The recent news that voting machines had been hacked for sport at the Def Con hackers’ conference, should not have been news at all. Since computerized voting was introduced more than two decades ago, it has been shown again and again to have significant vulnerabilities that put a central tenet of American democracy—free and fair elections—at risk.
Books
Extend and Pretend
Since 2010, the people of Greece have been mired in a financial catastrophe as severe and era-defining as the Great Depression in the 1930s. The particulars are horrible to contemplate: salaries unmet, pensions cut, hospital budgets decimated, political turmoil, increased rates of suicide and infant mortality, and at least 23 percent of the working-age population still unemployed. Although the country has received €326 billion from its Eurozone and IMF creditors — spread over three different bailout packages — that money is basically earmarked to pay off Greece’s foreign debts, while tax hikes have had a wrenching effect on the country’s middle and lower classes. To follow the situation in the financial pages of the press is to inevitably knock into the phrase “extend and pretend” — a handy summing-up of the futility of the international community’s approach thus far. The calamity seems particularly intractable because politicians in the more economically robust European Union countries, like Germany, are loath to tell their constituents that their tax dollars have gone into a financial sinkhole.
What’s often lost in the updates on the Greek debt crisis is how it has uprooted individual and communal life. Christos Chrissopoulos and Christos Ikonomou are two Greek writers who use fiction to illuminate this gap. Collectively, their respective books, The Parthenon Bomber and Something Will Happen, You’ll See, express what’s is like to live in an intolerable, degrading situation. If you harbor any concerns for either your own or someone else’s long-term economic stability, then these books may appear especially (if grimly) relevant.
For both writers, nostalgia is a sentiment that sets their characters on edge. A man in one of Ikonomou’s short stories, included here, likens nostalgia to “a mangy dog with gunk in its eyes, licking its wounds. It tricks you into reaching out to pet it then bites you as hard as it can,” whereas for Ch.K, the main character in Chrissopoulos’s novella, The Parthenon Bomber, nostalgia is less an individual burden than a cultural inheritance that plagues Greek society. As with so many idol smashers, he aspires toward a form of liberation. The destruction of the Parthenon for him is both a means of self-assertion — an act he can call his own — and an attempt to free his fellow citizens from sheltering themselves in their country’s ancient glory. “In our city,” Ch.K says, “pride is nonexistent. We’re all living on borrowed greatness. Many would agree, but they’re cowards and won’t admit it.”
Given the rather forthright nature of the title, understandably, The Parthenon Bomber is structured around the questions of who committed the atrocity in question, and why. If the news reports in this self-referential book are to be trusted, Ch.K is a twenty-one-year-old unemployed male. In a parenthesis, Chrissopoulos writes that “only his initials were released to the public.” One of the witness accounts describes him as a kind of off-the-shelf luftmensch. “He comes to blows with inanimate objects, with abstract ideas, words, and phrases.” Though this is certainly an apt description of the main character, it’s impossible not to read his observations in the material light of Greece’s present-day hardship. When Ch.K says, “In this city, nothing belongs to us, ownership doesn’t exist here,” the statement reads like a poetic précis of the sense of dispossession felt by innumerable Athenians for whom austerity has been a catastrophe as much emotional as economic.
As I read The Parthenon Bomber, I couldn’t help but think of the Watts riots and the infamous question posed by distant observers: Why did the rioters destroy property in their own community? Chrissopoulos’s texts offers a rationale for why someone in the grips of unbridled desperation would destroy an emblem of communal pride to draw attention to the grievances that lurk behind the facade that a society presents to the world. Therefore, it’s telling that one of the Parthenon’s former guards, who recalls Ch.K’s numerous visits to the site, should end his testimony by asserting, “I’m sure of one thing about that visitor: He loved it.”
Ikonomou’s Something Will Happen, You’ll See depicts many lives, of all ages, that have been blighted by financial hardship. The book stands with Rafael Chirbes’s On the Edge as one of the remarkable literary interpretations of the recent global downturn. Yet, if I am to speak honestly about my reading experience, I must say that by a certain point I grew used to turning the page to a new story and perversely anticipating another beautifully wrought blow to human dignity.
Many of the characters in these stories smoke too many cigarettes and drink irresponsibly. Often, they are people bound to commitments they can’t keep because they lack the money to do so. Consequently, they stumble and humiliate themselves. Some try to place themselves in recycling bins. One man recommends television as the poor’s best available medicine, while another man eats tacks. The opening sentence from the last story, “Piece by Piece They’re Taking My World Away,” could serve as an epigraph for the book. “The waves fell on the shore like shipwrecked men, broken-spirited, disheartened and weak, one after another, with clipped moans, small sighs, one after another.”
The people in Ikonomou’s stories are hounded by dates — it’s always too long since they’ve been paid or will be paid. Morally and ethically, they are compromised by their poverty. As one character puts it, “Everyone knows — rich and poor — that to get by in times like these your heart has to be even deafer than your ears.” Or as another character says, “Evil’s first victory is when it starts speaking your language, he said — and that scared him because he knew he wasn’t capable of thinking or saying a thought like that.”
Certainly an abiding lesson of these books is that to measure one’s descent into poverty is to think new thoughts. No doubt that most who worship at the shrine of innovation (the technologists, the financiers, et al.) would be loath to pay the price demanded of the men and women in these stories.
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The Terrorists Go Shopping
A shabby-chic cadre of photogenic young Parisians coordinate a series of terrorist attacks, blowing up or setting fire to buildings and monuments throughout the city, then take refuge after nightfall in an empty department store. Nocturama, the French filmmaker Bertrand Bonello’s daring and controversial follow-up to his 2014 Yves Saint Laurent biopic, is at once timely and timeless. It sets the aftermath of two centuries of French history to a hypnotic, trancelike beat.
Unruly and Unerring
Roxane Gay is a writer of extreme empathy. Her fiction and essays elicit as much shared understanding as they give. Her new memoir, Hunger, is the story of being a physical woman in a physical world that has been shaped for so long by men. And I suspect that every woman who reads Hunger will recognize herself in it. For men who read the book, it will be more of a travelogue. Vade mecum.
Jo Nesbo
Every author has a story beyond the one that they put down on paper. The Barnes & Noble Podcast goes between the lines with today’s most interesting writers, exploring what inspires them, what confounds them, and what they were thinking when they wrote the books we’re talking about.
For many writers, the word “vampire” conjures visions of immortal beings of vast powers and romantic destinies. For Jo Nesbo, it meant research into the annals of abnormal psychology, into a world of delusion and obsession more disturbing than any supernatural fable. In this episode of the podcast, the bestselling Norwegian writer talks with Bill Tipper about the stranger-than-fiction cases that inspired The Thirst, Nesbo’s latest novel to feature the world-weary and painfully honest Oslo detective Harry Hole.
The murder victim, a self-declared Tinder addict. The one solid clue—fragments of rust and paint in her wounds—leaves the investigating team baffled. Two days later, there’s a second murder: a woman of the same age, a Tinder user, an eerily similar scene.
The chief of police knows there’s only one man for this case. But Harry Hole is no longer with the force. He promised the woman he loves, and he promised himself, that he’d never go back: not after his last case, which put the people closest to him in grave danger.
But there’s something about these murders that catches his attention, something in the details that the investigators have missed. For Harry, it’s like hearing “the voice of a man he was trying not to remember.” Now, despite his promises, despite everything he risks, Harry throws himself back into the hunt for a figure who haunts him, the monster who got away.
See more from Jo Nesbo here.
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Heretics!: The Wondrous (and Dangerous) Beginnings of Modern Philosophy
Say you went to college. Furthermore, say you went to a college that required you to take a two-year ride through Contemporary Civilization, or Philosophy I and II, or The World According to Dead White Men. They were called survey courses, but they didn’t simply scan the horizon from a comfortable distance — two years with a gin-and-tonic in an Adirondack chair. They were more like two years of what aspirants to enter the Navy SEALs only have to endure for seven days: Hell Week. Many students fell mortally wounded on the punji sticks of Gottfried Leibniz’s sentences; Bento Spinoza did his best to slaughter the survivors. Still, you look back on those years fondly, upon the few weeks when you covered Renaissance philosophy and were asked to read Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Discourse on Method, Leviathan, Pascal’s Pensées, Spinoza’s Ethics, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and, if you were lucky, Novum Organum and The Principia. Right. Fondly.
Enter Steven and Ben Nadler’s slenderized and tenderized intro to Renaissance philosophy by way of comics: Heretics! For those of us who hope to revive in memory what our liberal arts educations were supposed to leave us with for life, it is with pleasure that I can say that Nadler père, a professor of philosophy and humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Nadler fils, a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, have collaborated on a fine formula in which the narrative zip (and overall entertainment value) of the cartoon format lend critical aid to the project of introducing — or reintroducing — readers to philosophy’s revolutionary era. Steven deciphers many of the big ideas of the gentlemen named above, plus, glory be, a woman: Princess Palantine Elisabeth of Bohemia, who may have influenced Nicolas Malebranche, Henry More, Descartes, and Leibniz in ways untold. His work is epigrammatic, but not without polychrome and humor. He has employed the header of most panels to set the scene: political, historical, philosophical. The panel itself serves many purposes: to enlarge upon an idea, to poke fun at some dullard, to convey the excitement of unearthing something wholly new.
Although not strictly chronological, the story has both forward motion and specific gravity: the panels smoothing transition one to the next, building on ideas, introducing counterarguments, hitting high notes: Galileo on sun spots, the Transit of Venus, the movement of the moons of Jupiter; Descartes searching for a “body of knowledge that had the same degree of certainty as the truths of mathematics” (and his wonderful mindbender: “How can I know that I can know if I don’t know what it is to know?” which Steven deconstructs); the extension of Hobbes’s materialism: “Our ideas, our sense perceptions, our feelings, our imaginings, our volitions — they are all just motions in the body”; Viscountess Conway swerving uncannily close to today’s creationists; Locke’s appreciation that we have laws even in the state of nature; Spinoza’s struggle with passion and reason; Hobbes trying to reconcile popular consent with absolute sovereignty. What makes the lacunae acceptable — other than this being a short, graphic history — is that Steven is the kind of teacher who would make a good scoutmaster: he knows how to kindle a fire from unlikely sources. You want to keep building this flicker into something transformative; not a sea of flames, but a light by which to expand your worldview.
Ben is a natty, amiable cartoonist. His characters strike the right emotional response — I couldn’t help it that many reminded me of a weird old friend, Carl Anderson’s character Henry — and Ben gives the story heft and movement with an easy use of guiding gutters between panels and full-page splashes. What takes the cake is his choice of colors. They have an antique quality — pale rose, madder, lake, ocher, sienna — well in keeping with the seventeenth century. Princeton has invested serious resources on the book. The paper is as weighty and tactile as card stock, and the design and construction feel like a fancy car.
The book provides much in the way of where, how, and when, and even, for its limited introduction, aspects of why. Why this blossoming of radical thought, this turning on its head of received opinion; why this faith in the raw science of the familiar, and this lack of faith in religious authorities? This was revolutionary thinking. This thinking was — ready for it? — heretical. Giordano Bruno was sentenced to death by burning in 1600 for his heliocentric views (insubordination didn’t help his case). Here we see thinking’s heavy lifting being done at peril — thinking as elemental as the periodic table. And we are given that friendly nudge to familiarize ourselves with these people, not only to grasp how we arrived at our way of comprehending and being in the world, but to keep on questioning.
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Wagner on Trial
In Barrie Kosky’s new production of Die Meistersinger, which opened the 2017 Bayreuth Festival, the musical cobbler Hans Sachs has been restyled as his creator Richard Wagner, isolated in the witness box at the Nuremberg Trials, and we the audience have now become the tribunal, passing judgment on him. Sachs, singing of German art, seems to be desperately pleading for absolution after the vicious ways in which German high culture—and especially Wagner’s music—was harnessed to the ideology of Nazism.
Fools, Cowards, or Criminals?
Marcel Ophuls does not dilute the monstrosity of Nazi crimes at all. But he refuses to simply regard the perpetrators as monsters. “Belief in the Nazis as monsters,” he once said, “is a form of complacency.” This reminds me of something the controversial German novelist Martin Walser once said about the Auschwitz trials held in Frankfurt in the 1960s. He wasn’t against them. But he argued that the daily horror stories in the popular German press about the grotesque tortures inflicted by Nazi butchers made it easier for ordinary Germans to distance themselves from these crimes and the regime that made them happen. Who could possibly identify with such brutes? If only monsters were responsible for the Holocaust and other mass murders, there would never be any need for the rest of us to look in the mirror.
Doubt and Disruption: Ellen Ullman’s Life in Code
Ellen Ullman has long cast a skeptical eye over the tech world from the inside, spurning the Kool-Aid of start-up culture and questioning the industry’s obsession with disruption. Author of the cult classic Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents, she tumbled into the programming world accidentally. In 1979, fresh out of studying literature at Cornell University, Ullman was strolling through her San Francisco neighborhood when she saw a TRS-80 in the window of Radio Shack. Nicknamed the “Trash-80,” it was one of the first mass-marketed PCs. Reader, she bought it.
“I didn’t know it was the next cool thing. I just found great satisfaction in getting something to work,” Ullman tells me by phone from New York, where she has returned to live part-time after decades in San Francisco. Ullman parlayed her passion for tinkering with machines into a career as a programmer, but the written word’s allure never left her. She eventually turned to chronicling the transformation of the tech world and, in turn, the world’s transformation by tech.
Ullman began writing the linked essays in her riveting new book, Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology, in 1994. It was the year Amazon and Yahoo were born, and the moment web browsers first came to mainstream attention. One of the few women toiling in the coding coalmines, she documented the puerility of programming culture, where obnoxious behavior was not just accepted but admired in the young white men who dominated the industry.
In Life in Code, Ullman describes a software vendor developers’ conference where self-proclaimed “barbarian” engineers project slides of themselves dressed in animal skins, holding spears. When a man at the event asks Ullman why she has decided to leave engineering for consulting, she begins to explain her frustrations with the “the cult of the boy engineer” — only to be interrupted by a massive, organized water balloon fight.
There’s blatant sexism, too: at one company, her boss rubs her back while she codes. At another, she’s excluded from meetings even after being promoted to manager.
“I didn’t manage my anger well, and I felt I had to leave the company because of that,” Ullman admits with sigh. “I’ve learned over the years that angry dignity is the key: you have to learn to just stare it in the face, find a place inside you where you believe: I belong here.” She points out that she was just an ordinary programmer doing “the nitty-gritty to make things work,” not some revolutionary innovator. Yet, she says, “What kept me going was the fascination and wonder — with coding and understanding systems in a deeper and deeper way. It was not to prove that I could be the woman who broke the ceiling.”
Ullman vividly evokes a milieu of young men sealed inside their own mental bubbles, alienated from their bodies and disdainful of real-world interactions and responsibilities. They prefer communicating by email rather than by telephone or in the flesh. Those observations may seem commonplace now — but Ullman’s prescience was seeing how they created a system that facilitates these preferences. In doing so, they’ve remade the world in their image. As Ullman accurately predicted in the 1994 essay that kicks off this book, “Soon we may all be living the programming life,” each of us staring deep into our own machines.
In Life in Code, she follows human threads that sometimes get lost in discussions of technology’s grand tapestry. Ullman charmingly chronicles an email romance with a colleague that doesn’t survive their attempts to translate it into the flesh, and she wrangles with her doubts about Artificial Intelligence via a lovely ode to her elderly cat, Sadie. Pondering the idea that even organisms as complex as mammals can be understood purely in terms of genetically encoded logic and reflexes, she asks, “Was Sadie a trick? Was all that life — from acrobat to purring companion to arthritic old lady . . . just part of her hardwiring?”
This new book serves as a kind of sequel to 1997’s Close to the Machine. Like her chance collision with the TRS-80, Ullman’s first book was a result of serendipity. She says City Lights editor Nancy Peters mentioned at a dinner party that she was considering publishing Resisting the Virtual Life, an essay collection about the “information superhighway”; a mutual friend suggested that Ullman could supply an insider’s perspective. She followed her contribution to that book with Close to the Machine, an elegant swan dive into the tech boom that hit the zeitgeist perfectly.
“It was just at that time where people were intuiting that this wave was about to come over them and they didn’t know precisely what it was,” Ullman says. She continued gathering material for another nonfiction book but along the way veered into writing novels: The Bug, a thriller set at a Silicon Valley start-up, and By Blood, a psychological labyrinth of Hitchcockian twists that enfold both the legacy of the Holocaust and the social chaos of 1970s San Francisco.
For Life in Code, she gathered two decades’ worth of writing and added 100 pages of new material that confronts our tech-saturated present. Ullman describes the fever dream of the Internet — from utopian fantasia to financial hysteria to commercial dystopia — as it unfolds in real time. Some of the contemporaneous narratives, like the reported story about the Y2K panic from 1999, vibrate with the uncertainty of the moment. Interviewing tech people, she detects a kind of “animal insecurity, as if they’re sniffing something scary upwind.” Ullman herself is horrified by the potential for disaster built into our new, invisible infrastructure; as a programmer, she understands how haphazardly it is all constructed, layers on top of layers that were never built to last and that have been stretched and twisted far beyond their original purposes.
“It wasn’t this abstract dream, it was made of wires and networks and software, and the people who wrote these programs, they never thought they would still be running!” Ullman says with amazement. “They thought new technology would come along and it would all be rewritten.”
Asked if there are things she didn’t foresee, Ullman takes a long pause. “I thought we’d all be staring into computer screens, but I didn’t know we would all be walking around with the screens in front of us all the time,” she finally replies. “I also didn’t expect the discrimination against women to last. Not only that it would last this long but that it would even get more grueling for women.”
She did anticipate some of the contemporary problems the Internet has wrought. In a chapter of Life in Code written in 1998, she writes of disintermediation — the way technology is eliminating middlemen (salespeople, travel agents) in the name of efficiency. She mourns the human toll it took on her San Francisco neighborhood. “I watched the way that all of these little people were being put out of a job,” she says. “When I hear the word disruption, in my mind, I think of all these people in the middle who were earning a living. We will sweep away all that money they were earning and we will move that to the people at the top.”
Writing fiction has allowed Ullman to consider how our forerunners lived, in very specific ways. What did the streets smell like when cars were first invented? Did women’s shoes hurt back then? Although she remains excited by the wonders of new technology, Ullmann feels more than ever the need to remain grounded in the past. She says crisply, “All things change, but we always have to think: what are we leaving behind?”
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The Highest Form of Flattery
Like the nineteenth century, our own moment is one at which the expansion of museums and new technologies for the dissemination of images have combined to make the history of art-making seem open to view as never before. Elizabeth Prettejohn’s elegant new book reminds us that pastiche and ironic “appropriation” are not the only possible responses to that experience.
Sig Nordal 