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Hey everyone,
Last week Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared that “our children have become unknowning participants in a decades-long experiment” before issuing a report showing how social media use doubles mental health challenges and then blaring the bugle for, amongst other things, “tech-free zones”. What’s the best tech-free zone? We all know the answer. Let’s keep cultivating the skill of reading. As I said to Rich Roll last week: Even two pages counts!
Now let’s get to the books,
Neil
1. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight For A Human Future At The New Frontier Of Power by Shoshana Zuboff. This is the best book I have read this year. First, I have never read a better knockout blow to Google and Facebook – uppercut-off-the-planet-level -- and the grotesque form of mutant capitalism they spawned. Surveillance capitalism is ‘a new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales.’ Sound big? It is. The book is very wide-arms-around-everything – enticingly, wondrously, intoxicatingly so. As an example, that ‘new economic order’ line is one of eight definitions offered in the opening pages – right between the arresting 14-line epigraph from W.H. Auden and the 2-page Table of Contents – which, btw, is not to be confused with the detailed six-page Table of Contents from Page 536-Page 541. Here’s the thing: You will want to read it all. All! You’ll want to eat it all. The whole book! You will want to soak this book in through every pore on your skin like some kind of healing cream. It’s that good. That entrancing opening is just a slow-arcing bump for the gentle ten-fingered set that follows. A captivating 18-page Introduction awaits where Zuboff lays out starting grounds (‘The digital realm is overtaking and redefining everything familiar even before we have had a chance to ponder and decide’) and then outlines her premise: “… rights to privacy, knowledge, and application have been usurped by a bold market venture powered by unilateral claims to others’ experience and the knowledge that flows from it. What does this sea change mean for us, for our children, for our democracies, and for the very possibility of a human future in a digital world? This book aims to answer these questions.’ And then … it is on. She goes deep, fast, but with care, without ego, and with everything revealed in a winking-socratic-professor style that leaves you feeling almost intoxicated by learning. Case studies, news headlines, and philosophical questions are braided together wonderfully. She reminds us “until the last few minutes of human history, each life was foretold in blood and geography, sex and kin, rank and religion. I am my mother’s daughter. I am my father’s son. The sense of the human being as an individual emerged gradually over centuries, clawed from this ancient vise” before pushing to say “The new harms we face entail challenges to the sanctity of the individual… including the right to the future tense and the right to sanctuary” and then concluding that “My aim here is to slow down the action in order to enlarge the space for such debate and unmask the tendencies of these new creations as they amplify inequality, intensify social hierarchy, exacerbate exclusion, usurp rights, and strip personal life of whatever it is that makes it personal for you or me. If the digital future is to be our home, then it is we who must make it so. We will need to know. We will need to decide. We will need to decide who decides. This is our fight for a human future.” Does it feel like you’ve just read the book? That's just the end of the Introduction! Now you’re on Page 62 and the book is going 20,000 leagues under the sea. But fear not! The murky terrain is covered with a buoyant lightfootedness. The number of doors Zuboff opens – pulling long-kept-in-the-dark documents and tying together loosely-held headlines over decades – is some kind of top-tier detective work. I had a hankering I was going to love the book because I’d heard it referenced by Jenny Odell (How To Do Nothing) and Douglas Rushkoff (Team Human). So I went online and found a used hardcover from an indie bookstore (thank you Biblioasis from Windsor, Ontario!) and then, once I’d spent a couple hours with it and was still breathless, I decided to download it on Libro.FM as well. The size of this book sometimes felt intimidating – I mean, it’s 525 pages and that doesn’t include 166 pages of Notes and Index. But then I’d go on a long late-night walk and fall into an entire chapter on audio – often an hour and forty-five minutes long or something – and could feel like my mind expanding. Zuboff is 71 and a former professor at Harvard Business School and Harvard Law School. This is her third book. Her first came out in 1988. Her second in 2002. This one in 2019. She takes fifteen and a half years to write each book. It shows. (By way of comparison, Ryan Holiday has written 11 books since 2010. James Patterson has written 143!) The clarity and power which she navigates our deepening relationship with technology and what technology’s relationship is with us – from eons to centuries to decades ago to today – is sage-like. This is a seeing book – a vital and necessary primer to help us understand where we are and where we go from here. Highly recommended.
2. Freedom by Sebastian Junger. Let’s say you’re 51 and you just got divorced. You have no kids. You have a brilliant mind – and now it’s spinning a million miles a minute. What do you do? How do you … level set? Take a breath? Reorient yourself in your own life? Well, if you’re Sebastian Junger you spend a year with three friends illegally walking railroad tracks around the States. Doing what? ‘Dodging railroad cops, sleeping under bridges, cooking over fires, and drinking from creeks and rivers…’ says the inside jacket. I was intrigued! I loved Tribe, Junger’s 2016 book that I put on my Covid Reading List. First up, the book is small. Tiny! 145 pages of 14-point font with thick margins. And it opens with this palette-cleansing epigraph: “As for humans, God tests them so they may know they are animals.” Ecclesiastes 3:18 (NIV). Like it? First two sentences are further bait: “The change was immediate. The country opened up west of Harrisburg and suddenly we could drink from streams and build fires without getting caught and sleep pretty much anywhere we wanted.” It takes off quickly from there. There’s a lot to love about this book: the endless tight nerdy digressions on railroad history, the Apache, nomadic culture, and community. I loved geeking out with Junger and almost pictured us smoking in wet clothes on a wet log beside a buggy creek with a slow sun setting behind us. But, ultimately, that highlight is also the lowlight. The digressions kind of are the book. It’s like a handful of journal entries with a buried creek swirling somewhere underground. I guess this makes sense as it’s billed as “a profound rumination on the concept of freedom” so maybe I’m just saying let’s dial back "profound" to "interesting." If you’re new to Sebastian Junger, I’d suggest starting with Tribe. He has a fascinating mind and I’m excited to see where he goes next.
3. Excellent Advice For Living: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier by Kevin Kelly. You know how Spotify sends those end-of-year listening reports that everyone geeks out about for like 12 hours? Well, if I had a report like that for “links you’ve texted” I am pretty sure “1000 True Fans” would be in my top three. Kevin’s ability to distill unwieldy and complex things into tiny sentences places him on a high mantle with Seth Godin and Derek Sivers. That’s why I crushed on the KK.org blog post titled “68 Bits Of Advice” that he released on his birthday in 2020. (I even copied his format exactly for my 43 Things I’ve (Almost) Learned As I Turn 43 last year.) The post has since been taken down but he’s made a video if you want the Old Man On A Rocking Chair version – and the top YT comment has them all listed. After you’ve read them, don’t you just want Kevin to be your dad? Well, he kind of … could be? He’s omnipresent. He’s like an apparating Obi-Wan. He just sort of appears and starts telling you what to do. He did like a hundred more podcast conversations for this book (start with this one or this one!) and he blogs constantly and posts constantly and emails constantly. He writes wonderful books and now he has compressed his birthday compressions into the kind of book every writer wishes they wrote. A few of my favorites: “Make others feel they are important; it will make their day and it will make your day.”, “Buy used books. They have the same words as new ones.”, “Most effective remedy for anger is delay.”, “For best results with your children, spend only half the money you think you should, but double the time with them.”, “Unhappiness comes from wanting what others have. Happiness comes from wanting what you have.”, “The rich have money. The wealthy have time. It is easier to become wealthy than rich.” Highly recommended.
4. Free-Range Kids: Second Edition: How Parents And Teachers Can Let Go And Let Grow by Lenore Skenazy. Way back in 2008 an insanely viral article appeared in the The New York Sun called “Why I Let My 9-Year Old Ride The Subway Alone”. It opened with the following lines: “I left my 9-year-old at Bloomingdale’s (the original one) a couple weeks ago. Last seen, he was in first floor handbags as I sashayed out the door. Bye-bye! Have fun! / And he did. He came home on the subway and bus by himself. / Was I worried? Yes, a tinge. But it didn’t strike me as that daring, either. Isn’t New York as safe now as it was in 1963? It’s not like we’re living in downtown Baghdad.” Who wrote the piece? Lenore Skenazy. Dubbed “America’s Worst Mom” the next day when she was suddenly on the Today Show, Early Show, Fox News, and CNN. Her fame brought acolytes. Her blog Free-Range Kids got big. She met with Jonathan Haidt (NYU professor, author of The Coddling Of The American Mind) and Peter Gray (author of Free to Learn) and started the non-profit Let Grow which is “making it easy, normal, and legal to give kids the independence they need to grow into capable, confident, and happy laws.” So far the organization has helped usher in new laws in six states – dubbed “Reasonable Childhood Independence Law” – which helps spell out allowance for children to be independent outdoors. (Check out their legal work here!) This book reads like a screaming holler from the mountaintops, is written in a fast-casual bloggy style, and is organized into 18 commandments like “Boycott baby knee pads”, “Lock Them Out” and “Trust Strangers.” She writes “At its worst, Free-Range Parenting has been mistaken – deliberately or not – for cavalier bordering on crazy. But at its best, ‘Free Range’ became a rallying cry for all of us eager to believe in our kids, our communities, and our own instincts again.” Lenore concludes each “Commandment” chapter with a ‘baby’, ‘brave’, and ‘leap’ step to practice. Like at the end of Chapter 1 the baby step is “cross the street with your school-age child, without holding hands. Make ‘em look around at the traffic’, brave is ‘Let your little bikers, starting at age six or so, rider around the block a couple times, beyond where you can see them’ and Leap is ‘Drop your third- or fourth-grade child and a friend at an ice cream store with money for sundaes. Pick them up in half an hour.’ Sound easy? Not for me! I’m working on it. And this book is helping.
5. Hummingbirds: A Celebration of Nature’s Jewels by Glenn Bartley and Andy Swash. Hummingbirds evolved 40 million years ago. They can fly forwards, backwards, and upside down. They have the highest metabolic rate of any animal. They zip across the Gulf of Mexico without a pit stop and burn half their body weight in the process. They are the only birds with umami taste receptors. And there are 350 different species of them – making them the second largest bird family after Flycatchers. And, get this, they exist only in the “new world” – from the tip of Alaska to the tip of Patagonia. They want no part of oceans. And nobody’s smuggled a sack of them to New Zealand. Europeans, Asians, Africans, Australians? You’ll have to visit to witness the stunning beauty of Tufted Coquettes, Green-Tailed Sunbirds, Marvelous Spatutails, Ruby Topazes, or White-necked Jacobins. Or, you know, just buy this book. Highly recommended. (Thank you to Dr. Zogaris on Twitter for the suggestion!)
6. The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays by Esmé Weijun Wang. Last year I was at the wonderful Audrey’s Bookstore on Jasper Street in Edmonton and a bookseller took me straight to this book – filed spine-out somewhere near the back. “Favorite book in the store,” he said with a snap. I looked at it. I was expecting a novel. But here was … a collection of essays … about schizophrenia? What the? I mean, I bought it. You should have seen the look in his eye. A piercingness I still recall. I cracked it this month. And, you know, the first two essays were good – for sure -- but the third really sliced me open. Titled “High Functioning” it origami-folds Esmé’s autobiographical descent into her schizoaffective disorder into a ‘from a new vantage point’ story of her presenting the story. She tells us how she went to Yale and Stanford, her parents are Taiwanese immigrants, and how she was born in the US Midwest and raised in California. This book opened up schizophrenia the same way The Reason I Jump, reviewed in my January 2017 book club, opened up autism for me. A truly captivating from-the-inside-looking-out view. Here’s the first few sentences to see if it captures you: “Schizophrenia terrifies. It is the archetypal disorder of lunacy. Craziness scares us because we are creatures who long for structure and sense; we divide the interminable days into years, months, and weeks. We hope for ways to corral and control bad fortune, illness, unhappiness, discomfort, and death – all inevitable outcomes that we pretend are anything but. And still, the fight against entropy seems wildly futile in the faces of schizophrenia, which shirks reality in favor of its own internal logic.”
7. Pete’s a Pizza by William Steig. In my April 2023 book club I wrote about Abel’s Island by William Steig and I got this note back from Lisa who said I could share it with you: “I loved Abel's Island as a kid. I have always had a soft spot for little critters (I have pet rats) and they do have emotions just like us. We have had something of a rough patch lately (my husband's car was totaled, I have a kidney stone that finds my ureter too hospitable to leave- I named him Cuthbert for WWII spy Virginia Hall's prosthetic leg because he has been around long enough to need a name and as an attempt at some gallows humor, and we just had to euthanize one of our rats, Rathaniel, earlier this week) so warm feelings of recognition and nostalgia for books past are appreciated.” I’m sorry Lisa. That sounds completely overwhelming. I love how you named your kidney stone. We all need a laugh. A break! A smile! After looking over my own list of, uh, kind of heavy books this month, maybe we should end with another William Steig book. This is a 60-second read – not a chapter book – and my kids just love it. It’s about a boy who wants to go outside and "play ball with the guys" but then it starts to rain so his dad cheers him up by pretending to make him into a pizza. That’s it! Watch it on YouTube here. Snippy dialogue is pitch-perfect and it makes for a short and quick read before bed.
