Feldman's Faves: July 18, 2022

GOOD MORNING EVERYONE

I hope you all had a great weekend. The dog days of summer are in full force and one of the great things about these days (in our kind-of-post-Covid world0 is summer concerts. Last night Alanis was in town and she was great. She’s not as angry anymore but she’s still got it. I don’t know about all of you, but I am super-duper excited that our new billing system is up and running so we can all get back to daily docketing. So please remember to do so once again starting today.

No theme today, just topics of interest.

The Power – By: Naomi Alderman – Last week’s book was not my favourite so this week I went to “the well” (aka Gates Notes) to find a recommendation that I knew would deliver. As per usual, Bill came up with a great suggestion. While I am not usually drawn to science fiction as a genre The Power is one of the most interesting science fiction/thought experiment books I have ever read – and I actually really enjoyed. Once again this is a book within a book – but executed much more effectively. The basic premise is that a man named Neil Armon submits a manuscript to Naomi around five thousand years after women start developing a “power” as a result of a biological change in their bodies (the development of an electric current generating organ in their collar bone called a “skein”) and become the (physically) stronger sex and use that power initially for good but then ultimately to dominate and abuse their male counterparts. For those who took a first year Poli Sci course at university, we all remember Lord Acton’s famous saying that ‘Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely’. Everything seems absurd and unjust until you realize (Alderman’s point of course) that this is how men have been using their power over women since the beginning of time. In this world the default is the matriarchy and questions are raised as to whether society could be more peaceful if the world were run by men….There are numerous characters in the book including Allie (a mixed race foster child that is abused by her foster parents and who becomes the religious leader of the women’s movement, and changes her name to Mother Eve), Roxy (a British girl turned crime boss), Tatiana (the first lady turned President of an Eastern European republic) and Margot (a powerful US politician who is setting up training camps for women (including her daughter) to use and harness their new found power). There is also a male character, Tunde (from Nigeria) who is a reporter for CNN who discovers and then becomes the male gaze of these developments. The story is really powerful and the characters all come together in interesting ways but the way the world is turned upside down as a result of a the sudden power shift is what makes this novel so interesting and unique. As one reviewer notes,” Earlier this year, groups of men were up in arms about a series of women-only screenings of Wonder Woman at Alamo Drafthouse theaters in Austin and New York. “Reverse sexism!” they cried. They claimed that if the same theaters had attempted to host an all-male screening of, say, Thor 3, no one would allow it. These complaints seemed to come from a future era, in which men have forgotten that, for the last few millennia, they were, in fact, the ones methodically creating spaces where only, then mostly, men could be. This happens to be the world of Naomi Alderman’s new novel, The Power. Or, rather, it’s the world of Neil Adam Armon, a fictional author who has sent a historical novel called The Power to a writer named Naomi Alderman for an early read. We can call Neil a “man author,” like we do so often with “women authors,” because, in the future Neil lives in, he’s the one who is cautiously writing against a tradition that excludes his sex. His letter to Naomi is postmarked accordingly from an organization unrecognizable to us in the real world: something called “The Men Writers Association.” “Thank you so much for this,” he gushes in a cover letter that resonates with any woman who has sent off her own fawning letters to men of influence. “I am so grateful you could spare the time.” It’s a device that we are to understand as an act of fictional intellectual property theft, as it’s Alderman’s name that’s ultimately on the novel. What is it like to witness the oppression you have endured applied to someone else? That’s the conceit of The Power, or it will be, at least, for the women reading it. Except the question is more pointed (and uncomfortable) than that: The novel depicts a world in which women, empowered by a genetic mutation that enables them to harness and wield electrical currents, ultimately find themselves capable of the same greed and cruelty as their male counterparts. Many will find this vision objectionable….Fantasies of women with superpowers, from Wonder Woman to Buffy, have long been regarded and critiqued through the prism of feminist politics. The Power takes this typical model, in which the extraordinary abilities of one or a few women are generally anomalous, and pushes it to its darkest imaginative limits. When Neil Armon’s novel begins, in our contemporary times but thousands of years in his past, a surprising new physical ability in young women (typically teenagers) spreads as quickly as a viral video, simultaneously awakened in girls around the world. This power, an electricity gathered in a physical organ connected to the collarbone called a “skein,” is coursing through their bodies. With the touch of a fingertip, or through water, they can shock another person. As is soon discovered, they can torture and kill, too. Alderman knows exactly how seductive this idea is for those of us on the losing side of the world’s prevailing gender hierarchy, and spends the first hundred pages or so of Neil Armon’s novel masterfully indulging her reader. Through alternating dispatches from the perspective of several characters around the globe, we can see ourselves in a multitude of familiar situations, with dangers and threats that, instead of submitting to, we’re able to repel. They range from everyday harassment—in a convenience store in Nigeria, a man asks a woman to smile before she zaps him—to mortal combat: Allie, a biracial foster kid in a sexually abusive home in the South, is terrorized by her white foster parents before she is able to kill her rapist as he is assaulting her; Roxy, the estranged daughter of a London mob boss, kills her mother’s murderers, and then some. It is revenge porn, turned inside out, satisfying and twisted. What happens next is familiar, as the old order—also known as the men of the world—tries to get a grasp on the sudden disturbance of the usual way of things. Alderman reminds us of how power tries to consolidate itself during an insurrection: in families, in schools, in government, in the media. Like the hanged women of Salem, those discovered with “the power” are called witches, rounded up, brought to jail, and considered for extermination. Terrifyingly lifelike men’s rights groups pop up on Internet forums, peddling conspiracy theories and inciting violence. That’s where Margot Cleary comes in, through whom Alderman offers up an imagined female rule of law. A Massachusetts mayor, cool-headed but fierce, she conceals her skein (once it is discovered that young women can awaken it in their elders), and rises through the political ranks. One of the first in public office to defend the girls who have the power, she does what men in government seem incapable of doing—organizing—and sets up “training camps” to help young women control and hone their new abilities….Nonetheless, a sense of foreboding pervades The Power from the beginning; each chapter counts down from “Ten years to go” to a mysterious event, one that we start to understand will not be the feminist paradise of our dreams. As carefully as Alderman weaves the fantasy of domination, the notion that women are somehow more immune from the ultimate corruptions of power than men unravels. The narration of Tunde, a journalist who finds his calling after capturing the first viral video of a woman exercising her new powers in Nigeria (and who in 2017 would comfortably be called an “ally”), forms the soft underbelly to the hard armor that characterizes the women’s passages as they suit up for war. At first an annoying, self-interested fixture on the fringes of women’s rebellions in Saudi Arabia, Delhi, and elsewhere, he begins to record the unsavory sides of the new female regime. Again, the injustices he records are familiar, but become more disturbing: women, instead of fighting back, are perpetrating old crimes…..The most radical elements of Alderman’s dystopian creation are actually its subtleties. Even as she renders the satirical upside-down world in which, for example, a shiny newscaster duo consists of a serious woman and her handsome ditzy side-kick, she exposes the cracks in its defining binary. Margot’s daughter, Jocelyn, has a defective skein—she is bullied and harassed for her disability. Conversely, there are men who somehow have the skein and don’t know what to do with it. And at the most violent flash points of the women’s global takeover, it’s both men and women who suffer at the hands of warring factions, who are herded into refugee camps, murdered in mass executions, and asked to fall in line. The poorest, most vulnerable people are not fighting for dominance, but survival.” This one is worth reading. Here is a good review from Gates Notes - https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/The-Power

WorkLife with Adam Grant - The Not-So-Great Resignation – Everyone loves Adam…..He is still the most popular professor at Wharton. In this PODCAST Grant discusses impact of the Great Resignation with a little bit of hindsight. He acknowledges that many people are leaving bad jobs, which is understandable but then also examines why people are leaving seemingly good jobs, which he attributes to three main factors, (i) burn-out, (ii) mortality salience (i.e., the fear of getting sick or dying) and (iii) the taste of freedom of remote work. That said, there are many people that have quit that now regret that decision showing how difficult a decision it really is. There is a real impact on wellbeing after people quit – the grass is greener phenomenon. So before one quits, Grant notes there are three main factors to consider, (i) voice (do you have a say in improving your current situation), (ii) loyalty (how much do you care about your organization and the people) and (iii) alternatives (which are readily available, so what do you really want to do). This issue is so complex and interesting because it really digs deeply into the psychology of leaving a situation – also you might want to avoid a viral quitting video…..Here’s an excerpt from the PODCAST itself, “Over the past year, the Great Resignation has been all over the news. Many people are celebrating quitting their jobs… but it’s a decision some will come to regret. So when’s the right time to leave? How do you quit without burning bridges? And how can workplaces encourage people to stay? This is an episode of WorkLife with Adam Grant, another podcast from the TED Audio Collective. To hear more episodes on the science of making work (and life) not suck, follow WorkLife wherever you're listening to this”:https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/ted-business/id470622782?i=1000561515722

Thank you for your ongoing engagement and participation.

And remember to stay safe, stay healthy and to ONCE AGAIN docket daily.

Jon