Kelly McGonigal, The Upside of Stress: Why Stress Is Good for You and How To Get Good at It: Free early review copy. Stress is poorly defined here, unfortunately; it sometimes seems to cover the waterfront, including long-term challenges like caring for a sick partner as well as work crunches, but more often seems focused on time-limited challenges. McGonigal argues that we’re poorly served by being told that stress is a problem, because we generally (1) can’t get rid of most stress, and (2) often benefit from the stressful activities, like raising kids or caring for relatives or working at a challenging job, in ways that we would regret if they were absent. Stress, she argues, is not unhealthy or detrimental to performance if you understand it correctly. Research shows that people who are told that feeling stress won’t hurt their performance do perform better; they accept the stress as a sign of their commitment to the activity. More generally, reaffirming the values that you have and the benefits that an activity will give you and your community in the long term—especially by writing them down—can help you put stress in context and understand it as a reaction, not a condition to be treated. I don’t know how well it would work for a really long-term challenge, but I’m going to try that pep talk next time I’m nervous about my job.

Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: This is a comprehensive look at the various challenges for human privacy and security in an age of ever-increasing corporate and government ability to surveil and influence us. Nothing is likely to surprise anyone who’s been reading Wired, the EFF’s blog, or similar sources for the past few years, but Schneier provides an elegant update of the truism that those who sacrifice privacy for security will end up having neither.

Daria Roithmayr, Reproducing Racism: How Everyday Choices Lock in White Advantage: Short introduction to the feedback loops that make white privilege self-reinforcing, from the wealth boost provided by slavery and then discrimination against nonwhites, especially African Americans, in neighborhood funding and mortgage lending. With pervasive segregation, the word of mouth networks that provide many jobs—including the vital first jobs—are especially helpful to whites, and whites can more often afford to have their parents pay for at least part of college and help with household down payments. Depressingly, Roithmayr has very few suggestions for dealing with these locked-in advantages.

Kathryn Schultz, Being Wrong: Like it says on the tin, this is a book about the agonies and ecstasies of error. Just as bats are batty and slugs sluggish, to err is human, according to our own cliches; Schultz argues that error is regularly a path to discovery and improvement, and that we need to handle error with more than the usual denial and repression. It’s charmingly written, though I’m not sure how much I learned from it in the end.

Martha M. Ertman, Love’s Promises: How Formal and Informal Contracts Shape All Kinds of Families: Free review copy. Ertman recounts her own story of forming a voluntary family with a gay man who’s the father of her child, then beginning a long-term relationship with a woman who ultimately became her wife and the third parent of her child. She uses this as a jumping-off point to discuss the unenforceable “deals” we make in our private lives, and when they should be legally enforceable “contracts.” She deems marriage “plan A” because it’s the most common, but advocates for consistent legal recognition and treatment of “plan B” arrangements. G-d willing, the Supreme Court will soon make about half the justification for this book unnecessary, but for those who still don’t want to get married, she offers some general guidance about how to think about managing a relationship that doesn’t work out, and what kinds of promises people might make in advance both to increase the chances that the relationship will work out and to minimize the damage if it doesn’t. It’s not a substitute for legal advice, but the book does provide an overview of various rules about assisted reproduction, adoption, domestic partnerships, etc.

Elizabeth Warren & Amelia Warren Tyagi, The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke: Elizabeth Warren being down-home sensible before she burst onto the national scene; it’s nice to know some people don’t change. Basic argument: when most married women didn’t work, they served as reserve labor who could help tide a family over when a male breadwinner lost a job by going to work themselves. With more two-income families, that reserve is now deployed all the time and thus it can’t add income in times of stress. That wouldn’t be so bad if it were easy to cover the nut on one income and save/spend on extras with the other income, but in fact the increasing expense of housing in particular has meant that it takes two incomes to provide children with access to “good” schools and “safe” neighborhoods. (They point out that it doesn’t matter whether these schools/neighborhoods really are better as long as the parents believe it; they’ll take big risks for their children’s futures.) That means an unexpected job loss or medical crisis can start a devastating downwards spiral, and banks etc. will happily help that spiral accelerate. Unsurprisingly, this 2003 book told the truth about bad mortgage loans and predatory lenders, but no one was listening. I’m not particulary convinced that school vouchers are the way to fix the problem, but I think Warren has changed her thinking on that too as she’s seen more of the way inequality works now.

Alexa Clay & Kyra Maya Phillips, The Misfit Economy: Lessons in Creativity from Pirates, Hackers, Gangsters, and Other Informal Entrepreneurs: Free review copy. I wanted this to be an interesting book and not a bunch of business book platitudes. Oh well. Some pirates and lawbreakers are very successful! Unfortunately the book doesn’t have any theories about when breaking the rules/laws leads to success and when it leads to failure (indeed, the authors talk to a Somali pirate in a jail cell and a former convict who served a number of years for killing someone, and discuss what they say as if it were exactly what the non-caught people say). Perhaps the ultimate expression of the book’s failure to define or interrogate its terms is this sentence: “A significant majority of the misfits we spoke with (aside from the con artists, of course) had this commitment to authenticity in common.” Sadly, I think they’re serious.

This is perhaps the apotheosis of using “disruption” as a buzzword to cover anything that might someday make money, or at least anything that takes money from other people. The authors even say that hierarchy is bad, then discuss successful pirate endeavors with elaborate chains of command. And no, attacking ships with guns does not “build market opportunity where one does not seem to exist.” Actually, the Somali pirate story is the most interesting part in that it’s clear that the failure of the Somali state to keep poachers (also disruptors!) away from fishermen is what drove some of them into piracy in the first place. “[T]hey recognized an opportunity and seized it”—along with ships’ cargo; one interviewee describes how awful it was to board ships where people were crying and begging for their lives. If we wanted to draw lessons from the Somali pirates, rather than looking to lawbreakers, we might fruitfully look to law as the foundation for innovation and productive success instead of armed theft.

In one sense the book represents so much immersion in neoliberalism that the authors don’t even notice—embrace uncertainty, improvisation, living in the cracks, they say. Another feature of the US-based examples of successful rulebreaking is how much they were usually dependent on white privilege—some people can get away with moving fast and breaking things; others have to worry more about ending up shot for either. They cite research studying entrepreneurs (defined as those who engaged in inventive or risky activity, not just people self-employed in a known line of business) that found that a key characteristic associated with a successful entrepreneur was juvenile delinquency. But of course Bill Gates’ juvenile lawbreaking didn’t land him in jail. In this vein, you could think of today’s school-to-prison pipeline for black Americans as a perfect technique to strip minority communities of many potential go-getters—it couldn’t work better if we’d planned it that way. Now that would’ve been an interesting book, but unfortunately the authors didn’t write that book.

In a get-off-my-side moment, the authors condemn the patent system for helping sustain monopolies. Points, though, for giving me an example of a sentence where the Oxford comma provides no succor: “Pirate gangs also employ pimps to service gangs with prostitutes, lawyers, and banknote checkers who use machines to detect fake money.”