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Book Review: Fussell on Class

(astralcodexten.substack.com)
136 points DaoIsTheWay | 1 comments | 05 Mar 21 02:47 UTC | HN request time: 0.218s | source
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Mattasher ◴[05 Mar 21 03:38 UTC] No.26352313[source]▶
I had a great discussion about Class with author Sandra Tsing Loh:

https://mattasher.com/2020/09/01/ep-18-sandra-tsing-loh-on-a...

Sandra wrote what is imo the definitive book review of Class.

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pvg ◴[05 Mar 21 04:28 UTC] No.26352699[source]▶
Do you mean this piece in The Atlantic?

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/03/class-d...

It's a much better review than Scott Alexander's, although that's an unfairly low bar given he doesn't appear to have caught on the book is supposed to be funny, a "cocktail-party-ready argument" as Sandra Tsing Loh puts it.

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jerf ◴[05 Mar 21 04:39 UTC] No.26352783[source]▶
He's treating it as "ha ha only serious": http://catb.org/jargon/html/H/ha-ha-only-serious.html .

Haven't read it myself but he sounds right. Jokes like that aren't funny if they don't have a lot of truth in them.

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1. pvg ◴[05 Mar 21 05:03 UTC] No.26352944[source]▶
I'm not sure that's the case, it's certainly not clear from the flabalanche of writing he has loosed. If he got the joke, it's not mentioned in the review.