this makes me feel a lot better about being ehhhh on this book. the one time I was in a book store this year I skimmed through it and was like "meh" based on the writing, but had been reconsidering after seeing so many folks here shelve it!

This should be my favorite book ever? I am a total sucker for the mid 20th century think tanks that invented our technocracy. And yet. I'm hating this.

I'm about 20% through the book and while I'm appreciating some aspects of it there's a lot of stuff in here that is her just... making stuff up? Not in a plainly unethical way, it's always couched in "given his character, so-and-so would have reacted extremely poorly to this" and like. I hate this stuff? You don't know that this person did this thing you're saying he "probably" did. If you don't have a citation don't fill in the gap! I'm sorry, it's why when I write history it's often boring as shit but at least I'm not embellishing for the sake of a narrative.

Oh no, and now the author name drops Katharine Graham without explaining who she is. Like, jeez, I get it, you are very deeply part of the print media complex, but apparently you expect all of your readers to be as well? Again, just for perspective, she explains who Lyndon Johnson was. But apparently Katharine Graham needs no introduction!

@darius I was like, a famous dancer, right? and then realized I was thinking of Martha Graham and Katherine Dunham

@darius anyway, some non-fiction books are written to be relevant for exactly five (5) minutes and no longer

@darius hrm. i have a copy of her _these truths_ sitting on the to-read pile; this is decreasing my interest. i'm having similar problems with the ron chernow biography of grant i'm halfway through - it seems simultaneously deeply researched and full of weirdly unsupported statements about people's character and beliefs. i think there's a place for honest speculation, but like... i guess it bothers me more than it used to when historians/biographers just riff on a bias.

@darius @christa I was also deeply "meh" on this book and didn't finish it before library took it back...

unrelated but did y'all read the fires by joe flood? seems up respective alley

@hunterowens @christa oh nice, definitely going to give that a read, I can never get enough RAND stuff

@hunterowens @christa Extremely gratified that Seth Mnookin, who I respect greatly, agrees with our assessment:

www.nytimes.com/2020/09/15/books/review/if-then-jill-lepore.html

In particular I was thinking the same thing as him: he positions Simulmatics as a harbinger of doom but they were a complete failure of a company that couldn't deliver on almost anything they promised. The fact that she says simultaneously "these people were charlatans" (true) and "these people possessed the seed of 21st century data mining" (false) is weird. I would have preferred it if she kept it to a narrative of "these guys were grifters. So was Cambridge Analytica!" Because there is a lot of evidence that shows that CA and similar initiatives don't actually do what they claim to do. It could have been tied in to the adtech grift, especially since the company tried to pivot into adtech between elections!