I don't mean to nitpick, Tom, but is this really your plan?

Preliminary notes: (1) Survivorship bias, or why taking lessons only from the successful is a really bad idea, in an elegantly written narrative.

(2) Ugh, I hate grading.

(3) Note to self: Veronica Mars, for all its awesomeness and willingness to engage with class and gender politics, often enough cozied up to the creepy side thereof. E.g., Wanda Varner’s betrayal versus Duncan Kane’s noblesse oblige (and yes, there were structural reasons Wanda felt she had to betray others, but somehow that’s not what came off as the key message); Mac’s “real” parents and their apparent genetic superiority (though they were helpless in the face of Madison Sinclair’s reign of terror).

I did not notice at the time, but this is a depressing set of books.

Dan Baum, Gun Guys: A Road Trip: Baum is a dyed-in-the-wool liberal, except that he loves guns. And he agrees with gun guys that liberal distaste for guns is a matter of taste, since he argues that the effect of guns on crime can’t really be proven. (He has less to say about the effect of guns on suicide and accidental death, where he agrees that gun guys have fallen down in promoting responsibility as a gun owner’s social duty; he argues that social pressure should make poor gun storage socially unacceptable, like smoking at someone else’s house. He doesn’t mention “like driving drunk,” because of course that was both a social and a legal change, though he does suggest that rational gun owners ought to support the criminalization of reckless failure to secure guns.) I feel some sympathy for his ‘don’t target responsible gun owners’ (but for what? What exactly are they being targeted for?) position and for his argument that supporting gun restrictions has put a barrier between many lower-middle-class (white) voters and the Democratic party they should naturally support. But I feel like I’m being asked to make yet another deal with the devil (since the Democrats’ pact with Wall Street has gone so well), and I wondered why in his road trip to talk to gun owners and figure out what was up with them, he never did seek out the irresponsible ones whose kids shoot themselves or other kids. He did randomly encounter a guy who was put in a wheelchair by his own gun (his girlfriend shot him with a gun that he thought didn’t have a bullet chambered), and he sought out a former gang member who’d been shot, but he never manages to integrate these people or the “irresponsible” gun owners he generally condemns (including the drunken shooters who ricochet bullets down on him and his wife during a rafting trip as they shoot bullets at a rock face) with his insistence that carrying a gun makes him a more responsible, careful individual, always aware of his surroundings. I accept that this is true for him (though not for the security guards who leave their guns in restrooms, or the firearms instructor Baum encounters who forgets that her gun is loaded, or for that matter my brother-in-law whose friend accidentally discharged his gun in my brother-in-law’s apartment).

But that very fact—that carrying a gun changes a person—is another way of saying that a person with a gun is a different socio/cultural/technical entity than a person without a gun, and not always for the better; because of this, regulating the gun can change how the person behaves and even how the person sees him or herself. He imagines how guns can fend off crimes—for example inducing carriers to deescalate and avoid confrontation because any confrontation could become deadly—but never how they could make crimes worse. Baum ultimately argues that we need warriors—sheepdogs, is his other term—in our culture. But why do they need so many guns? If the argument is that Americans, unlike, say, Japanese or Australians, need lots of civilian guns to make each other behave, then shouldn’t we be taking a harder look at what we might be doing differently so that this need would diminish?

M.E. Thomas, Confessions of a Sociopath: A Life Spent Hiding in Plain Sight: This book, like the author, seems to be a hot mess. (Disclosure: apparently I know this person; she teaches in my field; I’ve watched her present at conferences, and I’ve cited her work.) Sociopaths, she argues, are just another variation on the human spectrum, and have some advantages in comparison to empaths (nonsociopaths). She describes a life of reckless choices made because she can’t be deterred by negative consequences, though she does like to game the system when such consequences are avoidable and to take significant risks, including driving dangerously and living in high-crime neighborhoods, when they offer corresponding pleasures. At the same time, she values other people for what they can provide—sometimes love, sometimes attention, sometimes the amusement of taking their lives apart. She describes physically and emotionally abusive parents, but argues that they gave her the tools to control her sociopathy so that she’s never done the kind of physical harm or life-ruining fraud we associate with sociopaths. Is she a sociopath? Or a really screwed up person with little emotional control? It’s hard to tell, and she notes that the diagnosis of sociopathy/psychopathy is hotly contested, but seems to derive great value from the label as a way to explain herself.

David A. Harris, Failed Evidence: Why Law Enforcement Resists Science: Dry but depressing book about how unreliable most “scientific” techniques are when used in criminal prosecution, and how prosecutors and police resist known improvements (sequential lineups instead of side-by-side, blinded investigators to avoid confirmation bias and the unconscious herding we do because we’re human, not because we’re bad people, etc.) out of inertia, institutional barriers, and the fear of losing status as the good guys. There are a few success stories, but even they don’t spread well despite not producing the feared collapse of conviction rates. I’m already on Harris’s side, so I would’ve appreciated more discussion of ways in which the solutions can be problematic—e.g., filming confessions gets rid of some things that police do that are bad, but a filmed confession also seems more truthful than a written one even when the same duplicitous techniques have been used on a vulnerable subject to produce a false confession.

Mark Mazzetti, The Way of the Knife: The story of how the CIA and the US military criss-crossed, with the military taking on increased intelligence gathering functions and the CIA carrying out more kill missions, after 9/11. Rather than consolidating, we just doubled down on having multiple agencies on the ground, sometimes working at cross purposes. We handed out millions of dollars—billions—going to private contractors and often enough to people who used our money and our weapons against us. Mazzetti contends that the seductiveness of drone strikes has led first the Bush administration and then the Obama administration to define success as having lots of kills, with no attention to whether we (a) know anything about the people who hate us and the countries they’re in or (b) are creating more enemies than we get rid of with each strike. Traditional intelligence has been subordinated to James Bond kill missions, to our detriment. Obama doesn’t come off well, giving the CIA everything it wants, but Bush is particularly pathetic, continuing to believe that Musharraf had wholly committed Pakistan to the US side when it was obvious to everyone else, including the other Americans, that he and his government were favoring the Taliban and more concerned about fighting India than helping the US hunt the people we deemed terrorists.

Michael Moss, Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us: Capitalism is not your friend. It wants you to eat lots and lots of cheap food whose otherwise bad taste is disguised by lots of salt, sugar, and fat, each of which disguise many sins; and then ideally it wants you to turn to expensive treatments for the resulting problems, often offered by the very same companies that sold you the terrible food in the first place. This book, which focuses on the food producers who fill the middle aisles in supermarkets, is full of really depressing facts about what the food industry has done to make its products worse and tastier, from testing on three-year-olds (who can’t even properly use language and have to be coaxed with Big Bird) to using “fruit concentrate” that has been reduced to just another form of sugar, but whose presence on the label gives an impression of healthfulness. One sad anecdote involves Philadelphia parents trying to get local store owners to refuse to sell junk to kids before breakfast; one of the parents doesn’t have time to cook, so chooses “fruit and yogurt” breakfast bars because they have calcium. But they also have more sugar and less fiber than Oreos. The most crucial point, Moss emphasizes, is that there is nothing accidental in the grocery store. It is all designed, and not with your interests in mind. Individual willpower isn’t enough as long as Wall Street demands ever greater profits, which can only be attained with ever greater consumption of ever sweeter, saltier, and fattier food.