Clara Raubertas // Freelance Web Design, Web Development, and Web Consulting // Cambridge and Boston, Massachusetts clara raubertas design. development. consulting.

I’m still working on my project of visiting every stop on the MBTA (albeit somewhat half-heartedly, and very slowly!). Recently I visited yet another new T stop — Maverick on the blue line, in East Boston.

The Maverick stop is convenient to Piers Park, which is a waterfront park with great oceanside views of the city tucked away into this unassuming neighborhood. I went there for a picnic around sunset, so I got photos of both the daytime and nighttime views, both of which are quite picturesque!

Maverick also had a cool feature I hadn’t seen in any other T stop — a real-time display of where various trains on the line were, so you could see how long you’d have to wait. (Blurry photo included — the lit dots are train cars!)

Unrelatedly: I’ve started tracking books I read on GoodReads rather than using this blog. So on the off-chance you want to keep up with what I’m reading, that’s where it is!

5. Peace - Gene Wolfe

6. Don’t Make Me Think - Steve Krug

7. Midnight Robber - Nalo Hopkinson

8. The Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula K. LeGuin

9. Generosity - Richard Powers

10. The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR’S Secretary of Labor and His Moral Conscience - Kirstin Downey

11. Where the Girls Are - Susan Douglas

End of 2009 Books

Backlash - Susan Faludi - This book was amazing. Well written, well researched, and terrifying. Faludi convincingly argues that not only did the 1980s show a cultural backlash against the progress made in womens’ rights in the 1970s, but that the same pattern has been visible historically every time women have made social progress.

Seed to Harvest - Octavia Butler - actually 4 books (Wild Seed, Mind of My Mind, Clay’s Ark, Patternmaster)

Oryx and Crake - Margaret Atwood

Witness to Roswell - Thomas Carey/Donald Schmitt - for book club. This book argues that extraterrestrials really landed at Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. While I wasn’t fully convinced that that’s the case, the book did put up a pretty compelling argument that something really weird happened there, and was covered up by the military.

A Tour of the Calculus - David Berlinski - kind of like if Tom Robbins were teaching Math 152

The Atrocity Archive - Charles Stross - This book had me at “Turing-Lovecraft Thesis”. A neat science fiction book seamlessly integrating otherworldly horrors with the day-to-day responsibilities of a government sysadmin.

2010 Books

1. Concrete Jungle - Charles Stross - the sequel to Atrocity Archive. A shorter, lighter book but still a good time.

2. The Tao is Silent - Raymond Smullyan

3. VALIS - Philip K. Dick - this book is intense! Even crazier than your average Dick book.^* Dick’s main character in this book may or may not be a hallucination of the narrator (Dick himself), who may or may not be schizophrenic, having had a mystical experience (identical to one Dick himself actually had) that either is a hallucination that means he’s crazy or an insight into the nature of the universe.

4. Fortress of Solitude - Jonathan Lethem

*tee hee^**

**I am 12.

Several of these are from the science fiction course my partner Jesse is teaching this semester; I decided to read along with the syllabus. Getting (back?) into scifi has been really rewarding so far, and I feel inspired to check out more science fiction writers (suggestions? leave a comment!).

• The Soloist - Steve Lopez - For book club. A Los Angeles journalist’s true account of his friendship with a schizophrenic homeless man who is also a brilliant musician. Brings up a lot of difficult, unsolved issues about the best ways to help people who are severely mentally ill.
• Galatea 2.2 - Richard Powers - A sci-fi novel about creating a computer program that can read and understand literature. The book itself is fairly literary in style — and occasionally a little overwrought (the protagonist is kind of emo, and named after the author(!)) — but does pursue some interesting ideas about the role of literature in the formation of a personality. As with most sci-fi that deals directly with Artificial Intelligence, I was irked by the implausibility of the programming process; I know I should be able to suspend my disbelief, but for some reason I have a hard time with that.
• Orphans of the Sky - Robert Heinlein - Is this Hisland?? Women are basically invisible in this young adult adventure story set in a society (in space!) where women are literally property. This book is kind of hilariously bad, actually.
• Nudge - Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein - A sensible, engaging economics text. The basic premise is that many economists analyze the world as though everyone always acts totally rationally — but in real life, humans don’t think through every decision that carefully, and are influenced by default options/where on the shelf a product is/what it seems like everyone else is doing. The authors propose a philosophy of “libertarian paternalism”: they believe people should be able to make their own choices about almost everything (hence libertarian), but that since people will be influenced by the way the choices are framed and structured, governments (or other organizations) should try to structure the defaults and the presentation of the options so that people will be more likely to choose a “good” option (hence paternalism). I like their combination of sensible economic analysis with acknowledgement that people are human and influenced by subtle “nudges” whether they consciously realize it or not. And it’s always fun to read books by University of Chicago economists who use restaurants I know in their examples :).
• Her Smoke Rose Up Forever - James Tiptree Jr. - OK, so this is a short story collection, and I’ve only gotten to a few so far. But so good. Tiptree was actually a woman writing under a pen name, and her stories have something of a feminist slant. They combine imaginative explorations of gender, sex, and technology with emotional nuance and an incredibly compelling writing style.
• Gateway - Frederik Pohl - From the seventies. Alternates the protagonist’s space explorations (using an ancient technology that humans don’t understand) with his sessions with an electronic psychiatrist; explores issues of choice and agency.
• Engine Summer - John Crowley - This book is a lot of fun! Like Gateway, it depicts a society of humans making use of technology left over from a more advanced civilization; however, the tone and attitude are completely different. Where Gateway depicts a barren earth and a bleak future focused on capitalism and scarcity, Engine Summer describes a happy group living commune-style, who have forgotten what money even is, and traces the protagonist’s coming-of-age journey in lyrical terms. This book really draws you into its world — and its world is a fun place to be!
• Murder Yet to Come - Isabel Briggs-Myers - A mystery novel written by one of the originators of the Myers-Briggs personality typing system. It’s fairly cheesy — almost a parody of the traditional British country-house mystery — but includes some fairly sophisticated fleshing-out of the characters’ personalities, which makes it a pretty good read. It’s fun to guess the characters’ types, and their respect for each others’ differing skills and interests links thematically to the objectives of the Myers-Briggs system (Gifts Differing is Briggs-Myers’s most famous book).
• Neuromancer - William Gibson - Ick. I know I’m supposed to like this book — it’s cyberpunk! I’m a hacker! — but this is the second time I’ve read it, and I just can’t get into it. The technology is inconsistent, and the author fails to explore its potentially interesting social ramifications; the characters are bland, and their motivations uncompelling; and the plot, which is supposed to be epic, just didn’t seem to mean much.
• Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ichiguro - Another sci-fi book. I loved this! This is a gripping, suspenseful, emotionally powerful tale. It’s really well-written, and it’s a subtle take on some very interesting and difficult social and ethical issues.
• Skinny Legs and All - Tom Robbins - For book club. As a story, it’s a fun read, with some magical realism thrown in (like a can of beans that ponders religious history). But it’s a little overwritten, and longer than it probably needs to be. Robbins explains his metaphors in detail and tries to use the book to convey some somewhat dubious philosophical ideas, saying that a lot of what humans do is just a “veil” over the real truth. (Not very pragmatic of him!)

What I’ve been reading this summer:

• Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day – Jennifer Grappone and Gradiva Couzin: One of the main takeaways from both this book and my own experience is that it helps your search ranking a lot to have a lot of indexable pages with different titles and content — like a blog! In fact, many of the visitors to this site come through the blog first, since there’s a lot of interesting content there for searchers to find. Other than that, the book mostly covered the technical basics that I already knew — page titles, h1 tags, etc. — but it’s nice to be reassured that I’m not missing something crucial.
• Shop Class as Soulcraft – Matthew B. Crawford: For book club. This is basically a polemic about how the author finds his work repairing motorcycles more satisfying than the white-collar jobs he’s tried, and he thinks everyone should consider the value of manual labor. Even though I agreed with some of its points, I found this book very frustrating, mostly because I thought it was intellectually dishonest and lazy. The author rails about the pointlessness of academia, yet is trying to write an academic treatise; it seems like he gets around this hypocrisy by not doing a very good job of organizing his argument and applying academic rigor, as though writing a sloppy philosophical book is his rebellion against the problematic institution of philosophy. He critiques all white-collar jobs based on a soul-sucking cubicle drone experience; and while such jobs certainly exist and aren’t beneficial to anyone, Crawford doesn’t put in the thought to consider whether this problem applies to all white-collar jobs, a particular type of them, or just some small random subsection. While this book’s assertion that manual labor and vocational education are undervalued in our society is well worth exploring, I don’t think Crawford does a very good job writing about it.
• Herland – Charlotte Perkins Gilman: My partner Jesse is a teaching assistant for a course in Science Fiction this fall, so I decided to read along with some of those books; this one we read aloud in the car during a summer roadtrip. It’s an early feminist utopia (written in 1915!) about a remote land that’s been populated only by women for the last 2000 years (they reproduce through parthenogenesis). The writing style is engaging, and I was impressed by the sophistication of feminist ideas Perkins Gilman had almost a century ago (though also somewhat depressed by how little has changed in society in some respects, sigh). One of my main critiques would be that she doesn’t distinguish the characteristics of her general social utopia (progressive education, communal child-rearing, no war or conflict ever) from those that she thinks would naturally follow from a land of women specifically — we don’t get much of a sense of how a similarly isolated and progressive-minded “Hisland” would be different. But her points about many of the supposed “defects” of women actually resulting from their societal disadvantages and oppression are spot-on. Overall a fun and thought-provoking read (and not too long).
• The Second Sex – Simone De Beauvoir: Early feminist theory; De Beauvoir is one of the first thinkers to systematically analyze the “othering” of women in society (the default person is male, and woman is just a counterpart to him, defined by her relation to him while he has his own status). 700+ page monstrosity, so this was my major reading accomplishment for the summer (OK, so I like really abstract beach reading). De Beauvoir tries to say basically everything there is to say about women — and comes pretty close, with sections/chapters like “The Data of Biology” (she starts with insects and works up), several historical chapters, “Myths: Dreams, Fears, Idols”, “The Young Girl”, “The Lesbian”, “The Married Woman”, “The Mother”, “Prostitutes and Hetairas”, “The Woman in Love”, “The Independent Woman” — and I am only naming a few. While it’s sort of more like a huge infodump than one argument running throughout the book, each chapter is jam-packed with interesting thoughts and analysis.
• Ubik — Philip K. Dick: Another book from the science fiction course. I thought it would take longer to read, but I got engaged in the story and blew through it in a day — oops! I don’t want to give spoilers, but this is a fun, creepy, trippy thriller/mystery/dystopian fantasy. Recommended for spending an afternoon creeping yourself out for the fun of it.

As a sort of self-portrait, I decided to stack up and photograph all the books I have in my house that I’ve read for the first time since moving here (in August 2006, so this is just about 3 years of reading).

Fiction

Nonfiction

All the books, stacked up evenly

Click to get huge versions, where you can zoom in and see the titles and authors clearly, or comment if you’re curious about any of them!

I realized I missed a few — like Hackers and In The Beginning Was The Command Line — and some, like Feminism is for Everybody, are loaned out — and though I can’t think of examples, there must be books I’ve read without owning — but this is the bulk of them. As I suspected, I’ve been reading a lot more nonfiction than fiction, even when you count Gravity’s Rainbow.

Books! Kind of like websites, but you can take them outside and sometimes they have complex ideas in them.

What I’ve been reading:

• Metamagical Themas - Douglas Hofstadter:
  Hofstadter is one of my all-time favorite authors — I love his broad range of interests, smart analysis, and clever writing. This book is a collection of his Scientific American columns from the early ’80s; thought-provoking and fun (even if his strong concern about the possibility of nuclear war doesn’t seem as urgent today as it must have then).
• All The King’s Men - Robert Penn Warren:
  This classic is a dense political novel; I read it after Jesse taught it for a course on Southern Literature and Culture this spring. Fantastic prose, intricate structure and plotting, complex ideas conveyed through fiction - highly recommended!
• The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan:
  A classic, obviously. Friedan’s analysis is straightforward and chilling; despite the amount of time that has passed, the concepts ring true; although it isn’t as strong as it was a few decades ago, the feminine mystique of relegating woman’s function to the sexual still exists.
  She more or less leaves out queer women, women of color, and lower-class women, but even with these problems, the ideas are still valuable. (This book was also fun to read while watching through the first season of Mad Men; the character of Betty is obviously based on Friedan’s examples.)
  I’m in the middle of The Second Sex right now and both books share a key takeaway for me: it’s impossible to fully develop yourself without a role in the world that involves meaningful interaction with other members of society, something that’s been denied to women in a lot of times and places. Finishing up The Feminine Mystique actually helped inspire me for another project that’s in the works — stay tuned!!
• The Drunkard’s Walk - Leonard Mlodinow:
  Read this one for the book club, and it was a lot more interesting than I expected it to be. Mlodinow gives clear explanations of key ideas in randomness and probability along with straightforward examples of their application and engaging anecdotes about the mathematicians who discovered them.

The books I’ve been reading this year, and some thoughts on them:

• America’s Women – Gail Collins: I love Collins’s columns in the New York Times and hoped this book would have a similar mix of historical detail with genuinely entertaining writing, and I was not disappointed. This is a great take on American history focused on women’s roles. Collins does a great job of weaving stories about particularly noteworthy and accomplished women with painstaking research on daily life and the experiences of average women at different periods of history. Highly recommended!
• The Principles of Beautiful Web Design – Jason Beaird: A good overview of some of the basic aspects of design for the web. The most useful part of this book for me was Beaird’s explanations of the importance of texture and detailed tutorials and examples of how to use appropriate texture on a site – they definitely helped me add depth to my designs.
• Blink – Malcolm Gladwell: I bought this in an airport bookstore and blew through it on the plane. It’s a quick, fun read about the ways in which humans make decisions unconsciously (and often rationalize them later!).
• The Stone Raft – Jose Saramago: Some friends started a book club, and this was the first selection. It was pretty fun to read, if a little slow — a story of magical realism that became a lot more interesting when we looked up its geopolitical context (Portugal in the 1980s) and were able to put together some of the themes with the social and political state of the setting.
• The Crying of Lot 49 – Thomas Pynchon: I’d already read this book more than once (it’s one of my all-time favorites), but I re-read it after I chose it for the book club’s second meeting.
• The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao – Junot Diaz: Another book club selection! I’d heard a lot of praise for this book, and it did not disappoint; it’s a dizzying pastiche of Dominican history, science-fiction and comic book references, mythology, Spanish slang, and compelling characters woven into an intriguing story. Highly recommended!
• A History of U.S. Feminisms – Rory Dicker: With a chapter for each of the three “waves”, this book is a straightforward summary of feminism’s ideas, conflicts, and accomplishments over the past century and a half. I’m still looking for something more theoretical/practical and less historical to recommend as a feminism primer, but for now, this is the best book I’ve found for the general newcomer to feminism.
• Feminism Is For Everybody – bell hooks: This book is really intelligent. hooks clearly explains what she believes should be the core tenets of feminism, and lays out a proposal for a new version of feminism that won’t have the heterosexist and white-centered connotations sometimes associated with the second wave, but instead will be inclusive and useful to all people. Possibly a little dense for people new to feminist thought, but highly recommended.
• Full Frontal Feminism - Jessica Valenti: By the founder of the excellent blog feministing.com. The subtitle is “A Young Woman’s Guide to Why Feminism Matters”, and that’s exactly what it is. I was hoping for a more seriously written introduction for a broader audience; Valenti’s slangy tone put me off a little (I could tell she was trying to be deliberately casual, but it made it seem like she wasn’t forming her thoughts carefully — even though she was). However, this would be a good introduction for the “I’m POST-feminist!” high-school/college crowd. I’ve also heard that Valenti’s later books (He’s a Stud, She’s a Slut and The Purity Myth) are less slangy and more in-depth, so I’ll probably try to pick them up.
• Better - Atul Gawande: Another book club selection. This was interesting to read since I knew almost nothing about the medical system. Gawande mixes personal anecdotes about his experiences as a surgeon with analysis on why things go wrong and what doctors can do to make improvements. A fast read that raises some interesting issues.

I used to spend a lot of time thinking about whether my activities were “pointful”. As a teenager, I’d obsessively analyze all the work I was doing and judge it by whether it had any measurable, real-world effect — “this shift at the bookstore was pointless because there were two of us and business was slow enough for one of us to handle”, or “my role as a stagehand is pointful because no one else in the show is available to turn on this light at this time”. I’d abandon “pointless” activities in favor of tasks where my presence made a quantifiable difference to some observable outcome.

As you might expect, this could get pretty depressing at times! Now that I’ve reached the ripe age of 23 (and, of course, now understand everything), I have a different perspective. I went canvassing to get out the vote in New Hampshire on Election Day — was this “pointful” by my old standards? Absolutely not! Every voter I talked to had already voted by the time I got to them — and even if I had been able to remind someone to go to the polls, it would hardly have made a difference, from my teenage perspective, to Obama’s tens-of-thousands-of-votes lead. Similarly, I gladly and proudly voted myself — but everything I voted for in Massachusetts was much closer to a 60/30 margin than a 50/50 one. My teenage self might have asked, why would I think it was so cool to participate in these things if it was so obviously pointless?

I used to focus on myself as an individual actor, but my appreciation has deepened for my role in emergent systems. My individual actions in getting out the vote and voting didn’t “make a difference”, but I was one of many cells making up larger systems (the campaign’s organization of volunteers, the electorate) that clearly did affect the outcome of the election — just like individual neurons in my brain die all the time without affecting my thoughts, but neurons certainly aren’t “pointless”, since all of them together collectively make up the larger system of my brain!

I was thinking about this because I’m reading I Am A Strange Loop, which explores some of these issues of emergent properties; it’s by the author of the extremely excellent (but long!) Gödel, Escher, Bach, which is also interested in these questions. For a breezier introduction, check out Steven Johnson’s take.

Also, I’m excited to be reading something new after taking almost six months to read Gravity’s Rainbow. Talk about intense! GR is also, in some sense, about the relationship between actors and larger systems. But it’s not about systems that emerge naturally from the combination of less complex elements — it’s a massive paranoid fantasy, full of ambiguity about what levels of the systems have agency, whether they’re constructed top-down or bottom-up, or whether they even exist!

Regular old emergent systems are much simpler.

Jesse recently read a few chapters of Joan Williams’s Unbending Gender for school, and recommended that I take a look at them. Although a lot of the more theoretical aspects went over my head, I found it an extremely intelligent and interesting analysis of work/family/gender issues with a lot of practical recommendations that support my own positions about work/life balance.

Williams describes a norm of domesticity based on an “ideal worker” doing market work, who works full-time, is available for overtime, is available for relocation, and takes little to no time off for child-rearing. Especially in cases where children are involved, this ideal worker can only fill this role if supported by someone, usually a partner, who abstains from ideal-worker market work in order to raise children and care for the household (hence the slogan “most women need a wife”). While the feminism of a few decades ago focused (successfully) on giving women access to these types of jobs, it insufficiently accounted for the fact that these workers are intended to be backed up by a partner taking care of family work; most women remain primarily responsible for childcare and household work regardless of their employment status, which leads to a situation in which they can only gain the social power of men through essentially working double shifts, one shift as a market worker and another as a mother and family worker. She describes this as a situation that can and should be legally framed as discrimination. She also points out that divorce laws, which award most of the household assets to the market worker (who “earned” the money) without compensating the family worker who made the market work possible (and who will probably also have to support the children after the divorce).

Williams also argues that this system is not just harmful to women (who disproportionately fill the role of marginalized caregiver, or if they do not, have a hard time living up to the ideal-worker norm because they rarely have partners available for family work), but also to men, children, and society — she quotes both women who “choose” to stay home with children but would prefer to keep working at a schedule that allows them to have time for their children as well as their careers, and men who “would prefer the ‘daddy track’ to the fast track”. While everyone seems to agree that children should have more time with their parents, employers reward the opposite behavior by promoting workers who spend long hours at work and passing over or not hiring workers they think will try to take time to be with their families.

She points out that work hours have increased in the U.S. over the past few decades; not only is there more overtime, but people work farther form their jobs, so getting home at 5 is unreasonable for most workers — but an 8-to-7 schedule for both parents is unreasonable for children, thus perpetuating the situation where it’s only practical for one parent to work (and since societal norms still punish men who don’t work, it’s still usually the man).

Williams has a solution to this: more flexible work hours for everyone. She points out an example of a family that decides that someone should be home with the children two days a week; if one parent asks for a three-day week, an employer will usually consider that unreasonable, but if employers were more open to giving both parents a four-day week they could both keep working and still give their children the time they need. She approaches this from an explicitly pragmatic perspective, pointing out that flexible schedules need not disadvantage employers. My position is that this would even be advantageous to employers, who would have a broader pool of qualified workers to choose from and happier (thus more productive) workers at work if they were more willing to give out schedules that accommodate employees’ values and non-market priorities.

The book focuses on families with children, but she briefly touches on how a more flexible work schedule would be advantageous for single or childless people. This is something I feel particularly invested in — as the text points out, the work-hours it takes now to produce a 1948 standard of living are less than half those it would have taken then, yet people are working longer hours and consuming more, in large part because employment structures discriminate against part-time workers, denying them benefits, fair pay, advancement opportunities, and respect. With more flexible opportunities, all kinds of people who are satisfied with a lower standard of living could work fewer hours and devote the extra time to community service, personal projects, travel, family, or any number of other worthwhile pursuits. I’ve seen a few news articles in the past few years incredulously describing the expectations of “Gen Y” workers new to the workforce — we want “work/life balance”, they scoff. How selfish! Imagine! Market work is not necessarily the most important thing in our lives, and we’d prefer less money to longer hours!

In fact, almost everyone hopes to balance their time between market work, family work, community work, and personal time — but employers almost never offer schedules amenable to such balance. If they did, everyone would be better off.