Books I loved reading in 2011 that related to decision-making and problem-solving:

• Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond – Well, we’re fucked. Brilliant, brilliant book. Worth reading, but intensely depressing in a clear, logical sort of way. Diamond claims to be cautiously optimistic, and I’d like to believe him, but I’ve read too much Derrick Jensen to be totally convinced.
• The Logic of Failure: Recognizing and Avoiding Error in Complex Situations by Dietrich Dorner – Analyzes tons of studies on how people try – and fail! – to handle complex situations. The main lessons I drew from this were – (a) You have to think about not only the problems you do have, but also the problems you DON’T have, because otherwise your solutions may well create new problems in the future; (b) feedback has a time lag, and unless you stick to tiny adjustments with delays to record feedback in between, you can easily end up ricocheting between extremes; (c) it’s hard to figure out the right amount of information to gather; (d) both overfocusing and ignoring complex details are extremely dangerous; and (e) learning the issues with dealing with complex problems doesn’t actually help you get better at handling them – only actual experience does that.
• Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science by Atul Gawande – Absolutely fantastic look at mistakes, the need for training and learning, social and ethical issues that interfere with training, cognitive errors, the difficulty in balancing our need for best health outcomes with our need for training students, and lots of surgical war stories along the way. I also highly recommend reading his essay Personal Best, where he discusses his decision to seek coaching to improve his surgical skills.
• Honeybee Democracy by Professor Thomas D. Seeley – This was the most incredible book I’ve read in a long time. He describes the studies he performed in trying to determine how honeybee swarms decide on where their next home should be, and get everyone there together. Lots of insight into bees, but also into decision-making process design. Even if you’re not obsessed with bees as I am, this is a book well worth reading – it’s an eloquent depiction of how science is done, plus Seeley is very into the idea that we should learn more on how to manage group decision-making from the example set out by the bees.
• Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein – Totally fascinating book about how to be a better choice architect, largely by adjusting incentives and defaults and making it just a bit easier for people to do what they in theory want to do anyway. Libertarian paternalism.

Books I loved reading in 2011 that related to race and class:

• A Dry White Season by André Brink – A white schoolteacher in South Africa learns a bit about race, politics, discrimination, abuse of power, and privilege. Intense and difficult to read, especially in our current political climate.
• Coyotes: A Journey Through the Secret World of America’s Illegal Aliens by Ted Conover – Gringo journalist decides to cross the border with Mexicans who migrate North for work each summer. Spends time on the journeys, spends time at the harvesting work, spends time driving [with, and also..] them across the country, spends time in their homes.
• Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones – A story told by a black girl living on a tropical island in the middle of a civil war, where the one white man left volunteers as a teacher, except the only book he has to teach from is Great Expectations. I worried it would be all full of white supremacy bullshit, but ultimately I actually thought it was generally aware, sensitive, and interesting. Heart-breaking in moments. Really an excellent little book, overall.
• Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams by Alfred Lubrano – Fascinating, useful book about class issues with people born to working class families who push themselves into the middle class. This book sparked a lot of ideas in me and moments of recognition when thinking about my family dynamics and history and issues I’ve had with others. Highly recommended.
• The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot – The story of the person and family behind the HeLa cell line! I’d also suggest reading this interview with Skloot where she explains her thoughts on structure in writing and how she chose to structure this book in particular.
• Gang Leader for a Day by Sudhir Venkatesh – Sociologist does fieldwork by hanging out with a gang in the projects. The Freakonomics people love this guy. I can see why.

Books I loved reading in 2011 that related to art and design:

• The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards – I went through all the exercises when I started my latest drawing kick, and I found them extremely helpful.
• Artist’s Complete Problem Solver by Trudy Friend – This is basically one of the best drawing and painting books I’ve found yet. It’s particularly good in terms of very specific techniques and concepts to keep in mind when trying to figure out what to focus on in observing and drawing. Also, micro brushstroke exercises.
• The Forgery of Venus by Michael Gruber – Drugs, hallucinations, art history, forgery, wonderful descriptions of technical processes of both forgery and painting generally. Absolutely lovely. Rather dark and fucked up in places, but in a beautiful way.
• Making Comics by Scott McCloud – Someday I’ll illustrate a webcomic. Someday.
• My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk – A murder mystery and an exploration on artistic pride, cultural influences, morality, religion, and the meaning of style. Very nice.
• The Non-Designer’s Design Book by Robin Williams – Reminded me of playing Set and of watching the parents figure out the layout for the old Fiske Terrace newsletter when I was a kid. Dead simple, basic stuff, but good important concepts to keep in mind.
• Poemcrazy: freeing your life with words by Susan Wooldridge – If you love words, read this.

Books I loved reading in 2011 that related to Judaism:

• Boychiks in the Hood: Travels in the Hasidic Underground by Robert Eisenberg – Deeply familiar and foreign at the same time. My people, and not my people. Which was perhaps the point. In point of reference, I was raised Conservative and have always identified as a Jewish agnostic.
• All Other Nights by Dara Horn – Jews in the Civil War! Lying liars who lie! I adore Dara Horn.
• The Book of the Unknown: Tales of the Thirty-Six by Jonathan Keats – This was really charming! It tells the stories of some of the lamed vavniks (in Jewish lore, these are the 36 just men and women who hold up the world, without realizing it or being acknowledged by others). Here are some of the lamed vavniks of a past era (there must be 36 of them alive in the world at any given time), and they are whores and thieves and golems and all sorts of unlikely personages. It was a good premise, nicely executed, and I particularly loved the rare pleasure of reading Jewish fairy tales that aren’t all about getting the king to promise not to kill all the Jews (only ha ha just kidding).
• The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit by Lucette Lagnado – Memoir of a Jewish Egyptian woman whose family fled Cairo when she was just a child. Absolutely wonderful, with a personal discussion of cultural stresses and family relationships that did feel real to me. Possibly only interesting if you’re a diaspora Jew whose family had to flee countries in grave danger, though. Hard to tell, since for me, this was my family’s life.
• City of Oranges by Adam LeBor – Fascinating history of Jews and Arabs in the old city of Yaffa. I’ve been there, and it was interesting to read this with my memories of walking through the area.
• Lost Tribe: Jewish Fiction from the Edge edited by Paul Zakrzewski – I didn’t expect much of this, but in fact there were a lot of really spectacularly good stories in it! Overlook the kitsch of the title and concept, and you’ll find the good stuff. My oh my.

Other fiction I loved reading in 2011:

• Santa Olivia and Saints Astray by Jacqueline Carey – Super cute YA with good queer character development and political exploration.
• Slammerkin by Emma Donoghue – I really enjoyed this novel! It has a lot of human flaws and weakness, and shows not only the way fucked up systems fuck people up, but also the incredibly awfulness that people are capable of. The protagonist is not a good person. You can’t quite figure out if you like her, even though you see the factors that went into messing her up and it’s hard to blame her for the first few. But later on, she’s making choices that you want to hate her for, again and again. But still in a sympathetic way. Really, just about all the characters are powerless in so many ways, and they take out the pain of their powerlessness on each other. The writing style just faded into the background and let me sink into the story, which I love.
• Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh – Just about the best fiction I’ve read in ages. Indian, complex, epic, poignant, fascinating. Lots of characters, but all are fleshed out and developed and weave in and out of each other’s lives. The focus on language and dialect is brilliant – it’s confusing at times, like the first time you read A Clockwork Orange, but you get the sense that so many of the characters are lost and confused that you’re supposed to be right there with them, and their languages are so defined by their backgrounds/lives/castes that it all comes together in a jumble as their society crackles around them. It’s killing me that the second book of this trilogy isn’t out in paperback yet, and the third isn’t out yet at all. I already want to reread the first.
• A big bunch of Alastair Reynolds books, which are all thoroughly stuffed with interesting ideas and characters but are ultimately a bit tough to tell apart. He manages to write the same book over and over again without getting boring, which is a neat parlor trick in itself.

Other non-fiction I loved reading in 2011:

• The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures by Anne Fadiman – An exploration of how cultural differences between Hmong and Americans interfere with access to health care, among other things.
• Lust for Justice: The Radical Life & Law of J. Tony Serra by Paulette Frankl – Inspiring biography of a radical hippie brilliant criminal defense lawyer, I really want to read a collection of his summations!
• The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America by Erik Larson – A history text written in an almost novel-ish prose style, about the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and the serial killer operating in Chicago at the time.
• China Witness: Voices From a Silent Generation by Xinran – I’ve been on a Chinese history reading kick. It’s just so huge, and there’s so much out there that I don’t have a clue about. Likened to Studs Terkel’s interview collections, this book is actually a fascinating set of conversations that offer insight into history and culture that I can’t seem to reach anywhere else.

Another man on the train:

A lady on the phone at Starbucks:

Dave, asleep on the bus, hiding from the light in his hoodie:

I went over to donate more books to Housing Works the other day, and of course got distracted shopping for books while I was there. It happens every time! I basically see Housing Works as my library – I borrow books, and through buying them and donating them back I help support people living with HIV/AIDS along the way. If I’ve got to have a book addiction, I may as well try to benefit others through it.

Whenever I see used books for sale, whether at Housing Works or stoop sales or anywhere else, I find myself tempted to pick out my favorites into a curated stack to nudge strangers towards them. When I mentioned this to a few friends later, it turned out that I’m not the only one!

So, why not? I threw together these book recommendation bookmarks to stick into used books I see for sale, but already own and love myself. My hope is that if I use these bookmarks, I will encourage strangers to read some of my favorite books, help support used bookstores generally, and have some interesting conversations along the way.

The bookmarks seem like a better way to satisfy that urge to help people find amazing books they might not notice otherwise, and to open the door to conversations with strangers about books we’ve both read! A little clearer and perhaps more useful than just reorganizing the stacks until entropy reasserts itself. Something that speaks to the next person who comes along.

No need to keep the fun for myself, though. You can download the full-sized, free PDF of my book-recommendation bookmarks to print out and use yourself here!

Have fun, read more, enjoy! Maybe I’ll bump into you at the Strand or Powell’s sometime.

I’m staggered and delighted by the responses to my little extension. I’m still not bored of watching people tweet their reactions or examples of swaps they’ve come across and liked best! Here’s a bit of a roundup of the press it’s received:

• I was interviewed on ALM’s Tech Marketplace. Thank you, public radio! I think you just made my month. My segment starts at 2:35 in that recording.

• The New Yorker mentioned me! Of course, they rather hilariously proved my point by writing: “Jezebel tests the new Google Chrome extension Jailbreak the Patriarchy, which feminizes nouns and pronouns on any Web site.” Only in a world in which the default is masculine can gender-swapping be described as “feminizing”.

• Jezebel: Fun Chrome Extension Gender-Swaps The Internet

• Flavorwire: Re-gender Your Webpages with the New ‘Jailbreak the Patriarchy’ Chrome Extension

• The Toronto Star: Woman! I feel like a man: Swap gender of words from your browser

• The Mary Sue: You Should Really Check Out Google Chrome’s Genderswap Plugin

• Cyborgology has perhaps the most thoughtful response I’ve read yet.

• Gina Carey: Swapping Gender in Books – “Humbert Humbert is a middle-aged, fastidious college professor. She also likes little boys.”

• Prosumer Report: Genderswap Your View of the World

• Maria Popova (brainpicker) declared Jailbreak the Patriarchy to be the “best Chrome extension ever – wow!

• And so many more! I’m pretty thrilled to have excited Kelley Eskridge, who’s pretty exciting herself. Morning Quickie suggested using Jailbreak in sociology or history classes (and women’s studies, of course). I made it onto Metafilter and Reddit. I love Ellen Chisa’s response. I probably shouldn’t admit to this, but I actually found some thoughtful discussion on gendered language over on the Sensible Erection forum discussion (includes NSFW images) of Jailbreak the Patriarchy.

• Not to mention all the other fabulous folks on Twitter who said wonderful things and quoted some great swaps they were finding: Jonathan Haynes and Oliver Burkeman of the Guardian, Zach Seward of the Wall Street Journal, Julian Sanchez of Reason Magazine, Charlie Glickman of Good Vibrations, Elizabeth Bear, Bloomsbury Press, TrustWomen, ResearchGate, Disinfo, and more. Even GRAMMARHULK seemed excited!

Thank you, everyone! I love seeing all your examples and hearing your responses. I’ve had an amazing week, seeing everyone react to this thing I built. What a trip!

If you haven’t checked it out yet, I suggest you go install Jailbreak the Patriarchy and then read pages such as Schrodinger’s Rapist or the art of being an ambitious female. Or perhaps the “relationships” tag on Ask Metafilter. Check out the news on the latest sex/harassment/abuse scandal, the latest corporate scandal, the latest big thing in business or politics. And for best effect, leave it installed for a few days, let yourself forget that it’s there, and see what jumps out and surprises you.

Edit: Nicholas FitzRoy-Dale ported Jailbreak to work for Safari! Awesome!

What does it do?

Jailbreak the Patriarchy genderswaps the world for you. When it’s installed, everything you read in Chrome (except for gmail, so far) loads with pronouns and a reasonably thorough set of other gendered words swapped. For example: “he loved his mother very much” would read as “she loved her father very much”, “the patriarchy also hurts men” would read as “the matriarchy also hurts women”, that sort of thing.

This makes reading stuff on the internet a pretty fascinating and eye-opening experience, I must say. What would the world be like if we reversed the way we speak about women and men? Well, now you can find out!

What if you need to read something on the web exactly as it was written?

Running this extension will not trap you outside the asylum. When you install Jailbreak the Patriarchy, you’ll see that there’s a new button in the top right corner of your browser. It looks like this:

When you click that button, it basically toggles the patriarchy. If Jailbreak the Patriarchy is active when you click, it pauses the extension and reloads your current tab back into reality. If the extension is already paused when you click the button, it unpauses the extension and reloads your current tab back into genderswapped-land.

Just to be clear, only your current tab will reload automatically, but the pause/unpause is browser-wide and persists until you toggle the button again. It’s easy to tell when the extension is paused, because the button in the browser will get a big red OFF tag, like so:

I found it helpful to pause the extension while writing this post, for instance, and intend to unpause it as soon as I’m done. No big deal, with that toggle button right in the browser at all times.

Why create such a thing?

I was having dinner with the incomparable Jess Hammer a couple weeks ago, when the topic of ebooks came around. I made an offhand comment about how someone really ought to make an app that toggles male/female characters’ genders in ebooks, and promptly started thinking about what I was really looking for along those lines.

I’m not much an ebook reader myself, so a Chrome extension feels much more useful to me. But it absolutely genderswaps html-formatted Project Gutenberg books, if that’s what tickles your fancy.

Running Jailbreak the Patriarchy for the past few days has already changed my perspective on the world in a way that I find interesting, enjoyable, and valuable. I’m very curious to hear how other folks feel about the experience! So please give it a try, and let me know whether and how it affects your perspective!

Are there any bugs?

There is a known bug with the English language itself that I’m dealing with imperfectly at the moment. See, sometimes “her” should translate to “him”, and sometimes it should translate to “his”. There are a lot of tricky edge cases here.

I have a set of rules that recognize the most common cases where “her” always or usually should translate to “him”, and then a rule that translates all remaining instances of “her” to “his” instead. It’s a decent system, but not yet thorough enough. (Better than it was when I started, though. Extra thanks to Molly Tomlinson and Xtina Schelin for helping me get this as close to accurate as it is already!) This is very much a work-in-progress.

What this ultimately means is that sometimes you’re going to see “his” where you really ought to see “him” instead, or vice-versa. You can help fix that! You don’t need to know Javascript to help – just knowing English is more than good enough! If you come up with any simple rules on when “her” ought to go to “him” but currently doesn’t, let me know, and I’ll update the extension to take care of those cases as well.

Beyond that, so far I know that Jailbreak the Patriarchy doesn’t affect gmail (which is very important to me), but I haven’t tested it on any other email sites. It works on twitter, greader, and facebook, but I haven’t tested it on dynamic content sites beyond that. Please let me know if you find any problems, and I’ll figure out how to deal with them and push an update through.

Other Notes

Although Jailbreak the Patriarchy does swap gendered terms beyond pronouns, I’ve undoubtedly missed some that I’d be happy to add in as we notice them.

That said, I’ve decided so far not to genderswap some categories of gendered terms, like certain popular slurs. I reserve the right to change my mind and am open to hearing feedback on this decision.

I’ve also decided not to genderswap people’s names, despite having some great theories on how to make that work if I wanted to. I have three reasons for this decision: I wanted to release this so we could play with it ASAP and figured I could always add that feature in later if I so choose; I think that although name-swapping would be great for an app that only affected works of fiction, changing people’s names all over the web would blur reality to the point of inconvenience; and last, I’m really just charmed by the way it makes the entire world feel a bit more genderqueer to me.

And here are some folks I saw on the subway over the past few weeks:

And more subway folks:

Still more subway folks, but these were done with a fountain brush pen:

Really cute kid I saw on the subway a few weeks ago:

(Hero M86 fountain pen with Noodler’s Kiowa Pecan ink; watercolors from my bestest little altoid tin palette)

Actually, on that note, this is the travel palette I built that I use nowadays:

I used hot glue to create 9 separate compartments in a teensy tiny mini Altoids tin, which I hot glued to a rectangle of cardboard.

(I also glued in a bit of scrap dry-erase board stuff left over from when we redid the upstairs hallway for mixing, but I don’t think that part is strictly necessary.)

I have a cool trio of primary colors (lemon yellow, scarlet lake, ultramarine), a warm trio of primary colors (indian yellow, permanent rose, and phthalo blue), and at the bottom as extras I have indigo and a bit of titanium white goache.

I keep a waterbrush in my pen case, and that’s it, easy and tiny.

It works basically like this, with the other end of the cardboard stuck between journal pages to hold the palette very conveniently in place for me:

View from The Elevated Acre at 55 Water St., NY, NY. With helicopters!

View when returning to the street from The Elevated Acre:

A lovely building just north of Union Square:

I flew into Burlington, Vermont and then took greyhound to Berri-Uqam station in the middle of Montreal, on my friend’s recommendation. When I got to the station, I found this guy sleeping behind a row of benches. People sat in front of him, totally ignoring him. He looked more like a backpacker than a bum.

(Drawn in ink on a sketchbook page I’d pre-splattered with coffee.)

I sketched this next guy in the airport while waiting for my plane to fly back home yesterday, which was crazy delayed. A TSA agent leaned over to look at sketchbook and complimented me profusely, which was a delightful change from my usual TSA interactions.

(Sketched with a pilot varsity fountain pen and noodler’s heart of darkness ink, watercolor to finish, over a lightly pre-splattered page.)

Grace United Methodist Church

Old First Reformed Church

(My absolute favorite bit here is the birds who were hanging out in the window, where I did the wash around them to highlight them.)

Memorial Presbyterian Church

God, I’m so in love with my $13 Hero M86 fountain pen, and the fraction of my $1.50 sample of Noodler’s Kiowa Pecan ink that I stuck in there. I have a favorite sketching implement, all right! It’s such a weird, nifty little tool.

“Want to go to the airport?” asks my brother.

“I’m sorry?”

“Terminal 5 is open to the public as part of Open House NY. It is never open to the public.”

Oh! Sure! So, it turned out that OHNY somehow managed to wrangle a few hours of public access to TWA Flight Center at JFK’s Terminal 5 yesterday. Who could resist?

It was like walking into the Enterprise!

Though it looked more like a Shadow ship from the outside.

Complete with all of New York’s finest shadowy people.

But really, pure scifi.

I did a few sketches while I was there, of course.

While Josh took photos of me sketching.

I was completely obsessed with that Vulcain clock in the center of the ceiling.

Such gorgeous curves, everywhere!

Now, THAT’S good design.

Airports bright with sinuous rills, as it were.

A gorgeous day, overall – Josh posed me out in the sunlight for one last shot of the day.

As we were driving out of Yellowstone, we got stuck in traffic caused by buffalo in the road. Eventually they moved on to the other lane, and we were able to inch forward before having to stop again. And then, suddenly, there was a buffalo walking down the road right next to the car! I shoved my camera into Mike’s hands and demanded that he take some photos, because he was closer.

They are such astonishing, majestic, ridiculous, and terrifying creatures.

Right there beside us.

They looked much smaller from a distance.

And much scruffier once you can see a bit more of them. Buffalo don’t all have leprosy, right?

And so we left the park. (Disturbing numbers of dead trees still all around.) Plenty more states left to go!