Content tagged with "society"

I decided to try something new with this book: I decided to give it one hour of my time, and see how much I could get out of it. If you search for “how to read like a graduate student,” you’ll learn an important point: grad students don’t read every word of all the books they’re assigned. They just…

This is essentially a long-form rant against the fact that people think they’re experts when they’re clearly not, and they tend to look down on actual expertise and distrust experts. It was both inspiring and infuriating. The author writes well, but he offered no solutions. So, take it for what it…

This book was recommended by a friend. This friend is a social, religious, and political conservative, with very specific opinions on the separation of genders. I did not want to like this book. But, in the end, I agreed with far more than I disagreed with. The book is very well-written. The first…

This is a book about how we don’t like reality anymore. We like the illusion of reality. As a society, we’re addicted to farce. It’s almost hilarious that this was written in 2009. If only the author had seen what was coming. He talks about “the illusion of literacy,” by contrasting it against…

I gave this book every chance, I really did. I didn’t abandon it, but I skipped around a lot. It’s purportedly about postmodernism. Or, perhaps about a history of how we ended up postmodern? I wasn’t sure. Each chapter was basically a history of many things, often pop-culture. I would read a…

I read this book for the pure titillation level, because I’m fascinated by high society in general and New York culture in particular. And the book delivered on that level – there are some horrifying anecdotes where of a woman trying to fit into Upper East Side mommies. Women who use Birkin bags as…

I didn’t get this book for about the first third of it. Then I figured out what it was all about – It’s about all the hidden things in life that we ignore from day to day. Where our food comes from, where are energy comes from, where our garbage grows, what’s in outer space, etc. We live in a…

This was a good book, though not quite what I expected. I guess I didn’t expect anything, but the introduction didn’t quite set the book up for what it was. The intro discusses a radio show replay the author heard. It was an episode of “Command Performance” that happened right after V-J day back in…

This book caused quite a stir when it was published in 1994. This is the quote that upset a lot of people: The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there isn’t one. The author was basically saying that evangelical Christians have stopped thinking rationally about anything. Unfortunately, it was a…

I like David Brooks. I like how he writes. It flows nicely. And this is good, because this book doesn’t really go in a straight line. It meanders. It wanders around a point, completely unfocused. “The First Mountain” we climb is superficial success – money, job, romance. “The Second Mountain” is a…

I had trouble with this book. It’s an examination of how trends move through cultures and are used to gain status. But, weirdly, it’s almost too basic. The author starts with a long-winded explanation of “status” …which will surprise no one. It’s one of those things we all know, and I’m just not…

This is simply the text of David Foster Wallace’s famed commencement speech given at Kenyon College a few years before he took his own life. What’s interesting is the format – it’s a tiny book , and each sentence is on it’s own page. Seriously – an entire page is each just one single sentence. It’s…

An entertaining and well-researched examination of the “club economy” – a world where “club promoters” worked “models and bottles.” There exists a job where you get models to nightclubs to just…exist. It turns out that rich men spend stupid amounts of money in the presence of attractive women, so…

Wonderfully complete history of Reddit, from the childhood lives of founders Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman, through the life of Aaron Swartz. The book has short chapters, and is mainly episodic – each chapter covers some moment in the history of Reddit, and they’re all there: the rise of…

This is the story of class in America. Specifically the “lower” class. In contrast to the Utopian image of Colonial America, the early years of the country were marked with extreme poverty. Before the slave trade geared up, most of the people sent to the New World were poor white people,…

Last year, I had lunch with a friend. She is very much on the Left, politically. I mentioned that I thought Bill Gates was a great humanitarian. She responded in a way that unsettled me . Sure he gives a way a lot of money, but we really need to examine how the world let someone get that rich in the…