Angela Ambroz
This book didn't land for me, alas, it didn't give me what I wanted.
What I wanted: A social history of “laziness” - where it comes from (Puritans? Calvinists?), maybe the underlying social and economic forces of why it came up and why it has persisted, and alternative philosophies of living.
What I got instead: A narrow-viewed self-help book about how to avoid burnout, written from a very specific perspective (American, modern, ableist (according to another v interesting review) etc), that sometimes overstated its thesis and called everything and anything bad the “laziness lie”.
A pretty fun, inspiring survey of progressive economics. Not sure if this would land much with non-economists, but - if you've ever swum around econ departments - this was quite fun.
Some things I want to keep in mind and dig deeper into:
- The economics of open source software
- Coops (especially software coops)
- Any post-capitalist stuff
- Any degrowth stuff
- That new Acemoglu book
- Those people 3D printing stuff in sub-Saharan Africa; and the general idea of 3D printing as a leapfrog similar to mPesa?
I enjoyed the cultural histories of economics, as a field. e.g. The eventual caricature of “homo economicus”. The constant criticisms/caveats that kinda get forgotten or caricatured away (especially by libertarians, DO NOT GET ME STARTED - I feel so much pain when Republicans/libertarians mansplain economics to me when they clearly didn't get past Econ 102).
Also enjoyed the emphasis on the power of images. This aligns with this great course I took on data visualization. The visual cortex!! IT IS A VERY POWERFUL SHORTCUT TO THE BRAIN.
Stuff I didn't care for:
- This felt quite fluffy (and Oxfamy!) and, ahem, not super rigorous. It was mostly a cri de ceour/impassioned blog post. That's fine, of course, but it did make me miss mainstream econ academia, if only for its stuffy Lagrangians and econometrics.
- I was pretty turned off by the self-promoting vibe, e.g. “I was talking to [random person] about my great idea, Doughnut Economics, and everybody clapped”. It's like... okay.
Brutal, but also sweet (?), graphic memoir about an elder Millennial navigating their late 90s/early 2000s teenage wasteland.
So I think Sarah Myer (they/them) and me must be the exact same age cuz BOY DID THIS HIT HARD. I had forgotten - and this book made me horrifyingly REMEMBER - how that 1999/2000 high school business was like. But especially: how damningly socially retrogade we all were? Good Lord.
Myer was born in Korea, adopted by white parents in suburban/rural Maryland, and grows up to be super nerdy, quirky, anime-loving and gender non-conforming. They love drawing and are HUGE DORKS. Boy, did that hit hard too! Unfortunately, their surroundings are... well, middle America in 1999. AKA there's racism, homophobia, transphobia, just a bunch of toxic sludge sloshing around all over the place. Identity politics was just gaining steam, I would say, around those issues, and so it was, indeed, very normal to sling around “gay” as an insult. Confession: I remember one of my bffs, who was gay, once stopped me in my tracks in 2001 by being like, “you know, that's very hurtful”. Teenage me was like [Pikachu surprised face] IT IS???? Gawd, I'm so embarrassed, still, about that. Thank you, [redacted], for tolerating my ignorance!!!
So Myer had, unfortunately, some very awful instances of bullying - and this memoir does a good job of both contextualizing that bullying, as well as reflecting on it with compassionate, adult distance. This memoir was also such a sweet, inspiring portrayal of (transracial) adoption gone RIGHT; something I really needed, after the horrors of We Were Once a Family. I really appreciated how Myer's parents ALWAYS had their back - the scene where they go to Otakon with their dad, just SINGLE TEAR.
Remember that one scene, in Swades, where SRK pulls up to a train station and buys water from a little kid selling it? And then he cries, and then I cry, and he re-commits himself to India's economic development?
This children's book is not about that, but it does feature Indian railways, and buying chai from a guy at the station. And thus I FRICKIN. LOVED. IT.
Really brutal and upsetting portrayal of the child welfare system. I honestly can't rate this - I don't want to - because some of the content was too distressing: what happened to those six kids is such an enormous failure of society. This is an investigative journalist's look into the 2018 Hart murder-suicide, with a special emphasis on the adopted childrens' biological families and histories.
I was actually reminded of the Kim Philby biography - about a British good ol' boy who turned out to be a Cold War double agent, working for the Russians for 30+ years. That book - and this book - stressed how “looking the part”, whether that be two “normal seeming” white women in South Dakota or a normal-seeming Eton/Cambridge guy, can hide real monstrosities. Except these two women did something so appalling to read: a lesbian couple who rush-adopted six Black children and then trapped them in a nightmare of abuse, all while posting self-serving social media “performance parenting”, before murdering them in a suicide-murder. It's just so terribly sad, and the author makes it a point to centralize the systemic failures which led to this - it is, indeed, nuts that a couple could adopt so quickly, with so little oversight, and with so many red flags accumulating. It just makes you want to scream.
Anyway. I spent much of the book asking myself why I was reading this. It felt voyeuristic and was so upsetting. If you have an interest in the foster care system, it's definitely of interest - but just be careful about the contents. Lots of interesting points about transracial adoption.
Okay, I feel silly that I spent 10 years wringing my hands about reading this, because I worried it would make me anxious about my own mortality. How silly.
This made me anxious about getting old! Ha HA, zing.
Anyway, two main sections:
Section 1 is about getting old. Lots of really interesting stuff about multi-generational housing (and how it is NOT (just) individualistic WEIRD (Western educated etc) societies that hate living with the very old and very young, but that most people - once they get some money - don't want to all live together as a family), about a post-multi-generational system to managing the very old (nursing homes, aging in place, assisted living, etc). How getting old is a biological FACT, despite our attempts to hide it or will it away (90 year olds running marathons indeed). I also found it very touching how many parallels there are between caring for the very young and the very old; I remember thinking that when visiting my beloved grandmother in the hospital. Everyone was very very old, very sick, and thus close to death. The nurses shuttled to and fro. It reminded me of a newborn ward!
Section 2 is about dying, or rather modern dying. Modern dying is unpleasant and highly medicalized. You spend most of your dying time in denial that you are, in fact, dying, and thus many people kinda stumble into death after trying some last-ditch surgery, intubated and unconscious. If you have lost any loved ones, you may be familiar with this type of death. It is, indeed, very distressing and NOT AT ALL the calm, serene, wise deaths many of us hope for ourselves and our loved ones. The author, Gawande, talks about how this type of “kicking and screaming” dying is the product of both our nuclear family/medicalized culture (death is hidden, most of us have not seen people die) and the normal incentives patients AND doctors have to “hope for the best” and just keep trying medical interventions. It does take a lot of wisdom and courage to “let go”. Tons of interesting stats on hospice care (and how good it is for you, ironically), how overly optimistic even oncologists are about survival chances (especially if they know their patient quite well - aka if they've bonded a bit), and all that.
A charming and fun anthropological survey of child-rearing practices around the world. Here's a sampling of some of the advice from these seven societies:
- Watch out for witches. Srs everyone is so worried about witches.
- Bury the placenta. This was a popular recommendation.
- If your baby is born with teeth, kill it (!).
- If your baby's first tooth is an upper tooth, sorry, kill it as well.
- Teach your baby all the proper greetings for family members; for example, teasing grandfather with lewd comments like “old saggy balls!”
- Don't let your baby touch the ground, we are not animals!!
- Make sure the ground is the first thing your baby touches, we are very connected to the land!
- Don't bother talking to your baby, they don't understand anything anyway.
- Remember to talk to your baby all the time, they understand ALL languages.
- Make sure to start teaching your baby Bible things asap... since your baby is born in original sin.
- Your baby just came from the afterlife.
- Your baby is actually a reincarnated god.
- Your baby is a reincarnated elder.
- Your baby might be eager to “reincarnate” an elder - aka, kill a grandparent.
- Definitely feed your baby tons of breastmilk.
- But not the early breastmilk.
- And only for three months.
- Or five years.
- But definitely around two years of breastmilk. Unless it's a girl. Then three years.
- Other good foods for newborns: tea, taro, millet, medicinal leaves.
- Srs watch for witches, they are the worst.
- Remember that witches are super jealous of your gorgeous baby. So cover your baby in cow dung and remark loudly, “Have you ever seen such an ugly baby?!”
In short, I loved this book. I'm going to post it on all parenting forums whenever someone says “in the old days” or “the natural way” to do something is XYZ. I will run in and scream “BUT HAVE YOU ADEQUATELY PROTECTED YOUR BABY FROM WITCHES?”
A straightforward, easy-to-fall-into novelization of what MIGHT have happened in the early 1600s, in the lives of Pocahontas and John Smith.
Picture, if you will, a swampy bog near Washington DC. The year is 1600mumble mumble. The English - rancidly smelly in their rancid ass wool - have just disembarked in the shittiest part of what-is-to-become-Virginia and are seeking (1) GOLD, (2) A PASSAGE TO INDIA, and (3) GOLD? Meanwhile, you, dear reader, are a feisty, ambitious prepubescent hellion named Amonute - you do NOT smell like rancid ass wool, but are instead super cool and interesting and fun, running around your pretty damn idyllic Tidewater/Tsenacomoco/world.
This book is a vivid portrayal of what life may have been like. I keep emphasizing the “might” and “may” because I actually felt a little uneasy about Libbie Hawker (sorry, Libbie Hawker) cuz I was like, wait, are you Native American? wait, are you a historian? wait, ahem, what gives you the right? But, after doing some extremely minimal googling, I was satisfied that this was, if anything, well-intentioned, reasonably well-informed (?), and, above all, REASONABLE. Like, obviously we don't have access to Pocahontas's inner life, and John Smith's diaries are all apparently like “and they were just jealous and I was awesome again and everyone clapped”, but we do know the commonly-agreed on facts: Pocahontas's 3 names (Amonute, Mataoka, Rebecca), her conversion to Christianity and her visit to England. And just the popularity of her myth is telling; something about her left a deep impression on the English.
I found the story itself very beautiful and sad. I was reminded, just like after reading Charles Mann's 1491 and Kim Stanley Robinson's The Years of Rice and Salt, of what an enormous, unforgivable loss the Columbian exchange was: an entire hemisphere of culture that was almost entirely wiped out. I just wanted to learn more about Tsenacomoco, and Pocahontas's realization and pain when she visited London - and what a dystopian nightmare that felt like!! - was so, so acute. I really felt for her. And I wish we (the white/Euro settlers of the New World) could have better integrated into this indigenous world.
In fact. An aside on colonialism. After finishing this book and crying for a bit, I then asked ChatGPT about the differences between the colonization of the New World vs. the Indian subcontinent. Like, today, indigenous Americans live on reservations, a tiny fraction of their previous populations, their culture very very marginalized. Meanwhile, South Asian culture is thriving and has, indeed, deeply influenced the UK (wonderful British-Asian literature, food, etc). WHY? ChatGPT gave me garbage vanilla answers. I thought if it was maybe Acemoglu and Robinson's institutionalist theories: that is, extractive colonies vs. inclusive colonies. But the latter - inclusive colonies - basically meant, “we'll (Euros) come and build and stay”. Which may have led to, indeed, better GDP outcomes for these eventual colony-countries than the extractive colony-countries, but at tremendous cost - the near-extinction of indigenous societies? e.g. USA, Canada, Australia, etc...
Anyway, as you can see, this got me thinking. The book itself is much more human-sized and it's very touching and, tbh, I loved all the characters and really felt for them. Pocahontas was one of those people who stood at the intersection of history and really, frickin, just SAW IT ALL. What an amazing life.
Fun! Inspiring! I'm pumped! Or maybe my biceps are.
In 2013, while living in Tanzania, I decided to lose some weight. I don't know how I ended up doing it this way, but I made a Google spreadsheet, inputting how much a pound was in calories (3,500), calculated my likely daily caloric needs using some online calculator, tried to eat under that, and tracked the cumulative calorie deficit. I kept the spreadsheet to remind myself that losing weight is slow. Like, VERY slow. Anyway, in doing this, I (a) lost weight (more than intended), but, more importantly, I (b) discovered macros. OH, MACROS! Let me sing thy praises! PROTEIN, CARB AND FAT, HOW I LOVE THEEEEE.
I also discovered, from experience, that protein + caffeine can really help with keeping you full, but that your brain can die if you under-carb it (there was one day when I had to rush out to find a pastry - ANY PASTRY - before I brain-deathed all over my laptop at work). I also discovered protein gets you shredded (who knew). I also discovered r/fitness, the bro lifting community, deadlifts (my love!!!), and, actually, Reddit overall? Wow, what a time to be alive that was.
So this book included a lot of THAT stuff (minus Reddit). One thing from r/fitness/the lifting world is that you must “bulk” (eat above maintenance calories) to gain muscle and then you must “cut” (eat below) to remove fat and, voila, reveal your 6 pack. As a woman who grew up in the late 20th century, where a very thin, androgynous, under-fed body type was lauded as super model-worthy, I have never (!) had the courage to bulk. Eat MORE than I need, are you mad?! That said, I think I'm approaching the time to do that. I have had some refreshing brainwaves where I started to value a different body type (in myself and others), and also I had a REAL big nirvana last year about “health at every size” - like, my post-pregnancy body was just a blob of aches and pains. I started running. I didn't lose any weight (indeed, gained some!), but I felt MUCH MUCH BETTER. Health at every size, bitches!!! I also discovered some body-diverse athletes like the Slow AF run club guy, who's just great. This has really dislodged a lot of my adolescent body image BS programming.
OK. All that to say! The big takeaways from this book, some of which were new to me:
- Bulking and cutting are the yin and yang of your fitness journey
- CICO is the main way
- Macros are the second most important thing (PROTEINNNNN)
- Caffeine helps you feel sated. Cocaine or amphetamines would probably help even more KIDDING KIDDING
- You can't endlessly cut (or bulk, for that matter), you need “maintenance periods” to reset your body and mind. Namely: Cut for 3 months, maintenance for 1-3 months, etc. This was a real nirvana moment for me.
- You probably need to bulk. JUST BULK. Put on that muscle! As lovely Casey Johnston/Swole Woman says, you must eat like a big beautiful horse. Do you want a horse butt? What is more beautiful than a juicy zebra butt? Nothing, people! Anyway, given how the Exercised guy scared me about muscle wasting during our advancing years, I'm now like, oh shit, I gotta bulk up like Arnold. It is time!
- You cannot, alas, do everything at the same time (you cannot bulk + cut, obviously, but you also, sigh, cannot excel athletically in ALL your fields (endurance, strength, etc)... I am running up against this now and it is saddening me OH SO MUCH, maybe a lament for another review. Are there any good “hybrid athletics” books out there?!)
There was also some discussion of, like, being a woman in this culture and eating disorders and so on. Tbh I found that stuff kinda ham-fisted? It was well-meaning. I don't know if people who suffer from EDs would find it helpful? I also found the motivating pep talk “you can do it” stuff like meh, whatever. Much more motivating/inspiring were the many many pics of various women of various ages and body sizes doing various athletic things (wow that deadlift, lady! ooh, you ski?!).
I spent 90% of this book thinking about the movie Troy. I think the audiobook narrator did too. He was TOTALLY doing a Sean Bean impression for Odysseus.
Anyway, this book was tactile, earthy, rich. My book club went on and on about how the writing was sub-par but they are VERY WRONG, I loved this writing. It was like mid-2000s fanfic. In fact, I even started to suspect that Madeline Miller was a livejournal fanfic author I was reading in the mid-2000s, post-Troy, post-LOTR fannish euphoria: QueenOfThorns, is that you???
Super fun. I love these big, bombastic, heroic legends brought down to (fanfic) human size. This was great.
Snarky, sassy professor with overabundant personality tells you that (1) exercise sucks (like, our brains have evolved to avoid it at all costs), but (2) it will help you live better. Type 2 fun! I enjoyed this a lot, actually. I found his sass amusing. I was inspired to run around in no shoes. He also made me understand how to prioritize everything: cardio for longevity, HIIT for VO2 max (sob), strength for quality of life. I loved his anthropological examinations of fitness fads like CrossFit (which I still think is prob the most efficient one? don't @ me, I know about the injuries problem) or, ahem, PRIMAL MOVEMENT (hee hee).
I love the idea of him dragging a treadmill to the Maasai. Was it the Maasai? I also loved his descriptive stats of how much various modern-day nomadic people move.
Warm, funny, humane, and now I feel like I'm basically a licensed psychotherapist myself. I loved this. We follow an LA therapist and a handful of her patients through their therapy sessions/journey and just, like, LIFE, man. I cried, I laughed, I also laugh-cried with vicarious joy. Really glorious. This opened my heart and my mind in the same way Kristen Neff's Self-Compassion showed me that there are ways to human better.
A raw story about addiction, mental illness, immigration, race, and religion vs. science. This is the story of Gifty, a Ghanaian-American woman who was raised in Alabama and is now pursuing a PhD in neuroscience at Stanford. Early on, we learn that her older brother died from a drug overdose, and her mother suffers from bouts of major depression. Meanwhile, Gifty works in a lab dedicated to finding neurosciencey ways to fight... addiction and mental illness.
So honestly I would have rated this 3 stars, but the very end killed me. If your life has been touched by mental illness and addiction, this book is just a super sad, super raw read. Gifty is an unpleasant narrator - she's self-righteous, prim, provincial - but she's also, like, just a hurt, “good” girl. Every other character is likewise flawed to the point of being unlikable - at the same time, they're just human. Gifty spends a lot of time working her way through the evangelical/Pentecostal Christianity of her childhood with the STEM world of her adulthood - she uses both to try to explain her hurt, or at least soothe it, and both naturally fail (at least partly). Her life is completely caged by the tragedies of her brother and mom, and watching her try to explore what it means to just live - just enjoy people, have relationships, explore and be curious - was painful. So many fits and starts! So much caution! I do so hope this fictional character discovers Nar-Anon and goes to therapy!!
I love any stories that centralize the experience of immigration; and this certainly had a lot of that. Gifty's parents are Ghanaian immigrants to Alabama. The culture shock, oh man, is REAL. Especially the insidious and structural racism. This kinda reminded me of the wonderful Mississippi Masala (one of my fave movies!), about Indian-Ugandan immigrants to Mississippi. If I would criticize anything about this book, it's that the Alabaman supporting cast felt underdeveloped and thin. Everyone was just kinda a “basic white Southerner” from central casting.
This was an interesting read. I was surprised to see that it was published by Shambhala Publications - aka the Buddhist people - and I was annoyed when the author began by saying we could put the structural problems of parenting-while-capitalist aside (e.g. no government subsidies for childcare, no government mandated parental leave, oh my blood is boiling again), and focus on changing our mindset. My initial reaction was, “lady, whut”. But she did make some very good points - and I can see how indeed very Buddhist these points were. Namely: Life is suffering (First Noble Truth) - aka, there are seasons of life and experiences that are just difficult. Deal with it!
Indeed, the main thesis of the book is that, if we stop RESISTING the difficulties in our chaotic, parenting-small-children-while-trying-to-work, upside-down-house lives, we will save ourselves a lot of extra pain. And that is certainly true and sensible. Emily Oster - who recommended this book on her substack - often talks about “there is no option C”. Sometimes we are just faced with two unpleasant choices, and waffling between them will not make a better, third option appear. It's another way of saying: acknowledge your constraints. It is physically not possible to work 80 hour weeks and parent small children - accept that! I found that helpful. It's always a good reminder. You are going to drop balls. Oh well!
There were some worksheets and self-helpy activities, but I listened to this on audiobook, so can't really evaluate them.