Top Ten Places I Follow Outside of Books

Posted on May 22, 2012 by smellincoffee

This week the Broke and the Bookish are taking a pause from books and asking: what NON-book related sites do you most frequently visit?

1. Forums (CivFanatics, TrekBBS)

In my first year online, I quickly ditched chatrooms for forums. While I’ve joined too many to name in the years since, the two listed are the only ones I invariably visit. Though my initial motivation for joining CFC was to talk about Civilization III, its non-gaming forums attract a lot of intelligent conversation about various issues.

2. LiveScience | Science20

These are both science-news websites targeted toward the general reader. LiveScience’s style is more ‘hip’ than thorough; over the years I’ve seen more lists and pictures and less content, hence my switching to Science 2.0.

3. EconTalk.org

This may be cheating; it’s a podcast that features a lot of authors. I never expected to become a fan of an economics podcast, let alone one that’s so staunchly free market, but so help me if I don’t spend my Mondays thinking, “Ooh, yeah! EconTalk updates tonight!”  The lure, for me, is that the host and his guests have long, intelligent conversations, the kind I can learn from listening to even if I don’t agree with the point one of them is trying to make. It’s hard to find that kind of sensible approach these days — and the books the podcast features are fantastically interesting.

4.StrongTowns.org & KunstlerCast

These are both about urban design: one is a nonprofit run by an engineer and urban planner, the other a podcast featuring a journalist who despises modern architecture and has a rich and colorful vocabulary for describing the many things wrong with it.  Although the KCast is more entertaining, I rather prefer StrongTowns. The root point of both is that America’s current building pattern of suburban sprawl is uneconomical, unsustainable, and unfit for human habitation in general.  The author of StrongTowns updates the blog three times a week, and always provides something meaty to chew on.

5. News (BBC, NPR, The Economist, The Atlantic)

I don’t go to any of these daily, but through a mix of radio/podcasts, online reading, and magazine reading, I hear from one of them at least once a day. The Economist is one I’ve only discovered in the past few months.

6. Comics (Frazz, QuestionableContent, XKCD, Unshelved)

All four of these are unique to the web: some I’ve been following for years (Unshelved, XKCD), and others I’ve only found recently.  Unshelved is set in a library;  QuestionableContent is about a group of twenty-somethings and their odd lives;  Frazz is set in a school, where an intellectual janitor and an extremely bright kid bounce off a tired teacher with humor and insight that remind me of Calvin and Hobbes; and XKCD pretty much speaks for itself.

7. Eleven Points

A blog of top ten eleven lists on ecclectic topics, rangng from the predictable (movies, games) to the odd (“11 Strangest Things on Amazon). Although I don’t follow any sports, I’ve grown to like his NFL predictions; during football season he attempts to pick a random NFL game through eleven methods, most of them utterly off the wall. He’ll have his dog choose between two treats, with each treat representing a game. He’ll model the game on a twenty-year old NES platform, or call in a phone psyhic. Last season he tried it based on Handsomest Player — and the season before that, on the cheerleaders.

8. The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe | StarTalk Radio

SGU is a panel podcast about science/technology news and general skepticism; the standard panel is a trio of brothers with medical degrees and a couple of their friends, often joined by a ‘guest rogue’. Excellent show for those interested in critical thinking or concerned about the popularity of quacks and superstition.  StarTalk Radio is somewhat similar; hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson, it’s more of a discussion show with two hosts and a guest. The general theme is science and society. The most  recent episode is an interview with Mark Kurlansky, the author of Salt: A World History. I’m jazzed to have discovered it before Tyson!

9. TvTropes

TvTropes is a…aw, just look at this XKCD comic about it,

10. LameBook and People of WalMart

…guilty pleasures!

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The Wal-Mart Effect

Posted on May 18, 2012 by smellincoffee
The Wal-Mart Effect: How the World’s Most Powerful Company Really Works, and How It’s Transforming the American Economy
© 2006 Charles Fishman
352 pages

In only a little over fifty years, Wal-Mart has grown from a small five-and-dime store in rural Arkansas to an outright goliath, dominating the American, and increasingly, the global economy to an unprecedented degree. In The Wal-Mart Effect, Charles Fishman examines the secret of the corporation’s success, and explores how that success has altered the global marketplace.

Fishman does to Wal-Mart specifically what Eric Schlosser did for the fast food companies in general: probe into the details of their business, as far as the corporate obsession with secrecy will allow, and air out the laundry. But if Sclosser is a journalist looking for the ‘dark side’ of his subject, Fishman takes more of a neutral stance; however, a sense of awe pervades the text. He’s no less critical of Wal-Mart, but more honestly curious. It is the same attitude one might find in a history of Napoleon’s Grand Armee or the German Wehrmacht. The difference is that those legendary armies of old are now long gone: Wal-Mart is still very much alive: the changes it brings about are seen in the newspapers, not the history books.

            The secret to Wal-Mart’s success lays in its near-maniacal obsession with finding the cheapest products and offering them as cheaply as possible.  This seems an obvious proposition: doesn’t every business use that as its model?  Wal-Mart’s distinction is a matter of degree: cutting expenses is an obsession in this corporation, at all levels. Fishman’s investigations find workaholic executives who meet in boardrooms filled with discarded lawn furniture, because Wal-Mart sees no reason in buying furnishing that hopeful clients provide for free. He finds managers who lock their employees in overnight and encourage people to work off the clock – and employees who exist in a perpetual limbo between partial and full employment,  working too few hours to qualify for the meager benefits, but too many to look for a second job. But one expects a chain store like Wal-Mart to prosper by keeping wages low;  the war it wages on its suppliers is more novel.

            Wal-Mart is a supermarket: it sells vast quantities of goods, and its original successes allowed it to expand to the point that 90% of Americans live within a fifteen-mile radius of one of its stores. A company that does business with Wal-Mart can expect to sell more volume than they ever anticipated producing through the stores, but Wal-Mart is no passive player in the marketplace. That obsession with finding the lowest prices means obtaining the lowest price from their suppliers – and Wal-Mart conducts its commanding volume into power, in effect dictating prices to its suppliers. This doesn’t happen at the outset; instead, prospective clients are lured into business, then hit with demands that they lower their price 5% every year. Companies which can’t afford this go out of business, and those who linger can only make the cut by producing ever-more shoddy merchandise, or finding a cheaper source of production…like China. Wal-Mart not only prospers from outsourcing; it engineers it.

            That Wal-Mart can dictate prices like this indicates that it has outgrown the restrictions normally present in the free market: indeed, Wal-mart is now so large that when it enters a market, that market becomes its own. It not only sets the prices in its own stores: other companies have to resort to the same tactics just to keep even. When Wal-Mart moves into a town, small businesses competing with it go out of business (creating a net job loss, for those ‘growth’-minded politicians who think the answer to a stagnant economy is big box stores). Those who try to compete with the giant of Bentonville face angry customers, because the Wal-Mart price has become the expectedprice – and it is, in fact, the lowest price that can possibly be offered. Wal-Mart’s enormous income derives from volume sales, not a generous profit margin: Fishman elaborates that if Wal-Mart attempted to raise its standard wage from $10 to $12, the company would be operating at a net loss.

        Although its effect on local economies and wages is deleterious, Fishman’s chief concern with Wal-Mart is that its size makes it unmanageable: it’s too big to be reined in by the market, because it is the market. His account doesn’t address how exactly what concerned people should do with Wal-Mart, although after finishing it I think people who can might give it a miss and shop elsewhere, even if the prices aren’t rock bottom. Fishman believes people are starting to tire of the store, missing quality goods and service. Wal-Mart’s obsession with providing cheap goods has made shopping there an experience bereft of value.

Definitely a book to consider for Americans.

Related:
WalMart Watch
Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser

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Hollow Men

Posted on May 18, 2012 by smellincoffee

Star Trek Deep Space Nine: Hollow Men
© 2005 Una McCormack
368 pages

 

            Deep Space Nine is notoriously the darkest of the six Star Trek series, repeatedly exploring corridors of the human experience that other series gave a wide berth. The horrors of war dominated the latter half of the series, and no character escaped the grim costs of war…especially not Captain Benjamin Sisko, who, in “In the Pale Moonlight” struck a Faustian bargain to save the Alpha Quadrant from outright conquest at the hands of the Dominion.  What began as a devious exercise in manipulation ended in murder, twice over, with a succession of increasingly dubious steps connecting the two.  Uma McCormack follows up on this most intriguing episode by exploring the consequences of Captain Sisko’s actions when he and his co-conspirator Garak are summoned to Starfleet Headquarters. Sisko, morally plagued, hopes for punishment and redemption; Garak anticipates savage treatment at the hands of Starfleet Intelligence, almost hopefully so – but neither man has any idea what is in store for them.
            Hollow Men is almost a creature from Trek literature’s previous generation in that it seems episodic; there’s a large A-story, and two smaller threads that connect together for a B story.  The primary action takes place on Earth, where Sisko explores his conscience, and Garak, paradise. On the action, Odo deals with a security crisis and his thawing relationship with Colonel Kira.  The two stories share a common theme, however; the cost of war.  When an old nemesis of Odo arrives on the station, the constable is absolutely positive the recently-released convict is there to commit a latinum heist. New Federation security measures give him a lot of leeway in times of war, but is his personal satisfaction worth using such extreme measures? On Earth, both Sisko and Garak confront a Starfleet captain turned peace activist – but for their own reasons, and Garak’s are not his own, for powers on Earth attempt to convert him into a pawn in their own game.
            Deep Space Nine stands apart from the rest of the franchise not only for its darker themes, but its reliance on long-running arcs and rich characters. McCormack’s narrative definitely keeps with DS9’s tradition there;  weaving the story’s threads seamlessly into Deep Space Nine’s sixth season – building on content from the show, or setting it up. All this she does and delivers two mysteries and a lot of room for thought. This is very much a keeper for Niners.
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Reefer Madness

Posted on May 16, 2012 by smellincoffee

Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market
310 pages
© 2003 Eric Schlosser

What do pornography, marijuana, and migrant labor have in common? They’re all factors in an underground economy, a vast web of cash-heavy transactions barred (or limited) by laws and social mores, but which generate substantial wealth for those willing to risk criminality.  Reefer Madness contains thre seperate exposes on these subjects by the author of Fast Food Nation, followed by a conclusion which attempts to tie them together and glean some general lessons about the black market. Although the three don’t quite fit together as well as Schlosser might hope, each piece is well worth considering on its own, pointed as well as entertaining.

Although “An Empire of the Obscene” is something of an oddity (pornography isn’t illegal),  the preceding sections (“Reefer Madness” and “In the Strawberty Fields”) address subject alive and well in American politics today. All three mix colorful history and contemporary exposition which reveal both fascinating trivia and lessons about the specific subjects and the black market in general. The underground economy is not marginal, and its size should concern us not because of potential tax revenues lost by corrupt porn kings like Reuben Sturman, but because they fundamentally alter the rules that everyone else plays by. The use of undocumented workers in California, for instance, keeps food prices artifically low and stifles innovation by allowing companies to be dependent on cheap labor, just as the American south stagnated based on its use of slave labor. Considering the conditions migrant workers are forced to live in, the comparison to slavery is most apt.  Despite the long-term consequences of allowing this behavior to go on — tolerating it because it keeps food cheap — the US government’s attitude toward companies that seek out migrant labor is far too lenient. In other cases, the government is far too heavy-handed. This is the case with marijuana; Schlosser covers our bizaare obsession with it, which far exceed the concern the facts would merit we have. In what other nation can a person receive a lighter sentence for murder than selling a largely harmless drug?  Considering the US’s economic woes, decriminalizing the drug would go a long way in freeing up police and prison resources that could be better used elsewhere.

Schlosser believes that a study of the black market can teach us about the market in general — and namely, impart the lesson that Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ is not always one of providence. It is one, in fact, that can lead to great abuses (like exploitation of migrant labor). What they excel in providing us outside the bounds of the law tells us secrets about ourselves; that we have a ‘deep psychosis’ regarding marijuana, for instance, and that Puritanical rejection of sexuality is out of line with human nature. Reefer Madness is a call for sensibly-informed moderation, although it misses one point certainly worth mentioning, that foolish laws, or the lack of laws when they are crucially needed, saps the public’s respect for law in general.

Choice quotations:

We have been told for years to bow down before ‘the market’. We have placed our faith in the laws of supply and demand. What has been forgotten, or ignored, is that the market rewards only efficiency. Every other human value gets in its way. […] No deity that man have ever worshiped is more ruthless and more hollow than the free market unchecked. […]  

p. 108

Black markets will always be with us. But they will recede in importance when our public morality is consistent with our private one. The underground is a good measure of the progress and health of nations. When much is wrong, much needs to be hidden.

p. 221

Related:
Off the Books: the Underground Economy of the Urban Poor, Sudhir Venkatesh
Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal, Eric Schlosser

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Teaser Tuesday (15 May)

Posted on May 15, 2012 by smellincoffee

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly book event in which we share excerpts from our current reads…or in today’s case, two recently-completed reads. Play Along at Should Be Reading!

During the 1920s “stag nights” — gatherings at which hard-core films were shown to an all-male audience — became a familar, socially acceptable custom. In the United States, hard-core films were not exhibited at brothels or socialist meeting halls; they were shown at politically conservative institutions, at Kiwanis clubs, American Legion halls, and college fraternities.

p. 126, Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor. Eric Schlosser.

Streets that once served vehicles and people equitably are now designed for the sole purpose of moving vehicles through them as quickly as possible. They have become, in effect, traffic sewers. No surprise, then, that they fail to sustain pedestrian life.

p. 64, Suburban Nation: the Rise of Sprawl and Decline of the American Dream, Andres Duany et. al.
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Catching Fire

Posted on May 9, 2012 by smellincoffee

Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human
 © 2009 Richard Wrangham
309 pages

Cooking has created a great many fantastic dish throughout the centuries, but Richard Wrangham holds that the culinary art’s greatest triumph is us — humanity, for the advent of cooking substantially altered our biological and cultural revolution. Not only did it give us smaller guts and smaller mouths, but Wrangham also believes the cooking process set the stage for the sexual division of labor and largely monogamous pair-bonds. Although the biological claim is safer,  both are fascinating to consider, for if they are true then a ‘natural’ diet for human beings is one which is cooked. Additionally, if this is the case then a cultural adaption has manipulated biology, and in a profound way.

The genius of cooking is that it allows us to maximize the potential calorie intake of a given foodproduct. Raw food is tough; herbivorous animals in particular spend their entire day grazing and chewing. Their intestines must work throughout the day, and often into the night, breaking down ingested food into the fuel the body so desperately needs. But all that work takes energy itself. Meat eaters have an easier time of it,  but muscle tissue is resilient; thick, tough, and tightly connected. At the outset, Wrangham establishes that the ease of digestion is fundamentally important, citing cases in which two sets of animals were given identical amounts of the same food; rats, for instance, given a set number of food pellets.  Each group’s calorie count was identical, but one group had “soft” pellets, or pellets in which air had been inserted. The group eating soft pellets put on muscle mass far more quickly than the group chewing on hard pellets; in fact, the soft-pellet group became obese. In processing and cooking food — grinding seeds, tenderizing meat by pounding it with rocks, and then heating items — we greatly reduce the amount of work our bodies must do to digest them.  The more processed they are, the more efficiently we can take in the calories…and while easy calories have become a problem to us now, in the days prior to agriculture it was a godsend.

Cooking not only gave us a competitive edge, it altered our physiology. We no longer needed huge teeth for grinding raw muscle, nor expansive intestines for long-term digestion…and when those became smaller, we had more energy to invest in brains. Although Wrangham doesn’t speculate on the result of increased intelligence and leisure time, one can assume the combination had a dramatic effect on human culture.  Fundamentally, the author contends that the division of labor roles could have never transpired without cooking. Raw food requires so much time to chew and digest that men wouldn’t have been able to spend their days hunting (or lounging around, as the case might be) if they could not have come back to the tribe camp with a cooked meal waiting for them.  Since women, the gatherers, provided the economic foundation of the tribe — supplying food if and when the men failed to deliver — one might think this gave them the power. Instead, cooking became a liability. Women tending food at a fire needed to protect it, lest the food be stolen.  Wrangham believes that pair bonds arose for this reason: women provided the food, and men protected it.  Although this is more of a stretch than the biological claims, requiring more inference on our part,  it offers a count to the usual sex-driven conception of pair bonds. Time and again Wrangham documents tribes that don’t seem to care if married women sleep with other men…but woe betide them if they cook for other men.

Wrangham ends by chastising nutritionists for missing the point about food, and particularly for believing every food delivers a set amount of calories or nutrients, when that amount greatly varies depending on how the food has been processed and cooked. Given the obesity epidemic, the relationship between processing and calories is certainly one worth our consideration…and Wrangham’s work is wide open to lay readers, so dig in.

Related:
ScienceFriday interview with Richard Wrangham regarding Catching Fire
Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond

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Worlds of Ds9: The Dominion and Ferenginar

Posted on May 9, 2012 by smellincoffee

Star Trek Worlds of Deep Space Nine, Volume III: The Dominion and Ferenginar
© 2010 David R. George III, Keith R.A. DeCandido
(Trade Paperback) 352 pages

The Dominion and Ferenginar is the final volume in the Worlds of Deep Space Nine series, and the only one to focus on worlds completely outside the sphere of Federation influence. Like its predecessors, Andor and Cardassia and Bajor and Trill, D&F consists of two novellas. This volume is penned by two of modern Trek’s most popular authors. DeCandido opens the collection with “Satisfaction is Not Guaranteed”, a tale of business politics in which a cabal of angry Ferengi attempt to enlist Quark’s support in a conspiracy aimed against his brother, Grand Nagus Rom, whose reforms (allowing women to wear clothes and earn profit, mandating an income tax) they despise. Quark is torn between his own contempt for the “New Ferenginar” and family loyalty, but the decision is made somewhat easier when he finds out the cabal is hoping to seat his old enemy Brunt as the new nagus.  This is a story interesting and sometimes funny, albiet not remarkable — the standard for Ferengi stories has been set by The 34th Rule, and that’s a book which won’t be beat anytime soon.

David R. George follows this with a novella set in the Gamma Quadrant, “Olympus Descending”. At the end of Deep Space Nine’s series, Odo decided to stay with his people, becoming an exile from his friends in the hopes of teaching the Dominion more peaceful ways. Meanwhile, an elderly Jem’Hedar soldier who Odo sent to the Alpha Quadrant in hopes of reforming, is finding life increasingly difficult to bear. The Federation’s vicious enemy has never been fully explored in novel. The length of George’s story doesn’t allow for a lot of expansion here, and George paints the Founders as largely detatched from the everyday affairs of empire. This is somewhat disappointing, but understandable. Odo’s quest to understand his people and his own origins ends with a staggering turn of events, one I’m surprised no one has followed up on. The last great Borg War may have taken precendence, though.

These are both fine stories; “Olympus Descending” is the stronger of the two,  helped by its subject matter being more exotic.

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Watching the Clock

Posted on May 8, 2012 by smellincoffee

Star Trek DTI: Watching the Clock
© 2011 Christopher L. Bennett
512 pages

Time travel! It’s a staple of Star Trek. No crew among the show’s five series has been able to resist gallavanting around in the timestream, not even in the movies. But for every temporal adventure, there’s a mess left behind to clean up…and that ornerous task falls to the Department of Temporal Investigations. DS9’s “Trials and Tribble-lations” introduced us to Agents Lucsly and Dulmur, two humorless grey-suited cosmic bureaucrats    whose are renoun for their skill at keeping the timeline pristine. The two are joined by a Deltan and a DTI newbie on two distinct cases that span the book, involve both the USS Titan and the USS Enterprise. The narrative is dense; Bennett somehow makes temporal mechanics seem sensible in the light of both current quantum theory and the time travel we’ve seen on screen. Frequent flashbacks ensure that a narrative rich in exposition is peppered too with action and humor, and no time-traveling incident in the entire Trek canon goes without being mentioned. Bennett even works in Deep Space Nine‘s Millenium series.

Bennett has given life two two stiffs, managed offer a view of time that makes all the myriad temporal incidents seem as though they could have occurred in the same universe, and initiated an altogether unique series in Trek literature. Its success has been followed by a sequel, Forgotten History, which establishes DTI’s beginnings in the TOS era.

Related:
The End of Eternity, Isaac Asimov (which Bennett cites)

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Top Ten Favorite Teases

Posted on May 8, 2012 by smellincoffee

Top ten all-time favorite quotations from books? Talk about an overwhelming subject! I’ve decided to narrow the field a bit. Since I participate in another Tuesday book-game, Teaser Tuesday, and since it involves quotations, I’m going to post my ten favorite teasers from the past two or three years since I’ve been participating. (Besides, I already have a Top Ten Quotations post.)  In no particular order…

1. “I did it! I did it! With my own hands, I did it!”


The Sea Wolf, Jack London. Context is key in fully appreciating this quote; a literary professor with no practical skills is rescued at sea and ‘impressed’ into service aboard a sealing vessel run by a brute, a man who thinks himself a Nietzschean  übermensch. Though he’s lived a soft life, our hero must learn self-reliance and physical prowess to overcome the captain.

2. “They’ll hang the fellow at Tyburn, and there will be an end to it.”
“If he is found Guilty.”
“Indeed. Your legal acuity never ceases to amaze me.”
“I do not intend that he shall be found Guilty.”
“A commendable position for the Counsel for the Defense. Bravissimo.”

A Far Better Rest, Susan Alleyn, which is A Tale of Two Cities from Sidney’s point of view. I find this particular quotation so amusing as delivered in my head that I sometimes recite it to amuse myself.
3.  I said to him, “What are you doing here, Isaac? Why aren’t you home writing a book?”
[Asimov] groaned. “In a way that’s what I’m doing here. Doubleday wants me to write a mystery novel entitled Murder at the ABA.” 
Murder at the ABA, Isaac Asimov. (Naturally.)
4. “Neighborhoods like Georgetown or Beacon Hill are walking neighborhoods. It is not necessary to hop in the car to get an ice cream cone or a bottle of aspirin. You walk to  a store — enjoying the felicities of the street as you go — and you are able to see other people along the way. You may even have a conversation with a stranger. This is called meeting people, the quintessential urban pleasure. (Or else it is called a mugging, the quintessential urban calamity.).

The Geography of Nowhere, James Howard Kunstler

5. In another Christmas story, Dale Pearson, evil developer, self-absorbed woman hater, and seemingly unredeemable curmudgeon, might by visited in the night by a series of ghosts who, by showing him bleak visions of Christmas future, past, and present, would bring about in him a change to generosity, kindness, and a general warmth toward his fellow man. But this is not that kind of Christmas story, so here, in not too many pages, someone is going to dispatch the miserable son of a bitch with a shovel. That’s the spirit yet to come in these parts. Ho, ho, ho.

The Stupidest Angel, Christopher Moore.

6. “Are you in trouble again? Did you kidnap another world leader when I wasn’t looking?”
“No, but the day’s young yet,” Picard said, pulling down on the front of his uniform.

Paths of Disharmony, Dayton Ward. This is actually the second of two casual kidnapping references by Dayton Ward in two different trek books. Both appeared as teasers.

7. “Feeling the words, and remembering how Billie could tell you her whole life story in the glide of a note, Frank began to sing the lyrics as if he really meant them, and something happened.
The girls, dancing with their dates, began to stop mid-step and stare at him.”

Frank: the Voice, James Kaplan

8. “Before the evening was out she had seduced him into seducing her, a conquest that the young Tuohy lived to regret when he discovered, at roughly the same time as the dean, that his latest mistress was the dean’s youngest daughter. Which is how Tuohy, despite his passing grades, came to be expelled from the Columbia University School of Mines.”

The Revolutionist,  Robert Littell
9. “Consumed by flames, the torso crackled and the fat sputtered, and then as the skin burned away, the black, flat ribs of the skeleton were revealed, and then the whole torso turned, and suddenly the neck of the animal swung up, surrounded by flames, moving as the skin contracted. And inside the flames Levine saw a long pointed snout, and rows of sharp predatory teeth, and hollow eye sockets, the whole thing burning like some medieval dragon rising in flames up into the sky. “
The Lost World, Michael Crichton.
10. “‘Repeat after me,’ said the parson. ‘I, Horatio, take thee, Maria Ellen –‘
The thought came up in Hornblower’s mind that these were the last few seconds in which he could withdraw from doing something which he knew to be ill-considered.”

Hornblower and the Hotspur, C.S. Forester.
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Teaser Tuesday (8 May)

Posted on May 8, 2012 by smellincoffee

“Under this system, an unmarried woman who offers food to a man is effectively flirting, if not offering betrothal. Male anthropologists have to be aware of this to avoid embarrassment.”

p. 164, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made us Human, Robert Wrangham

Just ask Cap’n Mal of Serenity.

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