Thoughts on production, alienation, and ideology
These are posts about books from the blog Base and Superstructure. Occasionally I’ll read a book worth talking about, and write some thoughts on it. These cover a wide range of topics from the blog.
John Steinbeck wrote about two thefts of the land in The Grapes of Wrath. As readers, we know Steinbeck as the classic author who wrote eloquently about the second theft, the banks’ theft of the dying Oklahoma countryside from its tenant farmers. But many of us know less than we should about the first theft.
Let’s take a look.
Welcome to the third installment of my reading list series! I’m writing on a gorgeous 70 degree March day in Iowa, and I’ve spent most it outside. They won’t all be like this, though. Here’s some recent and upcoming reading for those rainy days, surprise snows, or…coronavirus quarantines.
Iowa winters are longer and colder than the ones I remember growing up in southern Indiana. Finishing up February, we need something to look forward to. For baseball fans, that’s easy. The latter half of February reliably brings us the first spring training games.
Anyone on a trip to Florida or Arizona with 5 bucks in their pocket can see major league baseball players preparing for the upcoming season. The players are shaking off the rust, working on a new swing, or rehabbing a surgically-repaired arm. Even those of us still in Iowa can read about it and dream about what’s on the horizon – baseball and warmer days.
Spring training is a consolation in a cold, dark season. And, of course, it marks the beginning of a new one.
I did a summer reading list about 6 months ago. In fact, I did two of them. Let’s try a winter reading list! And this time I’ll combine fiction and non-fiction into a single list. Here’s what I’ve been reading this winter, along with an upcoming book or two.
I recently read Kate Eichhorn’s book The End of Forgetting: Growing Up with Social Media. In fact, I picked it up while I was at the 4S conference in New Orleans. It seemed to offer the best of science studies, namely careful analytical work around important issues in science and technology. Good stuff.
I’m curious about the effects of social media on childhood. I’ve seen plenty of evidence social media changes – and perhaps distorts – childhood. What kind of evidence? Young people carefully curating their social media profiles, grandstanding or engaging in other attention-seeking behavior online, using temporary and/or anonymous chat apps, and propagating oddly insular and distorted views about most Americans.
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