the significantly lesser amount he might have suffered had he accepted a release from the Hỏa Lò Prison instead of rejecting it for the sake of a POW code. The picture that emerges, overall, from DFW's account of his behind-the-scenes time with McCain's camp, is wonderfully complex and ambiguous – representative, you might say, of the entire business of politics and campaigning.
There was a rather long and dull and technical/quasi-technical middle section, which DFW acknowledges as showcasing the general tedium of great parts of the campaign trail. Apart from these sections, which almost tempted me into skimming, the essay beautifully maneuvers into and along the important issues not so much with regard to campaigning, but concerning the reader/voter/the Young Voter/the cynic/the wants-to-be-an-idealist in an age of Great Cynicism.
"If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don't bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched Establishments of the two major parties, who please rest assured are not dumb, and who are keenly aware that it is in their interests to keep you disgusted and bored and cynical and to give you every possible reason to stay at home doing one-hitters and watching MTV on primary day. By all means stay home if you want, but don't bullshit yourself that you're not voting. In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote."
"Am I a good person? Deep down, do I even really want to be a good person, or do I only want to seem like a good person so that people (including myse
"Am I a good person? Deep down, do I even really want to be a good person, or do I only want to seem like a good person so that people (including myself) will approve of me? Is there a difference? How do I ever know whether I'm bullshitting myself, morally speaking (257)
I have been reading this collection of DFW's essays intermittently since (I just checked) November 13, 2012. I turned to Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays primarily because of specific interest in two essays: one on Kafka, the other on Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky (as an avowed Dostoevskyphile and Kafkaphile these couldn't be missed, or so I figured [and wasn't wrong]). I had the book in electronic form, and read aforementioned essays on my laptop during one particularly uninspiring class (on climate ethics – no conclusions should be drawn from this fact, though). Both essays were wonderful, and I subsequently read the essay on the porn industry, called Big Red Son, as well, which was intriguing and amusing without being enduring in an 'I must re-read this someday' sense. In fact, when a few weeks ago I decided to buy myself a physical copy of the collection – since the electronic version was not really working, not drawing me in again – I did not re-read Big Red Son, although I did re-read both the Kafka and Frank's Dostoevsky pieces.
I did, however, read the other, remaining essays in the span of a few days: Certainly the End Of Something Or Other, One Would Sort Of Have To Think, a scathing and downright hilarious review of John Updike's Toward the End of Time; Authority and American Usage, a fascinating review of Bryan Garner's A Dictionary of Modern American Usage; The View From Mrs. Thompson's, a recounting of the (his [DFW's]) moments during and after the 9/11 attacks; How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart, a review of former tennis starlet Tracy Austin's inevitably highly disappointing autobiography; Up, Simba, which traces DFW's experiences during John McCain's 2000 campaign trail, of which he took part and on which he reported for Rolling Stone magazine; Consider the Lobster, on the Maine Lobster festival of 2003 and on the question of whether 1) lobsters feel pain, and 2) whether this matters, and, finally; Host, on The John Ziegler Show and (conservative, right-wing) talk radio more generally. I read these them with a strange kind of urgency and joy and compassion and understanding, finishing the last of them today, on August 1, 2016. You might even say that I was inspired, in the non-cliché, original sense, un-cynical-DFW kind of way.
Loading...
