Book reviews
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On Charles Foster’s ‘Being a Beast’ and battling the empathy gap.
If Charles Foster can learn, & care, what it’s like to be a badger, all citizens should be able to empathize with the experience of Homo sapiens from other ethnic backgrounds.
agricultural revolution, all lives matter, Being a Beast, Black Lives Matter, brains, Charles Foster, civil forfieture, common ancestors, Donald Trump, empathy, empathy gap, evolution, family first, faulty roadside drug tests, Hungary, incarceration crisis, injustice, Jeneen Interlandi, jeremy betham, John Oliver, living as a badger, natural selection, Neil Gaiman, neurological basis of empathy, Peter Singer, power racing, psychology, reading fiction develops empathy, river otters, Roma, swift, The View from the Cheap Seats, tofu, utilitarianism, vegan, vegetarian
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On Stefan Hertmans’s ‘War & Turpentine.’
At the heart of Stefan Hertmans’s gorgeous ‘War & Turpentine’ is the gruesome knowledge that much pain and suffering underpin our beautiful world.
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On districting, or how much your vote matters.
If our political representation doesn’t match the popular vote, it’s hard to swallow the lie that everyone is being treated equally.
Bill Bishop, clustering of like-minded people, David Daley, districting, gerrymander, gerrymandering, ideological isolation, political divisiveness, political obstruction, politics, proportion of representatives do not reflect popular vote, Ratf**ked, Ratfucked, redistricting, rigging the vote, subverting democracy, The Big Sort
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On Colson Whitehead’s ‘The Underground Railroad.’
In Colson Whitehead’s new speculative fiction, he condenses a century of racial injustice into a single fugitive’s journey. I hope readers realize the reality was even worse, that some of these crimes spanned the century and reverberate still.
alternate history, animal welfare, Blood at the Root, Carol Anderson, Colson Whitehead, curses, Douglas Blackmon, emancipation, evil, Forsyth County, fugitive slave act, graduate school, Harriet Washington, incarceration crisis, Lewis Hyde, Medical Apartheid, Michelle Alexander, oppression, Patrick Phillips, police brutality, review of The Underground Railroad, science fiction, slavery, Slavery By Another Name, speculative fiction, Stanford, The Gift, The New Jim Crow, The Underground Railroad, Thirteenth Amendment, trust, Tuskegee Syphilis Study, vegan, vegetarian, whose pain matters, witchcraft
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On Don Delillo’s ‘Zero K’ and the dream of eternal life.
Would it be easier to use artificial intelligence to resurrect the more self-absorbed and robotic among us?
aging, artificial intelligence, biology of aging, caloric restriction, cellular biology, don delillo, freeze my brain, heat death of the universe, immortality, lifespan, limited senescence, lobsters, mechanical mind, meditation, memory, Mr. Darcy is a weird dude, neurology, pride and prejudice, psychology studies, simulating a human brain, social psychology, synaptic connectome, telomere elongation, the inevitability of death, Turing test, White Noise, why do we die?, zero k
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On deer, wolves, and Sean Carroll’s ‘The Serengeti Rules.’
Monoculture — whether it’s a body churning out cancer cells, an environment churning out deer, or a world churning out Starbucks — is an illness.
apex predators, Beyond Words, Bloomington, Carl Safina, climate change, college kids need more fear, deer, ecological diversity, elk, environmentalism, gardening, gas tax, Hope Jahren, keystone species, Lab Girl, overbreeding, overpopulation, planting trees, population regulation, predation, Robert Paine, Sean Carroll, starfish, starvation, The Serengeti Rules, we need wilderness, wolves, Yellowstone
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On horror, healing, and Joanna Connors’s ‘I Will Find You.’
In a courageous effort to heal, an investigative reporter uncovers the long history of violence behind her own trauma.
American Salvage, Bonnie Jo Campbell, forgiveness, healing, hurt people hurt people, I Will Find You, inequality starts before birth, investigative journalism, Joanna Connors, lost innocence, meth, methamphetamine, nature versus nurture, preemptive punishment, PTSD, racial disparities in the criminal justice system, rape, rape prosecution, sexual assault, The Trespasser, vengeance
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On Han Kang’s ‘The Vegetarian.’
Plants photosynthesize. Humans kill to eat. But I still think humans are pretty great.
anorexia, Being a Beast, biology isn’t destiny, bulimia, Charles Foster, chlorophyll habit, empathy, ethical eating, ethics of eating, Fiona Apple, Han Kang, humans evolved to be omnivorous, Naomi Wolf, Paper Bag, Queer, Rat Park, Stuart McMillen, The Beauty Myth, The Vegetarian, turning into a plant, vegan, veganism, why are more women than men vegetarian, William Burroughs, Yi Sang -
On Stephon Alexander’s ‘The Jazz of Physics.’
Everything vibrates! Vibrations make sound! But does the universe make music?
bowing random objects to hear what sound they make, Curse of the Ratist, formation of galaxies, holiday record, jazz, Johnny Fuerza, nucleation of structure in the early universe, paralysis of choice, photoelectric effect, physics, restrictions breed creativity, science analogies, soloing, sound, The Jazz of Physics, uncertainty principle, vibrations
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On PTSD and David Means’s ‘Hystopia.’
Saying “thank you” isn’t enough to cure trauma.
Frank Brown Cloud 