Citizen Reader

I'm a total sucker for police procedurals, in both book and TV form (hello The Wire, best TV program ever), so it should come as no surprise that I found Rosa Brooks's new book Tangled Up In Blue: Policing the American City, to be a fascinating read.

Brooks, a journalist and Georgetown University professor, decided to apply to become a reserve police officer in the Washington DC Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) to try and understand what policing a community looks like. Although the job is a volunteer, unpaid one, it is no small undertaking; reserve police officers with the MPD go through the same police academy and eventually become sworn, armed police officers with full arrest powers (which they keep, as long as they fulfill their end of the bargain: working at least twenty-four hours of patrol each month).

Brooks's narrative takes you through her application process, her academy training, and what she learned on patrol. It wasn't my favorite book ever, but it was certainly engrossing. I wasn't really surprised by most of the problems Brooks faced while patrolling or the types of calls she dealt with (that's what happens when you read a lot of depressing nonfiction and police procedurals), but I was interested to hear how difficult it can be to get in and out of your uniform and juggle all the things you have to juggle, like driving while plugging information into your car's police computer, or how many different phones and radios you have to juggle because they police-issued phones that work with the radio don't make calls, so you have to have your personal cell phone with you at all times.

In another interesting twist, Brooks is also the daughter of investigative author Barbara Ehrenreich (who I sometimes enjoy reading but who is not one of my favorite NF authors), so I enjoyed the brief insights into Ehrenreich's thoughts on the police and how Brooks reacted to them.

An interesting read and a sometimes enlightening one. With all the focus on what police work can be and should be, now might be a good time to read it.

Mr. CR saw this book, Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley, by Corey Pein, on the end table and he said, "Kudos to you, another depressing nonfiction book."

Which I think is rich, coming from Mr. CR, who is my partner in our natural (if not ideal) habit of always imagining the worst-case scenario. He's way more bleak than me, but he hides it better, mostly because he's very, very quiet.

I know. You totally want to hang out in our cheerful, laugh-a-minute home, don't you?*

Anyway. He was right. This book was super depressing.

It's been on that end table for a week now, because that's where I set it when I finished reading it, had a little cry, and then moved on to whatever homeschooling, caregiving, or freelancing stuff I had going on that day. I've been trying for a week to get myself to post about this book, because I actually do think you should read it.

Pein set out to live and succeed in Silicon Valley, figuring there's tons of start-up cash available there for whatever kind of start-up he might be able to dream up (and then kind of vaguely start, and then cash out of). In other words, and as the jacket copy proclaims: "To truly understand the delirious reality of the tech entrepreneurs, he knew he would have to inhabit that perspective--he would have to become an entrepreneur himself."

And so he does. The first hurdle, of course, is finding a place to live on a journalist's budget in Silicon Valley. It's pretty much impossible, and it involves either living with many, many other tech workers in tiny, tiny, tiny (and shared) living spaces, or actually in a tent that somebody is renting out as an Airbnb. The second hurdle is dreaming up an idea for a start-up, and then getting that idea in front of investors. Third? Try not to lose your soul.

I think I left this book sitting on the end table because I knew it was going to be hard for me to do it justice in a review. It's sort of a strange concept, but there's no doubt that Pein does a very good job of dropping the reader right in the middle of Silicon Valley culture, and WOW, I find that a hugely scary place to be.

The most disturbing story (for me, anyway) in a book of disturbing stories came at the end, when the author describes his and his spouse's life in India, where they lived in 2016. At that time, the prime minister, Narendra Modi, implemented a policy of "demonetization," because he wanted people to move to smartphone apps for all of their transactions. So Modi's government announced that two denominations of Indian currency--two denominations that comprised nearly 90% of all cash in circulation--wouldn't be considered legal tender and had to be turned in for larger bills.

That sounds fairly benign until you learn that the Indian government partnered with a tech company on a start-up app called Paytm, that was in no way able to handle the massive amounts of Indian citizens' daily transactions. It was a disaster:

"In the cities, many sick and elderly people died in the long ATM lines--in at least one case, a doctor refused treatment after demanding cash, which was, of course, what everyone was waiting in line for. It was easy to spend an entire day traipsing from one machine to another, only to find them all out of cash. But these problems were largely invisible to India's wealthy and middle class, who hired servants to do their shopping and thus escaped the battle of will and endurance that suddenly characterized routine commerce." (p. 290.)

Does that last bit sound like anywhere you know? Maybe everywhere, just recently when wealthier people paid desperate people (not enough) to go out and do their shopping or driving or other basic commerce for them? I thought, huh, I'm surprised no politician here has demanded that we all turn in cash and use only a Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos approved/created payment app.

Then I remembered, that just hasn't happened YET.

I know, it's depressing. Read this book anyway.

*Actually, we all do laugh a lot. First off, the CRjrs are hilarious little animals, and also, if you have an absurdist sense of humor, there is a LOT of material in our current world at which to laugh.