The Official What Are You Reading Thread

[Alice Ayers]

lol.

[nippletwister]

I'm reading McSweeny's volume 16.

[Pokaris]

Crash Course by Paul Ingrassia. It's a great book on the rise and fall of the car companies in Detroit. A great look at how both sides simply accepted things that led to the bankruptcy of Chrysler and GM.

[Alice Ayers]

Just started "Columbine." At first, it's hard to keep Eric and Dylan straight. I really can't believe it or what they did, even though it's grown to a complete distortion after all these years.

[$/]

"Whole Earth Discipline" by Stewart Brand

[Little Bobby Tables]

I read "and the hippos were boiled in their tanks". total waste of time.

Now I'm reading Gods Go Begging, which is excellent so far.

[Alice Ayers]

Finished "Columbine." I might discuss it a little bit more here. It does read a lot like "In Cold Blood" and some of it is really hard to handle reading, especially when the author describes Eric's journal entries and websites about how he wanted to literally kill everyone. Another hard scene describes the teacher who was shot and bled to death and how the Eagle Scouts recruited to help him kept trying to keep him alive. I guess he was bleeding to death for 3 hours before medical help arrived, and by then he was dead. His family was awarded some money in a lawsuit from the county after many years because with all of the police officers and SWAT members around the school that day, it probably was possible to evacuate him with enough time to save him. It tells the full story, like which families were involved in legal battles and which ones were caught by the Jesus Machines, and which families received money in legal settlements to pay for medical bills and injuries. It also follows their family's healing paths and how each injured kid coped and where they went to college afterwards.

They also talked about how strategies involving school shootings did improve after Columbine, so that the Virginia Tech shooter was stopped a lot faster than the Columbine kids. I guess I didn't pay that much attention to the Columbine story, so I did buy into a lot of the things the media said, about the kids being teased and the parents that ignored the pipe bombs and the trench coat mafia. But really, I guess the kids were pretty popular and had plenty of friends and their parents did shut the kids down a lot of times. They only wore their trenches a few times and one of them was on the day of the shooting, just to hide all of the guns they brought. They were never part of the Trench Coat Mafia and didn't really hate jocks and preps.

One of the guys was definitely a diagnosed psychopath, so he was able to lie and fool a lot of people, including a judge, a therapist and a doctor prior to his shooting spree. The other kid was really just depressed and really didn't want to go along with the massacre, but in the end just did it because he got acceptance and he wanted to kill himself, so it seemed like an easier way to do it.

It taught me a bit about psychopaths--just that there are warning signs but they are easily overlooked because psychopaths are able to quickly read people and determine what they want to hear and are also skillful liars without many signs of empathy and remorse. They might feel a little bit of empathy, but not enough at any point to stop or realize what they are doing. The book describes Eric Harris(psychopath kid) as someone who really did hate everyone, and made a list about all of the people he hated, including Tiger Woods and Hansen brothers, but even people that looked at him the wrong way in the hallway or people that didn't fully defer to him. He also went through the HS yearbook and decided over time that each and every kid was bad or stupid and should die. In the end, it also opened my eyes to the complete and explosive rages of teenage boys, even ones that aren't psychopaths. Man, it's kind of nuts to see how batshit some of the kids would go over completely nothing.

The county they lived in definitely had all of the pieces to notice this kid was going to kill, but it was another classic case of cover-ups after it was over and misfires before it happened. The DA's office was prosecuting the kids for breaking into a van a year before but never got the documentation from another department that listed about an early pipe bomb found in a park and an search warrant for Eric Harris's house that was never filed, inexplicably, even after parents of a classmate reported the website, death threats, violent outburst and graffiti tags of their house. So the DA sent the kids into a community service/therapy program, and that's where the psychopathic kid was able to fool the counselors and the medical doctors. If the DA and the sherrif's office had communicated, the county would have just locked the kids up, it might not have happened. Then it talked about normally depressed and otherwise socially isolated kids exhibiting signs of violence, they are probably not going to shoot up the school, but just that actual psychopaths do that.
Anyway, this is a really long post and I'm sure most people glossed over it. The book is pretty good and I also think it's worthwhile for anyone that wants to see how predatory churches can be to recruit members after a terrible event, but that storyline is mostly tertiary to this one.

[nippletwister]

...psychopaths are able to quickly read people and determine what they want to hear and are also skillful liars ...

I don't get it. I mean, I don't see how this follows. The book suggests that every 'psychopath' has the super-power of reading people and manipulating them?

Does the phrase 'psychopath' mean something specific in today's mental health community or is it a less specific word like 'crazy?'

[Alice Ayers]

Psychopath has a specific diagnosis in psychiatry. I think most of us can read people and know what they want to hear, but we might not always give them what they want or might only do it half-heartedly. Psychopaths will go the extra mile, lay the syrup on and just lie without any regrets, profusely. There is no cure and it's one of the few diagnosis that psychiatry cannot remedy because the psychopaths are skilled manipulators and counseling can sometimes cause more problems if the counselor falls for their antics. Parts of the book were pretty nauseating when comparing what Eric Harris was telling his doctor vs. what he was writing in his journals.

[nippletwister]

Okay, I waited until my beautiful and talented fiancee who works as a social worker at a mental facility and is going to grad school at UIC came home from her weekend out of town to say anything, I wanted to be sure I wasn't talking out of my ass here.

She says that the phrases "psychopath" and "psychopathy" are NOT included in the DSM, which I understand is some sort of internationally recognized collection of mental health diagnoses. She then checked this on Wikipedia, which points out the same thing. There was once a time when "psychopath" mean something specific, now it does not, much like how the words "imbecile" and "moron" had a much more specific meaning but were rendered less so through wider common usage. The terms "psychopath" and "sociopath" have been replaced with less common and more specific diagnoses such as "borderline personality disorder" and others.

If the word "psychopath" is thrown around a lot in this book, you should strongly consider the scientific credibility of the authors. Not that I don't believe that it's a fascinating look into the minds of killers and a portrait of a community torn apart; I just question the ethos of the work.

Now, when you say things like "Psychopaths will go the extra mile, lay the syrup on and just lie without any regrets, profusely," I can't tell if it's the book itself making these claims or if it's your interpretation of what you've read, but it's highly unscientific. I'd believe that "psychopaths" have a skewed perception of the world and feel a different social and moral responsibility than your average person, and therefore are able to lie or commit other anti-social behaviors with less visible stress and other indicators. But when you go ahead and say something like "psychopaths can do X and Y and Z because that's how they are," it feels like you're describing the powers of a super-villain, and with the assumption that all "psychopaths" behave the same way, and not approaching the situation with any sense of causation, any sense of why these people actually act this way.

I find that frustrating.

[Alice Ayers]

I'm grateful for the discussion. It's true that the DSM IV doesn't include psychopathy as a specific diagnosis, but I don't think that precludes the disorder within society. It hasn't been rewritten since 1994, though the current re-write is taking place now. (side note, I heard they are removing the term bipolar or significantly revising it, especially for young children.) Whether or not the use of the word psychopathy makes the book's discussion of the disorder unscientific can be left up to the reader. He does explain that it's not in the DSM-IV in the book as well and spends a few paragraphs on page 241 discussing the evolution of the different terms. He stated that the term antisocial personality disorder is the only term to land in the DSM-IV and

that the terms for antisocial personality disorder "covers a broader range of disorders than does "psychopathy" and has roundly been rejected by leading researchers.

I don't really find the use of the word discrediting to the psychiatrists that reviewed Eric Harris's tapes and records. If he used the term "mood disorder" instead, I don't think that would make the sources any less credible. He goes into some detail about the causation of "psychopathy". To clear Cullen, I'll just post some quotes from the book here to ease your concerns about the lack of scientific credibility. Maybe with more discussion of the topic, a clear point can be made about the researchers from whom Cullen drew his sources and you can hunt them down in order to tell them about your girlfriend in gradschool's wiki research.

The wiki page quotes Robert Hare, and the book actually uses Robert Hare's book : "Snakes in suits: when Psychopaths go to work". There are about 35 sources in the "psychopathy" section of the book, published in health journals with the word "psychopathy" in the tile of the published research paper in psychiatric journals. Including though: Biological Psychiatry, Journal of Abnormal Psychology, Psychiatry research and International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology.
If you want, I can forward the bibliography to you.

Psychopaths are capable of behavior that normal people find not only horrific, but baffling, wrote Dr. Robert Hare, the leading authority of psychopaths. "They can torture and mutilate their victims with about the same sense of concern that we feel when we carve a turkey for Thanksgiving dinner."

So, we can debate the merit of Hare's research or use of metaphor, but I don't think we can really blame the author of the book for quoting Robert Hare unless it's widely acknowledged that Hare's research is unfounded. Robert Hare created the psychopathic checklist, the basis for all contemporary research.

Lying for amusement is so profound in psychopaths, it stands out as their signature characteristic. "Duping delight" psychologist Paul Ekman called it.

So where do psychopaths come from? Researchers are divided, with the majority suggesting a mixed role: nature leading, nurture folowing. Dr. Hare believes psychopaths are born with a powerful predisposition, which can be exacerbated by abuse or neglect. A correlation exists between psychopaths and unstable homes--and violent upbringings seem to turn the fledgling psychopaths more vicious. But current data suggests those conditions do not cause the psychopathy, they only make a bad situation worse. It also appears that even the best parenting may be no match for a child born to be bad.
Symptoms appear so early, and so often in stable homes with normal siblings, that the condition seems to be inborn. Most parents report having been aware of disturbing signs before the child entered kindergarten. Dr. Hare described a 5 year old girl repeatedly attempting to flush her kitten down the toilet. ...Psychopaths are not individuals losing touch with those emotions. They never developed them from the start.
Hare created a separate screening device for juveniles and identified hallmarks that appear during the school years: gratuitious lying, indifference to the pain of of others, defiance of authority figures, unresponsiveness to reprimands or threatened punishment, petty theft, persistent aggression, cutting classes and breaking curfew, cruelty to animals, early experiments with sex and vandalism and setting fires."
At some point--as either a cause or an effect of psychopathy--the psychopath's brain begins processing emotional responses differently. Early in his career, Dr. Hare recognized the anatomical difference. He submitted a paper analyzing the unusual brainwaves of psychopaths to a journal which rejected it with a dismissive letter. "Those EEGs couldn't have been from real people," the editor wrote.
Exactly! Hare thought. Psychopaths are different. Eric Harris baffled the public because we could not conceive of a human with his motives.

Clekley described this a poverty of emotional range. That's a tricky concept, because psychopaths develop a handful of primitive emotions closely related to their own welfare. Three have been identified: anger, frustration, and rage. Psychopaths erupt with a ferocious bouts of anger, which can get them labled emotional. Look more closely, Cleckley advised: the conviction dawns on those who observe him carefully that here we deal with a readiness of expression rather than a strength of feeling. No lob, no grief, not even sorry, really, or hope or despair about his own future. Psychopaths feel nothing deep, complex, or sustained. the psychopath was prone to "vexation, spite, quick and labile flashes of quasi-affection, peevish resentment, shallow moods of self-pity, puerile attitutdes of vanity, absurd and showy poses of indignation." "they lack clear goals and objectives, getting involved in a wide variety of opportunistic offenses, rather than specializing ithe way typica career criminals do. " Cleckly wrote.

The book also goes on to describe Dr. Kent Kiehl's research with fMRIs at the University of New Mexico and his 2008 prison scan study and the juvenile research study at the University of WIsconsin, Dr. Frank Ochberg, with Michigan State University and the FBI investigator, Dr. Fuselier.
Edited to fix the quote tags.

Anyway, this might be the longest post I've made on ST so far.

[nippletwister]

Okay.

[$/]

"Player Piano." Loving it so far.

[nippletwister]

That's one of my favorite Vonnegut books, but it's the one book that is the farthest from his signature style. A lot closer to mid-century, Bradbury-esque scifi. Still, a good one.

[Alice Ayers]

"To the record." I toast to that sometimes.

[Zeppelin]

Born Standing Up - Steve Martin

finished my book on a flight and had a decent lay over in LAX. I remember it being recommended on a podcast so I picked it up. Just in the early years but realy good so far.

[John Ford]

The Power Broker

[Fuzzy]

born round by frank bruni

[Prison Mike]

just got done w/ the satanic verses. loved it, except for all of the references to islam and indian food that went way over my head.

[Alice Ayers]

Finished The fall of Ann Boleyn by Alison Weir. Non-fiction. She's pretty good with reading original texts and explaining multiple sides of interpretation and each party's bias. Henry Viii was pretty self deluded, IMO.

Read all 3 Hunger Games trilogy. It was awesome, addicting like Harry Potter. Haven'te felt that engrossed in a plotline since the early Harry Potters.

[Pesto]

"First Big Crush" by Eric Arnold.

[craiggers]

Just finished the Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, now starting on Blink. Pretty good so far. The Tipping Point was an examination of social epidemics and what causes them. Might be a little dry for some, but overall, pretty cool. Blink is about trusting your first instinct and judgment because scientifically, its usually right.

[violet]

I just finished The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson. I love to read, but my hectic schedule really has really cut into my reading time. However, I really tried make time to read this book. My husband and I have watched the two films that have been released so far, but I think would have enjoyed the book(s) regardless of my viewing of the movies. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo movie follows the book fairly closely. I have just started The Girl Who Played with Fire.

[Little Bobby Tables]

Currently:
-Kurt Vonnegut -Look at the Birdie: Unpublished Short Fiction. It's great.
-Barbara Ehrenreich - Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. It's not exactly revelatory, and smells of patronizing class tourism. Hey guys, did you know it sucks to be poor?

[nippletwister]

I got that Vonnegut for Xmas. Forcing myself to finish Gargoyle first.

I love Vonnegut so much.

[Alice Ayers]

Just finished the Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, now starting on Blink. Pretty good so far. The Tipping Point was an examination of social epidemics and what causes them. Might be a little dry for some, but overall, pretty cool. Blink is about trusting your first instinct and judgment because scientifically, its usually right.

Didn't he find a way to train people to change their first instinct, too?

[Alice Ayers]

Just finished reading "Man of my Dreams" by Curtis Sittenfeld. I loved her after American Wife and Prep and I'm sad that I've read all of her books now. Just one short story left. The titles sound like chick lit, but it's actually literary. She's definitely on my list of authors that I'd love to meet.

[Little Bobby Tables]

I'm reading "How to Wreck a Nice Beach: The Vocoder from World War II to Hip Hop." It's great so far.

[Pink Cheeze]

Currently reading "a long way gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier".

Ahh, ST, how I have missed thee?

[Alice Ayers]

Pinky, we missed you like crazy! I read about 1/2 of Long Way Gone, but I really had to stop reading it every chapter because it was breaking my heart. I even made a facebook note about how I had no idea what I was doing with my life after reading that.

[Turbo]

The ISU library finally got this book back:

http://www.amazon.com/Final-Cut-Making- ... 379&sr=1-1

I enjoy corporate success/failure books very much

[Fuzzy]

finished moby dick, now lolita

[nippletwister]

<3 lolita

[Fuzzy]

It's really good so far.

[Pesto]

Concrete Mathematics: A Foundation for Computer Science by Graham, Knuth and Patashnik

[GPCR]

Picked up a bunch of textbooks last week on the cheap:

Protein NMR Spectroscopy: Principles and Practice [2nd edition] (John Cavanagh et al)
haven't taken the time to go through, but a recommended refresher text if i ever get around to it
G Protein-Coupled Receptors in Drug Discovery: Methods and Protocols (Leifert)
this book is shit. bunch of outdated and sloppily described molecular protocols. no theory either.
G Protein-Coupled Receptors as Drug Targets: Analysis of Activation and Constitutive Activity [vol 24] (Mannhold et al)
don't plan on reading this
An Introduction to Bioinformatic Algorithms (Jones and Pevzner)
only a few chapters of interest to me.
Support Vector Machines: Theory and Applications (Weng)
might actually work my way through this one

[GPCR]

A book I'm actually now reading (after a pause):
The Great Financial Crisis: Causes and Consequences

[bith]

SVM stuff is actually pretty cool. I haven't extensively read about it. However I've had classes that deal with it and it comes up in a lot of publications in my field.

[GPCR]

Agreed. I've developed some fairly well-performing SVM protein classifiers over the past few years to predict function. I'm pretty convinced that most of the other pubs that report decent classification accuracy suffer from various forms of statistical over-fitting. I've tried validating my own work with more advanced forms of cross-validation. It's a problem that most of the computer science people who've published papers in this area don't seem to recognize- then they wonder why no one on the bio-sciences side ever actually applies their algorithms to genomic data. Also experimenting with a novel scoring scheme for multi-class problems. Leads to anecdotally better performance, but I need to trace back what I'm doing to see if its in keeping with some underlying statistical assumptions before making a generalizing argument. That, or just go talk to Vasant in the comp sci department. Figure I should probably gain a better theoretical understanding before I do that.

[Fuzzy]

done with lolita, on to canticle for liebowitz.

[Talenos]

on to canticle for liebowitz.

I'm happy for you. I had a great experience reading that the first time.

[nippletwister]

Lolita slows in the back half, but you liked it?

Conversely, Liebowitz starts slow and gets better.


Finished Casino Royale this weekend, starting Live and Let Die. I think I might just sprint through all the Bond novels.

[Fuzzy]

lolita does slow in the back half but those last 4-5 chapters (spec. chapters 28-29) are gorgeous, and the parts where humbert is acting the paranoid fool are exciting in a manic sort of fashion.

[Uncle Sherm]

I don't know how anything can be slow after reading Moby Dick. That was a long ass book that could have been a short story.

I'm reading The Bear and the Dragon. My first Clancy novel, and I am really liking it.

[Fuzzy]

I don't know how anything can be slow after reading Moby Dick. That was a long ass book that could have been a short story.

[nippletwister]

Finished Live and Let Die. Library didn't have Moonraker, so I started in on Diamonds are Forever.

[Fuzzy]

how are those?

[nippletwister]

Pulp. Light. Comparisons to Raymond Chandler are almost apt, though Chandler usually has more twists.

Mostly dumb fun. Though so far, not nearly as dumb as the movies. Less kitsch.

[Little Bobby Tables]

Just started Virtual Justice: The New Laws of Online Worlds. Pretty interesting so far.

[Uncle Sherm]

Badass: Birth of a Legend

They guy that does Badassoftheweek.com writes pretty good books.

[MarcusAurelius]

Badassoftheweek.com

well i have a new favorite blog

[nippletwister]

Just got Chuck Palahniuk's newest in the mail (didn't even know it was out) so I'll be taking a break between Bond novels for that.

[Fuzzy]

finished canticle, i really like it. i had no clue what was going to happen at any time during the book. fun read.

started anthony bourdain's newest book, medium raw. maybe not as good as kitchen confidential, but it's entertaining.

[Uncle Sherm]

Lamb: The Gospel according to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal.

I recommend this.

[Talenos]

Biff Tannen?

[nithos]

Lamb: The Gospel according to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal.

I recommend this.

I am only 25% into this book, but I agree. Liking it better than A Dirty Job so far.

[$/]

Concrete Mathematics: A Foundation for Computer Science by Graham, Knuth and Patashnik

Are you finding it worthwhile?

I'm enjoying "1491" so far.

[Fuzzy]

Finished Medium raw, starting blood meridian.

[Dr. Faustus]

I'm making another attempt at reading Lacan's Ecirts this summer. I actually understand most of it this time around. I went on this Freud reading binge last fall and checked out most of the books the Brooklyn Public Library had of his. Combine that with a loose familiarity with Hegel and things get clearer. Lacan attended those Kojeve lectures on Hegel and it shows. It's kind of funny how I missed these things the first time around.

[nippletwister]

Just finished Armageddon in Retrospect, the second posthumous Vonnegut collection.

I think it's on to some Pynchon. The Crying of Lot 49. A tiny book for Pynchon. Not sleepytime reading.

[nithos]

Jumping back and forth between:

Nerd Do Well - Simon Pegg
The Devil in the White City - Larson
American Gods - Gaiman

[violet]

Denying Evolution: Creationism, Scientism, and the Nature of Science-Massimo Pigliucci

[Dr. Faustus]

Denying Evolution: Creationism, Scientism, and the Nature of Science-Massimo Pigliucci

Ha! I've met that guy. He does a "Dinner and Philosophy Now" Meetup in NYC. Philosophy Now is some magazine he contributes to. It's usually at an Italian restaurant in Midtown. He seemed nice, but I only went to one of them. The crowd was way too hostile to anything postmodern, existential, continental....basically everything I'm into. He knows what he's talking about, but I'd be lying if I said the philosophy of science types didn't get on my nerves. They end up asking these questions that are so besides the point. I say this as an unapologetic atheist.

[violet]

I got the book when I was taking BETAL (education seminar) and we read excerpts from it. Then I sat down and read quite a bit of it but got busy and didn't finish it. It's been a couple years, so I'm just starting it over. I think he does a nice job of tracking the debate from its origins through today. I like all the footnotes and the appendices (excerpts from Hume and Bryan's last speech) will be interesting to read. Books like these keep me thinking and on my toes for when I encounter such questions from students.

[Little Bobby Tables]

Glamorama by Bret Easton Ellis.

I liked Rules of Attraction better. Some day I'll get around to reading American Psycho.