just a selkie in the sea

(I also go by Liz)

avatar by @PotechiPon on twitter


...when your books accidentally have an ✨aesthetic✨

-Just Finished-

Anthropologists in the Stock Exchange: A Financial History of Victorian Science — Marc Flandreau

Yep, this is a good one. My brain isn't doing words super good today, so I'm going to let this passage from the book speak for itself:

If one lesson has emerged from this investigation of the jungle of white collar cannibals, it is that an attempt to understand any science, especially the social sciences, that starts with a select group of "genuine" scientists and then somehow inductively defines the contours of the discipline is a non-starter. The prestige of science is precisely what the politicians of science want us to look at. One can see how previous scholars, by keeping in mind such questions as the greater or lesser prestige of such and such anthropologist from the period, constructed a universe where Lubbock was well in sight except when he was trafficking in Corporation of Foreign Bond holders' voting rights. This was also a universe where Pim was nowhere to be seen except as a puppet in a gruesome horror show suddenly displayed for a one-night stand at St. James's Hall and then hidden again forever—the horror. What was missed as a result—totally missed—was the commonality of the technologies in which Pim and Lubbock were conversant. (274)


And this:

That anthropologists (and ethnologists) had roots in the stock exchange implies that they were shaped by it in a fundamental way. If the key theme that has gradually emerged from the narrative in this book is to be distilled in one expression, perhaps a correct characterization would be to say that anthropology was one of the techniques of globalization that developed in an age when the control of the West expanded and operated through the capital market. It is because the West had capital markets and because imperial conquest raised problems of value and valuation that British anthropology took the form it took. Anthropological science followed the capital pull just like the capital followed anthropological knowledge. The result was the embedding of anthropology inside a network of correspondents or members located in Real del Monte or Massowah, itself reflecting preoccupations with bullion or cotton. (275)

I'm always up for a good questioning of the "nobility of science" and this is an excellent entry in the series.

Broken Arrow: The Declassified History of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Accidents (Vol. 1) — Michael H. Maggelet and James C. Oskins

Honestly don't have much to say about this that I didn't say last week. If you're interested in simple reporting on weapons accidents with no meta-level analysis across accidents, you've come to the right place.

-Now Reading-

What If? — Randall Munroe

If you're not familiar with the conceit of this book, here you go. While I of course love a silly question taken absolutely seriously (do I ever), I also think that What If? is a masterclass in science communication. Taking a silly question like "From what height would you need to drop a steak for it to be cooked when it hit the ground?" and turning it into a lesson on physics and the Earth's atmosphere just... rules. It's very cool (just like the steak would be).

a graph of steak trajectories with horizontal axis 'steak altitude' and vertical axis 'steak speed'

Around the World in 80 Days — Jules Verne, narrated by Jim Dale

We're closing in! Today, there was an attempted takeover of the train across the Great Plains and Passepartout saved the day with his acrobatic skills! Fogg had to go rescue him, though, so we're behind schedule once again! Next up: a sail-sled journey across the Plains. I assume nothing will go awry here.

Netflix Recommends: Algorithms, Film Choice, and the History of Taste — Mattias Frey

Basically paused this week while I finished other stuff! It's a library book, though, so it's close to the top of the queue.

Gender in Play on the Shakespearean Stage — Michael Shapiro

Despite the title, this book is not just about cross-dressing and gender in Shakespeare—instead, it takes Shakespeare as one early adopter of this convention (on the stage) and traces the lineage of playboys (yes) dressing as women, and as women-dressing-as-men, through about an 80-year period. While he is of course interested in the actual performance of these roles, he is primarily interested in what these roles and the audience's reaction to them can tell us about gender in Early Modern England.

Hilariously, it turns out I already own one of the books he cites as the resource in historical study of cross-dressing and gender, at least circa 1996: The Tradition of Female Transvestism in Early Modern Europe, Rudolf Dekker and Lotte van de Pol. And yes, I will be reviewing said book in an upcoming books post because it just got bumped way up on the to-read list.


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