Gongol.com Archives: April 2021
April 5, 2021
Publishers ought to offer special editions of nonfiction books, wherein the author takes all of the content they wrote down just because they wanted them in a permanent record somewhere...and moves them to the footnotes. Nobody can deny that there is a natural "padding" effect that dominates a lot of nonfiction: If an author has gone to the trouble of researching something, they're incentivized to document what they've found, and thus into the book it goes -- even when what's been uncovered isn't all that important. ■ Reader-optimized versions of these nonfiction books would really be a grand invention. Not Reader's Digest or Blinkist versions of these books (in which an outside editor does the stripping), but rather versions where the author him/herself is charged with identifying which parts of the book really matter versus which parts are really just documentation for its own sake. ■ Documentation for its own sake isn't a bad thing, per se: The problem arises when the documentation turns what ought to be a brief work into a tome so laborious that it fails to reach the audience it deserves. Few people were better-positioned to write the history of World War II than Winston Churchill, but it's especially hard for anyone who lived an experience to leave out the details -- and that's why Churchill's series on the war takes up 5,142 pages across six volumes. Footnotes are at once the best and most under-used features of nonfiction books. They let the author come up with a "director's cut" that lets the reader see exactly what's in or out. The stuff the author labored to produce doesn't have to get kicked to the curb -- but it's only fair to the reader for the author to make the distinction. ■ Most nonfiction books could really be wrapped up in 100 to 150 pages of the real meat and potatoes. Any number of people have been attributed with variations on the quote that "I wrote a long piece because I didn't have time to write a short one", and the durability of the statement is a credit to its truth. It takes longer for an author to shave things down than to dump everything on the page the first time around. But considering how complex our world already is, and how inevitable it is that the world will become more complex, we need more readers to spend more time learning broadly about all kinds of things that matter -- and books simply cannot be beaten for their efficiency in transmitting knowledge. Footnotes would still let authors pad their books until they can meet some mystical 250-page quota or 80,000-page word count, but without exhausting readers by drowning them in minutiae. Brief, thoughtful books can say a great deal that needs to be said.
China steams an aircraft carrier past Okinawa
Nikkei Asia notes, "The movements come as the U.S. Navy intensifies cooperation with the Quad partners of Japan, India and Australia in the Indo-Pacific." But let's not mistake correlation for causality here. China's regime has certain ambitions. Cooperation among the Quad didn't create those, and it's ill-serving to try to reach a false equivalence.
Just five years after WWII was over, Japan was already a major supplier of trucks to the US Army as America pivoted to the Korean conflict. The United States still occupied Japan at the time. Considering how long we have been engaged in conflicts abroad just this century, we should be asking ourselves whether we can do better at winning the peace. Our trade with Iraq, for instance, isn't much to be impressed by.
Iowa opens vaccines to all adults
Time to run up the scoreboard
Iowans betting hard with online sports gambling
One of the ubiquitous video ads for these sports-betting sites comes right out and says that you'll become a more intense sports fan if you have some "skin in the game". Considering America's unimpressive record with sports-related rioting, do fans really need reasons to be more intense?
Pfizer data indicates 100% efficacy against severe Covid-19
These numbers are just jaw-droppingly good. It's hard to contextualize how impressive the Covid-19 vaccines are turning out to be, not just for public health but on an individual basis.
