by Weike Wang

This wasn’t quite what I was expecting. What I was expecting from JOAN IS OKAY was something along the lines of ELEANOR OLIPHANT IS COMPLETELY FINE. Both are about misfit women. (And both women are either OK or completely fine.) But ELEANOR is played for laughs and sentimentality, while JOAN was completely serious and refused to follow any predictable narrative arc.

Joan is an ICU doctor who lives inside her work. She enjoys nothing more than being a cog in a machine. She has odd, not-exactly-close yet not-really-distant relationships with her mother and her older brother, and likewise had with her father, whose death back in China opens the novel. Her relationships with her co-workers are also not cold or distant or weird, but odd, in a matter-of-fact kind of way.

Joan gets a new neighbor across the hall who infiltrates her life in a frankly creepy-friendly way. He gives her food, objects, furniture. As this guy noses in more and more, his furniture filling her previously spartan living space, one would be forgiven for thinking: ah, now here is where the fun young guy shows Joan, one piece of furniture at a time, how to live, laugh, and love! But, no. It is not that kind of book at all.

The author is not a medical doctor, but she is a chemist with a doctorate in public health. It’s always so refreshing to read about characters who are in STEM. Writers only ever seem to write about other writers, usually thinly disguised as “artists.” (I always imagine them thinking, “It’ll be way too obvious I’m writing about myself if I make her a writer… I know! I’ve got it, she’ll be an artist.” Right, they’ll never suspect.)

by Nikole Hannah-Jones & the NYT Magazine

Hi [Friend Who Gave Me This for Xmas]!

I’ve read a little more than half of the 1619 Project and I think I’m going to bail.  It’s just one horrible thing after another.

It’s a tremendous work of scholarship, and given all the over-the-top controversy about it, I’m glad to have acquainted myself firsthand with at least half of it.   From what I’ve read about the accusations of historical inaccuracies, they seem to be a matter of misreading and of interpretation, not the result of actual poor scholarship, IMHO.

What I remember most about Ta-Nahesi Coates Between the World & Me was how said that as a kid he hated Black History month, and learning about the civil rights era, because it seemed to be all about black people being hurt.  Images of black people with fire hoses aimed at them, black people being beaten, etc.  That came back to me as I was reading last night and really wanted to be done with it.  I’m glad you gave it to me, I’m glad I read what I read, I’m glad it exists.  Thank you!

by Victoria Turk

Somehow I expected more about handling electronic communication at work, and less about dating apps and such. Extremely basic advice. Spot fake news by checking the sources! I do like that phone calls make her shudder. But I disagree with her that you should text a warning before you call. The three words I hate most in MS Teams are “can”, “I”, and “call.” Every fiber of my being screams noooooooooooooooooo you canNOT, while my fingers type the letters “O” and “K” because I’m such a good team player. If they’d just call and rip the band-aid off, it would be better. There was a blessed period when work texting blossomed when nobody called anymore. Then MS Teams made it so easy to make a Teams call. Pththththth on you, Microsoft.

by Eugenia Chang

Mathematician Eugenia Chang suggests ways to remedy gender-related disparities in representation, pay, etc. by changing the characteristics that we reward and value, irrespective of gender. So for example, theory: men are more confident, they speak up more, they get noticed more, they get valued more, they get paid more. Common wisdom redress: teach girls to be more confident. Get women to speak up more. Get men to quiet down and listen to women. Chang’s suggestion: Why are we paying people just for confidence and speaking up? The people not speaking up so much – often but not always women – are often bringing just as much value to the table; why aren’t we nurturing and rewarding them for the value they bring, instead of trying to make them more like men?

I think I got the gist of it there. To remove gender from the picture, Chang suggests two new adjectives to take the place of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine.’ I’ll quote her definitions here:

Ingressive: focusing on oneself over society and community, imposing on people more than taking others into account, emphasizing independence and individualism, more competitive and adversarial than collaborative, tending toward selective or single-track thought processes

Congressive: focusing on society and community over self, taking others into account more than imposing on them, emphasizing interdependence and interconnectedness, more collaborative and cooperative than competitive, tending toward circumspect thought processes

Chang suggests that we picture a society where congressiveness is valued more than ingressiveness. Not ‘as much as,’ but ‘more than.’ Here I feel Chang and I part company, and that her argument could have been stronger if, in a congressive mindset (!), she could have acknowledged that maybe we need the strengths of both personality types to make a good world. But she makes no bones about where she stands: congressive is better.

I like to think that I do not impose on people and am not particularly adversarial. Those are negative personality traits you could argue we could all do with less of, or do without. But what’s wrong with valuing one’s independence? With single-track thought processes? There is definitely a time and place for laser focus. If Chang had merely said, let’s make space for your more collaborative and wholistic-thinker types to flourish, I would have been much more receptive. I certainly love leaving gender out of it. That takes away space for men to get defensive, more ‘ingressively’ inclined females such as myself from getting similarly defensive (not that I ever would), and for anyone to decry ‘reverse sexism.’ Just focus on the individuals being marginalized, and why, and how to fix.

Another one of my heroes wrote to me!

This time it was Jonathan Haidt. Close to my heart most for The Righteous Mind, which I loved well enough to actually give a little lecture about it at my local library several years ago. I was listening to a 2020 podcast where he was interviewed by Fellow Noodle-Hero Julia Galef. (Double-hero-whammy, I love when that happens.) They were talking about the “sacred” as one of morality’s foundations (an important concept!) when he reached around for non-obvious “everyday” things one might find “sacred”, and he said, “Oh, say like even the Rolling Stones” (noodle ears perk up) “…Tattoo You…” (wha!?!) “…side 2.”

This guy is a fan of Tattoo You, the 1981 collection of throwaways only remembered nowadays for “Start Me Up” (which I understand is widely disliked for being overplayed) and “Waiting on a Friend” (more critically acclaimed/tolerated)! And not only that. SIDE 2!

I guess this guy gets a hundred emails a day through his website “Contact” link, but not many with the subject line “Tattoo You.” I basically told him how happy I was to now have one more reason to love him, and he basically said he was happy to hear it.

Reading books is so much a one-way street. When a writer’s ideas really resonate with me, and I put him/her up on my Pantheon shelf, and then something prompts me to reach out, and he/she actually replies, it just feels a little like god himself coming down from on high. You don’t expect it. People writing the books are in some higher realm communicating with you through the magical object, The Book. They talk TO you. You don’t expect them to talk BACK to you. Maybe it feels like the book talking?

Or maybe I’m just a squealing giddy schoolgirl at heart. MEEEEEE! HE WROTE TO MEEEEEE!