Manu's bookshelf: all en-US Wed, 14 May 2025 04:48:35 -0700 60 Manu's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell 210968683
Proceeding to London, he raises a beautiful woman from the dead and summons an army of ghostly ships to terrify the French. Yet the cautious, fussy Norrell is challenged by the emergence of another magician: the brilliant novice Jonathan Strange.

Young, handsome and daring, Strange is the very antithesis of Norrell. So begins a dangerous battle between these two great men which overwhelms that between England and France. And their own obsessions and secret dabblings with the dark arts are going to cause more trouble than they can imagine.]]> 1006 Susanna Clarke 0747579881 Manu 0 currently-reading 4.18 2004 Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
author: Susanna Clarke
name: Manu
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2004
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/14
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution]]> 212343628 It's time for us to rewrite the story of what we are and how we came to be, no matter how weird or hilarious the truth is.

From the way we grow our nails to how we think, everything we call human is fundamentally shaped by how our bodies evolved. Whether we are in pain or joy, abled or disabled, in sickness and in health until death do we disassemble, our bodies and brains are simply what we are.

For too long, in a world largely built for and by men, women have been systematically ignored. In this bold and provocative book, Cat Bohannon deftly traces the evolution of women's bodies for the first time to unravel how each of our features really came to be. From tits to toes, Eve is a no-nonsense, hard-hitting account of the evolution of one half of a very young, complex and fascinating species. This book will radically change the way we understand our bodies - and the world around us.]]> 612 Cat Bohannon 1529156173 Manu 0 review
The book is structured chronologically across 200 million years, and drives the story through the story of specific body parts, processes, and mechanisms. 'Eve traces the evolution of women's bodies, from tits to toes, and how that evolution shapes our lives today.' In that process, we get insights on why women live longer, why they menstruate, are female brains different, and the very interesting question of whether sexism is useful for evolution.

The chapters are titled Milk, Womb, Perception, Legs, Tools, Brain, Voice, Menopause, and finally Love. Each with a representative Eve. From tiny lactating mammals in the era of dinosaurs to human birth and menopause in the contemporary era, Eve deep dives into the biological and physiological traits that distinguish the female of our species and their ancestors, and how these shaped the evolution of our species. The book blends research and insights from multiple disciplines - evolutionary biology, anthropology, neuroscience, medicine, and towards the end, even socioeconomics.

The fundamental theme of the book is the idea that female-specific traits are not side notes in evolutionary history, as it might seem when seen through a male-focused lens, but are in fact, central forces that drove innovations and adaptations, which helped the species survive and thrive. This includes things like extended gestation, concealed ovulation, and how unique and challenging human childbirth is - courtesy a big head to house the brain, and the mother's narrow pelvis. These managed to shape not just our bodies but our cognitive development, social structures, and thereby culture. An excellent example of the last two is how the metabolic demands and processes of pregnancy and nursing might have been the basis for cooperative parenting and social bonding.

Eve is engaging because the author is able to present complex ideas and scientific data and logic in an accessible manner, using irreverent humour, anecdotes, and ELI5 techniques, especially useful when the content is full of anatomical terms and references! Having said that, I wonder if in the process, she has also done a Harari on details - being glib for the sake of narrative coherence. But my biggest bugbear - the usage of * in every other page with (usually) a long sidetrack written in tiny font! Always a momentum-killer for me!

Having said that, this is an essential book. It’s both enlightening and empowering, questioning the narratives about female bodies that our species has been taught. To me, the book is successful in reorienting the crucial role of the female and her body in the story of humanity's evolution.

P.S. With Eve, Figuring, and Broadband, I think there is an excellent trilogy for the story of the species as seen through the female experience.

Notes and Quotes
1. Modern human milk is mostly water. It is less about nutrition and more about hydration and infrastructure. For instance, a lot of the material in the milk is for the bacteria in the infant's stomach.
2. Milk is an interactive process. Lining the mother's milk ducts, from the nipple all the way to the glands, are an army of immuno-agents. And depending on what happens to be in the baby's spit that day, the mother's breasts will change the particular composition of her milk. If the baby is fighting an infection, for example, various signals of that infection will be in the spit. When that gets sucked up into the mother's breast, her immune systems will produce agents to fight the pathogen and send it via the milk into the baby's body.
3. Among humans, the muscles on the left side of the face are slightly more adept at social signalling, and 60-90% of women preferentially cradle infants towards the left side of her face. The right hemisphere of the adult brain is largely responsible for interpreting human social-emotional cues, and it receives these signals through the left eye. The mother's left eye watches the infant's face, interpreting the emotional state, while the infant gazes up to her more expressive side, learning how o read her emotions and respond.
4. Men's and women's ears respond differently to different pitches. The latter are specially tuned to frequencies corresponding to babies' cries. But that also forces them to be more aware of other sounds like the hum of electricity in fridges.
5. In mammals, there are two strategies for eye placement. Prey animals like hare, deer on either side and predators like eagle, dogs on the front. It has to do with the kind of vision they need- wide field, or focus respectively.
6. Mallard ducks are constantly raping each other. As a result, female mallards have trapdoor vaginas, which traps unwanted sperm in a side funnel and gets rid of it.
7. Abortion is common across mammals. Some spontaneous and some deliberate. In the presence of a male who isn't the father, a pregnant mouse will abort. It's called the Bruce effect. rodents, horses, lions, primates all do it.
8. Foals not only do sneaky sex, they also do cover up sex!
9. Armadillos can control when they get pregnant, sometimes as long as eight months. Embryos float around after fertilisation, before implantation. Helpful when there is scarcity of food or water.
10. Founder effect - when a migrating group is reproductively isolated and their offspring becomes less genetically diverse than expected.
11. The word 'hysterical' comes from the Greek word for uterus, which was believed to be the cause of disruptive emotional outbursts.
12. “And a human being whose life is nurtured in an advantage which has accrued from the disadvantage of other human beings, and who prefers that this should remain as it is, is a human being by definition only, having much more in common with the bedbug, the tapeworm, the cancer, and the scavengers of the deep sea.†― James Agee, Cotton Tenants: Three Families
13. In people who encounter threat every day, the HPA axis is overactive. They're waking up with higher cortisol levels than people who aren't stressed in this way. After a certain amount of time, chronic stress causes knock-on effects in many different parts of the body. But in the brain, especially, you'll see that classic pattern: difficulty with memory access, generally slower process-ing, and higher distractibility.
You can see similar patterns in people who suffer from chronic pain or depression, and in refugees who've recently had to flee a conflict zone. Too much cortisol every morning. Too many ran-dom bursts of epinephrine. Too much, and too frequent, vigilance.
Then, if you experience enough low-grade stress over enough time, you'll tend to develop emotional and perceptive detachment. Such numbness is essentially what happens when the brain itself adapts to be less responsive to its own signals: cortisol has a lesser effect and to get a boost, those brains require more epinephrine.
14. Forty-eight of fifty states in the United States do allow child marriage with the "permission" of the parentnited parents to child abuse (Ochieng, 1020). Unfortunately, the United States allows parents to do all sorts of things to their children, usually under the mantle of "religion" or "cultural preference. For example, in twenty-one of our fifty states, it is legal to force one's daughter-no matter her age to go through with a pregnancy when she clearly doesn't want to or, even worse, is simply too young to be able to understand the physical and existential consequences of doing so (AGI, 2023). If you're eleven years old and your parents tell you to give birth to a baby because they have a pre-established cultural belief, are you really going to be able to say no? And if you do, will you be able to run away and cross state lines and somehow get yourself an abortion within a time frame that allows the procedure to be simple and safe? No adult will be legally allowed to help you do so. Besides those twenty-one miserable places to be a girl, another sixteen states require the parents be notified about such a procedure, which is wonderful if you happen to live in an abusive household (often the case for a pregnant eleven-year-old). You may be able to petition a judge to get around them if you have the resources and chutzpah to pull that off-but you'll have no guarantee that the judge will agree. The judge option exists only because the U.S. Supreme Court demanded a judicial bypass be provided, and even that might go away now that Roe v. Wade is gone.
14. A pregnant woman's brain will, quite reliably shrink in volume by as much as 5% during her third trimester, notably in areas strongly related to how we build emotional attachments, general learning and memory. This is followed by steady rebuilding during the first few months after giving birth. This is an extra phase of brain development similar to the ones in childhood, and adolescence. Not unique, but specialised for human females. A deep pruning before hormonal shifts and massive social learning- caring for a needy human newborn, understanding its needs, communicating with it, and continuing to raise it in deeply social setting for a long time. This is also a time when some of the mother's other relationships, like her social network, changes. Also whom to trust, whom to lean on for help.
]]> 4.02 2023 Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution
author: Cat Bohannon
name: Manu
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2025/05/14
date added: 2025/05/14
shelves: review
review:
There is a choice we make when we use the word 'mankind' when we should be using humankind, or even better, humanity. 'Eve' is a good reminder, and the sub-heading - How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution - is exactly what the book is about. Cat Bohannon gives us a lot of insights into the pivotal role of the female body in the evolutionary story, in a sweeping and provocative narrative that questions the 'male bias' in science and medicine at large, and offers the story of human evolution as told through the female body.

The book is structured chronologically across 200 million years, and drives the story through the story of specific body parts, processes, and mechanisms. 'Eve traces the evolution of women's bodies, from tits to toes, and how that evolution shapes our lives today.' In that process, we get insights on why women live longer, why they menstruate, are female brains different, and the very interesting question of whether sexism is useful for evolution.

The chapters are titled Milk, Womb, Perception, Legs, Tools, Brain, Voice, Menopause, and finally Love. Each with a representative Eve. From tiny lactating mammals in the era of dinosaurs to human birth and menopause in the contemporary era, Eve deep dives into the biological and physiological traits that distinguish the female of our species and their ancestors, and how these shaped the evolution of our species. The book blends research and insights from multiple disciplines - evolutionary biology, anthropology, neuroscience, medicine, and towards the end, even socioeconomics.

The fundamental theme of the book is the idea that female-specific traits are not side notes in evolutionary history, as it might seem when seen through a male-focused lens, but are in fact, central forces that drove innovations and adaptations, which helped the species survive and thrive. This includes things like extended gestation, concealed ovulation, and how unique and challenging human childbirth is - courtesy a big head to house the brain, and the mother's narrow pelvis. These managed to shape not just our bodies but our cognitive development, social structures, and thereby culture. An excellent example of the last two is how the metabolic demands and processes of pregnancy and nursing might have been the basis for cooperative parenting and social bonding.

Eve is engaging because the author is able to present complex ideas and scientific data and logic in an accessible manner, using irreverent humour, anecdotes, and ELI5 techniques, especially useful when the content is full of anatomical terms and references! Having said that, I wonder if in the process, she has also done a Harari on details - being glib for the sake of narrative coherence. But my biggest bugbear - the usage of * in every other page with (usually) a long sidetrack written in tiny font! Always a momentum-killer for me!

Having said that, this is an essential book. It’s both enlightening and empowering, questioning the narratives about female bodies that our species has been taught. To me, the book is successful in reorienting the crucial role of the female and her body in the story of humanity's evolution.

P.S. With Eve, Figuring, and Broadband, I think there is an excellent trilogy for the story of the species as seen through the female experience.

Notes and Quotes
1. Modern human milk is mostly water. It is less about nutrition and more about hydration and infrastructure. For instance, a lot of the material in the milk is for the bacteria in the infant's stomach.
2. Milk is an interactive process. Lining the mother's milk ducts, from the nipple all the way to the glands, are an army of immuno-agents. And depending on what happens to be in the baby's spit that day, the mother's breasts will change the particular composition of her milk. If the baby is fighting an infection, for example, various signals of that infection will be in the spit. When that gets sucked up into the mother's breast, her immune systems will produce agents to fight the pathogen and send it via the milk into the baby's body.
3. Among humans, the muscles on the left side of the face are slightly more adept at social signalling, and 60-90% of women preferentially cradle infants towards the left side of her face. The right hemisphere of the adult brain is largely responsible for interpreting human social-emotional cues, and it receives these signals through the left eye. The mother's left eye watches the infant's face, interpreting the emotional state, while the infant gazes up to her more expressive side, learning how o read her emotions and respond.
4. Men's and women's ears respond differently to different pitches. The latter are specially tuned to frequencies corresponding to babies' cries. But that also forces them to be more aware of other sounds like the hum of electricity in fridges.
5. In mammals, there are two strategies for eye placement. Prey animals like hare, deer on either side and predators like eagle, dogs on the front. It has to do with the kind of vision they need- wide field, or focus respectively.
6. Mallard ducks are constantly raping each other. As a result, female mallards have trapdoor vaginas, which traps unwanted sperm in a side funnel and gets rid of it.
7. Abortion is common across mammals. Some spontaneous and some deliberate. In the presence of a male who isn't the father, a pregnant mouse will abort. It's called the Bruce effect. rodents, horses, lions, primates all do it.
8. Foals not only do sneaky sex, they also do cover up sex!
9. Armadillos can control when they get pregnant, sometimes as long as eight months. Embryos float around after fertilisation, before implantation. Helpful when there is scarcity of food or water.
10. Founder effect - when a migrating group is reproductively isolated and their offspring becomes less genetically diverse than expected.
11. The word 'hysterical' comes from the Greek word for uterus, which was believed to be the cause of disruptive emotional outbursts.
12. “And a human being whose life is nurtured in an advantage which has accrued from the disadvantage of other human beings, and who prefers that this should remain as it is, is a human being by definition only, having much more in common with the bedbug, the tapeworm, the cancer, and the scavengers of the deep sea.†― James Agee, Cotton Tenants: Three Families
13. In people who encounter threat every day, the HPA axis is overactive. They're waking up with higher cortisol levels than people who aren't stressed in this way. After a certain amount of time, chronic stress causes knock-on effects in many different parts of the body. But in the brain, especially, you'll see that classic pattern: difficulty with memory access, generally slower process-ing, and higher distractibility.
You can see similar patterns in people who suffer from chronic pain or depression, and in refugees who've recently had to flee a conflict zone. Too much cortisol every morning. Too many ran-dom bursts of epinephrine. Too much, and too frequent, vigilance.
Then, if you experience enough low-grade stress over enough time, you'll tend to develop emotional and perceptive detachment. Such numbness is essentially what happens when the brain itself adapts to be less responsive to its own signals: cortisol has a lesser effect and to get a boost, those brains require more epinephrine.
14. Forty-eight of fifty states in the United States do allow child marriage with the "permission" of the parentnited parents to child abuse (Ochieng, 1020). Unfortunately, the United States allows parents to do all sorts of things to their children, usually under the mantle of "religion" or "cultural preference. For example, in twenty-one of our fifty states, it is legal to force one's daughter-no matter her age to go through with a pregnancy when she clearly doesn't want to or, even worse, is simply too young to be able to understand the physical and existential consequences of doing so (AGI, 2023). If you're eleven years old and your parents tell you to give birth to a baby because they have a pre-established cultural belief, are you really going to be able to say no? And if you do, will you be able to run away and cross state lines and somehow get yourself an abortion within a time frame that allows the procedure to be simple and safe? No adult will be legally allowed to help you do so. Besides those twenty-one miserable places to be a girl, another sixteen states require the parents be notified about such a procedure, which is wonderful if you happen to live in an abusive household (often the case for a pregnant eleven-year-old). You may be able to petition a judge to get around them if you have the resources and chutzpah to pull that off-but you'll have no guarantee that the judge will agree. The judge option exists only because the U.S. Supreme Court demanded a judicial bypass be provided, and even that might go away now that Roe v. Wade is gone.
14. A pregnant woman's brain will, quite reliably shrink in volume by as much as 5% during her third trimester, notably in areas strongly related to how we build emotional attachments, general learning and memory. This is followed by steady rebuilding during the first few months after giving birth. This is an extra phase of brain development similar to the ones in childhood, and adolescence. Not unique, but specialised for human females. A deep pruning before hormonal shifts and massive social learning- caring for a needy human newborn, understanding its needs, communicating with it, and continuing to raise it in deeply social setting for a long time. This is also a time when some of the mother's other relationships, like her social network, changes. Also whom to trust, whom to lean on for help.

]]> <![CDATA[The Vedas And Upanishads For Children]]> 43550627 424 Roopa Pai 9351952967 Manu 0 currently-reading 4.39 The Vedas And Upanishads For Children
author: Roopa Pai
name: Manu
average rating: 4.39
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/13
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> The New York Trilogy 31840554 The New York Trilogy is perhaps the most astonishing work by one of America's most consistently astonishing writers. The Trilogy is three cleverly interconnected novels that exploit the elements of standard detective fiction and achieve a new genre that is all the more gripping for its starkness. It is a riveting work of detective fiction worthy of Raymond Chandler, and at the same time a profound and unsettling existentialist enquiry in the tradition of Kafka or Borges. In each story the search for clues leads to remarkable coincidences in the universe as the simple act of trailing a man ultimately becomes a startling investigation of what it means to be human. The New York Trilogy is the modern novel at its finest: a truly bold and arresting work of fiction with something to transfix and astound every reader.]]> 314 Paul Auster 0571322808 Manu 0 3.82 1987 The New York Trilogy
author: Paul Auster
name: Manu
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1987
rating: 0
read at: 2025/05/05
date added: 2025/05/05
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Many Lives of Syeda X: The Story of an Unknown Indian]]> 216733966
Syeda X left Banaras for Delhi with her young family in the aftermath of riots triggered by the demolition of the Babri Masjid. In Delhi, she settled into the life of a poor migrant, juggling multiple jobs a day—from trimming the loose threads of jeans to cooking namkeen, and from shelling almonds to making tea strainers. Syeda has done over fifty different types of work, earning paltry sums in the process. And if she ever took a day off, her job would be lost to another faceless migrant.

Researched for close to a decade, in this book, we meet an unforgettable cast of characters: a rickshaw driver in Chandni Chowk who ends up tragically dead in a terrorist blast; a doctor who gets arrested for pre-natal sex determination; a gau rakshak whose sister elopes with Syeda’s son; and policemen who delight in beating young Muslim men.

In the end, things comes to a grotesque full circle for Syeda. Her life is upturned for the umpteenth time during the Delhi riots of 2020. But displacement, tragedy and hardships are the things she is used to—being poor and Muslim and a woman. Written with empathy and deep insight, this book is a portal to a harsh world hidden away from elite Indians. It is the story of untold millions and a searing account of urban life in New India.]]> 320 Neha Dixit 9353453542 Manu 4 review It is, as the cliche goes, the voice of the voiceless - the people whose desperate toils to survive, we deliberately look away from or pretend not to see, because it is a reality we will find difficult to face if we consider ourselves human. I call it sub-human because, from our gated vantage point, in a nation whose GDP chest-thumping and gleaming malls and fancy consumer goods belies the struggle of the large majority of its population, people like Syeda exist in conditions that are perilous in terms of income, health, and safety. A poor, Muslim, woman.
Syeda's life represents the struggles of the millions of 'invisible workers' in the country. The book follows her from Benaras, where the 1992 Babri Masjid-related riots upend 'the warp and the weft' that made up the handloom industry, and in the process, her life and work. Along with her husband and three children, she is forced to move to Delhi, a decision practically made for her by the person at the railway station ticket counter.
In the next three decades, we see her forced to move through fifty low-paying and exploitative jobs - stitching jeans, making bindis and stationery, shelling almonds. Holding multiple jobs at the same time with very little job security or safety. She is part of India’s informal economy, working in subhuman conditions with no formal contracts or labor rights. Extremely vulnerable, and way beyond hand to mouth. The section about the strikes to get Rs.10 extra is poignant.
It's not just the economics, it is also the compounding marginalisation of two other parts of her identity, if at all she has one - being Muslim, and being a woman. From her own family (including her husband) to society at large, and the governance, there is a systemic approach that doesn't stop at apathy, it moves into malice and violence. The number of times she has to up and move from her house/job is a testament to that.
The book, though unwavering in its focus on the marginalised, is also a political and social commentary, bringing out the communal tensions that repeatedly affect Syeda's life and work, and highlighting the systematic execution of the Hindu rashtra plan by the BJP and its cousins.
Through all this, Syeda is relentlessly resilient, eking out a sense of agency and constantly adapting to everything thrown at her. But "from a chatterbox who loved films, music, colours, she became an irritable, bitter, quiet woman, who kept to herself." Her only support, beyond her daughter Reshma (which she never really acknowledges) is the community of those like her, bonded by the different oppressions and systemic injustices they face.
It is impossible not to feel for her, Akmal (husband), and Reshma. The former becomes a rickshaw puller after being a skilled weaver of high-end saris, and the former, who despite being a spirited 'Dilliwali' struggles with the burden of looking after her parents amidst her own aspirations. It is heartbreaking to see that a generation later, though Reshma's job at the mall is ostensibly better than Syeda's work, it is still dreadful.
The book isn't a happy one, and the usage of Bollywood lyrics and Urdu poetry accentuate the poignance. An interesting aspect is how relevant events across the spectrum - from the release of movies to the launch of Aadhaar to the Shaheen Bagh protests - are highlighted to show how they affect those like Syeda. A dogged and unflinching portrayal of lives at the intersection of gender, poverty, and religion, it is a brutal but necessary gut punch for the reader and the society we are part of.

Notes
1. तमाम रिशà¥à¤¤à¥‹à¤‚ को मैं घर पे छोड़ आया था
फिर उस के बा'द मà¥à¤à¥‡ कोई अजनबी न मिला
- बशीर बदà¥à¤°
2. In October 2018, Kerala became the first state to pass the 'Right to Sit' law that mandated shops to provide seating arrangements for all workers.
3. The kind of errors Aadhar has, especially in the documents of those who are supposed to gain from it is crazy! A combination of illiteracy, systemic apathy, and corruption (in the cost to get changes done)]]> 4.44 The Many Lives of Syeda X: The Story of an Unknown Indian
author: Neha Dixit
name: Manu
average rating: 4.44
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/30
date added: 2025/04/30
shelves: review
review:
'The Many Lives of Syeda X' is the kind of book that forces one to look at one's privilege at an individual level, and holds a mirror to all of us at a societal level. Neha Dixit has researched this book for nine years, and the breadth and depth of her 900+ interactions, and her thinking, is evident in the structure and narrative of the book.
It is, as the cliche goes, the voice of the voiceless - the people whose desperate toils to survive, we deliberately look away from or pretend not to see, because it is a reality we will find difficult to face if we consider ourselves human. I call it sub-human because, from our gated vantage point, in a nation whose GDP chest-thumping and gleaming malls and fancy consumer goods belies the struggle of the large majority of its population, people like Syeda exist in conditions that are perilous in terms of income, health, and safety. A poor, Muslim, woman.
Syeda's life represents the struggles of the millions of 'invisible workers' in the country. The book follows her from Benaras, where the 1992 Babri Masjid-related riots upend 'the warp and the weft' that made up the handloom industry, and in the process, her life and work. Along with her husband and three children, she is forced to move to Delhi, a decision practically made for her by the person at the railway station ticket counter.
In the next three decades, we see her forced to move through fifty low-paying and exploitative jobs - stitching jeans, making bindis and stationery, shelling almonds. Holding multiple jobs at the same time with very little job security or safety. She is part of India’s informal economy, working in subhuman conditions with no formal contracts or labor rights. Extremely vulnerable, and way beyond hand to mouth. The section about the strikes to get Rs.10 extra is poignant.
It's not just the economics, it is also the compounding marginalisation of two other parts of her identity, if at all she has one - being Muslim, and being a woman. From her own family (including her husband) to society at large, and the governance, there is a systemic approach that doesn't stop at apathy, it moves into malice and violence. The number of times she has to up and move from her house/job is a testament to that.
The book, though unwavering in its focus on the marginalised, is also a political and social commentary, bringing out the communal tensions that repeatedly affect Syeda's life and work, and highlighting the systematic execution of the Hindu rashtra plan by the BJP and its cousins.
Through all this, Syeda is relentlessly resilient, eking out a sense of agency and constantly adapting to everything thrown at her. But "from a chatterbox who loved films, music, colours, she became an irritable, bitter, quiet woman, who kept to herself." Her only support, beyond her daughter Reshma (which she never really acknowledges) is the community of those like her, bonded by the different oppressions and systemic injustices they face.
It is impossible not to feel for her, Akmal (husband), and Reshma. The former becomes a rickshaw puller after being a skilled weaver of high-end saris, and the former, who despite being a spirited 'Dilliwali' struggles with the burden of looking after her parents amidst her own aspirations. It is heartbreaking to see that a generation later, though Reshma's job at the mall is ostensibly better than Syeda's work, it is still dreadful.
The book isn't a happy one, and the usage of Bollywood lyrics and Urdu poetry accentuate the poignance. An interesting aspect is how relevant events across the spectrum - from the release of movies to the launch of Aadhaar to the Shaheen Bagh protests - are highlighted to show how they affect those like Syeda. A dogged and unflinching portrayal of lives at the intersection of gender, poverty, and religion, it is a brutal but necessary gut punch for the reader and the society we are part of.

Notes
1. तमाम रिशà¥à¤¤à¥‹à¤‚ को मैं घर पे छोड़ आया था
फिर उस के बा'द मà¥à¤à¥‡ कोई अजनबी न मिला
- बशीर बदà¥à¤°
2. In October 2018, Kerala became the first state to pass the 'Right to Sit' law that mandated shops to provide seating arrangements for all workers.
3. The kind of errors Aadhar has, especially in the documents of those who are supposed to gain from it is crazy! A combination of illiteracy, systemic apathy, and corruption (in the cost to get changes done)
]]> <![CDATA[The Coming Wave: AI, Power and the 21st Century's Greatest Dilemma]]> 81071854 Cofounder of the pioneering AI company DeepMind sounds the alarm on the unprecedented risks to global order posed by a wave of fast-developing technologies like artificial intelligence and genetic engineering

A stark and urgent warning on the unprecedented risks that a wave of fast-developing technologies poses to global order, and how we might contain them while we have the chance-from a cofounder of the pioneering AI company DeepMind

We are about to cross a critical threshold in the history of our species. Everything is about to change.

Soon we will live surrounded by AIs. They will carry out complex tasks-operating businesses, producing unlimited digital content, running core government services and maintaining infrastructure. This will be a world of DNA printers and quantum computers, engineered pathogens and autonomous weapons, robot assistants and abundant energy. It represents nothing less than a step change in human capability.

We are not prepared.

As cofounder of the pioneering AI company DeepMind, Mustafa Suleyman has been at the center of this revolution, one poised to become the single greatest accelerant of progress in history. The coming decade, he argues, will be defined by this wave of powerful, fast-proliferating new technologies. Driven by overwhelming strategic and commercial incentives, these tools will help address our global challenges and create vast wealth-but also upheaval on a once unimaginable scale.

In The Coming Wave, Suleyman shows how these forces threaten the grand bargain of the nation state, the foundation of global order. As our fragile governments sleepwalk into disaster, we face an existential dilemma: unprecedented harms arising from unchecked openness on one side, the threat of overbearing surveillance on the other. Can we forge a narrow path between catastrophe and dystopia?

In this groundbreaking book from the ultimate AI insider, Suleyman establishes "the containment problem"-the task of maintaining control over powerful
technologies-as the essential challenge of our age.]]> 320 Mustafa Suleyman 1847927491 Manu 4 review The book is divided into four sections. The first looks at the history of technology and how it spreads. The second gets into the detailing of the coming wave - two general purpose technologies - AI and synthetic biology, and associated technologies like robotics and quantum computing. This section also goes into the features and incentives that drive them. Part 3 takes a side step into the political implications of this on the nation state, the only institution that can temper the wave. The last section looks at what is the 'containment problem' - a wave of technology is near impossible to contain, history has ample proof, but can we still take a shot at it.
In the first section, Suleyman shows how technology has a clear, inevitable trajectory: mass diffusion in great rolling waves. New discoveries are used by people to make cheaper food, better goods, more efficient transport etc. As demand grows, competition increases, the technology becomes better and cheaper, and easier to use. From farming to the internet, history has enough examples. A big challenge is that the inventor has no way of knowing the nth order consequence (the 'revenge effects' of technology - fridge makers didn't start out with the intent to punch a hole in the ozone later), and once a technology is out there, there is very little we can do to contain it. From fossil fuel emissions to opioid abuse to space junk, this is the story. The only partial exception is nuclear weapons.
There is a fascinating story in the beginning of the second section on DQN, an algorithm the DeepMind team created to play the game Breakout, and it discovered a strategy that most humans didn't think of. The trailer for AlphaGo. The section also goes deep into synthetic biology and robotics. Apparently, one can buy a benchtop DNA synthesiser for $25k.
But this section is even more important because it brings out the four intrinsic features of this wave that compound the containment problem. One, it has a hugely asymmetric impact. Which this has happened before (cannon vs a large set of people) it has been scaled massively with the internet and now AI (a single algorithm can hold massive systems to ransom). Two, they are developing fast - hyper-evolution - providing very little time to react, let alone regulate ((look at cars vs the frequency of the versions of GPT). Third, they are omni-use (AI can be applied in multiple domains, and can come up with compounds for cure or as poison). And fourth, its degree of autonomy is beyond any previous technology.
Add to that the incentives and the containment problem just gets magnified. Geopolitics and the power involved, a global research system that has rituals rewarding open publication - curiosity and the pursuit of new ideas, financial gains, and the the most human one of all - ego.
The third section is on the impact of all this on the nation state. He calls out that technology is not value-neutral, and quotes Langdon Winner, "Technology in its various manifestations is a significant part of the human world. Its structures, processes and alterations enter into and become part of the structures, processes and alterations of human consciousness, society and politics." From the printing press to weapons, tech has helped build the nation state. My favourite chapter in this is 'Fragility Amplifiers' - from robots with guns to lab leaks to 3d printing everything, even people with good intent can cause things to go wrong. "What does the social contract look like if a select group of 'post humans' engineer themselves to some unreachable intellectual or physical plane?"Add to it massive job displacement, and other social issues and the nation state faces challenges far beyond the standard issues of the day. The possibilities are a continuum from an extremely powerful nation state to completely decentralised groups of individuals.
In the last section, he looks at nine ways, working in cohesion to provide some sort of containment. Technical safety, audits, using choke points, maker responsibility to build in controls from the start, aligning business incentives with containment, helping governments build tech to regulate tech, international alliances for regulation and mitigation, a culture of sharing errors and learning from them, public input to make this all accountable. The tenth point he makes is that there is no silver bullet that will take us to any permanent solution. It is a narrow path which humanity must walk on. That probably is the biggest lesson.
I found the book full of great insights and perspectives, and written in a way that makes it accessible to those outside tech. An important book for everyone to read since it's a pragmatic look at what the future holds for the species.

Notes
1. (Life + Intelligence) x Energy = Civilisation
2. Liverpool's MP William Huskisson was killed under the wheels of the locomotive during the opening of the Liverpool - Manchester line, the first passenger railway because the crowd had no idea of the machine's power!
4. How the stirrup changed everything. Faced the rider to the horse, and the ability to power through. It became a leading offense strategy, and changed Europe. Horses - church land for rearing- ties to the kingdom - feudalism.
3. Today, no matter how wealthy you are, you simply cannot buy a more powerful smartphone than is available to billions of people
4. Primum non nocere - "first, do no harm". (Hippocratic Oath)]]> 3.67 2023 The Coming Wave: AI, Power and the 21st Century's Greatest Dilemma
author: Mustafa Suleyman
name: Manu
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/05/30
date added: 2025/04/27
shelves: review
review:
Co-founder of first DeepMind (the company behind a couple of massive leaps in AI - AlphaGo, AlphaFold, acquired by Google), then Inflection AI and now (before the book published, I think) CEO of Microsoft AI, I think there are few better people than Mustafa Suleyman to write about AI. And I suspect there will be few better moments than now. This was a book I was looking forward to reading, and it didn't disappoint.
The book is divided into four sections. The first looks at the history of technology and how it spreads. The second gets into the detailing of the coming wave - two general purpose technologies - AI and synthetic biology, and associated technologies like robotics and quantum computing. This section also goes into the features and incentives that drive them. Part 3 takes a side step into the political implications of this on the nation state, the only institution that can temper the wave. The last section looks at what is the 'containment problem' - a wave of technology is near impossible to contain, history has ample proof, but can we still take a shot at it.
In the first section, Suleyman shows how technology has a clear, inevitable trajectory: mass diffusion in great rolling waves. New discoveries are used by people to make cheaper food, better goods, more efficient transport etc. As demand grows, competition increases, the technology becomes better and cheaper, and easier to use. From farming to the internet, history has enough examples. A big challenge is that the inventor has no way of knowing the nth order consequence (the 'revenge effects' of technology - fridge makers didn't start out with the intent to punch a hole in the ozone later), and once a technology is out there, there is very little we can do to contain it. From fossil fuel emissions to opioid abuse to space junk, this is the story. The only partial exception is nuclear weapons.
There is a fascinating story in the beginning of the second section on DQN, an algorithm the DeepMind team created to play the game Breakout, and it discovered a strategy that most humans didn't think of. The trailer for AlphaGo. The section also goes deep into synthetic biology and robotics. Apparently, one can buy a benchtop DNA synthesiser for $25k.
But this section is even more important because it brings out the four intrinsic features of this wave that compound the containment problem. One, it has a hugely asymmetric impact. Which this has happened before (cannon vs a large set of people) it has been scaled massively with the internet and now AI (a single algorithm can hold massive systems to ransom). Two, they are developing fast - hyper-evolution - providing very little time to react, let alone regulate ((look at cars vs the frequency of the versions of GPT). Third, they are omni-use (AI can be applied in multiple domains, and can come up with compounds for cure or as poison). And fourth, its degree of autonomy is beyond any previous technology.
Add to that the incentives and the containment problem just gets magnified. Geopolitics and the power involved, a global research system that has rituals rewarding open publication - curiosity and the pursuit of new ideas, financial gains, and the the most human one of all - ego.
The third section is on the impact of all this on the nation state. He calls out that technology is not value-neutral, and quotes Langdon Winner, "Technology in its various manifestations is a significant part of the human world. Its structures, processes and alterations enter into and become part of the structures, processes and alterations of human consciousness, society and politics." From the printing press to weapons, tech has helped build the nation state. My favourite chapter in this is 'Fragility Amplifiers' - from robots with guns to lab leaks to 3d printing everything, even people with good intent can cause things to go wrong. "What does the social contract look like if a select group of 'post humans' engineer themselves to some unreachable intellectual or physical plane?"Add to it massive job displacement, and other social issues and the nation state faces challenges far beyond the standard issues of the day. The possibilities are a continuum from an extremely powerful nation state to completely decentralised groups of individuals.
In the last section, he looks at nine ways, working in cohesion to provide some sort of containment. Technical safety, audits, using choke points, maker responsibility to build in controls from the start, aligning business incentives with containment, helping governments build tech to regulate tech, international alliances for regulation and mitigation, a culture of sharing errors and learning from them, public input to make this all accountable. The tenth point he makes is that there is no silver bullet that will take us to any permanent solution. It is a narrow path which humanity must walk on. That probably is the biggest lesson.
I found the book full of great insights and perspectives, and written in a way that makes it accessible to those outside tech. An important book for everyone to read since it's a pragmatic look at what the future holds for the species.

Notes
1. (Life + Intelligence) x Energy = Civilisation
2. Liverpool's MP William Huskisson was killed under the wheels of the locomotive during the opening of the Liverpool - Manchester line, the first passenger railway because the crowd had no idea of the machine's power!
4. How the stirrup changed everything. Faced the rider to the horse, and the ability to power through. It became a leading offense strategy, and changed Europe. Horses - church land for rearing- ties to the kingdom - feudalism.
3. Today, no matter how wealthy you are, you simply cannot buy a more powerful smartphone than is available to billions of people
4. Primum non nocere - "first, do no harm". (Hippocratic Oath)
]]> SARTHA (OIP) 29511947
Nagabhatta, the scholar, is deputed by Amaruka, the king, to study the secrets of caravans of other lands in order to improve the economy of his kingdom. During his extensive travels, Nagabhatta becomes a witness to and comes under the influence of dozens of religious, social, and cultural modes. Unusual experiences and peoples are depicted in a historically changing time in the history of India. The novel is a result of a deep and extensive study of history and research conducted at actual locales, like Nalanda. It searches, creatively, the roots of conflicting religious beliefs which India is constantly facing.

Bhyrappa is well known for his profound study of philosophical questions. In Sartha, he goes back in time to recreate the atmosphere of a bygone era with an authenticity that is his hallmark. Through this gripping narrative, a vast panorama of the past unfolds before us. It is a novel that abounds in details of eighth-century India, creating an experience that is rich and strange--strange to readers uninitiated into the wealth and diversity of the India of more than a thousand years ago.

Sartha can be discussed at several levels. It is a historical novel par excellence, defying western critics' opinion that Indian fiction lacks historical sense. On another level, it is a Picaresque novel, in so far as it concerns itself with the escapades of the protagonist. On yet another plane it is a metaphysical novel, dealing with the philosophy of Advaitic thought. Finally, it is a romance, a very readable story about the true love of Nagabhatta and Chandrika.]]> 336 S.L. Bhyrappa 0198098650 Manu 4 4.21 1998 SARTHA (OIP)
author: S.L. Bhyrappa
name: Manu
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1998
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/22
date added: 2025/04/22
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[What Are You Doing With Your Life]]> 36385832 272 J. Krishnamurti 1846045851 Manu 0 3.80 1899 What Are You Doing With Your Life
author: J. Krishnamurti
name: Manu
average rating: 3.80
book published: 1899
rating: 0
read at: 2025/04/15
date added: 2025/04/15
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Ladies Coupé: A Novel in Parts]]> 3243754
Meet Akhilandeshwari, Akhila for short: forty-five and single, an income-tax clerk, and a woman who has never been allowed to live her own life - always the daughter, the sister, the aunt, the provider.

Until the day she gets herself a one-way ticket to the seaside town of Kanyakumari, gloriously alone for the first time in her life and determined to break free of all that her conservative Tamil brahmin life has bound her to.

In the intimate atmosphere of the ladies coupé which she shares with five other women, Akhila gets to know her fellow travellers:

Janaki, pampered wife and confused mother;

Margaret Shanti, a chemistry teacher married to the poetry of elements and an insensitive tyrant too self-absorbed to recognize her needs;

Prabha Devi, the perfect daughter and wife, transformed for life by a glimpse of a swimming pool;

Fourteen-year-old Sheela, with her ability to perceive what others cannot;

And Marikolanthu, whose innocence was destroyed by one night of lust.

As she listens to the women's stories, Akhila is drawn into the most private moments of their lives, seeking in them a solution to the question that has been with her all her life: Can a woman stay single and be happy, or does a woman need a man to feel complete?]]> 276 anita-nair 0141005955 Manu 0 3.51 2001 Ladies Coupé: A Novel in Parts
author: anita-nair
name: Manu
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2001
rating: 0
read at: 2025/04/10
date added: 2025/04/10
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Story of China: A Portrait of a Civilisation and its People]]> 58714957 A single volume history of China, offering a look into the past of the global superpower and its significance today.

Michael Wood has travelled the length and breadth of China producing a magisterial new book that combines a sweeping narrative of China’s story with the stories of its people, the history of its landscape and commentary from his extensive travel journals. He begins with a look at China’s prehistory—the early dynasties, the origins of the Chinese state, and the roots of Chinese culture in the teachings of Confucius. He looks at particular periods and themes that are being revaluated by historians now such as The Renaissance of the Song with its brilliant scientific discoveries. He offers a revaluation of the Qing Empire in the 18th century, just before the European impact, a time when China’s rich and diverse culture was at its height. Wood takes a new look at the encounter with the West, the Opium Wars, clashes with the British and the extraordinarily rich debates in the late 19th century as to which path China should take to move forward into modernity. Finally, he brings the story up to today by giving readers a clear, current account of China post 1949 complete with a more balanced view of Mao based on newly-opened archives. In the final chapter, Wood considers the provocative question of when, if ever, China will rule the world. Michael Wood’s The Story of China answers that question and is the indispensable book about the most intriguing and powerful country amassing power on the world stage today.]]> 624 Michael Wood 1471175987 Manu 5 4.10 2020 The Story of China: A Portrait of a Civilisation and its People
author: Michael Wood
name: Manu
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/06
date added: 2025/04/06
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[When We Cease to Understand the World]]> 57874791
When We Cease to Understand the World is a book about the complicated links between scientific and mathematical discovery, madness, and destruction.

Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger—these are some of luminaries into whose troubled lives Benjamín Labatut thrusts the reader, showing us how they grappled with the most profound questions of existence. They have strokes of unparalleled genius, alienate friends and lovers, descend into isolation and insanity. Some of their discoveries reshape human life for the better; others pave the way to chaos and unimaginable suffering. The lines are never clear.

At a breakneck pace and with a wealth of disturbing detail, Labatut uses the imaginative resources of fiction to tell the stories of the scientists and mathematicians who expanded our notions of the possible.]]> 192 Benjamín Labatut 1782276149 Manu 5 review Featuring real historic figures and events, it could even be non-fiction as it explores the lives and discoveries of scientists and mathematicians who changed the way we understood the world. More interestingly, it also puts focus on the moral consequences of their work, the effect it had on themselves, and the impact it had on the world. Apparently, the scientists and their discoveries are all factual, the personal lives include some fiction.
The book has five stories, with the longest being When We Cease to Understand the World that features one of my favourite reading subjects - the quantum world. It is fascinating to read about the actual lives and thinking behind the names I only knew in the context of theories/principles - Bohr model, Heisenberg's Uncertainty principle, Schrödinger's wave equation, their rivalries and arguments, the people they were, and what drove them. The book also highlights people about whom we don't hear much, but did play a role. In this case, Louis de Broglie, whom Einstein thought could stop Heisenberg's line of thinking on the quantum world. We also get a ringside view of the fifth Solvay Conference, how the Copenhagen Interpretation came about, how Einstein became the greatest enemy of quantum mechanics, and how he came to be admired by, but alienated from the next generation of scientists.
While this was my favourite, I really liked the other stories too. I think of 'Prussian Blue', the first story, as a sort of a partial biography for poison. Labatut traces the history of cyanide, starting with the discovery of Prussian Blue (Johann Conrad Dippel), a pigment that revolutionised European art. Its chemical composition led to the isolation of cyanide in 1782 by Carl Wilhelm Scheele, and its later use in the development of Zyklon B, a poison gas used in the Holocaust. On another front, Fritz Haber, a German chemist, harvested nitrogen from air, which led to the development of synthetic fertilisers, saved millions from famine and fuelled our overpopulation. He was also the first man to create a weapon of mass destruction - chlorine gas, used in WW1.
The second story "Schwarzschild's Singularity" explores the life and work of Karl Schwarzschild, who discovered the first exact solution to Einstein's theory of general relativity, revealing the concept of a black hole and its implications for our understanding of the universe. His calculations showed that a collapsing star would compress, increasing its density until the force of gravity distorts space and time, creating an "inescapable abyss" where nothing, not even light, can escape. this discovery, and what it implied, coupled with his experiences during World War I, deeply troubled Schwarzschild, who grappled with the incomprehensibility of his own discovery and its potential consequences. Einstein wrote a eulogy for him after his death, but fought hardest to exorcise the demon of this singularity, but the proof for it was published on the day the Nazis crossed the Polish border, by Robert Oppenheimer and Hartland Snyder.
“The Heart of the Heart,†is based on Alexander Grothendieck who tried to find a unifying principle for all of mathematics, but finally retreated to the life of a recluse. His story is (almost) echoing in the life of Shinichi Mochizuki, a contemporary scientist.
In all these stories, there are connections between individuals/events that almost seem like providence. And that's what makes the narrative fascinating because Labatut recreates the story to instil a sense of awe, probably trying to mirror our ignorance of how reality works.
This is expressed in the last story - The Night Gardener (#3 in Notes below), which provides a poignant and personal (for the author, since he uses the first person here) connection to some of the earlier stories.
What I really liked was how the essence of the complex mysteries of science and mathematics have been made accessible even to the average reader. The writing is vivid and sublime, drawing you into some of the greatest minds that have lived among us. Some have described it as a book against scientists, but I think it shows us a mirror of what science can do if we don't proceed with caution. To scientists, and humanity.

Notes and Quotes
1. The effects of cyanide are so swift that there is only one historical account of its flavour, left behind in the early twenty-first century by M.P.Prasad, an Indian goldsmith, 32 years old, who managed to write three lines after swallowing it. "Doctors, potassium cyanide. I have tasted it. It burns the tongue and tastes acrid"
2. Niels Bohr's response to Einstein's "God does not play dice with the universe" was "It's not our place to tell Him how to run the world"
3. The Night Gardener's sudden realisation that it was mathematics - not nuclear weapons, computers, biological warfare or our climate Armageddon - which was changing our world to the point where, in a couple of decades at most, we would simply not be able to grasp what being human really meant. Not that we ever did, he said, but things are getting worse. We can pull atoms apart, peer back at the first light and predict the end of the universe with just a handful of equations, squiggly lines and arcane symbols that normal people cannot fathom, even though they hold sway over their lives. But it's not just regular folks; even scientists no longer comprehend the world. Take quantum mechanics, the crown jewel of our species, the most accurate, far-ranging and beautiful of all our physical theories. It lies behind the supremacy of our smartphones, behind the Internet, behind the coming promise of godlike computing power. It has completely reshaped our world. We know how to use it, it works as if by some strange miracle, and yet there is not a human soul, alive or dead, who actually gets it. The mind cannot come to grips with its paradoxes and contradictions. It's as if the theory had fallen to earth from another planet, and we simply scamper around it like apes, toying and playing with it, but with no true understanding.]]> 4.15 2020 When We Cease to Understand the World
author: Benjamín Labatut
name: Manu
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/26
date added: 2025/03/26
shelves: review
review:
This is one of the most unique books I've read in a while. Though it can broadly be classified as historical fiction, that would fail to capture the essence of the book, because the subject is science, mathematics and the deep mysteries underlying reality. Almost philosophy.
Featuring real historic figures and events, it could even be non-fiction as it explores the lives and discoveries of scientists and mathematicians who changed the way we understood the world. More interestingly, it also puts focus on the moral consequences of their work, the effect it had on themselves, and the impact it had on the world. Apparently, the scientists and their discoveries are all factual, the personal lives include some fiction.
The book has five stories, with the longest being When We Cease to Understand the World that features one of my favourite reading subjects - the quantum world. It is fascinating to read about the actual lives and thinking behind the names I only knew in the context of theories/principles - Bohr model, Heisenberg's Uncertainty principle, Schrödinger's wave equation, their rivalries and arguments, the people they were, and what drove them. The book also highlights people about whom we don't hear much, but did play a role. In this case, Louis de Broglie, whom Einstein thought could stop Heisenberg's line of thinking on the quantum world. We also get a ringside view of the fifth Solvay Conference, how the Copenhagen Interpretation came about, how Einstein became the greatest enemy of quantum mechanics, and how he came to be admired by, but alienated from the next generation of scientists.
While this was my favourite, I really liked the other stories too. I think of 'Prussian Blue', the first story, as a sort of a partial biography for poison. Labatut traces the history of cyanide, starting with the discovery of Prussian Blue (Johann Conrad Dippel), a pigment that revolutionised European art. Its chemical composition led to the isolation of cyanide in 1782 by Carl Wilhelm Scheele, and its later use in the development of Zyklon B, a poison gas used in the Holocaust. On another front, Fritz Haber, a German chemist, harvested nitrogen from air, which led to the development of synthetic fertilisers, saved millions from famine and fuelled our overpopulation. He was also the first man to create a weapon of mass destruction - chlorine gas, used in WW1.
The second story "Schwarzschild's Singularity" explores the life and work of Karl Schwarzschild, who discovered the first exact solution to Einstein's theory of general relativity, revealing the concept of a black hole and its implications for our understanding of the universe. His calculations showed that a collapsing star would compress, increasing its density until the force of gravity distorts space and time, creating an "inescapable abyss" where nothing, not even light, can escape. this discovery, and what it implied, coupled with his experiences during World War I, deeply troubled Schwarzschild, who grappled with the incomprehensibility of his own discovery and its potential consequences. Einstein wrote a eulogy for him after his death, but fought hardest to exorcise the demon of this singularity, but the proof for it was published on the day the Nazis crossed the Polish border, by Robert Oppenheimer and Hartland Snyder.
“The Heart of the Heart,†is based on Alexander Grothendieck who tried to find a unifying principle for all of mathematics, but finally retreated to the life of a recluse. His story is (almost) echoing in the life of Shinichi Mochizuki, a contemporary scientist.
In all these stories, there are connections between individuals/events that almost seem like providence. And that's what makes the narrative fascinating because Labatut recreates the story to instil a sense of awe, probably trying to mirror our ignorance of how reality works.
This is expressed in the last story - The Night Gardener (#3 in Notes below), which provides a poignant and personal (for the author, since he uses the first person here) connection to some of the earlier stories.
What I really liked was how the essence of the complex mysteries of science and mathematics have been made accessible even to the average reader. The writing is vivid and sublime, drawing you into some of the greatest minds that have lived among us. Some have described it as a book against scientists, but I think it shows us a mirror of what science can do if we don't proceed with caution. To scientists, and humanity.

Notes and Quotes
1. The effects of cyanide are so swift that there is only one historical account of its flavour, left behind in the early twenty-first century by M.P.Prasad, an Indian goldsmith, 32 years old, who managed to write three lines after swallowing it. "Doctors, potassium cyanide. I have tasted it. It burns the tongue and tastes acrid"
2. Niels Bohr's response to Einstein's "God does not play dice with the universe" was "It's not our place to tell Him how to run the world"
3. The Night Gardener's sudden realisation that it was mathematics - not nuclear weapons, computers, biological warfare or our climate Armageddon - which was changing our world to the point where, in a couple of decades at most, we would simply not be able to grasp what being human really meant. Not that we ever did, he said, but things are getting worse. We can pull atoms apart, peer back at the first light and predict the end of the universe with just a handful of equations, squiggly lines and arcane symbols that normal people cannot fathom, even though they hold sway over their lives. But it's not just regular folks; even scientists no longer comprehend the world. Take quantum mechanics, the crown jewel of our species, the most accurate, far-ranging and beautiful of all our physical theories. It lies behind the supremacy of our smartphones, behind the Internet, behind the coming promise of godlike computing power. It has completely reshaped our world. We know how to use it, it works as if by some strange miracle, and yet there is not a human soul, alive or dead, who actually gets it. The mind cannot come to grips with its paradoxes and contradictions. It's as if the theory had fallen to earth from another planet, and we simply scamper around it like apes, toying and playing with it, but with no true understanding.
]]> <![CDATA[The Decision Book: Fifty models for strategic thinking (New Edition)]]> 61157638 176 Mikael Krogerus 1800815204 Manu 3 3.67 2011 The Decision Book: Fifty models for strategic thinking (New Edition)
author: Mikael Krogerus
name: Manu
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2011
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/22
date added: 2025/03/22
shelves:
review:

]]> Service Model 214663714 A humorous tale of robotic murder from the Hugo-nominated author of Elder Race and Children of Time

To fix the world they first must break it further.

Humanity is a dying breed, utterly reliant on artificial labor and service. When a domesticated robot gets a nasty little idea downloaded into their core programming, they murder their owner. The robot then discovers they can also do something else they never did before: run away. After fleeing the household, they enter a wider world they never knew existed, where the age-old hierarchy of humans at the top is disintegrating, and a robot ecosystem devoted to human wellbeing is finding a new purpose.]]> 373 Adrian Tchaikovsky 1035045672 Manu 4 3.84 2024 Service Model
author: Adrian Tchaikovsky
name: Manu
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/22
date added: 2025/03/22
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model]]> 55384168 Discover an empowering new way of understanding your multifaceted mind—and healing the many parts that make you who you are.

Is there just one “youâ€? We’ve been taught to believe we have a single identity, and to feel fear or shame when we can’t control the inner voices that don’t match the ideal of who we think we should be. Yet Dr. Richard Schwartz’s research now challenges this “mono-mind†theory. “All of us are born with many sub-minds—or parts,†says Dr. Schwartz. “These parts are not imaginary or symbolic. They are individuals who exist as an internal family within us—and the key to health and happiness is to honor, understand, and love every part.â€

Dr. Schwartz’s Internal Family Systems (IFS) model has been transforming psychology for decades. With No Bad Parts, you’ll learn why IFS has been so effective in areas such as trauma recovery, addiction therapy, and depression treatment—and how this new understanding of consciousness has the potential to radically change our lives. Here you’ll explore:

• The IFS revolution—how honoring and communicating with our parts changes our approach to mental wellness
• Overturning the cultural, scientific, and spiritual assumptions that reinforce an outdated mono-mind model
• The ego, the inner critic, the saboteur—making these often-maligned parts into powerful allies
• Burdens—why our parts become distorted and stuck in childhood traumas and cultural beliefs
• How IFS demonstrates human goodness by revealing that there are no bad parts
• The Self—discover your wise, compassionate essence of goodness that is the source of healing and harmony
• Exercises for mapping your parts, accessing the Self, working with a challenging protector, identifying each part’s triggers, and more

IFS is a paradigm-changing model because it gives us a powerful approach for healing ourselves, our culture, and our planet. As Dr. Schwartz teaches, “Our parts can sometimes be disruptive or harmful, but once they’re unburdened, they return to their essential goodness. When we learn to love all our parts, we can learn to love all people—and that will contribute to healing the world.â€

]]> 216 Richard C. Schwartz 1683646681 Manu 4 4.13 2021 No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model
author: Richard C. Schwartz
name: Manu
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/18
date added: 2025/03/18
shelves:
review:

]]> The Midnight Library 54789601 'Between life and death there is a library, and within that library, the shelves go on forever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be if you had made other choices... Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets?'

A dazzling novel about all the choices that go into a life well lived, from the internationally bestselling author of Reasons to Stay Alive and How To Stop Time.

Somewhere out beyond the edge of the universe there is a library that contains an infinite number of books, each one the story of another reality. One tells the story of your life as it is, along with another book for the other life you could have lived if you had made a different choice at any point in your life. While we all wonder how our lives might have been, what if you had the chance to go to the library and see for yourself? Would any of these other lives truly be better?

In The Midnight Library, Matt Haig's enchanting novel, Nora Seed finds herself faced with this decision. Faced with the possibility of changing her life for a new one, following a different career, undoing old breakups, realizing her dreams of becoming a glaciologist; she must search within herself as she travels through the Midnight Library to decide what is truly fulfilling in life, and what makes it worth living in the first place.]]> 288 Matt Haig 1786892723 Manu 0 3.97 2020 The Midnight Library
author: Matt Haig
name: Manu
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/12
date added: 2025/03/12
shelves:
review:

]]> Entangled Life 54831593 ‘A dazzling, vibrant, vision-changing book. I ended it wonderstruck at the fungal world. A remarkable work by a remarkable writer’ Robert Macfarlane, author of Underland

The more we learn about fungi, the less makes sense without them.

Neither plant nor animal, they are found throughout the earth, the air and our bodies. They can be microscopic, yet also account for the largest organisms ever recorded. They enabled the first life on land, can survive unprotected in space and thrive amidst nuclear radiation. In fact, nearly all life relies in some way on fungi.

These endlessly surprising organisms have no brain but can solve problems and manipulate animal behaviour with devastating precision. In giving us bread, alcohol and life-saving medicines, fungi have shaped human history, and their psychedelic properties have recently been shown to alleviate a number of mental illnesses. Their ability to digest plastic, explosives, pesticides and crude oil is being harnessed in break-through technologies, and the discovery that they connect plants in underground networks, the ‘Wood Wide Web’, is transforming the way we understand ecosystems. Yet over ninety percent of their species remain undocumented.

Entangled Life is a mind-altering journey into a spectacular and neglected world, and shows that fungi provide a key to understanding both the planet on which we live, and life itself.

'One of those rare books that can truly change the way you see the world around you. Astounding' Helen MacDonald, author of H Is for Hawk]]> 358 Merlin Sheldrake 1784708275 Manu 0 4.28 2020 Entangled Life
author: Merlin Sheldrake
name: Manu
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/09
date added: 2025/03/09
shelves:
review:

]]> The Diary of a Young Girl 25541588 280 Anne Frank 8172345194 Manu 0 4.33 1947 The Diary of a Young Girl
author: Anne Frank
name: Manu
average rating: 4.33
book published: 1947
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/04
date added: 2025/03/04
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Status Game: On Social Position and How We Use It]]> 60508959
What drives our political and moral beliefs?
What shapes our bitterest conflicts and wildest dreams?
What makes you, you?

Across the world, from Papua New Guinea to Tokyo and Manhattan, humans compete for status. Through games of dominance, virtue and success, it's an obsession that has driven the best and worst of us: the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution as well as spree killers and tyrants at the gates of Europe. But what makes status an all-consuming prize? And how can we wield our desire for it to improve our relationships, win social media battles and be the best in the workplace?

A breathtaking rethink of human psychology, The Status Game will change how you see others - and how you see yourself.]]> 405 Will Storr 0008521670 Manu 4 review Will Storr explores the deep-rooted human drive for status, which has existed since our hunter-gatherer days, and makes a case for how it is one of the fundamental motivators of human behaviour, and how status-seeking influences everything from our personal health, happiness and identities to cultural and societal structures. Pretty much everything of consequence in civilisation - from art and innovation to cults and genocides, has a link to status. The book is structured around the different ways in which status is pursued and how this pursuit shapes human psychology, history, and social dynamics.
Storr begins by outlining how status is an intrinsic part of human nature, explaining that our brains are wired to detect and respond to hierarchical structures. He describes status as not just a desire but a need because it is closely linked to survival and social belonging. Back in the Stone Age, higher status meant access to better mates, more food and greater safety for the self and offspring. That hasn't changed much, so we're driven to connection and ranking - to be accepted into groups, and win status within them. What has changed is the amount and variety of status games we play - politics, offices, sports fandom, fashion, race, gender, nationalism and so on.
The great stretching of the game began when we moved from campsites to settled farming and herding communities. We now have games we play throughout our lives, often unconsciously, to gain respect, admiration, or influence within groups. Status is in a way a 'dark pattern' that fuels the story our brains tell us. Our status games are embedded in our perception and we experience reality through them. Even the morals we abide by are a component of our status game. We are thus the sum of the games we play.
The book then goes into the three primary types of status games that humans play. Dominance games - rooted in power and coercion, dominance-based status is often associated with aggression, violence, and force. Historically, this has been the primary way early human societies established hierarchies, but it continues to manifest in modern settings, from politics to corporate power struggles. Virtue games revolve around moral superiority and ethical standing. Storr explains how religious, ideological, and activist movements often rely on virtue-based status, where individuals or groups seek recognition for their righteousness or adherence to a set of moral principles. Cancel culture, social media outrage, and ideological purity tests are modern manifestations of this game. Success games are focused on competence and achievement, this game rewards people for skills, intelligence, or accomplishments. Scientists, artists, and entrepreneurs typically seek status through this avenue, gaining prestige by excelling in their respective fields.
Storr then examines how these status games influence cultural and historical events. They were designed by evolution to generate cooperation between humans to force (dominance) or convince (success, virtue) us to conform. Storr goes through history and argues that much of it - from the rise of religions to the development of capitalism - can be understood as the outcomes of competing status games. He highlights how political revolutions, scientific breakthroughs, and social movements often emerge from shifts in status hierarchies. The ultimate purpose of all status games is control.
While status games can be constructive, driving progress and innovation, Storr also explores their dangers. He discusses how status-seeking can lead to destructive behaviours such as fanaticism, exclusion, and even genocide. Groups that perceive a loss of status may react with aggression, leading to societal conflict.
Status is a never ending game, because we always want more. In the final section, Storr offers advice on navigating status games in a healthy way. He suggests that recognising the games we are playing, choosing constructive rather than destructive games, and seeking status through meaningful work and relationships can lead to a more fulfilling life. Broadly, the seven rules are an infinite game approach to life.
By understanding these dynamics, Storr suggests we can better navigate social interactions, recognise harmful status traps, and use status games to improve both our personal lives and society at large. The book is extremely accessible even as the subject is tackled through the lens of a variety of sciences. I'd highly recommend it, and maybe you could also follow it up with David Marx's Status and Culture.

Notes
1. As per social genomics, the basic idea is that when we're not doing well in the game of life, our bodies prepare for crisis by switching our settings so we're ready for attack. It increases inflammation, which helps heal any of the physical wounds we might be about to suffer.
2. The status detection system even reads symbolic information in sounds we can't consciously hear. When speaking, we emit a low frequency hum at around 500 hertz. When people meet and talk their hums shift. The highest status person in the group sets its level and the rest adjust to match.
3. We're used to think of money and power as principal motivating powers of life. But they're symbols we use to measure status.
4. We shifted away from fist and fang when we began playing games with symbols in the communal imagination. Accounts of how and why this happened can only be speculative and are debated hotly. Some believe that, after we came down from the trees, the threat from predators huddled us into protective groups. As living became denser, males found themselves with more rivals to fight off, so began shifting their mating strategy towards one of pair-bonding, in which they'd offer meat and protection to females in return for preferred sexual access. These emergent families became extended, with grand-parents, uncles and aunts building sustained relationships and sharing childrearing responsibilities. When women pair-bonded with males from different families, loose tribes or clans formed. Close-living meant close-learning and the ability for rules and symbols to be communicated down the generations.In this communal, nested world, brute ferocity by alpha males was unwelcome and unuseful. Getting along and getting ahead meant winning the cooperation of others. Hyper-violent males who attempted to dominate the tribe would increasingly find themselves ostracised or executed. More peaceable and socially intelligent men began to gain status. Slowly, a novel breed of human came into being, one that had subtly different patterns of hormones and brain chemistry regulating their behaviour. Our skeletons changed, our brains changed and our ways of living changed too.
5. Humiliation has been described as researchers as 'the nuclear bomb of emotions'
6. Fogg Behaviour Model - " a toll booth for entrepreneurs and product designers on their way to Facebook and Google
7. Copy-flatter-conform is our go-to model to get and retain status
8. Prince Charles paradox, in which the person can be simultaneously high and low in status. High in formal status, but low in true status because of low popular appeal
9. For humans, ideology is territory
10. Britain's success attributed to its many members in the Republic of Letters (success games as opposed to the Church's virtue games) and their institutions (Parliament, Bank of England, legal innovations such as patents and secure property) which allowed people to earn wealth and celebrity status. The Industrial Revolution was a status goldrush.
11. In tight cultures that include Pakistan, Germany, Malaysia, Switzerland, India, Singapore, Norway, Turkey, Japan and China - players dress more similarly, buy more similar things and possess superior self-control: they tend to have lower rates of crime, alcohol abuse and obesity. Their citizens are more punctual, and so is their public transport: Swiss trains have an average 97 per cent punctuality rate, in 2014, fourteen trains in Singapore arrived more than 30 minutes late; in 2013, Japan's Shinkansens had an average delay of 54 seconds. Even the time shown on public clocks across tight nations is more likely to be in sync.
People raised in tight cultures are also greater respecters of hierarchy and authority. Tight players are more likely to earn status from precisely correct moral behaviour, to a sometimes comical extent. In Germany, where rules mandate certain hours of the week as quiet one resident complained about a barking dog: in court the judge permitted the animal to bark for thirty minutes per day in ten-minute intervals. They're more interested in moral purity, more likely to have the death penalty, less welcoming to outsiders and prefer dominant leaders. Tight players also show a greater vulnerability to believing the wild, sacred dreams of their game.
11. Psychologists have a name for people with a heightened sensitivity to signals of failure: perfectionist. There are various forms of perfectionism: self-oriented perfectionists' have excessively high standards and often push themselves harder and harder in order to win; narcissistic perfectionists already believe they're number one and experience anxiety when the world treats them as less; neurotic perfectionists suffer low self-esteem and often believe with the next victory they'll finally feel good enough. But there's one species of perfectionism that's especially sensitive to the neoliberal game: 'social perfectionists feel the pressure to win comes from the people with whom they play, They'll tend to agree with statements such as, 'People expect nothing less than perfection from me' and 'Success means that I must work harder to please others' Social perfectionists are highly attuned to reputation and identity. They'll easily think they've let their peers down by being a bad employee, a bad activist, a bad woman. An especially hazardous quality of social perfectionism is that it's based on what we believe other people believe. It's in that black gap between imagination and reality that the demons come.
12. Status is relative : the amount we feel depends on how much we perceive others have
13. The drug of morality poisons empathy ]]> 4.33 The Status Game: On Social Position and How We Use It
author: Will Storr
name: Manu
average rating: 4.33
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/26
date added: 2025/02/26
shelves: review
review:
The Status Game had been on the list for a long while before I managed to get to it. While there were a few perspectives that I had already read about in other books, most notably Joseph Henrich's The WEIRDest People in the World, and to some extent Wanting by Luke Bergis, I found the overall narrative compelling and insightful.
Will Storr explores the deep-rooted human drive for status, which has existed since our hunter-gatherer days, and makes a case for how it is one of the fundamental motivators of human behaviour, and how status-seeking influences everything from our personal health, happiness and identities to cultural and societal structures. Pretty much everything of consequence in civilisation - from art and innovation to cults and genocides, has a link to status. The book is structured around the different ways in which status is pursued and how this pursuit shapes human psychology, history, and social dynamics.
Storr begins by outlining how status is an intrinsic part of human nature, explaining that our brains are wired to detect and respond to hierarchical structures. He describes status as not just a desire but a need because it is closely linked to survival and social belonging. Back in the Stone Age, higher status meant access to better mates, more food and greater safety for the self and offspring. That hasn't changed much, so we're driven to connection and ranking - to be accepted into groups, and win status within them. What has changed is the amount and variety of status games we play - politics, offices, sports fandom, fashion, race, gender, nationalism and so on.
The great stretching of the game began when we moved from campsites to settled farming and herding communities. We now have games we play throughout our lives, often unconsciously, to gain respect, admiration, or influence within groups. Status is in a way a 'dark pattern' that fuels the story our brains tell us. Our status games are embedded in our perception and we experience reality through them. Even the morals we abide by are a component of our status game. We are thus the sum of the games we play.
The book then goes into the three primary types of status games that humans play. Dominance games - rooted in power and coercion, dominance-based status is often associated with aggression, violence, and force. Historically, this has been the primary way early human societies established hierarchies, but it continues to manifest in modern settings, from politics to corporate power struggles. Virtue games revolve around moral superiority and ethical standing. Storr explains how religious, ideological, and activist movements often rely on virtue-based status, where individuals or groups seek recognition for their righteousness or adherence to a set of moral principles. Cancel culture, social media outrage, and ideological purity tests are modern manifestations of this game. Success games are focused on competence and achievement, this game rewards people for skills, intelligence, or accomplishments. Scientists, artists, and entrepreneurs typically seek status through this avenue, gaining prestige by excelling in their respective fields.
Storr then examines how these status games influence cultural and historical events. They were designed by evolution to generate cooperation between humans to force (dominance) or convince (success, virtue) us to conform. Storr goes through history and argues that much of it - from the rise of religions to the development of capitalism - can be understood as the outcomes of competing status games. He highlights how political revolutions, scientific breakthroughs, and social movements often emerge from shifts in status hierarchies. The ultimate purpose of all status games is control.
While status games can be constructive, driving progress and innovation, Storr also explores their dangers. He discusses how status-seeking can lead to destructive behaviours such as fanaticism, exclusion, and even genocide. Groups that perceive a loss of status may react with aggression, leading to societal conflict.
Status is a never ending game, because we always want more. In the final section, Storr offers advice on navigating status games in a healthy way. He suggests that recognising the games we are playing, choosing constructive rather than destructive games, and seeking status through meaningful work and relationships can lead to a more fulfilling life. Broadly, the seven rules are an infinite game approach to life.
By understanding these dynamics, Storr suggests we can better navigate social interactions, recognise harmful status traps, and use status games to improve both our personal lives and society at large. The book is extremely accessible even as the subject is tackled through the lens of a variety of sciences. I'd highly recommend it, and maybe you could also follow it up with David Marx's Status and Culture.

Notes
1. As per social genomics, the basic idea is that when we're not doing well in the game of life, our bodies prepare for crisis by switching our settings so we're ready for attack. It increases inflammation, which helps heal any of the physical wounds we might be about to suffer.
2. The status detection system even reads symbolic information in sounds we can't consciously hear. When speaking, we emit a low frequency hum at around 500 hertz. When people meet and talk their hums shift. The highest status person in the group sets its level and the rest adjust to match.
3. We're used to think of money and power as principal motivating powers of life. But they're symbols we use to measure status.
4. We shifted away from fist and fang when we began playing games with symbols in the communal imagination. Accounts of how and why this happened can only be speculative and are debated hotly. Some believe that, after we came down from the trees, the threat from predators huddled us into protective groups. As living became denser, males found themselves with more rivals to fight off, so began shifting their mating strategy towards one of pair-bonding, in which they'd offer meat and protection to females in return for preferred sexual access. These emergent families became extended, with grand-parents, uncles and aunts building sustained relationships and sharing childrearing responsibilities. When women pair-bonded with males from different families, loose tribes or clans formed. Close-living meant close-learning and the ability for rules and symbols to be communicated down the generations.In this communal, nested world, brute ferocity by alpha males was unwelcome and unuseful. Getting along and getting ahead meant winning the cooperation of others. Hyper-violent males who attempted to dominate the tribe would increasingly find themselves ostracised or executed. More peaceable and socially intelligent men began to gain status. Slowly, a novel breed of human came into being, one that had subtly different patterns of hormones and brain chemistry regulating their behaviour. Our skeletons changed, our brains changed and our ways of living changed too.
5. Humiliation has been described as researchers as 'the nuclear bomb of emotions'
6. Fogg Behaviour Model - " a toll booth for entrepreneurs and product designers on their way to Facebook and Google
7. Copy-flatter-conform is our go-to model to get and retain status
8. Prince Charles paradox, in which the person can be simultaneously high and low in status. High in formal status, but low in true status because of low popular appeal
9. For humans, ideology is territory
10. Britain's success attributed to its many members in the Republic of Letters (success games as opposed to the Church's virtue games) and their institutions (Parliament, Bank of England, legal innovations such as patents and secure property) which allowed people to earn wealth and celebrity status. The Industrial Revolution was a status goldrush.
11. In tight cultures that include Pakistan, Germany, Malaysia, Switzerland, India, Singapore, Norway, Turkey, Japan and China - players dress more similarly, buy more similar things and possess superior self-control: they tend to have lower rates of crime, alcohol abuse and obesity. Their citizens are more punctual, and so is their public transport: Swiss trains have an average 97 per cent punctuality rate, in 2014, fourteen trains in Singapore arrived more than 30 minutes late; in 2013, Japan's Shinkansens had an average delay of 54 seconds. Even the time shown on public clocks across tight nations is more likely to be in sync.
People raised in tight cultures are also greater respecters of hierarchy and authority. Tight players are more likely to earn status from precisely correct moral behaviour, to a sometimes comical extent. In Germany, where rules mandate certain hours of the week as quiet one resident complained about a barking dog: in court the judge permitted the animal to bark for thirty minutes per day in ten-minute intervals. They're more interested in moral purity, more likely to have the death penalty, less welcoming to outsiders and prefer dominant leaders. Tight players also show a greater vulnerability to believing the wild, sacred dreams of their game.
11. Psychologists have a name for people with a heightened sensitivity to signals of failure: perfectionist. There are various forms of perfectionism: self-oriented perfectionists' have excessively high standards and often push themselves harder and harder in order to win; narcissistic perfectionists already believe they're number one and experience anxiety when the world treats them as less; neurotic perfectionists suffer low self-esteem and often believe with the next victory they'll finally feel good enough. But there's one species of perfectionism that's especially sensitive to the neoliberal game: 'social perfectionists feel the pressure to win comes from the people with whom they play, They'll tend to agree with statements such as, 'People expect nothing less than perfection from me' and 'Success means that I must work harder to please others' Social perfectionists are highly attuned to reputation and identity. They'll easily think they've let their peers down by being a bad employee, a bad activist, a bad woman. An especially hazardous quality of social perfectionism is that it's based on what we believe other people believe. It's in that black gap between imagination and reality that the demons come.
12. Status is relative : the amount we feel depends on how much we perceive others have
13. The drug of morality poisons empathy
]]> <![CDATA[The Final Curtain (Detective Kaga, #4)]]> 202525215 The Final Curtain brings the story of Detective Kaga to a surprising conclusion in a series of rich, surprising twists with a confounding murder in Tokyo connected to the mystery of the disappearance and death of Detective Kaga's own mother.

A decade ago, Tokyo Police Detective Kyoichiro Kaga went to collect the ashes of his recently deceased mother. Years before, she ran away from her husband and son without explanation or any further contact, only to die alone in an apartment far away, leaving her estranged son with many unanswered questions.

Now in Tokyo, Michiko Oshitani is found dead many miles from home. Strangled to death, left in the bare apartment rented under a false name by a man who has disappeared without a trace. Oshitani lived far away in Sendai, with no known connection to Tokyo - and neither her family nor friends have any idea why she would have gone there.

Hers is the second strangulation death in that approximate area of Tokyo - the other was a homeless man, killed and his body burned in a tent by the river. As the police search through Oshitani's past for any clue that might shed some light, one of the detectives reaches out to Detective Kaga for advice. As the case unfolds, an unexpected connective emerges between the murder (or murders) now and the long-ago case of Detective Kaga's missing mother.]]> 400 Keigo Higashino 0349146322 Manu 4 4.10 2013 The Final Curtain (Detective Kaga, #4)
author: Keigo Higashino
name: Manu
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/16
date added: 2025/02/16
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence]]> 201751520
In Life as No One Knows It, physicist and astrobiologist Sara Imari Walker argues that solving the origin of life requires radical new thinking and an experimentally testable theory for what life is. This is an urgent issue for efforts to make life from scratch in laboratories here on Earth and missions searching for life on other planets.

Walker proposes a new paradigm for understanding what physics encompasses and what we recognize as life. She invites us into a world of maverick scientists working without a map, seeking not just answers but better ways to formulate the biggest questions we have about the universe. The book culminates with the bold proposal of a new theory for identifying and classifying life, one that applies not just to biological life on Earth but to any instance of life in the universe. Rigorous, accessible, and vital, Life as No One Knows It celebrates the mystery of life and the explanatory power of physics.]]> 272 Sara Imari Walker 0593191897 Manu 0 review Science has domains and subdomains and that has probably prevented it from looking at life in a more holistic way. Physicist and astrobiologist Sara Imari Walker is well placed to do that. Her approach to solving it is the Assembly Theory, a framework that tries to redefine our understanding of life through the complexity of objects and the informational processes that lead to their formation. The bias is thus more towards physics than biology, emphasising the former's role in the emergence of complex structures. Life is information - from molecules to minerals to RNA to the artefacts we build.
The theory, from what I understood, works around two concepts - assembly index, and copy number.
The assembly index is the minimum number of steps required to construct a specific object from basic building blocks, and copy number is the number of identical copies of that object exist within a system. The idea is that between these, we can determine the distinction between living and non-living entities. Objects with a high assembly index are associated with life since they are less likely to form spontaneously, and instead are more likely a result of information propagated across space and time, leading to the emergence of complex structures.
I preferred the first half of the book (why and what) over the second part (how) because the latter got a bit too technical for me. The former had all of the stuff that interested me. For instance, entropy and the concept of negative entropy, free will and how we have it but not always, the 'hard problems' of consciousness (how and why physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective experience), matter Things can be observed only in terms of interactions) and life (that abstractions i.e. information matter in determining what can exist.
"The origin of life is the unification point between biology and physics. It is where the universe described by the fixed laws of known physics - a universe without us - must yield to the seemingly endless forms of complexity generated in the evolution of our biosphere or any other. This unification must happen in what we call chemistry, because chemistry is the first thing the universe builds where not every object can exist. This leads to the possibility of an unfolding of different forms in different locations - what we might call different instances of "life". Not all chemical possibilities can exist all at once; the ones that do exist must therefore be selected. This is why chemistry also happens to be where life can first emerge."
As our explorations in AI and space accelerate, a means to identifying and classifying life, both on our planet and elsewhere in the universe is important. The book provides a view of what is happening on that front. I felt that the first half was quite accessible, but the second half went into thesis mode.
]]> 3.87 Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence
author: Sara Imari Walker
name: Manu
average rating: 3.87
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/10
date added: 2025/02/10
shelves: review
review:
A lot of the books I have read in the recent past have to do with trying to get a working definition of life and/or consciousness. I picked this one up to get more perspectives in that direction, but it gave me something else by shifting the frame. At exactly halfway through the book, there is a line that goes "what will really be alien are examples of life (biological or technological) that have traversed a completely different evolutionary trajectory than we have." And that's important because if we keep looking for markers based on life on earth, we may not find it anywhere else in the universe. It's thus important to find a framework that is agnostic of life as we know it, so that we have a measurable way of recognising and classifying signs of life/intelligence when we come across it.
Science has domains and subdomains and that has probably prevented it from looking at life in a more holistic way. Physicist and astrobiologist Sara Imari Walker is well placed to do that. Her approach to solving it is the Assembly Theory, a framework that tries to redefine our understanding of life through the complexity of objects and the informational processes that lead to their formation. The bias is thus more towards physics than biology, emphasising the former's role in the emergence of complex structures. Life is information - from molecules to minerals to RNA to the artefacts we build.
The theory, from what I understood, works around two concepts - assembly index, and copy number.
The assembly index is the minimum number of steps required to construct a specific object from basic building blocks, and copy number is the number of identical copies of that object exist within a system. The idea is that between these, we can determine the distinction between living and non-living entities. Objects with a high assembly index are associated with life since they are less likely to form spontaneously, and instead are more likely a result of information propagated across space and time, leading to the emergence of complex structures.
I preferred the first half of the book (why and what) over the second part (how) because the latter got a bit too technical for me. The former had all of the stuff that interested me. For instance, entropy and the concept of negative entropy, free will and how we have it but not always, the 'hard problems' of consciousness (how and why physical processes in the brain give rise to subjective experience), matter Things can be observed only in terms of interactions) and life (that abstractions i.e. information matter in determining what can exist.
"The origin of life is the unification point between biology and physics. It is where the universe described by the fixed laws of known physics - a universe without us - must yield to the seemingly endless forms of complexity generated in the evolution of our biosphere or any other. This unification must happen in what we call chemistry, because chemistry is the first thing the universe builds where not every object can exist. This leads to the possibility of an unfolding of different forms in different locations - what we might call different instances of "life". Not all chemical possibilities can exist all at once; the ones that do exist must therefore be selected. This is why chemistry also happens to be where life can first emerge."
As our explorations in AI and space accelerate, a means to identifying and classifying life, both on our planet and elsewhere in the universe is important. The book provides a view of what is happening on that front. I felt that the first half was quite accessible, but the second half went into thesis mode.

]]> Table for Two 213418104
The New York stories, most of which take place around the year 2000, consider the fateful consequences that can spring from brief encounters and the delicate mechanics of compromise that operate at the heart of modern marriages.

In Towles’s novel Rules of Civility, the indomitable Evelyn Ross leaves New York City in September 1938 with the intention of returning home to Indiana. But as her train pulls into Chicago, where her parents are waiting, she instead extends her ticket to Los Angeles.

Told from seven points of view, “Eve in Hollywood†describes how Eve crafts a new future for herself—and others—in a noirish tale that takes us through the movie sets, bungalows, and dive bars of Los Angeles. Written with his signature wit, humor, and sophistication, Table for Two is another glittering addition to Towles’s canon of stylish and transporting fiction]]> 451 Amor Towles 1529154111 Manu 5 4.07 2024 Table for Two
author: Amor Towles
name: Manu
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/07
date added: 2025/02/07
shelves:
review:

]]> When The Body Says No 39899252 Can a person literally die of loneliness? Is there a connection between the ability to express emotions and Alzheimer’s disease? Is there such a thing as a ‘cancer personality’?

Drawing on deep scientific research and Dr Gabor Maté’s acclaimed clinical work, When the Body Says No provides the answers to critical questions about the mind-body link – and the role that stress and our emotional makeup play in an array of common diseases.

When the Body Says No:

- Explores the role of the mind-body link in conditions and diseases such as arthritis, cancer, diabetes, heart disease, irritable bowel syndrome and multiple sclerosis.
- Shares dozens of enlightening case studies and stories, including those of people such as Lou Gehrig (ALS), Betty Ford (breast cancer), Ronald Reagan (Alzheimer’s), Gilda Radner (ovarian cancer) and Lance Armstrong (testicular cancer)
- Reveals ‘The Seven A’s of Healing’: principles in healing and the prevention of illness from hidden stress]]> 306 Gabor Maté 178504222X Manu 5 review
"No disease has a single cause. Even where significant risks can be identified such as biological heredity in some autoimmune diseases or smoking in lung cancer-these vulnerabilities do not exist in isolation. Personality also does not by itself cause disease: one does not get cancer simply from repressing anger or ALS just from being too nice. A systems model recognizes that many processes and factors work together in the formation of disease or in the creation of health. We have demonstrated in this book a biopsychosocial model of medicine. According to the biopsychosocial view, individual biology reflects the history of a human organism in lifelong interaction with an environment, a perpetual inter-change of energy in which psychological and social factors are as vital as physical ones."

Through a methodical approach to identifying stress, its manifestations through various types of diseases using anecdotes and studies, and its origins - which go beyond parents and into previous generations and the social and societal environments, Maté educates us on psychoneuroimmunology (PNI) - an individual's emotional makeup interacting with the nervous system, the immune system, and then the endocrine system - which provides systemic answers to diseases ranging from cardiovascular to cancer to Alzheimer's (there is a fascinating chapter on ALS with perspectives on personalities such as Morrie Schwartz and Stephen Hawking).

Stress, but how? Stress occurs when an organism perceives a threat to its existence or well-being. 'Perceived' is the keyword. It has three components - the physical or emotional event - stress stimulus/stressor, the processing system (in our case, the nervous system), and finally, the psychological and behavioural adjustments - stress response.

"When people describe themselves as being stressed, they usually mean the nervous agitation they experience under excessive demands-most commonly in the areas of work, family, relationships, finances or health. But sensations of nervous tension do not define stress-nor, strictly speaking, are they always perceived when people are stressed. Stress, as we will define it, is not a matter of subjective feeling. It is a measurable set of objective physiological events in the body, involving the brain, the hormonal apparatus, the immune system and many other organs. Both animals and people can experience stress with no awareness of its presence."

"How may stress be transmuted into illness? Stress is a complicated cascade of physical and biochemical responses to powerful emotional stimuli. Physiologically, emotions are themselves electrical, chemical and hormonal discharges of the human nervous system. Emotions influence and are influenced by the functioning of our major organs, the integrity of our immune defences and the workings of the many circulating biological substances that help govern the body's physical states. When emotions are repressed... this inhibition disarms the body's defences against illness. Repression - dissociating emotions from awareness and relegating them to the unconscious realm- disorganizes and confuses our physiological defences so that in some people these defences go awry, becoming the destroyers of health rather than its protectors."

Chapter 7 specifically packs a punch, starting with "Smoking no more causes cancer of the lung than being thrown into deep water causes drowning." It's a case of Nasruddin searching under a streetlight for the keys he left at home, because there is no light at the latter place. To be clear, smoking vastly increases the risk of cancer, but is not the sole factor. A logical conclusion because if that were not true, all smokers should have cancer. They don't. This chapter is a masterclass on the the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, a hormone system that helps the body manage stress, and its connection to cancer. While answering "Is there a cancer personality", Maté also educates us on some broader personalities-

"Type A individuals are seen as "angry, tense, fast, aggressive, in control" and more prone to heart disease. Type B represents the balanced, moderate human being who can feel and express emotion without being driven and without losing himself in uncontrolled emotional outbreaks. Type C personalities have been described as "extremely cooperative, patient, passive, lacking assertiveness and accepting. The Type C individual may resemble Type B, since both may appear easygoing and pleasant, but while the Type B easily expresses anger, fear, sadness and other emotions, the Type C individual, in our view, suppresses or represses 'negative' emotions, particularly anger, while struggling to maintain a strong and happy facade." Type C are seen to have links to cancer. Traits which were adopted in childhood to cope with the environment (most importantly parents and specifically the mother) then become personality traits in adulthood. Personality traits - physiological stress because emotions are not expressed - hormonal imbalance that messes with the natural culling of cells - disease.

The book is full of anecdotes of patients, their past, their traits, their diseases and in many of them, I could see shades of myself. IBS for instance - "When there are too many "gut-wrenching" experiences, the neurologicalÌýcan become oversensitized. Thus, in the spinal cord the conduction of pain from gut to brain is adjusted as a result ofÌýpsychological trauma. The nerves involved are set off by weaker stimuli. The greater the trauma, the lower becomes the sensory threshold. A normal amount of gas in the intestinal lumen and a normal level of tension in the intestinal wall will trigger pain in the sensitized person."

Another interesting chapter is 13, which details the response of the immune system and how stress affects it. "When our psychological capacity to distinguish the self from non-self is disabled, the impairment is bound to extend to our physiology as well. Repressed anger will lead to disordered immunity. The inability to process and express feelings effectively, and the tendency to serve the needs of others before even considering one's own, are common patterns in people who develop chronic illness. These coping styles represent a blurring of boundaries, a confusion of self and non-self on the psychological level. The same confusion will follow on the level of cells, tissues and body organs. The immune system becomes too confused to know self from other or too disabled to defend against danger."

The subsequent chapters are on the impact of parent-child relationships and the effects of generations before. The final chapters offer perspectives on how to mitigate the effects of all we have read thus far - both in terms of managing our perceptions including "negative thinking" (being more pragmatic, discarding beliefs and nature of relationships dangerous to health) as well as healing - the seven A's (Acceptance, awareness, anger, autonomy, attachment, assertion, affirmation).

The message is clear. In the words of Joann Peterson whom Maté quotes, "we experience life through our bodies. If we are not able to articulate our life experience, our bodies what our minds and mouths cannot." As I said, my lived experience and my intuition tell me this is true. I cannot recommend this book enough. It is insightful, accessible, all while being sensitive.

Notes
1. Emotional responses are of three types - the subjective experience, emotional displays with/without us being aware of them, and the physiological changes triggered by the emotional stimuli.

2. This was scary. "Characteristic of many persons with rheumatoid diseases is a stoicism carried to an extreme degree, a deeply ingrained reticence about seek-ing help. People often put up silently with agonizing discomfort, or will not voice their complaints loudly enough to be heard, or will resist the idea of taking symptom-relieving medications."

3. The partner who must suppress more of his or her own needs for the sake of the relationship is more likely to develop physical illness as well-hence the greater incidence, for example, of autoimmune disease and of non-smoking-related cancers among women. "The existence of a mind-body link and a person-person link means that it is possible for anxiety in one person to be manifested as a physical symptom in another person," Dr. Kerr writes. "As is the case with the emotional dysfunctions, the one prone to develop symptoms is the spouse who adapts most to maintain harmony in the relationship system."

4. Nature's ultimate goal is to foster the growth of the individual from absolute dependence to independence-or, more exactly, to the inter-dependence of mature adults living in community. Development is a process of moving from complete external regulation to self-regulation, as far as our genetic programming allows. Well-self-regulated people are the most capable of interacting fruitfully with others in a community

5. Anyone who has ever tried to force a baby to swallow foods he disliked or to induce a toddler even to open her mouth when she did not wish to eat can testify to the young human's inherent capacity to resist coercion and to express displeasure. So why do we start swallowing food we do not want or feelings our parents do not want? Not out of any natural inclination but from the need to survive.

6. One cannot be autonomous as long as one is driven by relationship dynamics, by guilt or attachment needs, by hunger for success, by the fear of the boss or by the fear of boredom. The reason is simple: autonomy is impossible as long as one is driven by anything. Like a leaf blown by the wind, the driven person is controlled by forces powerful than he is. more His autonomous will is not engaged, even if he believes that he has chosen his stressed lifestyle and even if he enjoys his activities. The choices he makes are attached to invisible strings. He is still unable to say no, even if it is only to his own drivenness. When he finally wakes up, he shakes his head, Pinocchio-like, and says, "How foolish I was when I was a puppet."]]> 4.17 2003 When The Body Says No
author: Gabor Maté
name: Manu
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2003
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/02
date added: 2025/02/03
shelves: review
review:
At the outset, let's just say that I am a believer when it comes to Gabor Maté's philosophy. That's because I first had the lived experience, then started connecting the dots, and finally came across this book which gave the whole thing a logical framing and rationale. I've had stress sequentially give me migraines, a heart attack, back pain, IBS and I suspect, even a (yet to be connected) BPPV. Most doctors I went to tried to cure the symptoms, only a couple of them pointed to stress. After I systematically began reading more (Robert Sapolsky, Lisa Feldman Barrett etc) and knocking off stress points, I reached a place where stress was my only stress! And I wondered why I have that stress in the first place. Enter Maté, with a systems thinking approach that I wish doctors would really look at! It is strange that they don't because even a Roman physician in the second century, Galen, had pointed out that "any part of the body can affect any other part through neural connections."

"No disease has a single cause. Even where significant risks can be identified such as biological heredity in some autoimmune diseases or smoking in lung cancer-these vulnerabilities do not exist in isolation. Personality also does not by itself cause disease: one does not get cancer simply from repressing anger or ALS just from being too nice. A systems model recognizes that many processes and factors work together in the formation of disease or in the creation of health. We have demonstrated in this book a biopsychosocial model of medicine. According to the biopsychosocial view, individual biology reflects the history of a human organism in lifelong interaction with an environment, a perpetual inter-change of energy in which psychological and social factors are as vital as physical ones."

Through a methodical approach to identifying stress, its manifestations through various types of diseases using anecdotes and studies, and its origins - which go beyond parents and into previous generations and the social and societal environments, Maté educates us on psychoneuroimmunology (PNI) - an individual's emotional makeup interacting with the nervous system, the immune system, and then the endocrine system - which provides systemic answers to diseases ranging from cardiovascular to cancer to Alzheimer's (there is a fascinating chapter on ALS with perspectives on personalities such as Morrie Schwartz and Stephen Hawking).

Stress, but how? Stress occurs when an organism perceives a threat to its existence or well-being. 'Perceived' is the keyword. It has three components - the physical or emotional event - stress stimulus/stressor, the processing system (in our case, the nervous system), and finally, the psychological and behavioural adjustments - stress response.

"When people describe themselves as being stressed, they usually mean the nervous agitation they experience under excessive demands-most commonly in the areas of work, family, relationships, finances or health. But sensations of nervous tension do not define stress-nor, strictly speaking, are they always perceived when people are stressed. Stress, as we will define it, is not a matter of subjective feeling. It is a measurable set of objective physiological events in the body, involving the brain, the hormonal apparatus, the immune system and many other organs. Both animals and people can experience stress with no awareness of its presence."

"How may stress be transmuted into illness? Stress is a complicated cascade of physical and biochemical responses to powerful emotional stimuli. Physiologically, emotions are themselves electrical, chemical and hormonal discharges of the human nervous system. Emotions influence and are influenced by the functioning of our major organs, the integrity of our immune defences and the workings of the many circulating biological substances that help govern the body's physical states. When emotions are repressed... this inhibition disarms the body's defences against illness. Repression - dissociating emotions from awareness and relegating them to the unconscious realm- disorganizes and confuses our physiological defences so that in some people these defences go awry, becoming the destroyers of health rather than its protectors."

Chapter 7 specifically packs a punch, starting with "Smoking no more causes cancer of the lung than being thrown into deep water causes drowning." It's a case of Nasruddin searching under a streetlight for the keys he left at home, because there is no light at the latter place. To be clear, smoking vastly increases the risk of cancer, but is not the sole factor. A logical conclusion because if that were not true, all smokers should have cancer. They don't. This chapter is a masterclass on the the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, a hormone system that helps the body manage stress, and its connection to cancer. While answering "Is there a cancer personality", Maté also educates us on some broader personalities-

"Type A individuals are seen as "angry, tense, fast, aggressive, in control" and more prone to heart disease. Type B represents the balanced, moderate human being who can feel and express emotion without being driven and without losing himself in uncontrolled emotional outbreaks. Type C personalities have been described as "extremely cooperative, patient, passive, lacking assertiveness and accepting. The Type C individual may resemble Type B, since both may appear easygoing and pleasant, but while the Type B easily expresses anger, fear, sadness and other emotions, the Type C individual, in our view, suppresses or represses 'negative' emotions, particularly anger, while struggling to maintain a strong and happy facade." Type C are seen to have links to cancer. Traits which were adopted in childhood to cope with the environment (most importantly parents and specifically the mother) then become personality traits in adulthood. Personality traits - physiological stress because emotions are not expressed - hormonal imbalance that messes with the natural culling of cells - disease.

The book is full of anecdotes of patients, their past, their traits, their diseases and in many of them, I could see shades of myself. IBS for instance - "When there are too many "gut-wrenching" experiences, the neurologicalÌýcan become oversensitized. Thus, in the spinal cord the conduction of pain from gut to brain is adjusted as a result ofÌýpsychological trauma. The nerves involved are set off by weaker stimuli. The greater the trauma, the lower becomes the sensory threshold. A normal amount of gas in the intestinal lumen and a normal level of tension in the intestinal wall will trigger pain in the sensitized person."

Another interesting chapter is 13, which details the response of the immune system and how stress affects it. "When our psychological capacity to distinguish the self from non-self is disabled, the impairment is bound to extend to our physiology as well. Repressed anger will lead to disordered immunity. The inability to process and express feelings effectively, and the tendency to serve the needs of others before even considering one's own, are common patterns in people who develop chronic illness. These coping styles represent a blurring of boundaries, a confusion of self and non-self on the psychological level. The same confusion will follow on the level of cells, tissues and body organs. The immune system becomes too confused to know self from other or too disabled to defend against danger."

The subsequent chapters are on the impact of parent-child relationships and the effects of generations before. The final chapters offer perspectives on how to mitigate the effects of all we have read thus far - both in terms of managing our perceptions including "negative thinking" (being more pragmatic, discarding beliefs and nature of relationships dangerous to health) as well as healing - the seven A's (Acceptance, awareness, anger, autonomy, attachment, assertion, affirmation).

The message is clear. In the words of Joann Peterson whom Maté quotes, "we experience life through our bodies. If we are not able to articulate our life experience, our bodies what our minds and mouths cannot." As I said, my lived experience and my intuition tell me this is true. I cannot recommend this book enough. It is insightful, accessible, all while being sensitive.

Notes
1. Emotional responses are of three types - the subjective experience, emotional displays with/without us being aware of them, and the physiological changes triggered by the emotional stimuli.

2. This was scary. "Characteristic of many persons with rheumatoid diseases is a stoicism carried to an extreme degree, a deeply ingrained reticence about seek-ing help. People often put up silently with agonizing discomfort, or will not voice their complaints loudly enough to be heard, or will resist the idea of taking symptom-relieving medications."

3. The partner who must suppress more of his or her own needs for the sake of the relationship is more likely to develop physical illness as well-hence the greater incidence, for example, of autoimmune disease and of non-smoking-related cancers among women. "The existence of a mind-body link and a person-person link means that it is possible for anxiety in one person to be manifested as a physical symptom in another person," Dr. Kerr writes. "As is the case with the emotional dysfunctions, the one prone to develop symptoms is the spouse who adapts most to maintain harmony in the relationship system."

4. Nature's ultimate goal is to foster the growth of the individual from absolute dependence to independence-or, more exactly, to the inter-dependence of mature adults living in community. Development is a process of moving from complete external regulation to self-regulation, as far as our genetic programming allows. Well-self-regulated people are the most capable of interacting fruitfully with others in a community

5. Anyone who has ever tried to force a baby to swallow foods he disliked or to induce a toddler even to open her mouth when she did not wish to eat can testify to the young human's inherent capacity to resist coercion and to express displeasure. So why do we start swallowing food we do not want or feelings our parents do not want? Not out of any natural inclination but from the need to survive.

6. One cannot be autonomous as long as one is driven by relationship dynamics, by guilt or attachment needs, by hunger for success, by the fear of the boss or by the fear of boredom. The reason is simple: autonomy is impossible as long as one is driven by anything. Like a leaf blown by the wind, the driven person is controlled by forces powerful than he is. more His autonomous will is not engaged, even if he believes that he has chosen his stressed lifestyle and even if he enjoys his activities. The choices he makes are attached to invisible strings. He is still unable to say no, even if it is only to his own drivenness. When he finally wakes up, he shakes his head, Pinocchio-like, and says, "How foolish I was when I was a puppet."
]]> The Other Sister 222264387 About the Book
HOW DO YOU FIND YOUR TRIBE WHEN YOU DON’T EVEN KNOW YOURSELF? WHAT DO YOU CLING TO WHEN YOU DON’T KNOW WHO OR HOW TO TRUST?
Maya is an urban millennial with a very full life. So it comes as a shock to her friends when she goes offline and ghosts them all of a sudden. As their enquiry into her absence gets increasingly frantic, Maya herself oscillates between fear and honesty, therapy and godmen, superstition and nostalgia. Crushed by generational trauma and long-hidden secrets, she chases faith and love in the most hopeless places, knowing that the only way out is through.
The Other Sister weaves a complex web, with a fair share of drama featuring an absent mother, a rotating cast of friends and lovers, an attentive but distant brother, and Akira, who defies description. It is a haunting exploration of young lives in disarray; a social media generation that’s hyper-connected yet somehow still isolated and misunderstood.

About the Author
Amrita Tripathi is an Indian author and podcaster. She is the founder-editor of The Health Collective, which focuses on mental health and storytelling, and founder of Tap in Tribe, a network empowering woman in leadership. Tripathi has twenty years of work experience in the media—she has been a news anchor and journalist, as well as the former head of content partnerships for Twitter India. She hosts the podcast #SayAgain, talking to leaders and change-makers about their own journeys, as well as what makes them tick.
The author of two previous novels, Amrita has also co-authored the Mindscape series of books on mental health as well as a book on India’s suicide crisis.]]> Amrita Tripathi Manu 0 2.60 The Other Sister
author: Amrita Tripathi
name: Manu
average rating: 2.60
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2025/01/26
date added: 2025/01/26
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Poor Charlie's Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger]]> 944652 512 Charles T. Munger 157864366X Manu 0 4.38 2005 Poor Charlie's Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger
author: Charles T. Munger
name: Manu
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2005
rating: 0
read at: 2025/01/23
date added: 2025/01/25
shelves:
review:

]]> The Last Queen 60130578 ‘I am Rani Jindan, Mother of the Khalsa. That is my identity. That is my fate.’

Daughter of the royal kennel keeper, the beautiful Jindan Kaur went on to become Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s youngest and last queen; his favourite. She became regent when her son Dalip, barely six years old, unexpectedly inherited the throne. Sharp-eyed, stubborn, passionate, and dedicated to protecting her son’s heritage, Jindan distrusted the British and fought hard to keep them from annexing Punjab. Defying tradition, she stepped out of the zenana, cast aside the veil and conducted state business in public. Addressing her Khalsa troops herself, she inspired her men in two wars against the ‘firangs’. Her power and influence were so formidable that the British, fearing an uprising, robbed the rebel queen of everything she had, including her son. She was imprisoned and exiled. But that did not crush her indomitable will.

An exquisite love story of a king and a commoner, a cautionary tale about loyalty and betrayal, and a powerful parable of the indestructible bond between mother and child, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s unforgettable novel brings alive one of the most fearless women of the nineteenth century, an inspiration for our times.]]> 376 Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni 9354894151 Manu 0 4.17 2021 The Last Queen
author: Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
name: Manu
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2025/01/15
date added: 2025/01/15
shelves:
review:

]]> The Affluent Society 41589 John Kenneth Galbraith's international bestseller The Affluent Society is a witty, graceful and devastating attack on some of our most cherished economic myths.

As relevant today as when it was first published over forty years ago, this newly updated edition of Galbraith's classic text on the 'economics of abundance', lays bare the hazards of individual and social complacency about economic inequality.

Why worship work and productivity if many of the goods we produce are superfluous - artificial 'needs' created by high-pressure advertising? Why begrudge expenditure on vital public works while ignoring waste and extravagance in the private sector of the economy? Classical economics was born in a harsh world of mass poverty, and has left us with a set of preconceptions ill-adapted to the realities of our own richer age. And so, too often, 'the bland lead the bland'. Our unfamiliar problems need a new approach, and the reception given to this famous book has shown the value of its fresh, lively ideas.

'A compelling challenge to conventional thought'
ÌýÌýThe New York Times

'He shows himself a truly sensitive and civilized man, whose ideas are grounded in the common culture of the two continents, and may serve as a link between them; his book is of foremost importance for them both'
ÌýÌýThe Times Literary Supplement

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006) was a Canadian-American economist. A Keynesian and an institutionalist, Galbraith was a leading proponent of 20th-century American liberalism and progressivism. Galbraith was the author of 30 books, including The Economics of Innocent Fraud, The Great Crash: 1929, and A History of Economics.]]> 276 John Kenneth Galbraith 0140285199 Manu 0 4.01 1958 The Affluent Society
author: John Kenneth Galbraith
name: Manu
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1958
rating: 0
read at: 2025/01/12
date added: 2025/01/12
shelves:
review:

]]> Human Acts 222973704
Human Acts is a universal book, utterly modern and profoundly timeless. Already a controversial bestseller and award-winning book in Korea, it confirms Han Kang as a writer of immense importance.]]> 224 Han Kang 1846275970 Manu 0 4.39 2014 Human Acts
author: Han Kang
name: Manu
average rating: 4.39
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at: 2025/01/04
date added: 2025/01/04
shelves:
review:

]]> The Book Of Life 10747703
Inspired by Krishnamurti’s belief that truth is found through living, The Book of Life presents 365 timeless daily meditations, developed thematically over seven days, illuminating the concepts of freedom, personal transformation, living fully awake and much more.

The Book of Life is a profound collection of insights to treasure every day for those who have come to cherish the wisdom of this extraordinary spiritual sage as well as those who are discovering it for the first time.]]> 422 J. Krishnamurti 0141004967 Manu 5 4.39 1995 The Book Of Life
author: J. Krishnamurti
name: Manu
average rating: 4.39
book published: 1995
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/31
date added: 2025/01/01
shelves:
review:

]]> The Tao of Physics 21068801 416 Fritjof Capra 0007272928 Manu 5 review Both science and religion/philosophy are trying to get to the reality that lies beyond our senses. One approaches it predominantly through rational means, the other through a non-intellectual experience by quietingÌýtheÌýmind with meditation and fine tuning intuition. Broadly, it turns out that many Eastern philosophies/religions - Hinduism, Buddhism, Tao, Zen - had alreadyÌýreached the understanding that modern (in the 80s) science later discovered.Ìý
The book is divided into three elegant sections - the way of physics, the way of eastern mysticism, and the parallels. Capra begins by summing up the evolution of physicsÌýfrom the time of the Greeks to its modern formulation in the form of Descartes' philosophy - the separation of mind and matter, which influenced not just the development of modern physics but also the general Western way of thinking - a mechanisticÌýworld. On the other hand Eastern philosophies have emphasised the unity of not just mind and matter but the individual and the universe at large.Ìý
The human mind is believed to have two kinds of knowledge - the rational and the intuitive. Science has a bias for the former and constructs an intellectual map of reality that mostly works on general outlines and abstractions because of the sheer variety of the phenomena around us. We use shortcuts and symbols but it is not a complete representation, though we often forget that. Eastern philosophies try to get rid of that through various practices to prepare the mind for a non-conceptual, non-verbal awareness of reality - like meditation, that is focused on an individual experience rather than generic laws, and cannot be really taught . Having said that, intuition and rationality also have a role to play in science and eastern mysticism respectively.
The two big pillars of 'modern' physics - relativity theory and quantum theory - started bringing the domain closer to eastern philosophies by dismantling the ground rules of classical physics - notions of absolute space and time, elementary solid particles, strictly causal nature of physical phenomena, and the ideal of an objective description of nature. Quantum theory revealed a basic oneness of the universe, with nature showing us a complicated web of relations between various parts, as opposed to 'basic building blocks'. At the subatomic level, matter only has tendency to occur. The final occurrence depends on an observer.
In the second section, there are a few fantastic chapters that serve as crash courses on the religions/ philosophies of the east - Hinduism, Buddhism, Chinese (Confucianism and Taoism, the former being a philosophy of social organisation, of common sense and practical knowledge, and the latter focusing on observation of nature and the discovery of its way), and Zen.
The rest of the chapters focus on the parallels - how physics also now recognises a few things Eastern philosophies have always known - the interconnected unity of all things, how space and time, which are prominent features of reality are creations of the mind and not an accurate representation of reality, how nature dynamically manifests itself in various forms and its essential nature is movement, flow, and change, and solid structures (including us) are only transient manifestations - an event, not a thing or a substance.
Since this is a later edition, the epilogue and afterword provide perspectives based on more recent advancements, and it is interesting that the direction of the book and even some of its specifics passes the test of time, thus far. While some parts do get technical, the majority of the book is very accessible, and one gets a very concise summary of physics and religion in the most simple of language. A fantastic read that I absolutely recommend.

Notes
1. “Science does not need mysticism and mysticism does not need science. But man needs both.â€

2. Maya does not mean that the world is an illusion. The illusion merely lies in our points of view, if we think that the shapes and structures, things and events, around us are realities of nature, instead of realising that they are concepts of our measuring and categorising minds. Maya is the illusion of taking these concepts for reality, of confusing the map with the territory.

3. Karma means action. It is the active principle of the play, the total universe in action, where everything is dynamically connected with everything else. As long as our view of the world is fragmented, as long as we are under the spell of Maya and think that we are separated from our environment and can act independently we are bound by karma. Being free from the bond of Karma means to realise the unity and harmony of all nature.
To be free from the spell of Maya, to break the bonds of Karma means to realise that all the phenomena we perceive with our senses are part of the same reality. It means to experience, concretely and personally, that everything, including our own self is Brahman. This experience is called Moksha.

4. As always, in Eastern mysticism, the intellect is seen nearly as a means to clear the way for the direct mystical experience, which Buddhist called the awakening. The essence of the this experience is to pass beyond the world of intellectual distinctions and opposites to reach the world of acintya, the unthinkable where reality appears is undivided and undifferentiated suchness.

5. The first Noble truth states at the outstanding characteristic of the human situation dukha, which is suffering, or frustration. This frustration comes from our difficulty in facing the basic fact of life, that everything around us is impermanent and transitory.
The second noble truth deals with the cause of all suffering, trishna, which is clinging or grasping. It is a futile grasping of life based on a wrong point of view, which is called avidya or ignorance in Buddhist philosophy. Out of this ignorance, we divide the perceived world into individual and separate things and thus attempt to confine the fluid forms of reality in fixed categories created by the mind.
The third noble truth states at the suffering and frustration can be ended. It is possible to transcend the vicious circle of samsara, to free oneself from the bonding of Karma, and to reach a state of total liberation called Nirvana. In this state, the false notions of a separate self have forever disappeared, and the oneness of all life has become a constant sensation.
The fourth noble truth is the Buddha's prescription to end all suffering, the eightfold path of self development which leads to the state of Buddhahood.
Two pillars supporting the great edifice of Buddhism - Prajna, which is transcendental wisdom or intuitive intelligence and Karuna, which is love or compassion.

6. Just as a man who wants to go for their and further East will end up in the west, those who accumulate more and more money in order to increase their wealth will end up being poor. Modern industrial society which is continuously trying to increase the standard of living and thereby decreases the quality of life for all its members is an eloquent illustration of the ancient Chinese system.
]]> 4.04 1975 The Tao of Physics
author: Fritjof Capra
name: Manu
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1975
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/31
date added: 2025/01/01
shelves: review
review:
The book was first published in 1975, and I'd say that it's even more relevant now in the context of science and theÌýdirection of humanÌýadvancement inÌýgeneral. As the subtitle of the book states, the idea is toÌýexplore theÌýparallels between modern physics and eastern mysticism.Ìý
Both science and religion/philosophy are trying to get to the reality that lies beyond our senses. One approaches it predominantly through rational means, the other through a non-intellectual experience by quietingÌýtheÌýmind with meditation and fine tuning intuition. Broadly, it turns out that many Eastern philosophies/religions - Hinduism, Buddhism, Tao, Zen - had alreadyÌýreached the understanding that modern (in the 80s) science later discovered.Ìý
The book is divided into three elegant sections - the way of physics, the way of eastern mysticism, and the parallels. Capra begins by summing up the evolution of physicsÌýfrom the time of the Greeks to its modern formulation in the form of Descartes' philosophy - the separation of mind and matter, which influenced not just the development of modern physics but also the general Western way of thinking - a mechanisticÌýworld. On the other hand Eastern philosophies have emphasised the unity of not just mind and matter but the individual and the universe at large.Ìý
The human mind is believed to have two kinds of knowledge - the rational and the intuitive. Science has a bias for the former and constructs an intellectual map of reality that mostly works on general outlines and abstractions because of the sheer variety of the phenomena around us. We use shortcuts and symbols but it is not a complete representation, though we often forget that. Eastern philosophies try to get rid of that through various practices to prepare the mind for a non-conceptual, non-verbal awareness of reality - like meditation, that is focused on an individual experience rather than generic laws, and cannot be really taught . Having said that, intuition and rationality also have a role to play in science and eastern mysticism respectively.
The two big pillars of 'modern' physics - relativity theory and quantum theory - started bringing the domain closer to eastern philosophies by dismantling the ground rules of classical physics - notions of absolute space and time, elementary solid particles, strictly causal nature of physical phenomena, and the ideal of an objective description of nature. Quantum theory revealed a basic oneness of the universe, with nature showing us a complicated web of relations between various parts, as opposed to 'basic building blocks'. At the subatomic level, matter only has tendency to occur. The final occurrence depends on an observer.
In the second section, there are a few fantastic chapters that serve as crash courses on the religions/ philosophies of the east - Hinduism, Buddhism, Chinese (Confucianism and Taoism, the former being a philosophy of social organisation, of common sense and practical knowledge, and the latter focusing on observation of nature and the discovery of its way), and Zen.
The rest of the chapters focus on the parallels - how physics also now recognises a few things Eastern philosophies have always known - the interconnected unity of all things, how space and time, which are prominent features of reality are creations of the mind and not an accurate representation of reality, how nature dynamically manifests itself in various forms and its essential nature is movement, flow, and change, and solid structures (including us) are only transient manifestations - an event, not a thing or a substance.
Since this is a later edition, the epilogue and afterword provide perspectives based on more recent advancements, and it is interesting that the direction of the book and even some of its specifics passes the test of time, thus far. While some parts do get technical, the majority of the book is very accessible, and one gets a very concise summary of physics and religion in the most simple of language. A fantastic read that I absolutely recommend.

Notes
1. “Science does not need mysticism and mysticism does not need science. But man needs both.â€

2. Maya does not mean that the world is an illusion. The illusion merely lies in our points of view, if we think that the shapes and structures, things and events, around us are realities of nature, instead of realising that they are concepts of our measuring and categorising minds. Maya is the illusion of taking these concepts for reality, of confusing the map with the territory.

3. Karma means action. It is the active principle of the play, the total universe in action, where everything is dynamically connected with everything else. As long as our view of the world is fragmented, as long as we are under the spell of Maya and think that we are separated from our environment and can act independently we are bound by karma. Being free from the bond of Karma means to realise the unity and harmony of all nature.
To be free from the spell of Maya, to break the bonds of Karma means to realise that all the phenomena we perceive with our senses are part of the same reality. It means to experience, concretely and personally, that everything, including our own self is Brahman. This experience is called Moksha.

4. As always, in Eastern mysticism, the intellect is seen nearly as a means to clear the way for the direct mystical experience, which Buddhist called the awakening. The essence of the this experience is to pass beyond the world of intellectual distinctions and opposites to reach the world of acintya, the unthinkable where reality appears is undivided and undifferentiated suchness.

5. The first Noble truth states at the outstanding characteristic of the human situation dukha, which is suffering, or frustration. This frustration comes from our difficulty in facing the basic fact of life, that everything around us is impermanent and transitory.
The second noble truth deals with the cause of all suffering, trishna, which is clinging or grasping. It is a futile grasping of life based on a wrong point of view, which is called avidya or ignorance in Buddhist philosophy. Out of this ignorance, we divide the perceived world into individual and separate things and thus attempt to confine the fluid forms of reality in fixed categories created by the mind.
The third noble truth states at the suffering and frustration can be ended. It is possible to transcend the vicious circle of samsara, to free oneself from the bonding of Karma, and to reach a state of total liberation called Nirvana. In this state, the false notions of a separate self have forever disappeared, and the oneness of all life has become a constant sensation.
The fourth noble truth is the Buddha's prescription to end all suffering, the eightfold path of self development which leads to the state of Buddhahood.
Two pillars supporting the great edifice of Buddhism - Prajna, which is transcendental wisdom or intuitive intelligence and Karuna, which is love or compassion.

6. Just as a man who wants to go for their and further East will end up in the west, those who accumulate more and more money in order to increase their wealth will end up being poor. Modern industrial society which is continuously trying to increase the standard of living and thereby decreases the quality of life for all its members is an eloquent illustration of the ancient Chinese system.

]]> <![CDATA[A Life of Adventure and Delight]]> 50497258
The protagonists in this tender and darkly comic collection deceive themselves and engage in odd behaviours as they navigate how to be good, how to make meaningful relationships, and the strengths and pitfalls of self-interest.

From a dazzlingly original, critically acclaimed writer, these stories, elegantly written and emotionally immediate, provide an intimate, honest assessment of human relationships between mothers and sons, sons and lovers, husband and wives.]]> 208 Akhil Sharma 0143444522 Manu 0 2.00 2017 A Life of Adventure and Delight
author: Akhil Sharma
name: Manu
average rating: 2.00
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/22
date added: 2024/12/22
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past]]> 40604608
The emerging picture is one of many waves of ancient human migrations, so that all populations living today are mixes of ancient ones, and often carry a genetic component from archaic humans. David Reich, whose team has been at the forefront of these discoveries, explains what genetics is telling us about ourselves and our complex and often surprising ancestry. Gone are old ideas of any kind of racial âpurity.' Instead, we are finding a rich variety of mixtures. Reich describes the
cutting-edge findings from the past few years, and also considers the sensitivities involved in tracing ancestry, with science sometimes jostling with politics and tradition. He brings an important wider message: that we should recognize that every one of us is the result of a long history of migration and
intermixing of ancient peoples, which we carry as ghosts in our DNA.

What will we discover next?]]> 368 David Reich 0198831447 Manu 0 4.56 2018 Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past
author: David Reich
name: Manu
average rating: 4.56
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/21
date added: 2024/12/21
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self]]> 4887 The bestselling book on childhood trauma and the enduring effects of repressed anger and pain.

Why are many of the most successful people plagued by feelings of emptiness and alienation? This wise and profound book has provided millions of readers with an answer—and has helped them to apply it to their own lives.

Far too many of us had to learn as children to hide our own feelings, needs, and memories skillfully in order to meet our parents' expectations and win their "love." Alice Miller writes, "When I used the word 'gifted' in the title, I had in mind neither children who receive high grades in school nor children talented in a special way. I simply meant all of us who have survived an abusive childhood thanks to an ability to adapt even to unspeakable cruelty by becoming numb.... Without this 'gift' offered us by nature, we would not have survived." But merely surviving is not enough. The Drama of the Gifted Child helps us to reclaim our life by discovering our own crucial needs and our own truth.]]> 136 Alice Miller 0465016901 Manu 4 review Through logic and anecdotes of patients, Miller explores the complexity of childhood and the impact it has on us as adults. The title of the book makes sense because of some focus on the gifted child, who is more intelligent/ sensitive/ emotionally aware than someone their age. These children understand their parents' expectations so well that they often develop a “false self†by suppressing their own emotions, needs, and authenticity to gain love, approval, or validation from their parents. This process often leads to emotional numbness, perfectionism, and low self-esteem, as the child grows up detached from their authentic self.
Adult struggles, thus, are a battle of the “true self†versus the “false selfâ€. The psychological impact of the unmet emotional needs during childhood manifests in adult life in mindset and actions and many a time, despite pursuing different activities across career and life (competitiveness, relationships, fetishes, cults, political belief systems etc) leaves behind an emptiness because of difficulty in accessing real feelings, trusting intuition, or establishing genuine connections with others. The feeling could be depression or grandiosity (excels in everything and needs to be admired). Often, it also perpetuates the cycle of emotional repression with their children or through dysfunctional relationships, exactly what their own parents did.
A key component of Miller’s solution is the need to acknowledge and process these buried childhood experiences. She emphasises the importance of mourning one’s unmet needs and reconnecting with the feelings that were suppressed in childhood. This self-reflection allows individuals to differentiate between their "true self "- with their genuine feelings, desires, and personality - and the "false self" they constructed to survive their childhood. She advocates for emotional empathy, nurturing, self-discovery, self-compassion and therapeutic intervention to break the cycle of inherited emotional trauma, regain one's authenticity, and lead more emotionally honest and fulfilling lives.

Notes
"Depression consists of a denial of one's own emotional reactions."

"The true opposite of depression is neither gaiety nor absence of pain, but vitality—the freedom to experience spontaneous feelings."

"If I were to reduce all my feelings and their painful conflicts to a single name, I can think of no other word but: dread. It was dread, dread and uncertainty, that I felt in all those hours of shattered childhood felicity : dread of punishment, dread of my own conscience, dread of stirrings in my soul which I considered forbidden and criminal." Hermann Hesse, A Child's Heart

"Once we are able to feel and understand the repressed emotions of childhood, we will no longer need contempt as a defence against them. On the other hand, as long as we despise the other person and over-value our own achievements (“he can’t do what I can doâ€), we do not have to mourn the fact that love is not forthcoming without achievement. Nevertheless, if we avoid this mourning it means that we remain at bottom the one who is despised, for we have to despise everything in ourselves that is not wonderful, good, and clever. Thus we perpetuate the loneliness of childhood: We despise weakness, helplessness, uncertainty—in short, the child in ourselves and in others.
The contempt for others in grandiose, successful people always includes disrespect for their own true selves, as their scorn implies: “Without these superior qualities of mine, a person is completely worthless.†This means further: “Without these achievements, these gifts, I could never be loved, would never have been loved.†Grandiosity in the adult guarantees that the illusion continues: “I was loved.â€"

"It is usually considered normal when sick or aged people who have suffered the loss of much of their health and vitality or women who are experiencing menopause become depressive. There are, however, many people who can tolerate the loss of beauty, health, youth, or loved ones and, although they grieve, do so without depression. In contrast, there are those with great gifts, often precisely the most gifted, who do suffer from severe depression. For one is free from it only when self-esteem is based on the authenticity of ones own feelings and not on the possession of certain qualities."

“The grandiose person is never really free; first because he is excessively dependent on admiration from others, and second, because his self-respect is dependent on qualities, functions, and achievements that can suddenly fail.â€

Disrespect" is the weapon of the weak and a defence against one's own despised and unwanted feelings, which could trigger memories of events in one's repressed history"

"The stronger a prisoner is, the thicker the prison walls have to be, which impede or completely prevent later emotional growth.â€

"Political action can be fed by the unconscious rage of children who have been misused, imprisoned, exploited, cramped and drilled. This rage can be partially discharged in fighting "enemies", without having to give up the idealisation of one's own parents"
]]> 4.05 1979 The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self
author: Alice Miller
name: Manu
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1979
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/15
date added: 2024/12/15
shelves: review
review:
I discovered this book via a fantastic conversation on the Tim Ferriss podcast in which Dr. Gabor Maté spoke about his life and work. This was one of the books that was brought up when the latter spoke about the question that drove his life's work - what is it that makes people be the way they are? Apparently, the German title of the book when translated is Prisoners of Childhood, which I think is more apt, but probably 'darker'! :)
Through logic and anecdotes of patients, Miller explores the complexity of childhood and the impact it has on us as adults. The title of the book makes sense because of some focus on the gifted child, who is more intelligent/ sensitive/ emotionally aware than someone their age. These children understand their parents' expectations so well that they often develop a “false self†by suppressing their own emotions, needs, and authenticity to gain love, approval, or validation from their parents. This process often leads to emotional numbness, perfectionism, and low self-esteem, as the child grows up detached from their authentic self.
Adult struggles, thus, are a battle of the “true self†versus the “false selfâ€. The psychological impact of the unmet emotional needs during childhood manifests in adult life in mindset and actions and many a time, despite pursuing different activities across career and life (competitiveness, relationships, fetishes, cults, political belief systems etc) leaves behind an emptiness because of difficulty in accessing real feelings, trusting intuition, or establishing genuine connections with others. The feeling could be depression or grandiosity (excels in everything and needs to be admired). Often, it also perpetuates the cycle of emotional repression with their children or through dysfunctional relationships, exactly what their own parents did.
A key component of Miller’s solution is the need to acknowledge and process these buried childhood experiences. She emphasises the importance of mourning one’s unmet needs and reconnecting with the feelings that were suppressed in childhood. This self-reflection allows individuals to differentiate between their "true self "- with their genuine feelings, desires, and personality - and the "false self" they constructed to survive their childhood. She advocates for emotional empathy, nurturing, self-discovery, self-compassion and therapeutic intervention to break the cycle of inherited emotional trauma, regain one's authenticity, and lead more emotionally honest and fulfilling lives.

Notes
"Depression consists of a denial of one's own emotional reactions."

"The true opposite of depression is neither gaiety nor absence of pain, but vitality—the freedom to experience spontaneous feelings."

"If I were to reduce all my feelings and their painful conflicts to a single name, I can think of no other word but: dread. It was dread, dread and uncertainty, that I felt in all those hours of shattered childhood felicity : dread of punishment, dread of my own conscience, dread of stirrings in my soul which I considered forbidden and criminal." Hermann Hesse, A Child's Heart

"Once we are able to feel and understand the repressed emotions of childhood, we will no longer need contempt as a defence against them. On the other hand, as long as we despise the other person and over-value our own achievements (“he can’t do what I can doâ€), we do not have to mourn the fact that love is not forthcoming without achievement. Nevertheless, if we avoid this mourning it means that we remain at bottom the one who is despised, for we have to despise everything in ourselves that is not wonderful, good, and clever. Thus we perpetuate the loneliness of childhood: We despise weakness, helplessness, uncertainty—in short, the child in ourselves and in others.
The contempt for others in grandiose, successful people always includes disrespect for their own true selves, as their scorn implies: “Without these superior qualities of mine, a person is completely worthless.†This means further: “Without these achievements, these gifts, I could never be loved, would never have been loved.†Grandiosity in the adult guarantees that the illusion continues: “I was loved.â€"

"It is usually considered normal when sick or aged people who have suffered the loss of much of their health and vitality or women who are experiencing menopause become depressive. There are, however, many people who can tolerate the loss of beauty, health, youth, or loved ones and, although they grieve, do so without depression. In contrast, there are those with great gifts, often precisely the most gifted, who do suffer from severe depression. For one is free from it only when self-esteem is based on the authenticity of ones own feelings and not on the possession of certain qualities."

“The grandiose person is never really free; first because he is excessively dependent on admiration from others, and second, because his self-respect is dependent on qualities, functions, and achievements that can suddenly fail.â€

Disrespect" is the weapon of the weak and a defence against one's own despised and unwanted feelings, which could trigger memories of events in one's repressed history"

"The stronger a prisoner is, the thicker the prison walls have to be, which impede or completely prevent later emotional growth.â€

"Political action can be fed by the unconscious rage of children who have been misused, imprisoned, exploited, cramped and drilled. This rage can be partially discharged in fighting "enemies", without having to give up the idealisation of one's own parents"

]]> <![CDATA[The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins]]> 55271833
Matsutake is the most valuable mushroom in the world―and a weed that grows in human-disturbed forests across the northern hemisphere. Through its ability to nurture trees, matsutake helps forests to grow in daunting places. It is also an edible delicacy in Japan, where it sometimes commands astronomical prices. In all its contradictions, matsutake offers insights into areas far beyond just mushrooms and addresses a crucial what manages to live in the ruins we have made?

A tale of diversity within our damaged landscapes, The Mushroom at the End of the World follows one of the strangest commodity chains of our times to explore the unexpected corners of capitalism. Here, we witness the varied and peculiar worlds of matsutake the worlds of Japanese gourmets, capitalist traders, Hmong jungle fighters, industrial forests, Yi Chinese goat herders, Finnish nature guides, and more. These companions also lead us into fungal ecologies and forest histories to better understand the promise of cohabitation in a time of massive human destruction.

By investigating one of the world's most sought-after fungi, The Mushroom at the End of the World presents an original examination into the relation between capitalist destruction and collaborative survival within multispecies landscapes, the prerequisite for continuing life on earth.]]> 352 Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing 0691220557 Manu 4 3.85 2015 The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins
author: Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
name: Manu
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2015
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/12
date added: 2024/12/12
shelves:
review:

]]> Butter 200776812 The cult Japanese bestseller about a female gourmet cook and serial killer and the journalist intent on cracking her case, inspired by a true story.

There are two things that I can simply not tolerate: feminists and margarine.

Gourmet cook Manako Kajii sits in Tokyo Detention Center convicted of the serial murders of lonely businessmen, who she is said to have seduced with her delicious home cooking. The case has captured the nation’s imagination but Kajii refuses to speak with the press, entertaining no visitors. That is, until journalist Rika Machida writes a letter asking for her recipe for beef stew and Kajii can’t resist writing back.

Rika, the only woman in her news office, works late each night, rarely cooking more than ramen. As the visits unfold between her and the steely Kajii, they are closer to a masterclass in food than journalistic research. Rika hopes this gastronomic exchange will help her soften Kajii but it seems that she might be the one changing. With each meal she eats, something is awakening in her body, might she and Kaji have more in common than she once thought?

Inspired by the real case of the convicted con woman and serial killer, "The Konkatsu Killer," Asako Yuzuki’s Butter is a vivid, unsettling exploration of misogyny, obsession, romance and the transgressive pleasures of food in Japan.]]> 464 Asako Yuzuki 0063236400 Manu 0 3.49 2017 Butter
author: Asako Yuzuki
name: Manu
average rating: 3.49
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/06
date added: 2024/12/06
shelves:
review:

]]> The Nicomachean Ethics 19068 ‘One swallow does not make a summer; neither does one day. Similarly neither can one day, or a brief space of time, make a man blessed and happy’

In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle sets out to examine the nature of happiness. He argues that happiness consists in ‘activity of the soul in accordance with virtue’, for example with moral virtues, such as courage, generosity and justice, and intellectual virtues, such as knowledge, wisdom and insight. The Ethics also discusses the nature of practical reasoning, the value and the objects of pleasure, the different forms of friendship, and the relationship between individual virtue, society and the State. Aristotle’s work has had a profound and lasting influence on all subsequent Western thought about ethical matters.

J. A. K. Thomson’s translation has been revised by Hugh Tredennick, and is accompanied by a new introduction by Jonathan Barnes. This edition also includes an updated list for further reading and a new chronology of Aristotle’s life and works.

Previously published as Ethics]]> 329 Aristotle 0140449493 Manu 0 4.00 -350 The Nicomachean Ethics
author: Aristotle
name: Manu
average rating: 4.00
book published: -350
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/01
date added: 2024/12/01
shelves:
review:

]]> The Silent Patient 45360527
When she shot her husband in the head five times.

Since then she hasn't spoken a single word.

It's time to find out why.]]> 352 Alex Michaelides 1409181634 Manu 0 4.06 2019 The Silent Patient
author: Alex Michaelides
name: Manu
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at: 2022/11/22
date added: 2024/11/24
shelves:
review:

]]> It Happened Tomorrow 5678950
The first Indian science fiction story is said to have been written in Bengali by Jagadish Chandra Bose and around the same time in Marathi by S.B. Ranade. Over the years science fiction has developed in other languages too, like in Tamil, but it has found strong roots in Marathi language primarily and this becomes evident in this anthology too. A comprehensive view of the trends in Indian science fiction can be obtained by going through this compilation of select stories in various Indian languages carefully culled by author-editor Bal Phondke, a prolific science communicator and former Director, CSIR, New Delhi.]]> 270 Bal Phondke 8123706197 Manu 0 4.09 1993 It Happened Tomorrow
author: Bal Phondke
name: Manu
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1993
rating: 0
read at: 2024/11/22
date added: 2024/11/22
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Alchemy: The Magic of Original Thinking in a World of Mind-Numbing Conformity]]> 46266507 A breakthrough book. Wonderfully applicable to everything in life, and funny as hell.’ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

To be brilliant, you have to be irrational

Why is Red Bull so popular – even though everyone hates the taste? Why do countdown boards on platforms take away the pain of train delays? And why do we prefer stripy toothpaste?

We think we are rational creatures. Economics and business rely on the assumption that we make logical decisions based on evidence.

But we aren’t, and we don’t.

In many crucial areas of our lives, reason plays a vanishingly small part. Instead we are driven by unconscious desires, which is why placebos are so powerful. We are drawn to the beautiful, the extravagant and the absurd – from lavish wedding invitations to tiny bottles of the latest fragrance. So if you want to influence people’s choices you have to bypass reason. The best ideas don’t make rational sense: they make you feel more than they make you think.

Rory Sutherland is the Ogilvy advertising legend whose TED Talks have been viewed nearly 7 million times. In his first book he blends cutting-edge behavioural science, jaw-dropping stories and a touch of branding magic, on his mission to turn us all into idea alchemists. The big problems we face every day, whether as an individual or in society, could very well be solved by letting go of logic and embracing the irrational.]]> 320 Rory Sutherland 0753556529 Manu 4 review
Thanks to books like Donald D. Hoffman's The Case Against Reality and Andy Clark's The Experience Machine, the hypothesis is that our entire biological system (body and mind) are built to navigate the world, and we only see a version of reality. The brain predicts based on its experience and hypothesis and we fill in the details. When we do not have a complete understanding of decisions we ourselves take, it is hubris to think that we completely understand the motivations of others. Especially without considering nuances beyond data. "By using a simple economic model with a narrow view of human motivation, the neo-liberal project has become a threat to the human imagination'.
The book makes important concepts very accessible, and Rory's humour and anecdotes make it a very engaging read. Highly recommended.

Notes
If you're wholly predictable, people can learn to hack you
We consider the appendix a vestigial organ, but a certain colon infection is 4 times more prevalent in people without it.
Offering people money when they do something you like makes perfect sense to economic theory, and is called an incentive, but this does not mean you should try to pay your spouse for sex. (context!)
In logic 10 x 1 is the same as 1 x 10. Now apply it in a Russian roulette in real life. In a world before 'reviews', you could run an eatery as a tourist restaurant (10 people, 1 time) or a pub (1 person, 10 times)
They ask still or sparkling, because we'd then find it difficult to say 'tap'
Steve Jobs had koumpounophobia, a fear of buttons
A hypothesis is that reason appeared not to inform our actions and beliefs but to explain and defend them to others
Scarcity. Frederick the Great tried compulsion to make farmers grow potatoes. When that didn't work he made a it a royal vegetable, established a royal potato patch and kept guards so no one could steal it. Easy to guess what happened next.
Affordances are cues that indicate how a user can interact with an object, whether it's physical or digital.
"We notice and attach meaning to those things that deviate from narrow, economic common sense, precisely because they deviate from it. The result of this is that the pursuit of narrow economic rationalism will produce a world rich in goods, but deficient in meaning"
"There is a good evolutionary reason why we are imbued with these strong, involuntary feelings: feelings can be inherited, whereas reasons have to be taught, which means that evolution can select for emotions much more reliably than for reasons" (e.g. fear of snakes - for survival - easier to exist as emotion than waiting to be taught)
Bravery placebos - parades, uniforms, trumpets, brothers-in-arms, fictive kin (regiments) - illusion to make people willing to sacrifice their lives
People want cheap, abundant, nice-tasting drinks, right? RedBull
Satisfice is satisfy and suffice (Herbert Simon) " We buy brands to satisfice. People do not choose Brand A over Brand B because they think Brand A is better, but because they are more certain it is good."
The Japanese Premier's response to the Allies' Potsdam resolution was mokusatsu. Derived from silence, he meant it as 'withholding comment'. It was translated by media as 'not worthy of comment'. Within days, the decision was made to drop the atomic bomb.]]> 4.20 2019 Alchemy: The Magic of Original Thinking in a World of Mind-Numbing Conformity
author: Rory Sutherland
name: Manu
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/18
date added: 2024/11/19
shelves: review
review:
I think this is the first book I've read by anyone associated with marketing/advertising. For anyone involved in selling anything, I'd say this is a must-read. You should also read this if you're intellectually curious, because in essence, this is a behavioural science book. It is even more relevant now because of the obsession with data. It isn't that you should not look at data, but as Rory says, if you're only using data, it's like playing golf with only one club. "Logic should be a tool, not a rule". This book is about the magic, which I think we're forgetting in the fixation for data. Rory calls it psycho-logical, which is the way we make decisions in daily life.

Thanks to books like Donald D. Hoffman's The Case Against Reality and Andy Clark's The Experience Machine, the hypothesis is that our entire biological system (body and mind) are built to navigate the world, and we only see a version of reality. The brain predicts based on its experience and hypothesis and we fill in the details. When we do not have a complete understanding of decisions we ourselves take, it is hubris to think that we completely understand the motivations of others. Especially without considering nuances beyond data. "By using a simple economic model with a narrow view of human motivation, the neo-liberal project has become a threat to the human imagination'.
The book makes important concepts very accessible, and Rory's humour and anecdotes make it a very engaging read. Highly recommended.

Notes
If you're wholly predictable, people can learn to hack you
We consider the appendix a vestigial organ, but a certain colon infection is 4 times more prevalent in people without it.
Offering people money when they do something you like makes perfect sense to economic theory, and is called an incentive, but this does not mean you should try to pay your spouse for sex. (context!)
In logic 10 x 1 is the same as 1 x 10. Now apply it in a Russian roulette in real life. In a world before 'reviews', you could run an eatery as a tourist restaurant (10 people, 1 time) or a pub (1 person, 10 times)
They ask still or sparkling, because we'd then find it difficult to say 'tap'
Steve Jobs had koumpounophobia, a fear of buttons
A hypothesis is that reason appeared not to inform our actions and beliefs but to explain and defend them to others
Scarcity. Frederick the Great tried compulsion to make farmers grow potatoes. When that didn't work he made a it a royal vegetable, established a royal potato patch and kept guards so no one could steal it. Easy to guess what happened next.
Affordances are cues that indicate how a user can interact with an object, whether it's physical or digital.
"We notice and attach meaning to those things that deviate from narrow, economic common sense, precisely because they deviate from it. The result of this is that the pursuit of narrow economic rationalism will produce a world rich in goods, but deficient in meaning"
"There is a good evolutionary reason why we are imbued with these strong, involuntary feelings: feelings can be inherited, whereas reasons have to be taught, which means that evolution can select for emotions much more reliably than for reasons" (e.g. fear of snakes - for survival - easier to exist as emotion than waiting to be taught)
Bravery placebos - parades, uniforms, trumpets, brothers-in-arms, fictive kin (regiments) - illusion to make people willing to sacrifice their lives
People want cheap, abundant, nice-tasting drinks, right? RedBull
Satisfice is satisfy and suffice (Herbert Simon) " We buy brands to satisfice. People do not choose Brand A over Brand B because they think Brand A is better, but because they are more certain it is good."
The Japanese Premier's response to the Allies' Potsdam resolution was mokusatsu. Derived from silence, he meant it as 'withholding comment'. It was translated by media as 'not worthy of comment'. Within days, the decision was made to drop the atomic bomb.
]]> The Yoga Vasistha 7893647
Abhinanda Pandita’s Laghu-Yoga-Vasishta is a well known obridgement of the big work and the present publication containing Introduction and Translation attempts to give the needed coherence and clarity to the supreme Teaching.]]> 588 K.N. Subramanian 8174784225 Manu 0 4.50 2003 The Yoga Vasistha
author: K.N. Subramanian
name: Manu
average rating: 4.50
book published: 2003
rating: 0
read at: 2024/11/11
date added: 2024/11/11
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Book of Laughter and Forgetting]]> 825330 312 Milan Kundera 057117437X Manu 0 3.84 1979 The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
author: Milan Kundera
name: Manu
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1979
rating: 0
read at: 2024/11/02
date added: 2024/11/02
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality]]> 213050349 Andy Clark 0141990589 Manu 4 review
Back in the 19th-century, the scientist Hermann von Helmholtz posited that there must be some underlying (unconscious) process of logical reasoning that is inherent in optical and auditory perception. Now, cognitive science agrees - a large part of our experience is guided by the predictive brain, which constructs a simulation, thus already shaping our understanding of reality, but then sometimes iterates its own understanding based on inputs from the world, and sometimes makes us act in ways to reduce the prediction error, depending on error dynamics. This means that nothing in our experience arrives unfiltered - from basic pain to ego, everything is a construct. "We are what predictive brains build".

The predictive brain has four primary elements - a 'generative' model that has some existing data and knowledge about our world at large, the constant predictions that come from it, the 'prediction errors' that arise when incomplete or incorrect predictions meet sensory evidence and account for it, and the precision weighting (estimates) that define the impact of sensory stimulations and predictions. It is amazing how the underlying process of perception and action are the same, and only the direction differs. In fact, our actions are also self-fulfilling predictions, and in both short and long term, there are ways in which we can make it work in our favour. There is some scientific backing for 'manifestation', it would seem that the brain orchestrates a series of actions to fulfil its predictions. No, you can't wish things/experiences into existence, you still have to work for it! :)

This predictive processing helps explain not only ordinary perception but also phenomena like chronic pain, mental health disorders, and even illusions - these experiences may be due to our brain’s predictions going slightly awry. A great example is chronic pain, which can be seen as a misfiring of this predictive system, where the brain expects pain, thus “creating†it even when no external cause remains. This insight means that potentially, the treatment method could be about recalibrating these predictive mechanisms rather than solely addressing physical symptoms.

What this thesis also does is question the duality of things like self and world, mind and body, and so on. Clark quotes Lisa Feldman Barrett - "every thought, memory, emotion, or perception that you construct in your life includes something about the state of your body. Your interoceptive network, which regulates your body budget, is launching these cascades." A mix of inward-looking, outward-looking, and action-guiding to construct and control a controlled hallucination. Fascinating!

Another interesting part was how nature has played it such that we also have openness and exploration to inform the predictive brain. Error dynamics estimations track how well the brain is doing at minimising prediction error. Being 'in the zone' is thus a mix of reduced prediction error and handling any error fluently. Those sensitive to their own error dynamics will seek out learning environments, so in the long game, the prediction errors can be further reduced.

Cognitive philosophy seems to have become a theme this year for me, and Andy Clark references my favourite read on the subject this year - Anil Seth's Being You, as well as another from four years ago - Lisa Feldman Barrett's How Emotions are Made. This book is a great addition to this 'series' - philosophy, cognitive science, and practical implications. It has given me me more perspective as I watch my brain! ]]> 3.22 The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality
author: Andy Clark
name: Manu
average rating: 3.22
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/29
date added: 2024/10/29
shelves: review
review:
The subtitle of the book is "How our minds predict and shape reality", and that's what the book is about. The conventional notion of cognition, at least to me, is that it begins with sense organs perceiving and providing inputs from what we experience, and the brain quickly piecing it all together to present me a coherent picture of what is, and what I should do next. But if we go by the "predictive brain" thesis, the brain doesn’t just passively interpret the world but is constantly predicting, shaping, and refining our reality based on sensory inputs.

Back in the 19th-century, the scientist Hermann von Helmholtz posited that there must be some underlying (unconscious) process of logical reasoning that is inherent in optical and auditory perception. Now, cognitive science agrees - a large part of our experience is guided by the predictive brain, which constructs a simulation, thus already shaping our understanding of reality, but then sometimes iterates its own understanding based on inputs from the world, and sometimes makes us act in ways to reduce the prediction error, depending on error dynamics. This means that nothing in our experience arrives unfiltered - from basic pain to ego, everything is a construct. "We are what predictive brains build".

The predictive brain has four primary elements - a 'generative' model that has some existing data and knowledge about our world at large, the constant predictions that come from it, the 'prediction errors' that arise when incomplete or incorrect predictions meet sensory evidence and account for it, and the precision weighting (estimates) that define the impact of sensory stimulations and predictions. It is amazing how the underlying process of perception and action are the same, and only the direction differs. In fact, our actions are also self-fulfilling predictions, and in both short and long term, there are ways in which we can make it work in our favour. There is some scientific backing for 'manifestation', it would seem that the brain orchestrates a series of actions to fulfil its predictions. No, you can't wish things/experiences into existence, you still have to work for it! :)

This predictive processing helps explain not only ordinary perception but also phenomena like chronic pain, mental health disorders, and even illusions - these experiences may be due to our brain’s predictions going slightly awry. A great example is chronic pain, which can be seen as a misfiring of this predictive system, where the brain expects pain, thus “creating†it even when no external cause remains. This insight means that potentially, the treatment method could be about recalibrating these predictive mechanisms rather than solely addressing physical symptoms.

What this thesis also does is question the duality of things like self and world, mind and body, and so on. Clark quotes Lisa Feldman Barrett - "every thought, memory, emotion, or perception that you construct in your life includes something about the state of your body. Your interoceptive network, which regulates your body budget, is launching these cascades." A mix of inward-looking, outward-looking, and action-guiding to construct and control a controlled hallucination. Fascinating!

Another interesting part was how nature has played it such that we also have openness and exploration to inform the predictive brain. Error dynamics estimations track how well the brain is doing at minimising prediction error. Being 'in the zone' is thus a mix of reduced prediction error and handling any error fluently. Those sensitive to their own error dynamics will seek out learning environments, so in the long game, the prediction errors can be further reduced.

Cognitive philosophy seems to have become a theme this year for me, and Andy Clark references my favourite read on the subject this year - Anil Seth's Being You, as well as another from four years ago - Lisa Feldman Barrett's How Emotions are Made. This book is a great addition to this 'series' - philosophy, cognitive science, and practical implications. It has given me me more perspective as I watch my brain!
]]> <![CDATA[What You Are Looking for Is in the Library]]> 63274127 What are you looking for?

So asks Tokyo's most enigmatic librarian, Sayuri Komachi. She is no ordinary librarian. Naturally, she has read every book on her shelf, but she also has the unique ability to read the souls of anyone who walks through her door. Sensing exactly what they're looking for in life, she provides just the book recommendation they never knew they needed to help them find it.

Every borrower in her library is at a different crossroads, from the restless retail assistant - can she ever get out of a dead-end job? - to the juggling new mother who dreams of becoming a magazine editor, and the meticulous accountant who yearns to own an antique store. The surprise book Komachi lends to each will change their lives for ever.

Which book will you recommend? ]]> 252 Michiko Aoyama 0857529129 Manu 5 4.17 2020 What You Are Looking for Is in the Library
author: Michiko Aoyama
name: Manu
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/23
date added: 2024/10/23
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America]]> 17333289 The “remarkable†story of America's secret post-WWII science programs (The Boston Globe), from the New York Times bestselling author of Area 51.

In the chaos following World War II, the U.S. government faced many difficult decisions, including what to do with the Third Reich's scientific minds. These were the brains behind the Nazis' once-indomitable war machine. So began Operation Paperclip, a decades-long, covert project to bring Hitler's scientists and their families to the United States.

Many of these men were accused of war crimes, and others had stood trial at Nuremberg; one was convicted of mass murder and slavery. They were also directly responsible for major advances in rocketry, medical treatments, and the U.S. space program. Was Operation Paperclip a moral outrage, or did it help America win the Cold War?

Drawing on exclusive interviews with dozens of Paperclip family members, colleagues, and interrogators, and with access to German archival documents (including previously unseen papers made available by direct descendants of the Third Reich's ranking members), files obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, and dossiers discovered in government archives and at Harvard University, Annie Jacobsen follows more than a dozen German scientists through their postwar lives and into a startling, complex, nefarious, and jealously guarded government secret of the twentieth century.

In this definitive, controversial look at one of America's most strategic, and disturbing, government programs, Jacobsen shows just how dark government can get in the name of national security.]]> 575 Annie Jacobsen 031622104X Manu 4 review The 'excuse' at first was the objective to beat Japan, and end the war. That later morphed into the threat of the Cold War and beating the Communists. Annie Jacobsen does a fantastic job of piecing together the historical contexts before and during the operation, the various organisations and people involved on both sides, their mindset and justifications, the crusaders who fought against it - including well-known people like Einstein and Eleanor Roosevelt as well as the scientist community and journalists, and getting into little known details that lend a lot of texture to the narrative. It is to be noted that this meant sifting through actual facts, propaganda released by the US government and the former Nazis to create the aura of how brilliant German scientists would make Americans' lives better, misreporting by media (sometimes deliberate, sometimes not), all this while many of the files were deemed classified, and everything had happened decades ago.
The moral dilemma, even for someone objectively looking at it, is just fascinating. One one hand, there are several advances in space research and exploration, medicine, chemistry and so on that did get a boost thanks to the German scientists. But on the flip side, this meant more than condoning their inhuman actions during the war. In fact, many of these people were celebrated, and some even became celebrities. Early in the book, Annie writes about the sign over the Buchenwald concentration camp gate - Jedem das Seine, which means 'to each what he deserves". It is difficult to see it as generically true once you read the book, and about people like Wernher von Braun, General Dornberger, and Otto Ambros who didn't really pay for their sins, and collateral damage like Frank Olson, who officially worked with the CIA but who was also the victim of a covert dosage of LSD by his own colleagues, which resulted in his suicide in a few days because of mental imbalance! 'Science at any price'.
This is a supremely well-written book, important through the lens of history as well as morality, and I'd highly recommend a read. ]]> 4.12 2014 Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America
author: Annie Jacobsen
name: Manu
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/19
date added: 2024/10/20
shelves: review
review:
It was in a show called Hunters that I first heard about Operation Paperclip. Even before WW 2 ended, and though there were common organisations among Allies, the race was on between the would-be victors to get Nazi science and tech to their own countries. This expanded to the Nazis who were working on such projects. Originally called Operation Overcast, the then rechristened Operation Paperclip was the US version, which ran between 1945 and 1959, and as a part of which more than 1600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians were taken from Nazi Germany to the U.S. and more often than not, given government employment. The American Dream!
The 'excuse' at first was the objective to beat Japan, and end the war. That later morphed into the threat of the Cold War and beating the Communists. Annie Jacobsen does a fantastic job of piecing together the historical contexts before and during the operation, the various organisations and people involved on both sides, their mindset and justifications, the crusaders who fought against it - including well-known people like Einstein and Eleanor Roosevelt as well as the scientist community and journalists, and getting into little known details that lend a lot of texture to the narrative. It is to be noted that this meant sifting through actual facts, propaganda released by the US government and the former Nazis to create the aura of how brilliant German scientists would make Americans' lives better, misreporting by media (sometimes deliberate, sometimes not), all this while many of the files were deemed classified, and everything had happened decades ago.
The moral dilemma, even for someone objectively looking at it, is just fascinating. One one hand, there are several advances in space research and exploration, medicine, chemistry and so on that did get a boost thanks to the German scientists. But on the flip side, this meant more than condoning their inhuman actions during the war. In fact, many of these people were celebrated, and some even became celebrities. Early in the book, Annie writes about the sign over the Buchenwald concentration camp gate - Jedem das Seine, which means 'to each what he deserves". It is difficult to see it as generically true once you read the book, and about people like Wernher von Braun, General Dornberger, and Otto Ambros who didn't really pay for their sins, and collateral damage like Frank Olson, who officially worked with the CIA but who was also the victim of a covert dosage of LSD by his own colleagues, which resulted in his suicide in a few days because of mental imbalance! 'Science at any price'.
This is a supremely well-written book, important through the lens of history as well as morality, and I'd highly recommend a read.
]]> <![CDATA[A Storm of Swords: Steel and Snow (A Song of Ice and Fire, #3.1)]]> 768889
The Seven Kingdoms are divided by revolt and blood feud. In the northern wastes, a horde of hungry, savage people steeped in the dark magic of the wilderness is poised to invade the Kingdom of the North where Robb Stark wears his new-forged crown. And Robb's defences are ranged against the South, the land of the cunning and cruel Lannisters, who have his young sisters in their power.

Throughout Westeros, the war for the Iron Throne rages more fiercely than ever, but if the wall is breached, no king will live to claim it.]]> 663 George R.R. Martin 0006479901 Manu 3 4.47 2000 A Storm of Swords: Steel and Snow (A Song of Ice and Fire, #3.1)
author: George R.R. Martin
name: Manu
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2000
rating: 3
read at: 2012/10/23
date added: 2024/10/15
shelves:
review:

]]> A Strange And Sublime Address 17879977 260 Amit Chaudhuri 0143419447 Manu 0 3.69 1991 A Strange And Sublime Address
author: Amit Chaudhuri
name: Manu
average rating: 3.69
book published: 1991
rating: 0
read at: 2024/09/30
date added: 2024/09/30
shelves:
review:

]]> Small Is Beautiful 1380589 252 Ernst F. Schumacher 0099225611 Manu 4 3.85 1973 Small Is Beautiful
author: Ernst F. Schumacher
name: Manu
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1973
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/25
date added: 2024/09/25
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload]]> 25878011
The information age is drowning us with an unprecedented deluge of data. At the same time, we’re expected to make more—and faster—decisions about our lives than ever before. No wonder, then, that the average American reports frequently losing car keys or reading glasses, missing appointments, and feeling worn out by the effort required just to keep up.

But somehow some people become quite accomplished at managing information flow. In The Organized Mind, Daniel J. Levitin, PhD, uses the latest brain science to demonstrate how those people excel—and how readers can use their methods to regain a sense of mastery over the way they organize their homes, workplaces, and time.

With lively, entertaining chapters on everything from the kitchen junk drawer to health care to executive office workflow, Levitin reveals how new research into the cognitive neuroscience of attention and memory can be applied to the challenges of our daily lives. This Is Your Brain on Music showed how to better play and appreciate music through an understanding of how the brain works. The Organized Mind shows how to navigate the churning flood of information in the twenty-first century with the same neuroscientific perspective.]]> 396 Daniel J. Levitin 0241965780 Manu 0 review The first fifty or so pages make some attempt at 'How you should organise yourself' - from where we place objects so we don't have to actively remember where they are kept to organising work into multiple 'folders' - a 2x2 of urgency and importance, but then degenerates into things like how to create a good password!
I thought that after setting the context in Part 1, Part 2 would get into frameworks or processes. But while the chapter titles are all on target- organising homes, social world, time, information for decision making, business world - I really didn't find anything useful. ]]> 3.70 2014 The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload
author: Daniel J. Levitin
name: Manu
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at: 2024/09/16
date added: 2024/09/21
shelves: review
review:
The title and the subtitle - Thinking straight in the age of information overload - led me to quite some expectation, which unfortunately weren't met. A better title for the book, IMO, would have been 'How the mind is organised'. That the book was published in 2014, when the noise levels were of a magnitude different from the current circumstances, also doesn't help.
The first fifty or so pages make some attempt at 'How you should organise yourself' - from where we place objects so we don't have to actively remember where they are kept to organising work into multiple 'folders' - a 2x2 of urgency and importance, but then degenerates into things like how to create a good password!
I thought that after setting the context in Part 1, Part 2 would get into frameworks or processes. But while the chapter titles are all on target- organising homes, social world, time, information for decision making, business world - I really didn't find anything useful.
]]> <![CDATA[A Death in Tokyo (Detective Kaga, #3)]]> 63269390 In the latest from international bestselling author Keigo Higashino, Tokyo Police Detective Kaga is faced with a very public murder that doesn't quite add up, a prime suspect unable to defend himself, and pressure from the highest levels for a quick solution.

In the Nihonbashi district of Tokyo an unusual statue of a Japanese mythic beast - a kirin - stands guard over the district from the classic Nihonbashi bridge. In the evening, a man who appears to be very drunk staggers onto the bridge and collapses right under the statue of the winged beast. The patrolman who sees this scene unfold goes to rouse the man, only to discover that the man has not passed out, he is dead; that he was not drunk, he was stabbed in the chest. However, where he died was not where the crime was committed - the key to solving the crime is to find out where he was attacked and why he made such a superhuman effort to carry himself to the Nihonbashi Bridge. That same night, a young man named Yashima is injured in a car accident while attempting to flee from the police. Found on him is the wallet of the murdered man.

Tokyo Police Detective Kyoichiro Kaga is assigned to the team investigating the murder - and must bring his skills to bear to uncover what actually happened that night on the Nihonbashi bridge. What, if any, connection is there between the murdered man and Yashima, the young man caught with his wallet? Kaga's investigation takes him down dark roads and into the unknown past to uncover what really happened and why.

A Death in Tokyo is another mind-bending mystery from the modern master of classic crime, finalist for both an Edgar Award and a CWA Dagger, the internationally bestselling Keigo Higashino.]]> 359 Keigo Higashino 0349145377 Manu 0 3.97 2011 A Death in Tokyo (Detective Kaga, #3)
author: Keigo Higashino
name: Manu
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at: 2024/09/20
date added: 2024/09/20
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store]]> 198971294
In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighbourhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows.

As these characters' stories overlap and deepen, it becomes clear how much the people who live on the margins struggle and what they must do to survive. When the truth is finally revealed about what happened on Chicken Hill and the part the town's white establishment played in it, McBride shows us that even in dark times, it is love and community-heaven and earth-that sustain us.]]> 385 James McBride 139962041X Manu 4 3.70 2023 The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
author: James McBride
name: Manu
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/09
date added: 2024/09/09
shelves:
review:

]]> Of Ants and Dinosaurs 53358618
In a sunlit clearing in central Gondwana, on an otherwise ordinary day in the late Cretaceous, the seeds of Earth's first and greatest civilization were sown in the grisly aftermath of a Tyrannosaurus' lunch.

Throughout the universe, intelligence is a rare and fragile commodity – a fleeting glimmer in the long night of cosmic history. That Earth should harbour not just one but two intelligent species at the same time, defies the odds. That these species, so unalike – and yet so complementary – should forge an alliance that kindled a civilization defies logic. But time is endless and everything comes to pass eventually...

The alliance between ants and dinosaurs, was of course, based on dentistry. Yet from such humble beginnings came writing, mathematics, computers, fusion, antimatter and even space travel – a veritable Age of Wonder! But such magnificent industry comes at a price – a price paid first by Earth's biosphere, and then by all those dependent on it.

And yet the Dinosaurs refused to heed the Ants' warning of impending ecological collapse, leaving the Ant Federation facing a single dilemma: destroy the dinosaurs, destroy a civilization... or perish alongside them?]]> 249 Liu Cixin 1789546125 Manu 4 3.85 2003 Of Ants and Dinosaurs
author: Liu Cixin
name: Manu
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2003
rating: 4
read at: 2024/08/20
date added: 2024/08/20
shelves:
review:

]]> Having and Being Had 50520232 An incisive collection from award-winning author Eula Biss, Having and Being Had is a personal reckoning with the intricacies of money, class and capitalism.

'My adult life can be divided into two distinct parts,' Eula Biss writes, 'the time before I owned a washing machine and the time after.' Having just purchased her first home, she now embarks on a roguish and risky self-audit of the value system she has bought into. The result is a radical interrogation of work, leisure and capitalism. Described by the New York Times as a writer who 'advances from all sides, like a chess player', Biss brings her approach to the lived experience of capitalism. Playfully ranging from IKEA to Beyoncé to Pokémon, across bars and laundromats and universities, she asks, of both herself and her class, 'In what have we invested?'

'Having and Being Had offers us a probing tour of capitalism and class that sidesteps posturing and jargon in favor of clarity, humility, and incitement.'
Maggie Nelson

'In this witty, genre-bending book, Eula Biss smashes the taboo against talking about money with exhilarating results . . . [and] disarming honesty and grace.'
Jenny Offill

'Eula Biss's prescient new book gave me new language for things I didn't know I felt . . . A brilliant, lacerating re-examination of our relationship to what we own and why, and who in turn might own us.'
Alexander Chee

'No contemporary writer I know explores and confronts her own societal responsibilities better than Eula Biss.'
Aleksandar Hemon

A meditation on race, consumerism and the American caste system. And a wry, vivd assessment of our spiritual moment. It is no accident that Having and Being Had reads like the poems money would write if money wrote poems.' Jeet Thayil]]> 324 Eula Biss 0571346421 Manu 0 review
The inputs are of many kinds and formats - books, art, conversations, observations of life around, lived experience - and we get glimpses of many characters around her- friends, mother, husband, child, neighbours, not to mention philosophers (Karl Marx ,John Kenneth Galbraith, David Graeber), and writers (Emily Dickinson, Joan Didion, Virginia Woolf). The neighbourhood she lives in, which is going through a gentrification process, as well as her home, which she owns but seems to have mixed feelings about since it needs to be paid for and maintained, also play substantial roles in the narrative.
The stream of consciousness style of reflections allows a range of topics to be covered both explicitly and implicitly - from race and white privilege, the role of art, work and labour, economics and money to Pokemon, IKEA and Beyonce.

I don't think this book will work for everyone, but that doesn't make it any less interesting. Nor does it take away from all the thought-starters it provides for our own meditations and conversations.

Notes & Quotes
"One of the main things Marx noticed about capitalism," she writes, "is that it really encourages people to have relationships with things instead of with other people." ~ Elizabeth Chin, My Life with Things : The Consumer Diaries

On consumption - Food is destroyed by your consumption, but silverware is not, though the metaphor behind this word suggests that we eat up even or on silverware and dishes too. "We should think about how far we want to extend the metaphor," Graeber warns. Yes, we consume fossil fuels in the "eat up, devour, waste, spend" sense of the word. But we don't consume music. Music becomes part of us as food does but it isn't destroyed in the process.

Modernisation was supposed to fill the world - both communist and capitalist - with jobs, and not just any jobs, but 'standard employment 'with stable wages and benefits. Such jobs are now quite rare; most people depend on much irregular livelihoods. The irony of our times, then, is that everyone depends on capitalism but almost no one has what we call a 'regular job.'"

A game can be played with these cards, supposedly, but none of the kids understand the rules. Their end is accumulation - collecting cards for a game they don't know how to play.

The barriers that prevent people from entering the middle class are the defining feature of the middle class, according to one way of thinking about class. While members of the middle class acquire education and skills, for instance, we exclude others from acquiring education and skills. Opportunity Hoarding is the term for this and it takes the form of admissions, procedures, testing, tuition costs, licensing, ranking and all sorts of credentialing. Conveniently, we don't need to think of these barriers as a means of protecting our class status, but as necessary measures to gauge intelligence, or ability or commitment, or excellence or hard work.
And then there is the Marxist approach to class, which focuses on how economic status gives some people control over the lives of others. The middle class, in this approach, lies between the capitalists who have control and the workers who were controlled. The middle class includes small-business owners, who are both capitals and workers, salaried managers and supervisors, whose financial interests are entangled with the corporations they serve, and educated professionals who have enough capital to make investments. This is a middle class with capitalistic aspirations. And that is why Marx considered this class dangerous. It is a class of conflicting religions and internal contradictions.
Most people, Wright observes, prefer not to think of class as a means of control or exclusion, but as a collection of things that can be acquired like property and education. Your class, in this approach, is determined by how much you have of three kinds of capital, economic capital, cultural capital and social capital, or what you want, what, you know, and who, you know.

...the etymology of scholastic... It's from the Greek....it means "to be at leisure to study." The Greeks in value work like we do. Work was for slaves and women - but they did value study. Leisure meant something different in ancient Greece. It was the opposite of being busy, but it wasn't rest or play. It was time spent on reflective thought and wonder. To be at leisure, to live a life of study and contemplation, was to enjoy true freedom. But that freedom depended on the work of women and slaves.

Pigouvian tax, a tax added to the price of a thing because of the social cost of the thing. Like the tax on cigarettes.

Middle age is really all about maintenance, my mother once said. You spend your life accumulating things, she said, and then you have to maintain them. Your house, your car, your body. You have to maintain your children, too, and your parents.

"Intellectual freedom depends upon material things", she wrote In a room of One's Own.

The reward of art is not fame, or success, but intoxication.

"...depending on the will or pleasure of another was the original meaning of precarious, and that it comes from the Latin for prayer. Precarity is everywhere, it seems. Maybe it is, as Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing writes, the condition of our time. It is also the defining feature of an entire class of people, the precariat.
Illness or disability can force somebody into the precariat as can divorce, war, or natural disaster. The precariat is composed of migrant workers and temp workers and contract workers, and part-time workers. People who work unstable jobs that offer "no sense of career." There are few opportunities to advance in these jobs, and no way to bargain for better terms.

Capital, the investor tells me, is something women didn't have until recently. We couldn't even carry our own credit cards until 1974, she reminds me. We didn't amass capital, we didn't understand it, and we didn't learn how to manage it. We didn't have mothers and grandmothers teaching as about capital. But here's the thing- she circles her womb with her hand - we are capital. We are the means of production. I had three children, she says. I've been the means of production. Now I want to own the means of production.
]]> 3.85 2020 Having and Being Had
author: Eula Biss
name: Manu
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at: 2024/08/17
date added: 2024/08/18
shelves: review
review:
If I had to sum up this book, it is Eula Biss having a conversation with capitalism -trying to understand its origins, its ethos, and its insidious and pervasive role in our lives. The only hint of structure are broad sections - consumption, work, investment, and accounting. But really, everything flows into everything else. I made up the narrative that she has 'consumed' her home (or the other way), she needs her work to pay for it, but also needs to make investments for her future - each piece complex in itself, their mutual relationships, and their relationship with her, and this is her account, and she has to account for everything. Everything is connected by capitalism. It reminded me of God, Human, Animal, Machine, which was reflections about consciousness itself.

The inputs are of many kinds and formats - books, art, conversations, observations of life around, lived experience - and we get glimpses of many characters around her- friends, mother, husband, child, neighbours, not to mention philosophers (Karl Marx ,John Kenneth Galbraith, David Graeber), and writers (Emily Dickinson, Joan Didion, Virginia Woolf). The neighbourhood she lives in, which is going through a gentrification process, as well as her home, which she owns but seems to have mixed feelings about since it needs to be paid for and maintained, also play substantial roles in the narrative.
The stream of consciousness style of reflections allows a range of topics to be covered both explicitly and implicitly - from race and white privilege, the role of art, work and labour, economics and money to Pokemon, IKEA and Beyonce.

I don't think this book will work for everyone, but that doesn't make it any less interesting. Nor does it take away from all the thought-starters it provides for our own meditations and conversations.

Notes & Quotes
"One of the main things Marx noticed about capitalism," she writes, "is that it really encourages people to have relationships with things instead of with other people." ~ Elizabeth Chin, My Life with Things : The Consumer Diaries

On consumption - Food is destroyed by your consumption, but silverware is not, though the metaphor behind this word suggests that we eat up even or on silverware and dishes too. "We should think about how far we want to extend the metaphor," Graeber warns. Yes, we consume fossil fuels in the "eat up, devour, waste, spend" sense of the word. But we don't consume music. Music becomes part of us as food does but it isn't destroyed in the process.

Modernisation was supposed to fill the world - both communist and capitalist - with jobs, and not just any jobs, but 'standard employment 'with stable wages and benefits. Such jobs are now quite rare; most people depend on much irregular livelihoods. The irony of our times, then, is that everyone depends on capitalism but almost no one has what we call a 'regular job.'"

A game can be played with these cards, supposedly, but none of the kids understand the rules. Their end is accumulation - collecting cards for a game they don't know how to play.

The barriers that prevent people from entering the middle class are the defining feature of the middle class, according to one way of thinking about class. While members of the middle class acquire education and skills, for instance, we exclude others from acquiring education and skills. Opportunity Hoarding is the term for this and it takes the form of admissions, procedures, testing, tuition costs, licensing, ranking and all sorts of credentialing. Conveniently, we don't need to think of these barriers as a means of protecting our class status, but as necessary measures to gauge intelligence, or ability or commitment, or excellence or hard work.
And then there is the Marxist approach to class, which focuses on how economic status gives some people control over the lives of others. The middle class, in this approach, lies between the capitalists who have control and the workers who were controlled. The middle class includes small-business owners, who are both capitals and workers, salaried managers and supervisors, whose financial interests are entangled with the corporations they serve, and educated professionals who have enough capital to make investments. This is a middle class with capitalistic aspirations. And that is why Marx considered this class dangerous. It is a class of conflicting religions and internal contradictions.
Most people, Wright observes, prefer not to think of class as a means of control or exclusion, but as a collection of things that can be acquired like property and education. Your class, in this approach, is determined by how much you have of three kinds of capital, economic capital, cultural capital and social capital, or what you want, what, you know, and who, you know.

...the etymology of scholastic... It's from the Greek....it means "to be at leisure to study." The Greeks in value work like we do. Work was for slaves and women - but they did value study. Leisure meant something different in ancient Greece. It was the opposite of being busy, but it wasn't rest or play. It was time spent on reflective thought and wonder. To be at leisure, to live a life of study and contemplation, was to enjoy true freedom. But that freedom depended on the work of women and slaves.

Pigouvian tax, a tax added to the price of a thing because of the social cost of the thing. Like the tax on cigarettes.

Middle age is really all about maintenance, my mother once said. You spend your life accumulating things, she said, and then you have to maintain them. Your house, your car, your body. You have to maintain your children, too, and your parents.

"Intellectual freedom depends upon material things", she wrote In a room of One's Own.

The reward of art is not fame, or success, but intoxication.

"...depending on the will or pleasure of another was the original meaning of precarious, and that it comes from the Latin for prayer. Precarity is everywhere, it seems. Maybe it is, as Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing writes, the condition of our time. It is also the defining feature of an entire class of people, the precariat.
Illness or disability can force somebody into the precariat as can divorce, war, or natural disaster. The precariat is composed of migrant workers and temp workers and contract workers, and part-time workers. People who work unstable jobs that offer "no sense of career." There are few opportunities to advance in these jobs, and no way to bargain for better terms.

Capital, the investor tells me, is something women didn't have until recently. We couldn't even carry our own credit cards until 1974, she reminds me. We didn't amass capital, we didn't understand it, and we didn't learn how to manage it. We didn't have mothers and grandmothers teaching as about capital. But here's the thing- she circles her womb with her hand - we are capital. We are the means of production. I had three children, she says. I've been the means of production. Now I want to own the means of production.

]]> <![CDATA[Die with Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life]]> 52950915 A Common-Sense Guide to Living Rich….Instead of Dying Rich

Imagine if by the time you died, you did everything you were told to. You worked hard, saved your money, and looked forward to financial freedom when you retired.
Ìý
The only thing you wasted along the way was…your life.
Ìý
Die with Zero presents a startling new and provocative philosophy as well as practical guide on how to get the most out of your money—and out ofÌýyour life. It’s intended for those who place lifelong memorable experiences far ahead of simply making and accumulating money for one’s so-called Golden Years.
Ìý
In short, Bill Perkins wants to rescue you from over-saving and under-living. Regardless of your age, Die with Zero will teach you Perkins’ plan for optimizing your life, stage by stage, so you’re fully engaged and enjoying what you’ve worked and saved for.
Ìý
You’ll discover how to maximize your lifetime memorable moments with “experience bucketing,†how to convert your earnings into priceless memories by following your “net worth curve,†and find out how to navigate whether to invest in, or delay, a meaningful adventure based on your “spend curve†and “personal interest rate.â€
Ìý
Using his own life experiences as well as the inspiring stories and cautionary tales of others—and drawing on eye-opening insights about time, money, and happiness from psychological science and behavioral finance —Perkins makes a timely, convincing, and contrarian case for living large.]]> 240 Bill Perkins 0358099765 Manu 0 review The basic premise of the book is that we should make full use of our money when we have the capability to enjoy what it brings us. As we age, that capability diminishes, a function of our desires, as well as deteriorating health. While we could still enjoy many things, the yield or utility per dollar goes down with age.
A part of the book is devoted to elaborating on this perspective and proving it with data and anecdotes. Data shows that a lot of people end up over-saving and underspending during retirement and die with a large sum of money still left. Hence the need to temper delayed gratification. Concepts like consumption smoothing - one's spending not mirroring the variations of income, and transferring money from years of abundance to leaner years. In other words, spend more than your income, if required, early in life for experiences that will give you memories to cherish in your old age, because you can repay it as income increases. To be fair, the author obviously discourages reckless spending.
This also goes for money you wish to give to your near and dear, as well as charity. For instance, better to give the kid money when you're 65 and he/she is 35, rather than 80 and 50 respectively. The peak utility of money is highest between 35 and 50, when people have the health and the desire. Even within retirement, there are go-go years, slow-go years, and no-go years, and one should bulk up the spending at the top. He also recommends getting a sense of your life expectancy using calculators so you can plan accordingly.
Another useful concept is that of time buckets. Take a duration, say 10 years, and look at 40-50, 50-60 and so on. Now slot the things you want to do, and when you're best placed to do it. Usually the control variable is money, here it is health and desire. This will help you figure that some things are better when done at certain ages. It's a perspective shift. The other related shift is seeing your peak as a date (related to biological age) and not a number.
The book also addresses the 'how' of implementing this, and overcoming the mental barriers that people commonly have towards this approach, including the not-so-common "I love my job".
The book does offer a reasonably unique perspective, and at its core, it urges thinking on first principles and making conscious decisions, both of which I support. But I felt that the author underestimates the scarcity mindset, or probably lacks the empathy required for it. The other aspect I didn't like is the tendency to quantify aspects of life that have multiple dimensions of quality. And finally, the 'inefficiency' comment on Sylvia Bloom, who worked as a legal secretary for 67 years, and when she died at 96, bequeathed $8.2m to charity. According to the author, she should have done this earlier while she was alive. Absolute tone-deafness.]]> 3.84 2020 Die with Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life
author: Bill Perkins
name: Manu
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at: 2023/09/26
date added: 2024/08/17
shelves: review
review:
Remember Aesop's The Ant & the Grasshopper? The one that is told to teach us the virtues of hard work and the importance of saving for a rainy day. Given the values still hold, most books that have anything to do with money are written for 'grasshoppers', but this one is more for the ants, or in the author's words, to drag the ant towards the grasshopper.
The basic premise of the book is that we should make full use of our money when we have the capability to enjoy what it brings us. As we age, that capability diminishes, a function of our desires, as well as deteriorating health. While we could still enjoy many things, the yield or utility per dollar goes down with age.
A part of the book is devoted to elaborating on this perspective and proving it with data and anecdotes. Data shows that a lot of people end up over-saving and underspending during retirement and die with a large sum of money still left. Hence the need to temper delayed gratification. Concepts like consumption smoothing - one's spending not mirroring the variations of income, and transferring money from years of abundance to leaner years. In other words, spend more than your income, if required, early in life for experiences that will give you memories to cherish in your old age, because you can repay it as income increases. To be fair, the author obviously discourages reckless spending.
This also goes for money you wish to give to your near and dear, as well as charity. For instance, better to give the kid money when you're 65 and he/she is 35, rather than 80 and 50 respectively. The peak utility of money is highest between 35 and 50, when people have the health and the desire. Even within retirement, there are go-go years, slow-go years, and no-go years, and one should bulk up the spending at the top. He also recommends getting a sense of your life expectancy using calculators so you can plan accordingly.
Another useful concept is that of time buckets. Take a duration, say 10 years, and look at 40-50, 50-60 and so on. Now slot the things you want to do, and when you're best placed to do it. Usually the control variable is money, here it is health and desire. This will help you figure that some things are better when done at certain ages. It's a perspective shift. The other related shift is seeing your peak as a date (related to biological age) and not a number.
The book also addresses the 'how' of implementing this, and overcoming the mental barriers that people commonly have towards this approach, including the not-so-common "I love my job".
The book does offer a reasonably unique perspective, and at its core, it urges thinking on first principles and making conscious decisions, both of which I support. But I felt that the author underestimates the scarcity mindset, or probably lacks the empathy required for it. The other aspect I didn't like is the tendency to quantify aspects of life that have multiple dimensions of quality. And finally, the 'inefficiency' comment on Sylvia Bloom, who worked as a legal secretary for 67 years, and when she died at 96, bequeathed $8.2m to charity. According to the author, she should have done this earlier while she was alive. Absolute tone-deafness.
]]> The Garden of Evening Mists 45526141 352 Tan Twan Eng 1786893894 Manu 0 4.14 2011 The Garden of Evening Mists
author: Tan Twan Eng
name: Manu
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at: 2024/08/12
date added: 2024/08/12
shelves:
review:

]]> The Strength In Our Scars 43361703 Through poetry, prose, and compassionate encouragement you would expect from someone who knows exactly what you’re working through, Sparacino is here with the words you need. “The Strength In Our Scars†tackles the gut-wrenching but relatable experiences of moving on, self-love, and ultimately learning to heal. In this book you will find peace, you will find a rock, you will find understanding, and you will find hope.
Remember: Whatever is dark within you has also carved light into your soul. Whatever is lost within you has also brought you back home to yourself. Whatever is hurt within you is also healing you in ways you may not understand at that moment in time. This book hopes to show you that.
]]> 157 Bianca Sparacino 0996487190 Manu 0 4.05 2018 The Strength In Our Scars
author: Bianca Sparacino
name: Manu
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at: 2024/08/05
date added: 2024/08/05
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Cosmic Game: Explorations of the Frontiers of Human Consciousness]]> 49205812 300 Stanislav Grof 9387496171 Manu 0 4.00 1997 The Cosmic Game: Explorations of the Frontiers of Human Consciousness
author: Stanislav Grof
name: Manu
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1997
rating: 0
read at: 2024/08/02
date added: 2024/08/02
shelves:
review:

]]> Memory Piece 210044293
By the time they are adults, their dreams are murkier. As a performance artist, Giselle must navigate an elite social world she never conceived of. As a coder thrilled by the internet’s early egalitarian promise, Jackie must contend with its more sinister shift toward monetization and surveillance. And as a community activist, Ellen confronts the increasing gentrification and policing overwhelming her New York City neighborhood. Over time their friendship matures and changes, their definitions of success become complicated, and their sense of what matters evolves.

Moving from the predigital 1980s to the art and tech subcultures of the 1990s to a strikingly imagined portrait of the 2040s, Memory Piece is an innovative and audacious story of three lifelong friends as they strive to build satisfying lives in a world that turns out to be radically different from the one they were promised.]]> 0 Lisa Ko 0349704325 Manu 0 3.43 2024 Memory Piece
author: Lisa Ko
name: Manu
average rating: 3.43
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2024/07/26
date added: 2024/07/26
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Long View: Why We Need to Transform How the World Sees Time]]> 178812489 0 Unknown Author 1472285220 Manu 0 4.00 The Long View: Why We Need to Transform How the World Sees Time
author: Unknown Author
name: Manu
average rating: 4.00
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2024/07/20
date added: 2024/07/20
shelves:
review:

]]> Bombay Balchao 86658857 About the Book

Bombay was the city everyone came to in the early decades of the nineteenth among them, the Goans and the Mangaloreans. Looking for safe harbour, livelihood, and a new place to call home. Communities congregated around churches and markets, sharing lord and land with the native East Indians. The young among them were nudged on to the path of marriage, procreation and godliness, though noble intentions were often ambushed by errant love and plain and simple lust. As in the story of Annette and Benji (and Joe) or Michael and Merlyn (and Ellena).
Lovers and haters, friends and family, married men and determined singles, churchgoers and abstainers, Bombay Balchao is a tangled tale of ordinary lives—of a woman who loses her husband to a dockyard explosion and turns to bootlegging, a teen romance that drowns like a paper boat, a social misfit rescued by his addiction to crosswords, a wife who tries to exorcise the spirit of her dead mother-in-law from her husband, a rebellious young woman who spurns true love for the abandonment of dance. Ordinary, except when seen through their own eyes. Then, it’s legend.
Set in Cavel, a tiny Catholic neighbourhood on Bombay’s D’Lima Street, this delightful debut novel is painted with many shades of history and memory, laughter and melancholy, sunshine and silver rain.

About the Author

Jane Borges is a Mumbai-based journalist. She currently writes on books, heritage and urban planning for Sunday mid-day, the weekend edition of mid-day newspaper. She has previously co-authored Mafia Queens of Stories of Women from the Ganglands with S. Hussain Zaidi in 2011.]]> 201 Jane Borges 9395073209 Manu 0 4.30 Bombay Balchao
author: Jane Borges
name: Manu
average rating: 4.30
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2024/07/12
date added: 2024/07/12
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Case Against Reality: How Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes]]> 49095589 The Case Against Reality, pioneering cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman says: No, we see what we need in order to survive. Our visual perceptions are not a window onto reality, Hoffman shows us, but instead are interfaces constructed by natural selection. The objects we see around us are not unlike the file icons on our computer desktops: while shaped like a small folder on our screens, the files themselves are made of a series of ones and zeros too complex for most of us to understand. In a similar way, Hoffman argues, evolution has shaped our perceptions into simplistic illusions to help us navigate the world around us. Yet now these illusions can be manipulated by advertising and design.

Drawing on thirty years of Hoffman's own influential research, as well as evolutionary biology, game theory, neuroscience, and philosophy, The Case Against Reality makes the mind-bending yet utterly convincing case that the world is nothing like what we see before our eyes.]]> 250 Donald D. Hoffman 0141983418 Manu 4 review Donald Hoffman posits that "some form of reality may exist, but may be completely different from the reality our brains model and perceive." Why is that? Fitness-Beats-Truth (FBT) theorem. Natural selection optimises for fitness payoffs, and thus organisms develop sensory systems and internal models of reality that increase these fitness payoffs but don't offer a correct perception of reality. In fact, natural selection doesn't just not favour true perceptions, it routinely drives them to extinction, and instead, favours perceptions that hide the truth and guides useful actions. He compares this to icons on our screens that are a way of interacting with the system but don't look/feel/behave like the system underneath. They are a user interface that spares you tiresome details on software, transistors, magnetic fields, logic gates etc. And everything we perceive around us through our sensory organs and mind is just like that - icons that help us navigate. Our perceptions don't even have the right language to understand/describe reality. And on this line of thought, even spacetime and the objects/ smells/ sounds/ texture/ motion etc we take for granted in it, crumble. They are just the data formats which have evolved and survived eons of tradeoff between knowledge and utility. Each species creates its own interfaces to deal with reality. Hoffman calls it the interface theory of perception (ITP).
There are several experiments and illustrations to help you get over the "so that tomato that both my friend and see is not real" and "so I can grab a rattlesnake and nothing will happen" and "there is no spoon" questions one is bound to feel. Broadly, when you delete a useful icon, the underlying system remains. But your access to that might be limited/difficult. So even though you don't take it literally, you do take it seriously. Amazing that Galileo got an early idea of that a while ago, though he didn't go further.
My intuition resisted it for a while until two things happened. One, moving the discussion from visual from things we see to things we taste. The taste of vanilla in no way describes the molecule. Plato's allegory of the cave! Second, I realised that we use heuristics and short cuts for practically everything. Our biases are our own and different from others' - our way of dealing with our life. I thought we were the first to do that, but maybe we do that because at a fundamental level, natural selection has been playing with the wiring to develop the mechanism that gets the best fitness payoffs. How humbling!
Natural selection is the only process we know that pushes organisms thermodynamically uphill to higher degrees of functional order to try and delay entropy if not offset it completely. We are arguably a milestone in that. Maybe the intelligence we create - AI - can help us analyse the UIs of multiple species and get a better sense of reality as is.
Hoffman invokes the red pill/ blue pill early on, and I must admit, the book does deliver on that. It is reasonably accessible and but a tad closer to 'truth' than 'fitness' on a scale of zero to Harari's Sapiens. ;) But it did expand and take forward my thinking in the quantum theory - evolutionary biology direction that I am now even more interested in!

Quotes
Science is not a theory of reality, but a method of inquiry.
We did not evolve our ability to reason in order to pursue the truth. We evolved it as a tool of social persuasion.]]> 3.69 The Case Against Reality: How Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes
author: Donald D. Hoffman
name: Manu
average rating: 3.69
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/08
date added: 2024/07/08
shelves: review
review:
My favourite read this year has been "Being You". The second half of that book has some reality-shattering theses. One of them is 'We perceive the world not as it is, but as it is useful to us.' Reality is thus an interpretation, and the entire process is not optimised for accuracy, it is designed for utility. A mechanism of making it seem real so we respond to it. Not to know the world, but to survive it! The end of the book also brings up the fascinating FEP (free energy principle) and specifically how it applies to living systems and consciousness. In this context, it boils down to this - being alive means being in a condition of low entropy. Any living system, to resist entropy, must occupy states which it expects to be in. Biology meets physics. Why am I bringing this up? Because this book touches upon both of these aspects I was fascinated by.
Donald Hoffman posits that "some form of reality may exist, but may be completely different from the reality our brains model and perceive." Why is that? Fitness-Beats-Truth (FBT) theorem. Natural selection optimises for fitness payoffs, and thus organisms develop sensory systems and internal models of reality that increase these fitness payoffs but don't offer a correct perception of reality. In fact, natural selection doesn't just not favour true perceptions, it routinely drives them to extinction, and instead, favours perceptions that hide the truth and guides useful actions. He compares this to icons on our screens that are a way of interacting with the system but don't look/feel/behave like the system underneath. They are a user interface that spares you tiresome details on software, transistors, magnetic fields, logic gates etc. And everything we perceive around us through our sensory organs and mind is just like that - icons that help us navigate. Our perceptions don't even have the right language to understand/describe reality. And on this line of thought, even spacetime and the objects/ smells/ sounds/ texture/ motion etc we take for granted in it, crumble. They are just the data formats which have evolved and survived eons of tradeoff between knowledge and utility. Each species creates its own interfaces to deal with reality. Hoffman calls it the interface theory of perception (ITP).
There are several experiments and illustrations to help you get over the "so that tomato that both my friend and see is not real" and "so I can grab a rattlesnake and nothing will happen" and "there is no spoon" questions one is bound to feel. Broadly, when you delete a useful icon, the underlying system remains. But your access to that might be limited/difficult. So even though you don't take it literally, you do take it seriously. Amazing that Galileo got an early idea of that a while ago, though he didn't go further.
My intuition resisted it for a while until two things happened. One, moving the discussion from visual from things we see to things we taste. The taste of vanilla in no way describes the molecule. Plato's allegory of the cave! Second, I realised that we use heuristics and short cuts for practically everything. Our biases are our own and different from others' - our way of dealing with our life. I thought we were the first to do that, but maybe we do that because at a fundamental level, natural selection has been playing with the wiring to develop the mechanism that gets the best fitness payoffs. How humbling!
Natural selection is the only process we know that pushes organisms thermodynamically uphill to higher degrees of functional order to try and delay entropy if not offset it completely. We are arguably a milestone in that. Maybe the intelligence we create - AI - can help us analyse the UIs of multiple species and get a better sense of reality as is.
Hoffman invokes the red pill/ blue pill early on, and I must admit, the book does deliver on that. It is reasonably accessible and but a tad closer to 'truth' than 'fitness' on a scale of zero to Harari's Sapiens. ;) But it did expand and take forward my thinking in the quantum theory - evolutionary biology direction that I am now even more interested in!

Quotes
Science is not a theory of reality, but a method of inquiry.
We did not evolve our ability to reason in order to pursue the truth. We evolved it as a tool of social persuasion.
]]> <![CDATA[The Tokyo Zodiac Murders (Kiyoshi Mitarai, #1)]]> 40166502
By 1979, these Tokyo Zodiac Murders have been obsessing a nation for decades, but not one of them has been solved. A mystery-obsessed illustrator and a talented astrologer set off around the country – and you follow, carrying the enigma of the Zodiac murderer through madness, missed leads and magic tricks. You have all the clues, but can you solve the mystery before they do?]]> 316 SÅji Shimada 1782271384 Manu 0 3.76 1981 The Tokyo Zodiac Murders (Kiyoshi Mitarai, #1)
author: SÅji Shimada
name: Manu
average rating: 3.76
book published: 1981
rating: 0
read at: 2021/10/14
date added: 2024/07/06
shelves:
review:

]]> Sea of Tranquility 58740088 🎧Run Time = 5 hours and 47 minutes

NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER - The award-winning, best-selling author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel returns with a novel of art, time travel, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon five hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space.

One of the Best Books of the Year: The New York Times, NPR, GoodReads

"One of [Mandel's] finest novels and one of her most satisfying forays into the arena of speculative fiction yet." --The New York Times

Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal--an experience that shocks him to his core.

Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She's traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty. Within the text of Olive's best-selling pandemic novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him.

When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the black-skied Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in the North American wilderness, he uncovers a series of lives upended: The exiled son of an earl driven to madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the timeline of the universe.

A virtuoso performance that is as human and tender as it is intellectually playful, Sea of Tranquility is a novel of time travel and metaphysics that precisely captures the reality of our current moment.]]> 258 Emily St. John Mandel 1529083508 Manu 4 4.14 2022 Sea of Tranquility
author: Emily St. John Mandel
name: Manu
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/02
date added: 2024/07/02
shelves:
review:

]]> A Little Life 29408433 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A stunning “portrait of the enduring grace of friendship†(NPR) about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves. A masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century.

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST • WINNER OF THE KIRKUS PRIZE •

A Little Life follows four college classmates—broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition—as they move to New York in search of fame and fortune. While their relationships, which are tinged by addiction, success, and pride, deepen over the decades, the men are held together by their devotion to the brilliant, enigmatic Jude, a man scarred by an unspeakable childhood trauma. A hymn to brotherly bonds and a masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century, Hanya Yanagihara’s stunning novel is about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves.]]> 723 Hanya Yanagihara 1447294831 Manu 0 4.36 2015 A Little Life
author: Hanya Yanagihara
name: Manu
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at: 2023/08/26
date added: 2024/07/01
shelves:
review:

]]> The Burnout Society 25490360
]]> 60 Byung-Chul Han 0804795096 Manu 4 3.87 2010 The Burnout Society
author: Byung-Chul Han
name: Manu
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2010
rating: 4
read at: 2024/06/27
date added: 2024/06/27
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[My Poems Are Not for Your Ad Campaign]]> 204664985 171 Anuradha Sarma Pujari 0670096814 Manu 4 2.50 My Poems Are Not for Your Ad Campaign
author: Anuradha Sarma Pujari
name: Manu
average rating: 2.50
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2024/06/25
date added: 2024/06/25
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[We, The Citizens: Strengthening the Indian Republic]]> 209613988 We, the citizens.]]> 240 Khyati Pathak 0143463551 Manu 5 review The state is good at employing force, but isn't very efficient. The market is good at driving efficiency, but is not concerned with ensuring equity. Society is best suited to deal with behavioural changes, but it is prone to majoritarianism. The entire system is a maze of checks and balances to achieve progress while not allowing any of the elements to go out of control. The book delves into how each of these function, and should function.
The state, for instance has a toolkit of at least eight things from doing nothing to nudging to playing umpire to marginally/drastically changing incentives and so on but doesn't always employ the right one. Munger's "Show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome" brilliantly manifests in these explorations. The book provides an excellent framework to think about this based on axes of extent of intervention and state capacity. The government can fail in many ways, and the taxpayer pays for these mistakes. The best part about the book is how it uses examples to (literally) illustrate these mistakes, and how they can be avoided. All delivered with some fantastic humour.
Why are we a democratic republic and not just a democracy? Because while democracy gives the state legitimacy on coercion, the republic (constitution) guarantees the rule of law. What is the difference between a nation, state and government? The nation is an imagined community, where people don't know each other but are still willing to sacrifice for. On the other hand, a state is a political entity. The government is the temporary manager of the state. What are public and common goods? Public goods are goods that are non-excludable and non-rival. (e.g. a lighthouse which everyone can use and its usage by one person doesn't mean another cannot use it) On the other hand, common goods are non-excludable but rival (e.g. fish in the sea). This is why only the government produces public goods. These are the kind of significant nuances that the book uncovers.
I cannot stress how accessible this book is. Plain English, relatable examples, and frameworks that can be applied even in other contexts. Like many good things in life, I discovered the book courtesy the better half. I'd highly recommend this to anyone even remotely curious about how the 'system' works. If you're not, this can actually get you interested. ]]> 4.00 2024 We, The Citizens: Strengthening the Indian Republic
author: Khyati Pathak
name: Manu
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/06/20
date added: 2024/06/20
shelves: review
review:
Every day we look around and blame the government for not doing the things they are supposed to do, and for being overbearing on things like taxation. This is a wonderful little book (176 pages) that explains why things are the way they are. Full of wit and wisdom on subjects we don't think about enough, but are important. I think the authors have done a great job of making the complex interplay of state, market, and society understandable, and that includes the illustrations that elevate the narrative many a times. A graphic narrative that decodes how public policy works (and could work) in the Indian context.
The state is good at employing force, but isn't very efficient. The market is good at driving efficiency, but is not concerned with ensuring equity. Society is best suited to deal with behavioural changes, but it is prone to majoritarianism. The entire system is a maze of checks and balances to achieve progress while not allowing any of the elements to go out of control. The book delves into how each of these function, and should function.
The state, for instance has a toolkit of at least eight things from doing nothing to nudging to playing umpire to marginally/drastically changing incentives and so on but doesn't always employ the right one. Munger's "Show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome" brilliantly manifests in these explorations. The book provides an excellent framework to think about this based on axes of extent of intervention and state capacity. The government can fail in many ways, and the taxpayer pays for these mistakes. The best part about the book is how it uses examples to (literally) illustrate these mistakes, and how they can be avoided. All delivered with some fantastic humour.
Why are we a democratic republic and not just a democracy? Because while democracy gives the state legitimacy on coercion, the republic (constitution) guarantees the rule of law. What is the difference between a nation, state and government? The nation is an imagined community, where people don't know each other but are still willing to sacrifice for. On the other hand, a state is a political entity. The government is the temporary manager of the state. What are public and common goods? Public goods are goods that are non-excludable and non-rival. (e.g. a lighthouse which everyone can use and its usage by one person doesn't mean another cannot use it) On the other hand, common goods are non-excludable but rival (e.g. fish in the sea). This is why only the government produces public goods. These are the kind of significant nuances that the book uncovers.
I cannot stress how accessible this book is. Plain English, relatable examples, and frameworks that can be applied even in other contexts. Like many good things in life, I discovered the book courtesy the better half. I'd highly recommend this to anyone even remotely curious about how the 'system' works. If you're not, this can actually get you interested.
]]> Newcomer 51948772
This is the second appearance in English of Police detective Kyochiro Kaga, the protagonist of the critically acclaimed Malice.]]> 336 Keigo Higashino 0349143625 Manu 5 4.06 2009 Newcomer
author: Keigo Higashino
name: Manu
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2009
rating: 5
read at: 2024/06/18
date added: 2024/06/18
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World]]> 8064198 The Horse, the Wheel, and Language lifts the veil that has long shrouded these original Indo-European speakers, and reveals how their domestication of horses and use of the wheel spread language and transformed civilization.

Linking prehistoric archaeological remains with the development of language, David Anthony identifies the prehistoric peoples of central Eurasia's steppe grasslands as the original speakers of Proto-Indo-European, and shows how their innovative use of the ox wagon, horseback riding, and the warrior's chariot turned the Eurasian steppes into a thriving transcontinental corridor of communication, commerce, and cultural exchange. He explains how they spread their traditions and gave rise to important advances in copper mining, warfare, and patron-client political institutions, thereby ushering in an era of vibrant social change. Anthony also describes his fascinating discovery of how the wear from bits on ancient horse teeth reveals the origins of horseback riding.

The Horse, the Wheel, and Language solves a puzzle that has vexed scholars for two centuries--the source of the Indo-European languages and English--and recovers a magnificent and influential civilization from the past.]]> 553 David W. Anthony 069114818X Manu 0 4.13 2007 The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World
author: David W. Anthony
name: Manu
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2007
rating: 0
read at: 2024/06/12
date added: 2024/06/12
shelves:
review:

]]> Other Women 122938738
From the author of Little Deaths, shortlisted for the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction, comes the sensational Other Women. Mesmerising, haunting and utterly remarkable, Other Women is inspired by a murder that took place almost a hundred years ago. A devastating story of fantasy, obsession, and ultimately the lengths we will go to in order to save the ones we love.

Six years after the end of the Great War, the country is still in mourning. Thousands of husbands, fathers, sons and sweethearts were lost forever, and the sea of women they left behind must carry on without them.

But Beatrice Cade is not a wife, not a widow, not a mother. There are thousands of other women like her: nameless and invisible. Determined to carve out a richer and more fulfilling life for herself, Bea takes a job in the City and a room in a Bloomsbury ladies’ club. Then a fleeting encounter changes everything. Her emerging independence is destroyed when she falls in love for the first time.

Kate Ryan is a wife, a mother, and an accomplished liar. She has managed to build an enviable life with her husband and young daughter. To anyone looking in from the outside, they seem like a normal, happy family.

On the south coast of England, an anguished moment between lovers becomes a horrific murder. And two women who should never have met are connected forever.

Mesmerising, haunting and utterly remarkable, Other Women is inspired by a murder that took place almost a hundred years ago. A devastating story of fantasy, obsession, and ultimately the lengths we will go to in order to save the ones we love.]]> 368 Emma Flint 1509826556 Manu 0 4.16 2023 Other Women
author: Emma Flint
name: Manu
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2024/06/03
date added: 2024/06/03
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning]]> 60093180
“[A] truly fantastic book.â€â€”Ezra Klein
Ìý
For most of human history the world was a magical and enchanted place ruled by forces beyond our understanding. The rise of science and Descartes's division of mind from world made materialism our ruling paradigm, in the process asking whether our own consciousness—i.e., souls—might be illusions. Now the inexorable rise of technology, with artificial intelligences that surpass our comprehension and control, and the spread of digital metaphors for self-understanding, the core questions of existence—identity, knowledge, the very nature and purpose of life itself—urgently require rethinking.

Meghan O'Gieblyn tackles this challenge with philosophical rigor, intellectual reach, essayistic verve, refreshing originality, and an ironic sense of contradiction. She draws deeply and sometimes humorously from her own personal experience as a formerly religious believer still haunted by questions of faith, and she serves as the best possible guide to navigating the territory we are all entering.]]> 304 Meghan O'Gieblyn 0525562710 Manu 4 review Through chapters that are at once seamless and disparate, she navigates philosophy, technology, and theology and our different ways of understanding God, ourselves, and the world we are creating through technology. The metaphors of our time are built around technology, and AI and tech are raising questions that have for long been asked by philosophers - free will, immortality, the relationship between mind and body. Science by definition requires an objective perspective, and consciousness can only be felt, and measured inside. I can never know what it feels like to be another person. While there are many hypotheses, this is an area which science has been unable to really crack.
In 'Pattern' it is interesting to see the many parallels between the Bible and the belief systems of technologists, despite many of the latter being atheists. Transcendence through the Singularity and trans-humanism, just as through the Book of Revelation, the resurrection and rapture, for instance. I really liked Kurzweil's idea of consciousness as a pattern of information that persists over time. Essentially like a stream that rushes past the rocks in its path. The actual molecules of water change, but the stream remains the 'same'. In a letter to the author, he shares a wonderful insight that "the difference between so-called atheists and people who believe in 'God' is a matter of the choice of metaphor, and we could not get through our lives without having to choose metaphors for transcendent questions." From (divine) clockmakers to computers.
In the chapter 'Network', the idea of emergence is discussed in the context of consciousness, and so is the work of many scientists to recreate that - experimenting with robots to see if they evolve complex behaviour from simple rules. It hasn't really worked thus far, but I did wonder about the amount of time evolution took to 'produce' us.
In 'Paradox', there is mention of the parallels between quantum mechanics and eastern mysticism, and the idea of us being in a simulation, and/or a multiverse. It is interesting to note that all paths require a reasonable dose of faith! There is a very intriguing part that uses video games to illustrate how the first-person view makes it look like a world that is always complete as things appear when you move. But were they around when the player was not looking? Does the world "only render that which is being observed"?
'Metonymy' moves into materialism (science and its ability to reduce everything to causal mechanisms), dualism (mind-body), panpsychism (all things have a mind-like quality) and finally idealism (the physical world is wholly constituted by consciousness). The mind serving as a microcosm of the world's macroscopic consciousness reminded me of Aham Brahmasmi. Towards the end of this chapter, she quotes Hannah Arendt, who wrote about scientists who believed that computers can do what a human brain cannot comprehend.
That paves the way for 'Algorithm', which begins with Chris Anderson's 2008 view that data deluge has made our scientific method obsolete. It has now gotten to a state where we will accept the algorithm's perspective probably more than our own mind's! But as Nick Bostrom has pointed out, there is no reason for a super intelligence to share our values including benevolent concern for others. The algorithm does not necessarily worry about downstream consequences or collateral damage. And yet, even as algorithms are plagued by errors and the biases we have fed it, 'dataism', as Yuval Noah Harari states, is the new ideology. That if we have enough data, we can know everything, thereby increasing surveillance and tracking.
The end of this chapter has a chilling, and yet fascinating observation - "What we are abdicating, in the end, is our duty to create meaning from our empirical observations — to define for ourselves what constitutes justice, and morality, and quality of life — a task we forfeit each time we forget that meaning is an implicitly human category that cannot be reduced to quantification. To forget this truth is to use our tools to thwart our own interests, to build machines in our image that do nothing but dehumanize us."
In 'Virality', the final chapter, she discusses how in the digital domain, quantitative measures of success like clicks and likes have overtaken the virtue or validity of the content. There is also the funny (and yet quite true) part of how, when we treat Trump as an algorithm which has mastered social media, it all makes sense!
The book is intensely thought-provoking, and O'Gieblyn manages to balance curiosity and a healthy skepticism, distilling thoughts from various streams and thinkers, to provide a coherent narrative that fuels more thinking. For all of this, the book is also deeply personal and extremely accessible. Highly recommended.]]> 4.22 2021 God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning
author: Meghan O'Gieblyn
name: Manu
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2023/05/31
date added: 2024/06/01
shelves: review
review:
It is difficult to slot this book. Meghan O'Gieblyn sets us off on a thought-provoking exploration of the intersection of faith, technology, and the human experience, and traverses many interesting paths to understand what makes us human, and our search for meaning. Descartes started us on the path to the Enlightenment by 'separating' the material world and our 'soul. From then, we took pride in using scientific temperament and technology to systematically solve nature's puzzles. And now, when the same toolkit has created machines whose learning and thinking models are increasingly 'black boxes', there is fear, uncertainty and probably a bit of ego.
Through chapters that are at once seamless and disparate, she navigates philosophy, technology, and theology and our different ways of understanding God, ourselves, and the world we are creating through technology. The metaphors of our time are built around technology, and AI and tech are raising questions that have for long been asked by philosophers - free will, immortality, the relationship between mind and body. Science by definition requires an objective perspective, and consciousness can only be felt, and measured inside. I can never know what it feels like to be another person. While there are many hypotheses, this is an area which science has been unable to really crack.
In 'Pattern' it is interesting to see the many parallels between the Bible and the belief systems of technologists, despite many of the latter being atheists. Transcendence through the Singularity and trans-humanism, just as through the Book of Revelation, the resurrection and rapture, for instance. I really liked Kurzweil's idea of consciousness as a pattern of information that persists over time. Essentially like a stream that rushes past the rocks in its path. The actual molecules of water change, but the stream remains the 'same'. In a letter to the author, he shares a wonderful insight that "the difference between so-called atheists and people who believe in 'God' is a matter of the choice of metaphor, and we could not get through our lives without having to choose metaphors for transcendent questions." From (divine) clockmakers to computers.
In the chapter 'Network', the idea of emergence is discussed in the context of consciousness, and so is the work of many scientists to recreate that - experimenting with robots to see if they evolve complex behaviour from simple rules. It hasn't really worked thus far, but I did wonder about the amount of time evolution took to 'produce' us.
In 'Paradox', there is mention of the parallels between quantum mechanics and eastern mysticism, and the idea of us being in a simulation, and/or a multiverse. It is interesting to note that all paths require a reasonable dose of faith! There is a very intriguing part that uses video games to illustrate how the first-person view makes it look like a world that is always complete as things appear when you move. But were they around when the player was not looking? Does the world "only render that which is being observed"?
'Metonymy' moves into materialism (science and its ability to reduce everything to causal mechanisms), dualism (mind-body), panpsychism (all things have a mind-like quality) and finally idealism (the physical world is wholly constituted by consciousness). The mind serving as a microcosm of the world's macroscopic consciousness reminded me of Aham Brahmasmi. Towards the end of this chapter, she quotes Hannah Arendt, who wrote about scientists who believed that computers can do what a human brain cannot comprehend.
That paves the way for 'Algorithm', which begins with Chris Anderson's 2008 view that data deluge has made our scientific method obsolete. It has now gotten to a state where we will accept the algorithm's perspective probably more than our own mind's! But as Nick Bostrom has pointed out, there is no reason for a super intelligence to share our values including benevolent concern for others. The algorithm does not necessarily worry about downstream consequences or collateral damage. And yet, even as algorithms are plagued by errors and the biases we have fed it, 'dataism', as Yuval Noah Harari states, is the new ideology. That if we have enough data, we can know everything, thereby increasing surveillance and tracking.
The end of this chapter has a chilling, and yet fascinating observation - "What we are abdicating, in the end, is our duty to create meaning from our empirical observations — to define for ourselves what constitutes justice, and morality, and quality of life — a task we forfeit each time we forget that meaning is an implicitly human category that cannot be reduced to quantification. To forget this truth is to use our tools to thwart our own interests, to build machines in our image that do nothing but dehumanize us."
In 'Virality', the final chapter, she discusses how in the digital domain, quantitative measures of success like clicks and likes have overtaken the virtue or validity of the content. There is also the funny (and yet quite true) part of how, when we treat Trump as an algorithm which has mastered social media, it all makes sense!
The book is intensely thought-provoking, and O'Gieblyn manages to balance curiosity and a healthy skepticism, distilling thoughts from various streams and thinkers, to provide a coherent narrative that fuels more thinking. For all of this, the book is also deeply personal and extremely accessible. Highly recommended.
]]> <![CDATA[Lilliput Land: How Small is Driving India's Mega Consumption Story]]> 209327904 304 Rama Bijapurkar 014346549X Manu 0 5.00 Lilliput Land: How Small is Driving India's Mega Consumption Story
author: Rama Bijapurkar
name: Manu
average rating: 5.00
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2024/05/23
date added: 2024/05/23
shelves:
review:

]]> Identity 678954 Sometimes - perhaps only for an instant - we fail to recognize a companion; for a moment their identity ceases to exist, and thus we come to doubt our own. The effect is at its most acute in a couple, where our existence is given meaning by our perception of a lover, and theirs of ours.]]> 153 Milan Kundera 0571196357 Manu 4 3.42 1997 Identity
author: Milan Kundera
name: Manu
average rating: 3.42
book published: 1997
rating: 4
read at: 2024/05/17
date added: 2024/05/17
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Glucose Revolution: The life-changing power of balancing your blood sugar]]> 59639788 Uma abordagem original e fascinante para entender como a glicose afeta os mais diversos aspectos da nossa saúde ― do peso ao humor ―, e como é transformador manter seu nível em equilíbrio.
Best-seller internacional da fundadora da popular conta do Instagram GlucoseGoddess.

Como principal fonte de energia, a glicose impacta de maneira surpreendente o nosso corpo. Se a concentração no sangue fica muito alta, ocorrem respostas das mais variadas: compulsões alimentares, espinhas, enxaqueca, névoa mental, oscilações de humor, ganho de peso, sonolência e infertilidade. E, com o passar do tempo, esse desequilíbrio pode contribuir para o desenvolvimento de doenças como diabetes tipo 2, síndrome do ovário policístico, câncer, demência e cardiopatias.
Com base nas mais recentes pesquisas, em observações práticas e testes de alimentos específicos ― inclusive nosso açaí ―, Jessie Inchauspé nos mostra quais opções de café da manhã podem causar compulsões, em que ordem devemos comer cada tipo de alimento, o que não ingerir de estômago vazio, quais alimentos levam a mudanças de humor e como evitar aquele incômodo sono do meio da tarde. A revolução da glicose oferece estratégias simples e cientificamente comprovadas para achatar a curva de glicemia de forma rápida e sustentável, em uma nova abordagem para melhorar nossa vida, quaisquer que sejam as preferências alimentares.

“Uma revolução alimentar.†― The Daily Mail

“O melhor guia prático para controlar a glicose e melhorar a saúde e a longevidade.†― David Sinclair, autor do best-seller Tempo de vida]]> 320 Jessie Inchauspé 178072523X Manu 5 review The reason why I loved this book are many. One, it's not just a lot of theory. She combines lived experiences (of herself and others in the community), scientific research, and experiments (to validate) to show how it works. Two, she layers that with the overall science behind why they work that way. Three, she does so in the most accessible manner. And finally, she doesn't just point out the problems, she also provides solutions and paths to address them.
The book is divided into three parts. The first explains the origins of glucose and why it is important. While we colloquially call them all carbs, glucose, fructose, sucrose, starch, fibre are all varied forms and have different impact.
The second describes how dysregulated glucose levels and glucose spikes affects us in the short-term and the long-term. From hunger pangs at one end to worsened cognitive function at the other. During glucose spikes, the mitochondria quickly get more glucose than they need, some glucose gets converted into fat, and more importantly, molecules called free radicals are released into our system. When there are too many of these, it results in oxidative stress, a driver of heart disease, Type 2 diabetes etc. Glucose also glycates other molecules, damaging them forever. Wrinkles, cataracts etc.
The combination of all these result in inflammation, and chronic inflammation is the source of most chronic illnesses we get.
When we have excess glucose in our body, the pancreas sends out insulin to store it and keep it out of circulation. Liver, muscles and conversion into fat are the three ways it is done. That last bit is how we gain weight. The stored glucose is used when mitochondria needs it, and when glycogen (the glucose in the liver and muscles) gets diminished, our fat reserves come into play. But this cannot happen when insulin is high. (read notes for more on this) There are explanations for why and how each kind of disease related to this happens.
Part 3 is a set of ten (simple) hacks to flatten the glucose curves (reducing glycaemic variability). The first and most useful hack is the order of eating your meal. Veggies (fibre) first, proteins and fats next, and starch/carbs last. Fibre reduces the action of alpha amylase, the enzyme that breaks starch into glucose, it slows down gastric emptying, and creates a mesh which makes it difficult for glucose to get into the bloodstream. My second favourite hack was #7 - drinking apple cider vinegar before eating sweets. Acetic acid in vinegar temporarily inactivates alpha amylase.
Again, this is a fantastic book because of its actionable insights and the accessibility. Highly recommended.

Notes
1. Any food made from flour has starch
2. We like sweetness because back in the Stone Age the taste of sweetness signalled foods were safe (there are no foods that are sweet and poisonous). It gives us a dopamine hit.
3. Mitochondrial stress causes cells to lose their smooth shape. The lining becomes bumpy and fat particles get stuck more easily. LDL (B) does exactly this. If an when cholesterol gets oxidised (happens when more glucose, fructose, insulin are present), it creates plaque. Triglycerides become LDL (B). A good measurement is triglycerides/HDL. If it's less than 2, great
4. Insulin treatment brings down glucose temporarily but is harmful in the long run.
5. Sugar is sugar, whether it comes from fruit or table sugar. Relatively the first is better.
6. Similar story with whole grains. Dark bread/ seed breads are relatively better. ]]> 4.40 2022 Glucose Revolution: The life-changing power of balancing your blood sugar
author: Jessie Inchauspé
name: Manu
average rating: 4.40
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2024/05/16
date added: 2024/05/17
shelves: review
review:
Another one of those books that I wasn't even aware of, but came in via a referral, and I believe will actually make a difference in my life. Jessie Inchauspé, also known as Glucose Goddess, does a fantastic job of showing a way out of the clutches of glucose imbalances which are an underlying cause of many health issues - from cardiovascular diseases to PCOS to acne and even mood swings.
The reason why I loved this book are many. One, it's not just a lot of theory. She combines lived experiences (of herself and others in the community), scientific research, and experiments (to validate) to show how it works. Two, she layers that with the overall science behind why they work that way. Three, she does so in the most accessible manner. And finally, she doesn't just point out the problems, she also provides solutions and paths to address them.
The book is divided into three parts. The first explains the origins of glucose and why it is important. While we colloquially call them all carbs, glucose, fructose, sucrose, starch, fibre are all varied forms and have different impact.
The second describes how dysregulated glucose levels and glucose spikes affects us in the short-term and the long-term. From hunger pangs at one end to worsened cognitive function at the other. During glucose spikes, the mitochondria quickly get more glucose than they need, some glucose gets converted into fat, and more importantly, molecules called free radicals are released into our system. When there are too many of these, it results in oxidative stress, a driver of heart disease, Type 2 diabetes etc. Glucose also glycates other molecules, damaging them forever. Wrinkles, cataracts etc.
The combination of all these result in inflammation, and chronic inflammation is the source of most chronic illnesses we get.
When we have excess glucose in our body, the pancreas sends out insulin to store it and keep it out of circulation. Liver, muscles and conversion into fat are the three ways it is done. That last bit is how we gain weight. The stored glucose is used when mitochondria needs it, and when glycogen (the glucose in the liver and muscles) gets diminished, our fat reserves come into play. But this cannot happen when insulin is high. (read notes for more on this) There are explanations for why and how each kind of disease related to this happens.
Part 3 is a set of ten (simple) hacks to flatten the glucose curves (reducing glycaemic variability). The first and most useful hack is the order of eating your meal. Veggies (fibre) first, proteins and fats next, and starch/carbs last. Fibre reduces the action of alpha amylase, the enzyme that breaks starch into glucose, it slows down gastric emptying, and creates a mesh which makes it difficult for glucose to get into the bloodstream. My second favourite hack was #7 - drinking apple cider vinegar before eating sweets. Acetic acid in vinegar temporarily inactivates alpha amylase.
Again, this is a fantastic book because of its actionable insights and the accessibility. Highly recommended.

Notes
1. Any food made from flour has starch
2. We like sweetness because back in the Stone Age the taste of sweetness signalled foods were safe (there are no foods that are sweet and poisonous). It gives us a dopamine hit.
3. Mitochondrial stress causes cells to lose their smooth shape. The lining becomes bumpy and fat particles get stuck more easily. LDL (B) does exactly this. If an when cholesterol gets oxidised (happens when more glucose, fructose, insulin are present), it creates plaque. Triglycerides become LDL (B). A good measurement is triglycerides/HDL. If it's less than 2, great
4. Insulin treatment brings down glucose temporarily but is harmful in the long run.
5. Sugar is sugar, whether it comes from fruit or table sugar. Relatively the first is better.
6. Similar story with whole grains. Dark bread/ seed breads are relatively better.
]]> <![CDATA[The Greatest Malayalam Stories Ever Told]]> 200737356 464 A.J. Thomas 9390652766 Manu 0 3.00 The Greatest Malayalam Stories Ever Told
author: A.J. Thomas
name: Manu
average rating: 3.00
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2024/05/13
date added: 2024/05/13
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets]]> 18081132 244 Michael J. Sandel 0241954487 Manu 4 review The book starts with multiple examples of what I would call the overreach of markets - upgrading a prison cell, the right to shoot an endangered black rhino, stand in line in Capitol Hill in place of a lobbyist, get paid in primary school to read a book, pay life insurance premium on behalf of an elderly person you don't know and collect the payout after their death, and so on. Sandel points out that it is not just greed, it is the expansion of the market into spheres of life we once thought were beyond it.
"Drifting from having a market economy to being a market society." The former is a tool for organising productive activity, the latter is one in which social relations are made over in the image of the market.
In the subsequent chapters, he provides a huge set of scenarios where this is playing out. Examples of jumping the queue using money - from fast tracks in airports and supermarkets to hiring people to stand in queues in Capitol Hill or exclusive events. A rare opposite is Springsteen's concerts whose pricing reflects that he sees it more as a social event than a market good. The principles of 'wait in line' and 'don't jump the queue' are relics.
Monetary incentives are being used for everything from sterilisation to good grades to losing weight to immigration, and refugees (paying another country to take your share) to pollution permits and carbon credits. An insightful point is the nuance between fines and fees. Fine carries moral weight, it points out that you're doing something wrong, fees is a transaction. Sandel notes how economics tries to stay away from ethics and quotes Levitt and Dubner, "Morality represents the way we would like the world to work, and economics represents how it actually does work." But by getting into social aspects, this distinction starts to blur.
When money gets introduced into the social sphere, it starts crowding out morality - in China, you can hire someone to apologise on your behalf. But you needn't go that far - cash vs a wedding gift, and the middle ground of a gift card is a good example to chew on. There is also the counter example of a town in Switzerland which agreed to be a waste site for nuclear material considering their civic duty, but promptly withdrew when each resident was offered monetary compensation. Another example is the Israeli day care, where introducing fines for parents who came late to pick up their kids increased the number of late arrivals, because it eroded the parents' sense of responsibility by making it a transaction.
Even life and death are not exempt. The good use case of insurance is transformed into what is called janitors insurance. Companies buy insurance on behalf of employees without their knowledge and cash in, creating a revenue source! Then there are viatical investments - say a person with a $100000 policy is told that he has a year to live. An investor buys that for half the price in cash, which the patient uses for treatment. The investor collects the insurance after the patient's death! Thus people have an incentive for another person's death! Insurance had been prohibited for centuries just to prevent this! But now, investors buy insurance of elderly people using the same tricks. It is a major industry. There are also sites that apparently allow bets on celebrities dying in a particular year.
Naming rights of public places in lieu of payment is another area of infringement. It has moved beyond stadia and sports to prisons and schools. In the latter, the corporate spin is allowed to varnish or even omit truth.
In all of this, two objections usually arise from those who oppose this- fairness and corruption. Fairness, because when money is introduced, those without it start losing access. Corruption, not in the way we normally use it, but how it degrades the original quality of the interaction. The Swiss and Israel examples point to that. Ironically economists see altruism as a valuable and rare good that depletes when used too much. And therein probably begins the warped worldview.
But as Sandel himself admits, this is a discussion on what we define as a good life, and whether that's what we want to lead. Public discourse is increasingly becoming devoid of moral and spiritual substance and money continues its march. Call me a cynic, but I am struggling to see a way out. An excellent book to read, to at least remember how the world and humanity used to be.]]> 3.97 2012 What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets
author: Michael J. Sandel
name: Manu
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2012
rating: 4
read at: 2023/05/20
date added: 2024/05/11
shelves: review
review:
Michael J. Sandel's 'The Tyranny of Merit', which questions what has become of 'common good', remains a favourite because it touched upon a topic that is not found commonly in public discourse. "What Money Can't Buy" continues that approach, and is about the invasion of market economics into areas of life that were previously considered above it - education, government, our physical body, and family life, among others. The book is about whether there is a moral limit to the reach of markets. I was reminded of "When money is made the measure of all things, it becomes the measure of all things."
The book starts with multiple examples of what I would call the overreach of markets - upgrading a prison cell, the right to shoot an endangered black rhino, stand in line in Capitol Hill in place of a lobbyist, get paid in primary school to read a book, pay life insurance premium on behalf of an elderly person you don't know and collect the payout after their death, and so on. Sandel points out that it is not just greed, it is the expansion of the market into spheres of life we once thought were beyond it.
"Drifting from having a market economy to being a market society." The former is a tool for organising productive activity, the latter is one in which social relations are made over in the image of the market.
In the subsequent chapters, he provides a huge set of scenarios where this is playing out. Examples of jumping the queue using money - from fast tracks in airports and supermarkets to hiring people to stand in queues in Capitol Hill or exclusive events. A rare opposite is Springsteen's concerts whose pricing reflects that he sees it more as a social event than a market good. The principles of 'wait in line' and 'don't jump the queue' are relics.
Monetary incentives are being used for everything from sterilisation to good grades to losing weight to immigration, and refugees (paying another country to take your share) to pollution permits and carbon credits. An insightful point is the nuance between fines and fees. Fine carries moral weight, it points out that you're doing something wrong, fees is a transaction. Sandel notes how economics tries to stay away from ethics and quotes Levitt and Dubner, "Morality represents the way we would like the world to work, and economics represents how it actually does work." But by getting into social aspects, this distinction starts to blur.
When money gets introduced into the social sphere, it starts crowding out morality - in China, you can hire someone to apologise on your behalf. But you needn't go that far - cash vs a wedding gift, and the middle ground of a gift card is a good example to chew on. There is also the counter example of a town in Switzerland which agreed to be a waste site for nuclear material considering their civic duty, but promptly withdrew when each resident was offered monetary compensation. Another example is the Israeli day care, where introducing fines for parents who came late to pick up their kids increased the number of late arrivals, because it eroded the parents' sense of responsibility by making it a transaction.
Even life and death are not exempt. The good use case of insurance is transformed into what is called janitors insurance. Companies buy insurance on behalf of employees without their knowledge and cash in, creating a revenue source! Then there are viatical investments - say a person with a $100000 policy is told that he has a year to live. An investor buys that for half the price in cash, which the patient uses for treatment. The investor collects the insurance after the patient's death! Thus people have an incentive for another person's death! Insurance had been prohibited for centuries just to prevent this! But now, investors buy insurance of elderly people using the same tricks. It is a major industry. There are also sites that apparently allow bets on celebrities dying in a particular year.
Naming rights of public places in lieu of payment is another area of infringement. It has moved beyond stadia and sports to prisons and schools. In the latter, the corporate spin is allowed to varnish or even omit truth.
In all of this, two objections usually arise from those who oppose this- fairness and corruption. Fairness, because when money is introduced, those without it start losing access. Corruption, not in the way we normally use it, but how it degrades the original quality of the interaction. The Swiss and Israel examples point to that. Ironically economists see altruism as a valuable and rare good that depletes when used too much. And therein probably begins the warped worldview.
But as Sandel himself admits, this is a discussion on what we define as a good life, and whether that's what we want to lead. Public discourse is increasingly becoming devoid of moral and spiritual substance and money continues its march. Call me a cynic, but I am struggling to see a way out. An excellent book to read, to at least remember how the world and humanity used to be.
]]> <![CDATA[The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous]]> 56155126 'A landmark in social thought. Henrich may go down as the most influential social scientist of the first half of the twenty-first century' MATTHEW SYED

Do you identify yourself by your profession or achievements, rather than your family network? Do you cultivate your unique attributes and goals? If so, perhaps you are WEIRD: raised in a society that is Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic.

Unlike most who have ever lived, WEIRD people are highly individualistic, nonconformist, analytical and control-oriented. How did WEIRD populations become so psychologically peculiar? What part did these differences play in our history, and what do they mean for our collective identity?

Joseph Henrich, who developed the game-changing concept of WEIRD, uses leading-edge research in anthropology, psychology, economics and evolutionary biology to explore how changing family structures, marriage practices and religious beliefs in the Middle Ages shaped the Western mind, laying the foundations for the world we know today. Brilliant, provocative, engaging and surprising, this landmark study will revolutionize your understanding of who - and how - we are now.

'Phenomenal ... The only theory I am aware of that attempts to explain broad patterns of human psychology on a global scale' Washington Post

'You will never look again in the same way at your own seemingly universal values' Uta Frith, Professor of Cognitive Development, University College London

]]> 680 Joseph Henrich 0141976217 Manu 5 review He sets the stage with the influence of Protestantism in this. Its credo of the individual's personal relationship with God spurred the belief that a person should read the Bible (sola scriptura), increasing literacy in the process. But beyond this, he points out that religious convictions shape decision-making, psychology, society and culture at large.
But what is the WEIRD psychology? Broadly individualism and personal motivation (self focus, guilt over shame, dispositional thinking - based on intent not context, low conformity, self regulation and control and patience, time thrift, value of labour, desire for control and choice); impersonal prosociality (impartial principles, trust, honesty and cooperation with strangers and impersonal institutions, emphasising mental states in moral judgment, not revengeful but willing to punish third parties for not sticking to principles, reduced in-group favouritism, free will, belief in moral truths like physics principles, linear time), and perceptual and cognitive abilities and biases (analytical over holistic thinking, attention to foreground and not surroundings, endowment effect, overconfidence on own abilities)
To understand how people became WEIRD, he brings up the importance of cultural learning in evolutionary psychology. "Unlike other animals, we have evolved genetically to rely on learning from others to acquire an immense amount of behavioural information, including motivations, heuristics, and beliefs that are central to our survival and reproduction." From our own motor patterns to projectile technology and food processing to grammar and social norms. Cultural learning adaptively rewires our brains and biology to calibrate them for navigating our culturally constructed worlds. This is cumulative cultural evolution.
It started off with kinship altruism, which other primates too possess, and extended to pair bonding and marriage, which is the most primeval of the institutions we have created. Preferred sexual access and a guarantee of paternity in return for protection and providing for the family. This paternity certainty and norms to cement it is where we start differing from most other primates. This also creates in-laws (affines) forming connections with more people who are not genetically related. From there on, basic communal rituals like dance, drills etc also bind people together with "mind hacks" through mimicry and a suggestion that others are like us and have an affection for us.
The next big shift was agriculture, which necessitated securing and holding lands. This needed co-operation and gave an edge to those communities with more social norms - rituals, beliefs etc. Fierce competition between groups generated a coevolutionary interaction between agriculture and societal complexity. And so, though farming was less productive and even nutritious than hunting and gathering at an individual level, between sedentism and productivity of the unskilled (young) labour, farmer communities just reproduced more quickly and removed/assimilated hunter-gatherers.
Further inter-group competition led to clans which were kin-based institutions. These then became chiefdoms and premodern states. Built on norms and beliefs. And then non-kin based institutions developed between the elites and others to create stratified societies. e.g armies, tax collection.
In the meanwhile, religion, based on our supernatural beliefs and worldviews, started scaling cultural evolution by creating 'doctrinal' rituals - prayers, hymns, parables etc and being transmitted by successful people - prophets and community leaders. These gave people a sense of unified commitment (conforming) and further evolved with identity markers- dresses, ornaments, taboos etc. By powerfully shaping behaviour and psychology, religion played a key role in forming higher-level political and economic institutions.
Thus begins another central point in the book - the role of the Church (and its MFP - Marriage and Family Program) in creating WEIRD people. The Church systematically started breaking the foundational kin-based societies using prohibitions and canon laws (marriage, adoption, divorce, polygamy, wills etc) over many centuries in Europe, 'threatening' people with divine retribution (in the afterlife) and excommunication (immediate). By allowing rich patrons to 'pay' with money and church-building, the Church continued to grow at the expense of the kin networks
With more and more people marrying and working outside the kin network, cultural evolution started favouring a psychology that was more individualistic, analytically-oriented, guilt-ridden (as opposed to shame - guilt depends on one’s own standards and self-evaluation while shame depends on societal standards and public judgement) and intention focused (in judging others) as opposed to being bound by tradition, elder authority, and general conformity.
An important part is how monogamy became a norm though logically polygynous works for both men and women (because women could be second wife to the best hunter rather than only wife to an average hunter). It evolved because it can give religious groups and societies an advantage in intergroup competition. By suppressing male-male competition an altering family structure, monogamous marriage shifts men's psychology in ways that tend to reduce crime, violence, and zero-sum thinking while promoting broader trust, long term investments and steady economic accumulation. Basically a testosterone-suppression system to reduce intra group competition. Between this and suppressed fertility (increased age of marriage, no pressure from kin, education for women) nuclear families started to focus on investing in their child - nutrition and education.
These changes also led to urbanisation as people travelled to places where they could find mates, vocation etc and expanded impersonal networks (trust in strangers as opposed to interpersonal kin networks) based on interests and worldviews, leading to universities, guilds and charter towns, who competed with each other to attract people. A pre cursor to the transition to political parties in later centuries. Another factor at play was wars. Though intuitively, one might think it derails progress, it actually builds intra group bonding and spurs technological advancements.
A rising middle class started demanding more rights, freedoms and privileges, leading to refinement of ideas, and acceptance of concepts like ownership and laws. Between this, impersonal networks and commerce, attributes like patience, time thrift (fascinating how clocks developed and changed the notion of time - wages per hour, need for efficiency, common market hours, contracts), self-regulation and positive-sum thinking (everyone can gain by advancements, I don't need to be selfish or envious) began being appreciated as qualities one would want in self and other people, in order to distinguish themselves and prosper. These mindsets explains the kind of representative governments, laws, and the innovation and economic growth since then. The Industrial Revolution, for example, was fuelled by the expanding size and interconnectedness of Europe's collective brain. In the political sphere, Protestantism, also a part of the larger religious cultural evolution, encouraged democratic institutions. Unlike the hierarchical Church, it requires communities to develop self-governing religious organisations using democratic principles. The cultural evolution can also explain things like patent concentration (in countries and regions) and economic characteristics at large in the contemporary era.
I can now easily see how the same principles apply to even India in the last say, five decades - better connectivity, educational institutions, urbanisation, reduction of kin bonds, and how that makes the 1% in the country closer to WEIRD than their own ancestors. This is a fascinating book supported by a ton of data and studies, and my only complaint is that like many other academics, Henrich too succumbs to the tendency of extensive usage of the latter at the risk of the narrative flow (instead of an appendix). But I'd still recommend it and between this, "Being You" (reality as a controlled hallucination and the brain only seeking to survive/control), and "The Master and His Emissary" (the hijacking of the narrative by the left brain especially since the Industrial Revolution), there emerges a phenomenally insightful view of the brain, its motivations and the interaction with cultural evolution. I really must repeat all these three soonest! ]]> 4.09 2020 The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous
author: Joseph Henrich
name: Manu
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2024/05/06
date added: 2024/05/07
shelves: review
review:
As an anthropologist, Joseph Henrich realised that much of the published work (and hence commentary) on human psychology (and social sciences at large) were based on work with experimental subjects who were based in or around Western universities. And when attempts were made to replicate these results with people in Africa/Asia, some of them even elites, it came to light that the subject pool was biased. They were WEIRD - Western, educated, industrialised, rich, democratic - and though only a small part of the species, are disproportionately represented in culture and thinking. How did this happen?
He sets the stage with the influence of Protestantism in this. Its credo of the individual's personal relationship with God spurred the belief that a person should read the Bible (sola scriptura), increasing literacy in the process. But beyond this, he points out that religious convictions shape decision-making, psychology, society and culture at large.
But what is the WEIRD psychology? Broadly individualism and personal motivation (self focus, guilt over shame, dispositional thinking - based on intent not context, low conformity, self regulation and control and patience, time thrift, value of labour, desire for control and choice); impersonal prosociality (impartial principles, trust, honesty and cooperation with strangers and impersonal institutions, emphasising mental states in moral judgment, not revengeful but willing to punish third parties for not sticking to principles, reduced in-group favouritism, free will, belief in moral truths like physics principles, linear time), and perceptual and cognitive abilities and biases (analytical over holistic thinking, attention to foreground and not surroundings, endowment effect, overconfidence on own abilities)
To understand how people became WEIRD, he brings up the importance of cultural learning in evolutionary psychology. "Unlike other animals, we have evolved genetically to rely on learning from others to acquire an immense amount of behavioural information, including motivations, heuristics, and beliefs that are central to our survival and reproduction." From our own motor patterns to projectile technology and food processing to grammar and social norms. Cultural learning adaptively rewires our brains and biology to calibrate them for navigating our culturally constructed worlds. This is cumulative cultural evolution.
It started off with kinship altruism, which other primates too possess, and extended to pair bonding and marriage, which is the most primeval of the institutions we have created. Preferred sexual access and a guarantee of paternity in return for protection and providing for the family. This paternity certainty and norms to cement it is where we start differing from most other primates. This also creates in-laws (affines) forming connections with more people who are not genetically related. From there on, basic communal rituals like dance, drills etc also bind people together with "mind hacks" through mimicry and a suggestion that others are like us and have an affection for us.
The next big shift was agriculture, which necessitated securing and holding lands. This needed co-operation and gave an edge to those communities with more social norms - rituals, beliefs etc. Fierce competition between groups generated a coevolutionary interaction between agriculture and societal complexity. And so, though farming was less productive and even nutritious than hunting and gathering at an individual level, between sedentism and productivity of the unskilled (young) labour, farmer communities just reproduced more quickly and removed/assimilated hunter-gatherers.
Further inter-group competition led to clans which were kin-based institutions. These then became chiefdoms and premodern states. Built on norms and beliefs. And then non-kin based institutions developed between the elites and others to create stratified societies. e.g armies, tax collection.
In the meanwhile, religion, based on our supernatural beliefs and worldviews, started scaling cultural evolution by creating 'doctrinal' rituals - prayers, hymns, parables etc and being transmitted by successful people - prophets and community leaders. These gave people a sense of unified commitment (conforming) and further evolved with identity markers- dresses, ornaments, taboos etc. By powerfully shaping behaviour and psychology, religion played a key role in forming higher-level political and economic institutions.
Thus begins another central point in the book - the role of the Church (and its MFP - Marriage and Family Program) in creating WEIRD people. The Church systematically started breaking the foundational kin-based societies using prohibitions and canon laws (marriage, adoption, divorce, polygamy, wills etc) over many centuries in Europe, 'threatening' people with divine retribution (in the afterlife) and excommunication (immediate). By allowing rich patrons to 'pay' with money and church-building, the Church continued to grow at the expense of the kin networks
With more and more people marrying and working outside the kin network, cultural evolution started favouring a psychology that was more individualistic, analytically-oriented, guilt-ridden (as opposed to shame - guilt depends on one’s own standards and self-evaluation while shame depends on societal standards and public judgement) and intention focused (in judging others) as opposed to being bound by tradition, elder authority, and general conformity.
An important part is how monogamy became a norm though logically polygynous works for both men and women (because women could be second wife to the best hunter rather than only wife to an average hunter). It evolved because it can give religious groups and societies an advantage in intergroup competition. By suppressing male-male competition an altering family structure, monogamous marriage shifts men's psychology in ways that tend to reduce crime, violence, and zero-sum thinking while promoting broader trust, long term investments and steady economic accumulation. Basically a testosterone-suppression system to reduce intra group competition. Between this and suppressed fertility (increased age of marriage, no pressure from kin, education for women) nuclear families started to focus on investing in their child - nutrition and education.
These changes also led to urbanisation as people travelled to places where they could find mates, vocation etc and expanded impersonal networks (trust in strangers as opposed to interpersonal kin networks) based on interests and worldviews, leading to universities, guilds and charter towns, who competed with each other to attract people. A pre cursor to the transition to political parties in later centuries. Another factor at play was wars. Though intuitively, one might think it derails progress, it actually builds intra group bonding and spurs technological advancements.
A rising middle class started demanding more rights, freedoms and privileges, leading to refinement of ideas, and acceptance of concepts like ownership and laws. Between this, impersonal networks and commerce, attributes like patience, time thrift (fascinating how clocks developed and changed the notion of time - wages per hour, need for efficiency, common market hours, contracts), self-regulation and positive-sum thinking (everyone can gain by advancements, I don't need to be selfish or envious) began being appreciated as qualities one would want in self and other people, in order to distinguish themselves and prosper. These mindsets explains the kind of representative governments, laws, and the innovation and economic growth since then. The Industrial Revolution, for example, was fuelled by the expanding size and interconnectedness of Europe's collective brain. In the political sphere, Protestantism, also a part of the larger religious cultural evolution, encouraged democratic institutions. Unlike the hierarchical Church, it requires communities to develop self-governing religious organisations using democratic principles. The cultural evolution can also explain things like patent concentration (in countries and regions) and economic characteristics at large in the contemporary era.
I can now easily see how the same principles apply to even India in the last say, five decades - better connectivity, educational institutions, urbanisation, reduction of kin bonds, and how that makes the 1% in the country closer to WEIRD than their own ancestors. This is a fascinating book supported by a ton of data and studies, and my only complaint is that like many other academics, Henrich too succumbs to the tendency of extensive usage of the latter at the risk of the narrative flow (instead of an appendix). But I'd still recommend it and between this, "Being You" (reality as a controlled hallucination and the brain only seeking to survive/control), and "The Master and His Emissary" (the hijacking of the narrative by the left brain especially since the Industrial Revolution), there emerges a phenomenally insightful view of the brain, its motivations and the interaction with cultural evolution. I really must repeat all these three soonest!
]]> <![CDATA[Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes]]> 201762999
Everyone wants to see the future. Few are good at it. From business to economics, politics to social trends, we’re just not very good at predicting what happens next.

According to Morgan Housel, this is because we focus too much on what we think will change and not enough on what we know will stay the same.

If you traveled in time to 500 years ago or 500 years from now, you would be astounded at how much technology and medicine has changed. The geopolitical order would make no sense to you. The language and dialect may be completely foreign.ÌýBut you’d notice people falling for greed and fear just like they do in our current world.

You’d see people persuaded by risk, jealousy, and tribal affiliations in ways that are familiar to you.

You’d see overconfidence and short-sightedness that reminds you of people's behavior today.

You’d find people seeking the secret to a happy life and trying to find certainty when none exists in ways that are so relatable.Ìý

When transported to an unfamiliar world, you’d spend a few minutes watching people behave and say, “Ah. I’ve seen this before. Same as ever.â€

History is filled with surprises no one could have seen coming. But if we learn to see what doesn’t change, we can be more confident in our choices, no matter what the future brings.]]> 224 Morgan Housel 1804090948 Manu 0 review To begin with, I think you shouldn't expect the refreshing sense you'd get from the previous book. This is even more so if you've been reading the Collab Blog. The book's cover promises 'timeless lessons on risk, opportunity, and living a good life' and to some extent, delivers on all. There are many extremely good insights and the pithy ways in which Housel articulates profound truths continue to be a source of 'aha'.
What I missed though was the smooth flow of the previous book. It doesn't help that many of the chapters seem to be force fitted into a narrative, and many anecdotes and other content are from the blog. Housel does go for a structure but I think it might have helped if this were presented as just a series of essays. He does say that these are standalone but then also proceeds to try connections at the end of each chapter. The overall experience therefore is a little jarring.
Having said that, this is a useful book to read, with some great but lesser-known anecdotes, and indeed, timeless insights.

Notes and Quotes
"Risk is what's left over after you think you've thought of everything" ~ Carl Richards
"Invest in preparedness, not in prediction" ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Money brings happiness the same way drugs bring pleasure: incredible if done right, dangerous if used to mask a weakness, and disastrous when no amount is enough.
"The majority of Americans were likely than their descendants to be dogged by the frightening sense of insecurity that comes from being jostled by forces - economic, political, international - beyond one's ken. Their horizons were close to them." ~ Frederick Lewis Allen (1900)
People don't want accuracy. They want certainty.
If you have the right answer, you may or may not get ahead. If you've the wrong answer but you're a good storyteller, you'll probably get ahead (for a while). If you've the right answer and you're a good storyteller you'll most certainly get ahead.
"Humour is a good way to show you're smart without bragging" ~ Mark Twain
"The higher the monkey climbs a tree, the more you can see his ass" ~ T. Boone Pickens
"A mind that is stretched by new experience can never go back to its old dimensions" ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes ]]> 4.07 2023 Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes
author: Morgan Housel
name: Manu
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2024/04/26
date added: 2024/04/26
shelves: review
review:
"The Psychology of Money" is acknowledged as a game changer. It gave me fresh perspectives, validation, and the confidence to continue on the path I had set out on financially. So it wasn't surprising that I was looking forward to this book.
To begin with, I think you shouldn't expect the refreshing sense you'd get from the previous book. This is even more so if you've been reading the Collab Blog. The book's cover promises 'timeless lessons on risk, opportunity, and living a good life' and to some extent, delivers on all. There are many extremely good insights and the pithy ways in which Housel articulates profound truths continue to be a source of 'aha'.
What I missed though was the smooth flow of the previous book. It doesn't help that many of the chapters seem to be force fitted into a narrative, and many anecdotes and other content are from the blog. Housel does go for a structure but I think it might have helped if this were presented as just a series of essays. He does say that these are standalone but then also proceeds to try connections at the end of each chapter. The overall experience therefore is a little jarring.
Having said that, this is a useful book to read, with some great but lesser-known anecdotes, and indeed, timeless insights.

Notes and Quotes
"Risk is what's left over after you think you've thought of everything" ~ Carl Richards
"Invest in preparedness, not in prediction" ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Money brings happiness the same way drugs bring pleasure: incredible if done right, dangerous if used to mask a weakness, and disastrous when no amount is enough.
"The majority of Americans were likely than their descendants to be dogged by the frightening sense of insecurity that comes from being jostled by forces - economic, political, international - beyond one's ken. Their horizons were close to them." ~ Frederick Lewis Allen (1900)
People don't want accuracy. They want certainty.
If you have the right answer, you may or may not get ahead. If you've the wrong answer but you're a good storyteller, you'll probably get ahead (for a while). If you've the right answer and you're a good storyteller you'll most certainly get ahead.
"Humour is a good way to show you're smart without bragging" ~ Mark Twain
"The higher the monkey climbs a tree, the more you can see his ass" ~ T. Boone Pickens
"A mind that is stretched by new experience can never go back to its old dimensions" ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes
]]> The Stranger in the Lifeboat 139562022 0 Mitch Albom 075158455X Manu 0 4.00 2021 The Stranger in the Lifeboat
author: Mitch Albom
name: Manu
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2024/04/23
date added: 2024/04/23
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Being You: A New Science of Consciousness]]> 58944907 THE TOP 10 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

Anil Seth's radical new theory of consciousness challenges our understanding of perception and reality, doing for brain science what Dawkins did for evolutionary biology.

'A brilliant beast of a book. Seth proposes to explain not just what and how we are, but why we are the way we are. Hugely inspirational.'
DAVID BYRNE

'Insightful and profound. The nature of consciousness is still one of the hardest problems in science, but Anil Seth brings us closer than ever before to the answer. This a hugely important book.'
JIM AL-KHALILI

'Anil Seth thinks clearly and sharply on one of the hardest problems of science and philosophy, cutting through weeds with a scientist's mind and a storyteller's skill.'
ADAM RUTHERFORD

'Seth provokes us to think about thinking . . . readable, relatable, and gripping.'
ALEX GARLAND, director of Ex Machina

'Amazing . . . a brilliant read.'
RUSSELL BRAND

'An exhilarating book: a vast-ranging, phenomenal achievement that will undoubtedly become a seminal text.' GAIA VINCE, GUARDIAN (Book of the Day)

'Likely to be one of the most important books of 2021.' FIVE BOOKS
Being You is not as simple as it sounds. Somehow, within each of our brains, billions of neurons work to create our conscious experience. How does this happen? Why do we experience life in the first person? After over twenty years researching the brain, world-renowned neuroscientist Anil Seth puts forward a radical new theory of consciousness and self. His unique theory of what it means to 'be you' challenges our understanding of perception and reality and it turns what you thought you knew about yourself on its head.

'A fascinating book. A joy to read. Anil Seth explores fundamental questions about consciousness and the self from the perspective of a philosophically-informed neuroscientist. Highly recommended.'
NIGEL WARBURTON

'Offers us new cause for astonishment and wonder . . . a must-read for anyone seeking a better understanding of the brain and how nature sculpts the human exprerience.'
ANNAKA HARRIS, author of Conscious

'Few people are as well positioned as Anil Seth to tackle the question of consciousness. Beautifully written, crystal clear, deeply insightful.'
DAVID EAGLEMAN, Pulitzer Prize-nominated author of Livewired

'Truly compelling.'
PROFESSOR KARL FRISTON, Universty College London

'A wonderfully accessible and comprehensive account of how our minds capture the world, and how that makes us who we are.'
SEAN CARROLL, author of Something Deeply Hidden]]> 358 Anil Seth 0571337724 Manu 5 review Being ourselves is not something we are always conscious of.* Anil Seth sets out to explore how billions of neurons within the brain end up creating a conscious experience - a uniquely personal, first person experience. The book is divided into four sections - defining the 'problem' and showing the approach to the scientific exploration of consciousness, looking at it through how it relates to 'content' and external phenomena, and then going inwards to the experiences of conscious selfhood, and finally applying the learning to non-human entities - animals and AI.
In the first section, Seth brings up the 'hard' and 'real' problems of consciousness. The first (David Chalmers) is focused on how consciousness happens, how it is related to our biophysical machinery and how it is connected to the universe at large. On the other hand, the 'real' problem is how the 'primary goals of consciousness science is to explain, predict and control the phenomenological properties of conscious experience.' i.e. why is a particular experience the way it is, and what is its relation with what is happening with the brain and body. In other words, deeply understanding the connection between mind and matter. The latter approach would need measurement.
This begins with understanding 'conscious levels' - complete absence (e.g. coma) to light sleep to waking states. Conscious content is what we are conscious of - sights, smells, emotions, moods, thoughts, beliefs - all sorts of perception. There is a very interesting part on how psychedelic states are at a conscious level well above waking state, and have the maximum algorithmic complexity (a measure of the diversity of signals). Another interesting proposal is how all conscious experiences are informative and integrated, (red ball vs red and ball separately) leading to the integrated information theory (IIT) of consciousness, an axiomatic approach that starts with theories and use them to support claims on what properties the mechanisms underlying the experiences will have.
The next section is about conscious content and then the experience of a conscious self. Here's where the idea of perception gets upturned. Perception is a 'controlled hallucination' (phrase by Chris Frith), an active construction as opposed to a passive registering of an external reality. The brain constantly makes predictions about the causes of its sensory signals through a Bayesian process in which the sensory signals (also) continuously rein in the brain's various hypotheses. Perception is a continual process of prediction error minimisation (reducing the difference between what the brain expects and what the signal provides).
Reality is an interpretation, and the entire process is not optimised for accuracy, it is designed for utility. 'We perceive the world not as it is, but as it is useful to us.' A mechanism of making it seem real so we respond to it. Not to know the world, but to survive it! There is the fascinating part on colour - an object is not objectively 'red', redness is just the way in which it reflects light, and how the brain perceives it. And this applies to all of our perceptions. Mind effing bending! A great distinction here (John Locke) is on why that train is not just a perception and you shouldn't jump in front of it. Objects have primary qualities that exist independently of an observer (e.g. space it occupies, movement, solidity), and secondary qualities that depend on the observer (e.g. colour)
The self, as shown in the next section, is also a perception, a controlled hallucination. To begin with, selfhood is divided into an embodied (being a body), perspectival (having a first-person perspective), volitional (having 'free will') and narrative (personal identity and deep emotions), social (how I perceive others perceiving me). The link between perception and the body and its physiological processes exist in all these forms. When we flip the learning from the previous section inwards, we understand that we do not perceive ourselves to know ourselves, we do it in order to control ourselves'. The entire panorama of experience and the mental life and thus its perceptions and cognitions stems from a deep-seated biological drive to stay alive.
I found the part on why we think we are stable and unchanging over time, very interesting. Perceptual inference is about finding out things about the outside world. Interoceptive inference is about controlling things - physiological regulation. In the latter, the prediction error minimisation happens by acting to fulfil top-down predictions of the brain. The brain, for survival, desires predicted ranges of physiological viability and thus the need for strong, precise and self-fulfilling predictions. And if it comes to that, the brain will (and does) systematically misperceive.
The end of the section also brings in the complex but fascinating FEP (free energy principle) and specifically how it applies to living systems and consciousness. In this context, it boils down to this - being alive means being in a condition of low entropy. Any living system, to resist entropy, must occupy states which it expects to be in. Free energy here approximates sensory entropy, and apparently, it amounts to the same thing as prediction error. Broadly, that connection with physics and the universe, and the brain's regulation of the perception of the worlds outside and inside! Appealing, but they're still ironing out many wrinkles.
I found the last parts - free will, and consciousness in animals and AI to be areas which are still under much (more) debate, and therefore more descriptive than insightful. That is not to say that it does not merit a read! It is just that the 200+ pages before were so rich and intense that on a purely relative scale, this seemed less so.
As I said, this is most definitely not an easy book, but it does such a fantastic job of providing that glimpse and promise that we might actually get answers to our most basic and profound questions that one automatically cheers for the understanding that each chapter provides. Also the kind of book that makes me wish I were smarter - to really grasp the entirety of it! It also made me think of how science and spirituality seem to converge - the latter's approach to reducing wants and desires, and increasing mindfulness as a means to prediction error minimisation. :)

Notes and Quotes
"The essence of selfhood is neither a rational mind nor an immaterial soul. It is a deeply embodied biological process.."
"Wherever there is experience, there is phenomenology, wherever there is phenomenology there is consciousness."
Deductive (reaching conclusions by logic), inductive (extrapolating from a series of observations) and abductive reasoning (the best explanation from a series of observations)


*now that I have read the book, I am analysing this sentence!]]> 3.94 2020 Being You: A New Science of Consciousness
author: Anil Seth
name: Manu
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2024/04/19
date added: 2024/04/21
shelves: review
review:
I have to confess, I will need to read this again. I also want to. For two reasons. First, the subject is something I feel is important - understanding consciousness through the lens of a scientific method. Second, grasping all of the material in Anil Seth's fascinating exploration, I feel, is impossible with a single read. Having said that, the first read is indeed enlightening.
Being ourselves is not something we are always conscious of.* Anil Seth sets out to explore how billions of neurons within the brain end up creating a conscious experience - a uniquely personal, first person experience. The book is divided into four sections - defining the 'problem' and showing the approach to the scientific exploration of consciousness, looking at it through how it relates to 'content' and external phenomena, and then going inwards to the experiences of conscious selfhood, and finally applying the learning to non-human entities - animals and AI.
In the first section, Seth brings up the 'hard' and 'real' problems of consciousness. The first (David Chalmers) is focused on how consciousness happens, how it is related to our biophysical machinery and how it is connected to the universe at large. On the other hand, the 'real' problem is how the 'primary goals of consciousness science is to explain, predict and control the phenomenological properties of conscious experience.' i.e. why is a particular experience the way it is, and what is its relation with what is happening with the brain and body. In other words, deeply understanding the connection between mind and matter. The latter approach would need measurement.
This begins with understanding 'conscious levels' - complete absence (e.g. coma) to light sleep to waking states. Conscious content is what we are conscious of - sights, smells, emotions, moods, thoughts, beliefs - all sorts of perception. There is a very interesting part on how psychedelic states are at a conscious level well above waking state, and have the maximum algorithmic complexity (a measure of the diversity of signals). Another interesting proposal is how all conscious experiences are informative and integrated, (red ball vs red and ball separately) leading to the integrated information theory (IIT) of consciousness, an axiomatic approach that starts with theories and use them to support claims on what properties the mechanisms underlying the experiences will have.
The next section is about conscious content and then the experience of a conscious self. Here's where the idea of perception gets upturned. Perception is a 'controlled hallucination' (phrase by Chris Frith), an active construction as opposed to a passive registering of an external reality. The brain constantly makes predictions about the causes of its sensory signals through a Bayesian process in which the sensory signals (also) continuously rein in the brain's various hypotheses. Perception is a continual process of prediction error minimisation (reducing the difference between what the brain expects and what the signal provides).
Reality is an interpretation, and the entire process is not optimised for accuracy, it is designed for utility. 'We perceive the world not as it is, but as it is useful to us.' A mechanism of making it seem real so we respond to it. Not to know the world, but to survive it! There is the fascinating part on colour - an object is not objectively 'red', redness is just the way in which it reflects light, and how the brain perceives it. And this applies to all of our perceptions. Mind effing bending! A great distinction here (John Locke) is on why that train is not just a perception and you shouldn't jump in front of it. Objects have primary qualities that exist independently of an observer (e.g. space it occupies, movement, solidity), and secondary qualities that depend on the observer (e.g. colour)
The self, as shown in the next section, is also a perception, a controlled hallucination. To begin with, selfhood is divided into an embodied (being a body), perspectival (having a first-person perspective), volitional (having 'free will') and narrative (personal identity and deep emotions), social (how I perceive others perceiving me). The link between perception and the body and its physiological processes exist in all these forms. When we flip the learning from the previous section inwards, we understand that we do not perceive ourselves to know ourselves, we do it in order to control ourselves'. The entire panorama of experience and the mental life and thus its perceptions and cognitions stems from a deep-seated biological drive to stay alive.
I found the part on why we think we are stable and unchanging over time, very interesting. Perceptual inference is about finding out things about the outside world. Interoceptive inference is about controlling things - physiological regulation. In the latter, the prediction error minimisation happens by acting to fulfil top-down predictions of the brain. The brain, for survival, desires predicted ranges of physiological viability and thus the need for strong, precise and self-fulfilling predictions. And if it comes to that, the brain will (and does) systematically misperceive.
The end of the section also brings in the complex but fascinating FEP (free energy principle) and specifically how it applies to living systems and consciousness. In this context, it boils down to this - being alive means being in a condition of low entropy. Any living system, to resist entropy, must occupy states which it expects to be in. Free energy here approximates sensory entropy, and apparently, it amounts to the same thing as prediction error. Broadly, that connection with physics and the universe, and the brain's regulation of the perception of the worlds outside and inside! Appealing, but they're still ironing out many wrinkles.
I found the last parts - free will, and consciousness in animals and AI to be areas which are still under much (more) debate, and therefore more descriptive than insightful. That is not to say that it does not merit a read! It is just that the 200+ pages before were so rich and intense that on a purely relative scale, this seemed less so.
As I said, this is most definitely not an easy book, but it does such a fantastic job of providing that glimpse and promise that we might actually get answers to our most basic and profound questions that one automatically cheers for the understanding that each chapter provides. Also the kind of book that makes me wish I were smarter - to really grasp the entirety of it! It also made me think of how science and spirituality seem to converge - the latter's approach to reducing wants and desires, and increasing mindfulness as a means to prediction error minimisation. :)

Notes and Quotes
"The essence of selfhood is neither a rational mind nor an immaterial soul. It is a deeply embodied biological process.."
"Wherever there is experience, there is phenomenology, wherever there is phenomenology there is consciousness."
Deductive (reaching conclusions by logic), inductive (extrapolating from a series of observations) and abductive reasoning (the best explanation from a series of observations)


*now that I have read the book, I am analysing this sentence!
]]> Imperium (Cicero, #1) 6511526
The stranger is a Sicilian, a victim of the island's corrupt Roman governor, Verres. The senator is Cicero, a brilliant young lawyer and spellbinding orator, determined to attain imperium - supreme power in the state.

This is the starting-point of Robert Harris's most accomplished novel to date. Compellingly written in Tiro's voice, it takes us inside the violent, treacherous world of Roman politics, to describe how one man - clever, compassionate, devious, vulnerable - fought to reach the top.]]> 481 Robert Harris 0099527669 Manu 0 4.19 2006 Imperium (Cicero, #1)
author: Robert Harris
name: Manu
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2006
rating: 0
read at: 2024/04/12
date added: 2024/04/12
shelves:
review:

]]> End Times 62971327 From the pioneering co-founder of cliodynamics, the ground-breaking new interdisciplinary science of history, a brilliant big-picture explanation for America's civil strife and its possible endgames

Peter Turchin, one of the most interesting social scientists of our age by any measure, has infused the study of history with approaches and insights from other fields for over a quarter century. The Wealth Pump is the culmination of his work to understand what causes political communities to cohere and what causes them to fall apart, as applied to the current turmoil within the United States.
Back in 2010, Nature magazine asked Turchin, along with other leading scientists, to provide a ten-year forecast. Based on his models, Turchin predicted that America was in a spiral of social disintegration that would lead to a breakdown in the political order ca 2020. As the years passed, and his prediction proved accurate in more and more respects, attention around his work grew. The Wealth Pump distills his framework, its empirical justification, and its highly relevant findings, into an accessible, thought-provoking book that puts the American story into broad historical context.
The lessons of world history are clear, Turchin argues: when the equilibrium between ruling elites and the majority tips too far in favor of elites, political instability is all but inevitable. Before the industrial era, the imbalance between labor and capital, signaled by rising economic inequality, was usually caused by excessive population growth. For the past 250 or so years, it has been laissez-faire government, technological innovation, globalization, and immigration that have tended to disrupt the balance. Whatever the cause, when income inequality surges, the common people suffer, and prosperity flows disproportionately into the hands of the elites.
This vicious cycle is the wealth pump --the mechanism that causes both the relative impoverishment of most people and the increasingly desperate competition among elites. And since the number of positions of real social power remains relatively fixed, the overproduction of elites inevitably leads to frustrated elite aspirants, who harness popular resentment to turn against the established order. History shows that when the elite is riven by too many claimants, when counter-elites are powerful enough to lead effective populist uprisings, then the death knell of the established order is nigh.
In America, the wealth pump has been operating full blast for two generations. In historical terms, our current cycle of elite overproduction and popular immiseration is far along the path to violent political rupture. Time will tell whether Peter Turchin's warning is heeded.]]> 0 Peter Turchin 0241637791 Manu 0 review The book begins with a look at the sources of power and its correlation with wealth. The former is of at least four types - force, wealth, bureaucratic, and ideological. It then takes a quick look at contemporary America, and specifically the reasons for the rise of Trump. I found the parallels with the 1850s, Lincoln, and the Civil war that his election triggered, quite insightful. (it really wasn't just about slavery, the business and economic interests were the much broader canvas)
And how does this power dissipate? From his research, the lessons history teaches is that there are four structural drivers of instability - popular immiseration (impoverishment of the working class) leading to mass mobilisation potential; elite overproduction (too many elites vying for too few seats of power and wealth) leading to intraelite conflict; Failing fiscal health and weakened legitimacy of the state; and geopolitical factors. The second is the most reliable predictor.
With this context, he delves into each of these factors in the subsequent chapters. An interesting point in the popular immiseration is the impact of immigration - how it drives down wages because of the overabundance of labour. In the second- elite overproduction, he quotes Guy Standing on the so-called 'precariat'- "It consists of people who went to college, promised by their parents, teachers, and politicians that this will grant them a career. They soon realise they were sold a lottery ticket and come out without a future and with plenty of debt. This faction is dangerous in a more positive way. They are unlikely to support populists. But they also reject old conservative or social democratic political parties. Intuitively, they are looking for a new politics of paradise, which they do not see in the old political spectrum or in such bodies as trade unions." And David Callahan - "As the ranks of the affluent have swelled over the past two decades, so have the number of kids who receive every advantage in their education. The growing competition in turn, has compelled more parents to spend more money and cut more corners in an effort to give their children an extra edge. Nothing less than an academic arms race is unfolding within the upper sections of U.S. society. Yet even the most heroic - or sleazy - efforts don't guarantee a superior edge."
He then points to how the two parties in the US have moved away from their original audience and stance, and how ideological fragmentation has progressed so far that any classification has become impossible. And we're now dominated by radical politics. America is now a plutocracy - economic elites who are able to influence policy with its "structural economic power". The issues in which they are in disagreement with the common folks always get decided in the elites' favour. Plutocrats are able to create a vulnerability in democracies because they use their wealth to buy mass media, to fund think tanks, and handsomely reward those social influencers who promote their messages. A three part way of controlling public perceptions of practically anything! The chapter 'Why is America a plutocracy' also has an insightful section on why the US didn't turn out like Denmark despite being at roughly the same place at the beginning of the twentieth century.
In the last section, he looks at history to understand the possible outcomes for the US in the future- how the trajectory of post USSR Slavic states - Ukraine, Belarus - and Russia differed. He also goes further back to look at examples of states that have survived by taking measures to prevent collapse -
England in the Chartist period, Russia in the Reform period. In the US now, the Democratic Party is a now of the 10 percent and the 1 percent. And the 1 percent is losing its traditional vehicle - the Republican party, which is increasingly being taken over by right-wing populist factions. Once upon a time, American elites successfully adopted reforms to rebalance the social system. It's either that or they get overthrown.
While Turchin gets technical, the narrative is coherent and insightful. It also brings science to the many signs of decay we see around us. Overall, an excellent read, if you're interested in the broad subject.

Notes
1. George RR Martin based Lannisters in GoT on Lancasters in the 1400s
2. Just as physical contagions were a driver in empires collapsing, idea contagions are in today's environment (Arab Spring)
3. After the Civil War, there was Reconstruction, and then the Gilded Age (excess) followed by the Progressive Era (reforms). For two generations after the 1930s the elite proactively did things for improving the conditions of the masses, but from the 1980s, the concentration of wealth began again. ]]> 4.22 End Times
author: Peter Turchin
name: Manu
average rating: 4.22
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2024/04/04
date added: 2024/04/05
shelves: review
review:
If you've read Asimov's Foundation series, you'd know psychohistory - the 'science' that predicts the future of humanity at large. Peter Turchin is on a similar path, though he does call out the underlying methodology of psychohistory as pseudoscience and in his version, attempts to do it with a lot of data and actual science. The field is cliodynamics, focusing on political integration and disintegration, and state formation and collapse. He and his colleagues have discovered recurring patterns in history over the last ten thousand years, and some common underlying principles on why this happens.
The book begins with a look at the sources of power and its correlation with wealth. The former is of at least four types - force, wealth, bureaucratic, and ideological. It then takes a quick look at contemporary America, and specifically the reasons for the rise of Trump. I found the parallels with the 1850s, Lincoln, and the Civil war that his election triggered, quite insightful. (it really wasn't just about slavery, the business and economic interests were the much broader canvas)
And how does this power dissipate? From his research, the lessons history teaches is that there are four structural drivers of instability - popular immiseration (impoverishment of the working class) leading to mass mobilisation potential; elite overproduction (too many elites vying for too few seats of power and wealth) leading to intraelite conflict; Failing fiscal health and weakened legitimacy of the state; and geopolitical factors. The second is the most reliable predictor.
With this context, he delves into each of these factors in the subsequent chapters. An interesting point in the popular immiseration is the impact of immigration - how it drives down wages because of the overabundance of labour. In the second- elite overproduction, he quotes Guy Standing on the so-called 'precariat'- "It consists of people who went to college, promised by their parents, teachers, and politicians that this will grant them a career. They soon realise they were sold a lottery ticket and come out without a future and with plenty of debt. This faction is dangerous in a more positive way. They are unlikely to support populists. But they also reject old conservative or social democratic political parties. Intuitively, they are looking for a new politics of paradise, which they do not see in the old political spectrum or in such bodies as trade unions." And David Callahan - "As the ranks of the affluent have swelled over the past two decades, so have the number of kids who receive every advantage in their education. The growing competition in turn, has compelled more parents to spend more money and cut more corners in an effort to give their children an extra edge. Nothing less than an academic arms race is unfolding within the upper sections of U.S. society. Yet even the most heroic - or sleazy - efforts don't guarantee a superior edge."
He then points to how the two parties in the US have moved away from their original audience and stance, and how ideological fragmentation has progressed so far that any classification has become impossible. And we're now dominated by radical politics. America is now a plutocracy - economic elites who are able to influence policy with its "structural economic power". The issues in which they are in disagreement with the common folks always get decided in the elites' favour. Plutocrats are able to create a vulnerability in democracies because they use their wealth to buy mass media, to fund think tanks, and handsomely reward those social influencers who promote their messages. A three part way of controlling public perceptions of practically anything! The chapter 'Why is America a plutocracy' also has an insightful section on why the US didn't turn out like Denmark despite being at roughly the same place at the beginning of the twentieth century.
In the last section, he looks at history to understand the possible outcomes for the US in the future- how the trajectory of post USSR Slavic states - Ukraine, Belarus - and Russia differed. He also goes further back to look at examples of states that have survived by taking measures to prevent collapse -
England in the Chartist period, Russia in the Reform period. In the US now, the Democratic Party is a now of the 10 percent and the 1 percent. And the 1 percent is losing its traditional vehicle - the Republican party, which is increasingly being taken over by right-wing populist factions. Once upon a time, American elites successfully adopted reforms to rebalance the social system. It's either that or they get overthrown.
While Turchin gets technical, the narrative is coherent and insightful. It also brings science to the many signs of decay we see around us. Overall, an excellent read, if you're interested in the broad subject.

Notes
1. George RR Martin based Lannisters in GoT on Lancasters in the 1400s
2. Just as physical contagions were a driver in empires collapsing, idea contagions are in today's environment (Arab Spring)
3. After the Civil War, there was Reconstruction, and then the Gilded Age (excess) followed by the Progressive Era (reforms). For two generations after the 1930s the elite proactively did things for improving the conditions of the masses, but from the 1980s, the concentration of wealth began again.
]]> The Authenticity Project 53328371 The Radio 2 Book Club pick, perfect for fans of The Flatshare

'This is the feel-good story, full of hope, that we all need to read right now.' Woman & Home, Book of the Month

‘A joyous, funny read that leaves you all warm inside’ Beth Morrey, author of Saving Missy
--------------------
Six strangers with one universal thing in common: their lives aren’t always what they make them out to be.

What would happen if they told the truth instead?

Julian Jessop is tired of hiding the deep loneliness he feels. So he begins The Authenticity Project – a small green notebook containing the truth about his life.

Leaving the notebook on a table in his friendly neighbourhood café, Julian never expects Monica, the owner, to track him down after finding it. Or that she’ll be inspired to write down her own story.

Little do they realize that such small acts of honesty hold the power to impact all those who discover the notebook and change their lives completely.

Praise for The Authenticity Project :

'A clever, uplifting book that entertains and makes you think.’ Sophie Kinsella

'If you're a fan of Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, read this!' Fabulous

'A warm and endearing tale about truth, friendship and the power of connection.' Mike Gayle

‘One of the best books I’ve read in a long time. Original, engaging and unforgettable.’ Sunday Times bestselling author, Sarah Morgan

‘Full of life’s truths, funny, poignant and ultimately uplifting. I thoroughly enjoyed it.’ Fanny Blake]]> 400 Pooley Clare 1784164690 Manu 0 3.97 2020 The Authenticity Project
author: Pooley Clare
name: Manu
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at: 2024/03/28
date added: 2024/03/28
shelves:
review:

]]> Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers 327 Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers features new chapters on how stress affects sleep and addiction, as well as new insights into anxiety and personality disorder and the impact of spirituality on managing stress.

As Sapolsky explains, most of us do not lie awake at night worrying about whether we have leprosy or malaria. Instead, the diseases we fear—and the ones that plague us now—are illnesses brought on by the slow accumulation of damage, such as heart disease and cancer. When we worry or experience stress, our body turns on the same physiological responses that an animal's does, but we do not resolve conflict in the same way—through fighting or fleeing. Over time, this activation of a stress response makes us sick.]]> 560 Robert M. Sapolsky 0805073698 Manu 0 review He gets the title out of the way very quickly, and this is perhaps the underlying premise of the book - zebras, and the lions who chase them both are stressed, and their bodies are brilliantly adapted to handle these emergencies - fear of life and fear of starvation respectively. Go up to the apex predator - humans, and it can even handle things like drought, famine, pests. But when we include psychological and social disruptions - from finding a parking spot to an unpleasant conversation with a manager/spouse etc - and start worrying about them, we turn on the same physiological responses. When this is chronic (and it is - think about the things you get stressed about daily), the stress response itself becomes harmful to the body, sometimes even more than the stressor itself. Because they were not meant to do this all the while, they were only for emergencies!
The early pages also draw out a significant difference - between homeostasis and allostasis. 'The brain seeks homeostasis', but the concept itself is now modernised because there is no single optimal level (e.g. it can't be the same when sleeping vs skiing) and because we now understand that the point cannot always be reached by a local regulatory mechanism, it requires 'the brain coordinating body-wide changes, often including changes in behaviour'. And this tinkering has its own second-order consequences. Even more complicated because in allostatic thinking, there can be changes made in anticipation of a level going awry. When it is stressed for 'emergencies', the body goes for homeostasis, with consequences in the long run.
The book then traces out the working of the brain - and the regulation of glands and hormones (and how it is different in males and females), before getting into specific areas that stress specialises in! This includes physiological things cardiovascular health, ulcers and IBS, (oh, if only I knew this 3 years ago, I would have been better equipped to deal with idiot doctors) pregnancy and parenting, sex and reproduction, pain, immunity and diseases, memory, sleep, cancer (the jury is still out on this) and aging and death, as well as psychological domains like addiction, depression. It also looks at how temperament and personality can either assist or resist stress.
In the personality section, Sapolsky practically described my (former) Type A personality down to a behavioural "time-pressuredness" (research by Meyer Friedman and colleagues), default hostility, and a persistent sense of insecurity, the last being a predictor of cardiovascular problems. Add to it disciplined, discomfort with ambiguity, and (formerly) repressive in terms of emotional expression, and you have my profile! Damn!
Towards the end, there is also a very interesting section (and studies) on how socio-economic-status (SES) can affect stress. The poor have more chronic daily stressors, and feeling poor (not the same as being poor) in our socioeconomic world (digital media expands 'our' from friends, family and neighbours to anyone on Insta) predicts poor health. Income inequality predicts mortality rates across all ages in the US.
The last chapter is on managing stress - exercise, meditation, increasing control and predictability, social support, finding outlets for frustration. And building coping mechanisms around fixed rules and flexible strategies - when stress management is not working, instead of trying extra hard on our preferred strategy - problem solving/emotional/social support - switch the approach.
I was expecting a fair amount of trudging and it turned out to be that way. But it is definitely fascinating to see the stress fingerprint in so many of our ailments - ranging from very visible to almost invisible. Great book, if you have the interest and patience for it. :)

1. Water shortage in California. Homeostatic solution: mandate smaller water tanks. Allostatic: smaller toilet tanks, convince people to conserve water, buy rice from SE Asia instead of doing water-intensive farming in a semi-arid state.
2. When stressed, the sympathetic nervous system is activated, the parasympathetic nervous system is turned down, the heart shifts into a higher gear, glucocorticoids enter the play enhancing the effects of epinephrine and norepinephrine. As a result blood pressure goes up, the blood sent to nonessential areas like digestive tract and kidneys go down (fascinating how we wet our pants in fear though the kidney function is kept low - basically to remove excess water quickly from the bladder). Chronic use of this mechanism promotes plaque formation in arteries by increasing the chances of blood vessels being damaged and inflamed and the likelihood of platelets, fat, cholesterol sticking to those areas.
3. Also when stressed, the contractions in the colon increase to get rid of the 'dead weight'. See how IBS and diarrhoea works!
4. In a British Victorian family, the mother's favourite son David dies and she takes to bed, ignoring her 6 year old son. And when the boy comes to the darkened room, she asks 'David, is that you?', before saying 'Oh, it's only you'. The younger boy stops growing, because this is the only way he seems to get some chance of affection. He is J M Barrie, the author of Peter Pan!
5. Stress-induced analgesia (not feeling pain during strenuous activities - from war to exercise) and stress- induced hyperalgesia (feeling more pain, e.g. waiting for a dentist) Both are emotional reactivity to pain and do not involve pain receptors or the spinal cord.
6. Personality style can lead to stress-related disease - either due to a mismatch between the magnitude of stressors and respective stress responses, or even reacting to a situation that is not a stressor
7. How does social capital turn into better health throughout the community? Less social isolation. More rapid diffusion of health information. Potentially social constraints on publicly unhealthy behaviour. Less psychological stress. Better organised groups demanding better public services.
8. If you want to improve health and quality of life, and decrease the stress, for the average person in a society, you do so by spending money on public goods - better public transit, safer streets, cleaner water, better public schools, universal health care. The bigger the income inequality is in a society, the greater the financial distance between the wealthy and the average. The bigger the distance between the wealthy and the average, the less benefit the wealthy will feel from expenditures on the public good. Instead they would derive much more benefit by spending the same (taxed) money on their private good - a better chauffeur, a gated community, bottled water, private schools, private health insurance. As (Robert) Evans writes, "The more unequal are incomes in a society, the more pronounced will be its disadvantages to its better-off members from public expenditure, and the more resources will those members have (available to them) to mount effective political opposition." He notes how this "secession of the wealthy" pushes toward "private affluence and public squalor". And more public squalor means more of the daily stressors and allostatic load that drives down health for everyone. For the wealthy, this is because of the costs of walling themselves off from the rest of society, and for the rest of the society because they have to live in it.
8. Heaven, we are told, consists of spending all of eternity in the study of the holy books. In contrast, hell consists of spending all of eternity in the study of the holy books. :D
9. In a diagnosis that helps explain the confusing and contradictory aspects of the cosmos that have baffled philosophers, theologians, and other students of the human condition for millennia, God, creator of the universe and longtime deity to billions of followers, was found Monday to suffer from bipolar disorder. ~ The Onion
]]> 4.17 1993 Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers
author: Robert M. Sapolsky
name: Manu
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1993
rating: 0
read at: 2024/03/25
date added: 2024/03/25
shelves: review
review:
Sapolsky's 'Behave' was in my list of favourites back in 2021. So when I got to know about this book, it it was a must-read, and that title really helped. The book was originally written in 1994, and is now in its third edition, so things continue to be updated.
He gets the title out of the way very quickly, and this is perhaps the underlying premise of the book - zebras, and the lions who chase them both are stressed, and their bodies are brilliantly adapted to handle these emergencies - fear of life and fear of starvation respectively. Go up to the apex predator - humans, and it can even handle things like drought, famine, pests. But when we include psychological and social disruptions - from finding a parking spot to an unpleasant conversation with a manager/spouse etc - and start worrying about them, we turn on the same physiological responses. When this is chronic (and it is - think about the things you get stressed about daily), the stress response itself becomes harmful to the body, sometimes even more than the stressor itself. Because they were not meant to do this all the while, they were only for emergencies!
The early pages also draw out a significant difference - between homeostasis and allostasis. 'The brain seeks homeostasis', but the concept itself is now modernised because there is no single optimal level (e.g. it can't be the same when sleeping vs skiing) and because we now understand that the point cannot always be reached by a local regulatory mechanism, it requires 'the brain coordinating body-wide changes, often including changes in behaviour'. And this tinkering has its own second-order consequences. Even more complicated because in allostatic thinking, there can be changes made in anticipation of a level going awry. When it is stressed for 'emergencies', the body goes for homeostasis, with consequences in the long run.
The book then traces out the working of the brain - and the regulation of glands and hormones (and how it is different in males and females), before getting into specific areas that stress specialises in! This includes physiological things cardiovascular health, ulcers and IBS, (oh, if only I knew this 3 years ago, I would have been better equipped to deal with idiot doctors) pregnancy and parenting, sex and reproduction, pain, immunity and diseases, memory, sleep, cancer (the jury is still out on this) and aging and death, as well as psychological domains like addiction, depression. It also looks at how temperament and personality can either assist or resist stress.
In the personality section, Sapolsky practically described my (former) Type A personality down to a behavioural "time-pressuredness" (research by Meyer Friedman and colleagues), default hostility, and a persistent sense of insecurity, the last being a predictor of cardiovascular problems. Add to it disciplined, discomfort with ambiguity, and (formerly) repressive in terms of emotional expression, and you have my profile! Damn!
Towards the end, there is also a very interesting section (and studies) on how socio-economic-status (SES) can affect stress. The poor have more chronic daily stressors, and feeling poor (not the same as being poor) in our socioeconomic world (digital media expands 'our' from friends, family and neighbours to anyone on Insta) predicts poor health. Income inequality predicts mortality rates across all ages in the US.
The last chapter is on managing stress - exercise, meditation, increasing control and predictability, social support, finding outlets for frustration. And building coping mechanisms around fixed rules and flexible strategies - when stress management is not working, instead of trying extra hard on our preferred strategy - problem solving/emotional/social support - switch the approach.
I was expecting a fair amount of trudging and it turned out to be that way. But it is definitely fascinating to see the stress fingerprint in so many of our ailments - ranging from very visible to almost invisible. Great book, if you have the interest and patience for it. :)

1. Water shortage in California. Homeostatic solution: mandate smaller water tanks. Allostatic: smaller toilet tanks, convince people to conserve water, buy rice from SE Asia instead of doing water-intensive farming in a semi-arid state.
2. When stressed, the sympathetic nervous system is activated, the parasympathetic nervous system is turned down, the heart shifts into a higher gear, glucocorticoids enter the play enhancing the effects of epinephrine and norepinephrine. As a result blood pressure goes up, the blood sent to nonessential areas like digestive tract and kidneys go down (fascinating how we wet our pants in fear though the kidney function is kept low - basically to remove excess water quickly from the bladder). Chronic use of this mechanism promotes plaque formation in arteries by increasing the chances of blood vessels being damaged and inflamed and the likelihood of platelets, fat, cholesterol sticking to those areas.
3. Also when stressed, the contractions in the colon increase to get rid of the 'dead weight'. See how IBS and diarrhoea works!
4. In a British Victorian family, the mother's favourite son David dies and she takes to bed, ignoring her 6 year old son. And when the boy comes to the darkened room, she asks 'David, is that you?', before saying 'Oh, it's only you'. The younger boy stops growing, because this is the only way he seems to get some chance of affection. He is J M Barrie, the author of Peter Pan!
5. Stress-induced analgesia (not feeling pain during strenuous activities - from war to exercise) and stress- induced hyperalgesia (feeling more pain, e.g. waiting for a dentist) Both are emotional reactivity to pain and do not involve pain receptors or the spinal cord.
6. Personality style can lead to stress-related disease - either due to a mismatch between the magnitude of stressors and respective stress responses, or even reacting to a situation that is not a stressor
7. How does social capital turn into better health throughout the community? Less social isolation. More rapid diffusion of health information. Potentially social constraints on publicly unhealthy behaviour. Less psychological stress. Better organised groups demanding better public services.
8. If you want to improve health and quality of life, and decrease the stress, for the average person in a society, you do so by spending money on public goods - better public transit, safer streets, cleaner water, better public schools, universal health care. The bigger the income inequality is in a society, the greater the financial distance between the wealthy and the average. The bigger the distance between the wealthy and the average, the less benefit the wealthy will feel from expenditures on the public good. Instead they would derive much more benefit by spending the same (taxed) money on their private good - a better chauffeur, a gated community, bottled water, private schools, private health insurance. As (Robert) Evans writes, "The more unequal are incomes in a society, the more pronounced will be its disadvantages to its better-off members from public expenditure, and the more resources will those members have (available to them) to mount effective political opposition." He notes how this "secession of the wealthy" pushes toward "private affluence and public squalor". And more public squalor means more of the daily stressors and allostatic load that drives down health for everyone. For the wealthy, this is because of the costs of walling themselves off from the rest of society, and for the rest of the society because they have to live in it.
8. Heaven, we are told, consists of spending all of eternity in the study of the holy books. In contrast, hell consists of spending all of eternity in the study of the holy books. :D
9. In a diagnosis that helps explain the confusing and contradictory aspects of the cosmos that have baffled philosophers, theologians, and other students of the human condition for millennia, God, creator of the universe and longtime deity to billions of followers, was found Monday to suffer from bipolar disorder. ~ The Onion

]]> Malice (Kyoichiro Kaga, #4) 24514244
Acclaimed bestselling novelist Kunihiko Hidaka is found brutally murdered in his home on the night before he's planning to leave Japan and relocate to Vancouver. His body is found in his office, in a locked room, within his locked house, by his wife and his best friend, both of whom have rock solid alibis. Or so it seems.

Police Detective Kyochiro Kaga recognizes Hidaka's best friend from years ago when they were both teachers. Kaga joined the police force while Nonoguchi became a writer, though with not nearly the success of his friend Hidaka. When Kaga suspects something is a little bit off with Nonoguchi's statement, he investigates further, searching Nonoguchi's apartment. There he finds evidence that shows that the two writers' relationship was very different than the two claimed...

In a brilliantly realized tale of cat and mouse, the detective and the writer battle over the truth of the past and how events that led to the murder really unfolded. Which one of the two writers was ultimately guilty of malice?]]> 320 Keigo Higashino 0349140529 Manu 4 4.01 1996 Malice (Kyoichiro Kaga, #4)
author: Keigo Higashino
name: Manu
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1996
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/14
date added: 2024/03/14
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Doppelganger( International Edition)]]> 144359076 What if you woke up one morning and found you’d acquired a double? Someone almost like you, and yet not you at all?

When Naomi Klein discovered that a woman who shared her first name, but had radically different, harmful views, was getting chronically mistaken for her, it seemed too ridiculous to take seriously. Then suddenly it wasn’t. She started to find herself grappling with a distorted sense of reality, becoming obsessed with reading the threats on social media, the endlessly scrolling insults from the followers of her doppelganger. Why had her shadowy other gone down such an extreme path? Why was identity – all we have to meet the world – so unstable?

To find out, Klein decided to follow her double into a bizarre, uncanny mirror world: one of conspiracy theories, anti-vaxxers and demagogue hucksters, where soft-focus wellness influencers make common cause with fire-breathing far right propagandists (all in the name of protecting ‘the children’). In doing so, she lifts the lid on our own culture during this surreal moment in history, as we turn ourselves into polished virtual brands, publicly shame our enemies, watch as deep fakes proliferate and whole nations flip from democracy to something far more sinister.

This is a book for our age and for all of us; a deadly serious dark comedy which invites us to view our reflections in the looking glass. It’s for anyone who has lost hours down an internet rabbit hole, who wonders why our politics has become so fatally warped, and who wants a way out of our collective vertigo and back to fighting for what really matters.]]> 352 Naomi Klein 0241621313 Manu 4 review In her new avatar, Wolf's argument - with a full endorsement from none other than Steven Bannon (once Trump's chief strategist) - during Covid was that vaccines and public health measures were a conspiracy by a global cabal to sterilise, and in general, undermine the constitution. People increasingly began believing that these were Klein's views. At one point, after it goes beyond being just a joke, Klein decides to dive into the rabbit hole of the universe that Wolf inhabits - the Mirror World is how Klein describes it.
While this is where the book starts, and also spends pages drawing out the different worldviews, approaches etc, the narrative then expands its scope to cover the title - Doppelgangers - in general. Not just at an individual level but a societal level. For instance, today the simplistic left vs right categorisation is almost devoid of meaning. Even the horseshoe theory of left and right being similar the extremes isn't nuanced enough. With big tech, Covid lockdowns, and a plethora of social media influencers, most people have very little trust in anything mainstream media, or what politicians say or do. The difference is only in their own perspectives of who is lying and for what. Wolf and Klein, for example, agree on Bill Gates being a force for evil. While the former goes on about tracking people, the latter is against how he sided with big drug company patents on life-saving Covid medicines.
Klein decodes how issues remain the same but how Bannon & Co spin it to stoke common underlying tensions and use it to further their agenda. For example, blue collar workers who felt betrayed by Democrats when the latter signed trade deals that accelerated factory closures, Bannon pitched Trump as a radically different Republican who promised to make the rich pay. This modus operandi was an echo of what I had read in Peter Pomerantsev's 'This is not propaganda', in which he pointed out how Trump and his ilk could create coalitions of people who agreed on some topics, while the left/liberals would argue on the tiniest of nuances. There is a name for the former - diagonalism.
There is also an interesting section on how our personal brands are our doppelgangers - what happens to our self when we create for social media? What is real, and what is for camera? "Which of our opinions is genuine, and which are for show? Which friendships are rooted in love, and which are co-branding collabs? Which collaborations don't happen that should because individual brands are pitted against one another?" What doesn't ever get said, or shared, because it's off-brand?" What does it do to our capacity for internal dialogue and deliberation?
The focus on doppelgangers allows Klein to apply it to diverse contexts - wellness influencers who became anti-vaccine propagandists, parents of autistic children (and their belief that this was something that had to be cured instead of accepting the child and its unique ways), to Nazis (and the fascinating view that European colonists had been on genocide sprees long before Hitler, and that it was only the scale and more importantly, that it happened in Europe that shocked the West into retaliating; also how the Australian Aborigines League saw this coming way back in 1938 and wrote a protest letter against persecution and handed it to the German Consulate) to Israel (and how the Palestinians had become the victims' victims).
Towards the end of the book, the narrative switches back to personal, with lovely anecdotes on how Klein was originally inspired by Wolf, and also how today, with Wolf uttering all sorts of things in public, Klein believes she is freed from her own public self and how it's an “unconventional Buddhist exercise in annihilating the ego".

This is a fascinating read which prompts us to look within ourselves and at the society we inhabit, forcing us to acknowledge the doppelganger within us at both levels.

Quotes
"Ms.Wolf is the moral equivalent of an Armani T-shirt, because Mr.Gore has obscenely overpaid for something basic" ~ Maureen Dowd
"The accelerated need for growth has made our economic lives more precarious, leading to the drive to brand and commodify our identities, to optimise our selves, our bodies, and our kids" Naomi Klein
"In the Mirror World, they... rile up anger about the Davos elites, At Big Tech and Big Pharma - but the rage never seems to reach those targets. Instead it gets diverted into culture wars about ant-racist education, all-gender bathrooms, and Great Replacement panic directed at Black people, nonwhite immigrants and Jews." Naomi Klein]]> 4.13 2023 Doppelganger( International Edition)
author: Naomi Klein
name: Manu
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/10
date added: 2024/03/10
shelves: review
review:
Quite eerie that I read this immediately after I read Carol Roth's "You will own nothing". Here's why. Doppelganger's starting premise is how the author (Naomi Klein) gets confused for Naomi Wolf, both being 'white Jewish women', increasingly helped by the overlap in the subjects they comment on. The former is a left-leaning writer and social activist while the latter is a third wave feminist who turned from centre-left to becoming a right wing conspiracist. It is fascinating how Roth's views largely align with Klein (Davos, Big Tech) but also agree with Wolf in others (Canadian truckers, for instance)
In her new avatar, Wolf's argument - with a full endorsement from none other than Steven Bannon (once Trump's chief strategist) - during Covid was that vaccines and public health measures were a conspiracy by a global cabal to sterilise, and in general, undermine the constitution. People increasingly began believing that these were Klein's views. At one point, after it goes beyond being just a joke, Klein decides to dive into the rabbit hole of the universe that Wolf inhabits - the Mirror World is how Klein describes it.
While this is where the book starts, and also spends pages drawing out the different worldviews, approaches etc, the narrative then expands its scope to cover the title - Doppelgangers - in general. Not just at an individual level but a societal level. For instance, today the simplistic left vs right categorisation is almost devoid of meaning. Even the horseshoe theory of left and right being similar the extremes isn't nuanced enough. With big tech, Covid lockdowns, and a plethora of social media influencers, most people have very little trust in anything mainstream media, or what politicians say or do. The difference is only in their own perspectives of who is lying and for what. Wolf and Klein, for example, agree on Bill Gates being a force for evil. While the former goes on about tracking people, the latter is against how he sided with big drug company patents on life-saving Covid medicines.
Klein decodes how issues remain the same but how Bannon & Co spin it to stoke common underlying tensions and use it to further their agenda. For example, blue collar workers who felt betrayed by Democrats when the latter signed trade deals that accelerated factory closures, Bannon pitched Trump as a radically different Republican who promised to make the rich pay. This modus operandi was an echo of what I had read in Peter Pomerantsev's 'This is not propaganda', in which he pointed out how Trump and his ilk could create coalitions of people who agreed on some topics, while the left/liberals would argue on the tiniest of nuances. There is a name for the former - diagonalism.
There is also an interesting section on how our personal brands are our doppelgangers - what happens to our self when we create for social media? What is real, and what is for camera? "Which of our opinions is genuine, and which are for show? Which friendships are rooted in love, and which are co-branding collabs? Which collaborations don't happen that should because individual brands are pitted against one another?" What doesn't ever get said, or shared, because it's off-brand?" What does it do to our capacity for internal dialogue and deliberation?
The focus on doppelgangers allows Klein to apply it to diverse contexts - wellness influencers who became anti-vaccine propagandists, parents of autistic children (and their belief that this was something that had to be cured instead of accepting the child and its unique ways), to Nazis (and the fascinating view that European colonists had been on genocide sprees long before Hitler, and that it was only the scale and more importantly, that it happened in Europe that shocked the West into retaliating; also how the Australian Aborigines League saw this coming way back in 1938 and wrote a protest letter against persecution and handed it to the German Consulate) to Israel (and how the Palestinians had become the victims' victims).
Towards the end of the book, the narrative switches back to personal, with lovely anecdotes on how Klein was originally inspired by Wolf, and also how today, with Wolf uttering all sorts of things in public, Klein believes she is freed from her own public self and how it's an “unconventional Buddhist exercise in annihilating the ego".

This is a fascinating read which prompts us to look within ourselves and at the society we inhabit, forcing us to acknowledge the doppelganger within us at both levels.

Quotes
"Ms.Wolf is the moral equivalent of an Armani T-shirt, because Mr.Gore has obscenely overpaid for something basic" ~ Maureen Dowd
"The accelerated need for growth has made our economic lives more precarious, leading to the drive to brand and commodify our identities, to optimise our selves, our bodies, and our kids" Naomi Klein
"In the Mirror World, they... rile up anger about the Davos elites, At Big Tech and Big Pharma - but the rage never seems to reach those targets. Instead it gets diverted into culture wars about ant-racist education, all-gender bathrooms, and Great Replacement panic directed at Black people, nonwhite immigrants and Jews." Naomi Klein
]]> <![CDATA[You Will Own Nothing: Your War with a New Financial World Order and How to Fight Back―The Dark Future of a World Without Ownership]]> 63247364 352 Carol Roth 0063304937 Manu 4 review She calls this a war where three kinds of forces - government and government-related forces, elite power-grabbers and bad actors, and Big Tech are colluding to ensure that they remain on top for the new financial order that will come up. Owning wealth and power.
She begins with how frontline forces who risked their lives during the pandemic were punished, their livelihoods taken away, for non compliance with a vaccine mandate. Moving quickly from social acceptance to social credit. Judged by public approval than a court of law. In China, they have already gone quite deep into the Social Credit System, where you're watched and rewarded (red list)/penalised (black list).
She uses the history of empires to show the cycles of rise and fall, and how war is usually a catalyst for change and a new financial order. The US began its ascent after WW2, and according to Roth (and data), we are now seeing a decline in the US financial system, which is likely to lead to a shift in power, and or economic and geopolitical chaos. And if we go by GoT, "Chaos is a ladder".
She also discusses Peter Thiel's framework of how good ideas cause bad outcomes through a believers (idea)- racketeers (ROI) - Useful Idiots (ROE, e for ego). Think of climate change and read it as genuine activists - ESG sellers - regular people pandering to their desire for validation and ego by sharing posts/emojis/slogans without really understanding the discourse.
The next chapters expand on the debasing of the dollar (some insightful charts on its decreasing purchasing power) and the huge concerns on turning it digital - CBDC (central bank digital currency) and how it can be used against the common person's rights and freedoms. This allows a neat segue into Big Tech and how they have made us dependent, and infringed on our basic rights. Think of getting locked out of mail, social media, payments etc with no easy means of recourse. Most of us don't really own anything digitally, it's all on a company's servers. They would serve as great allies of the government, possibly even overshadowing them with their technical superiority. Wars are almost more cyber than real, after all.
She then does a deep dive on the various power and money grab mechanisms already underway. ESG, (thanks BlackRock!) for instance, played a crucial role in tanking Sri Lanka's economy. The increasingly unattainable home ownership in US thanks to corporations, who are helped by cheap capital enabled by the Fed, competing against the common man for real estate. And city administrations who are happy to go along with AirBnB because they pay taxes. Add to this billionaires like Gates and institutions like Harvard (enabled by endowments) buying up farmland, including things like water rights. Now think about it, why wouldn't private investors start moving water to say, nearest cities, because they think it's the most efficient use of water?
Another example is the crazy cost of education and the increasing lack of ROI, thereby creating a population that is always in debt. And guess who's the one providing these loans - the government! And despite their 'loan forgiveness', ultimately it's the taxpayer footing the bill! A transfer of money from the working class to the college-educated class.
The final chapter is on how the common man (in the US context) can fight back against all this. While the context is the US, the ideology of capitalism and the alliance of government-corporations-BigTech is a global phenomenon, soon coming to a country near you.
What was super insightful to me is the nuance of arguments. I had broadly supported the vaccine mandate, Biden, and was not fond of Joe Rogan, but I was forced to think deeply on all this. This is a fantastic read, and I absolutely recommend it.

Quote
"When a social moral code replaces a legal code and gains acceptance it is only a matter of time before those in power want to leverage that dynamic to secure more power for themselves"
'We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office' ~ Aesop]]> 3.57 You Will Own Nothing: Your War with a New Financial World Order and How to Fight Back―The Dark Future of a World Without Ownership
author: Carol Roth
name: Manu
average rating: 3.57
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2024/03/01
date added: 2024/03/01
shelves: review
review:
Carol Roth does a great job of using the title to shock the reader, but once you read the book, you might agree that it is justified. It was at the World Economic Forum that she first heard the prediction that in less than a decade, private ownership would be dead. The book is her research on "You will own nothing and be happy".
She calls this a war where three kinds of forces - government and government-related forces, elite power-grabbers and bad actors, and Big Tech are colluding to ensure that they remain on top for the new financial order that will come up. Owning wealth and power.
She begins with how frontline forces who risked their lives during the pandemic were punished, their livelihoods taken away, for non compliance with a vaccine mandate. Moving quickly from social acceptance to social credit. Judged by public approval than a court of law. In China, they have already gone quite deep into the Social Credit System, where you're watched and rewarded (red list)/penalised (black list).
She uses the history of empires to show the cycles of rise and fall, and how war is usually a catalyst for change and a new financial order. The US began its ascent after WW2, and according to Roth (and data), we are now seeing a decline in the US financial system, which is likely to lead to a shift in power, and or economic and geopolitical chaos. And if we go by GoT, "Chaos is a ladder".
She also discusses Peter Thiel's framework of how good ideas cause bad outcomes through a believers (idea)- racketeers (ROI) - Useful Idiots (ROE, e for ego). Think of climate change and read it as genuine activists - ESG sellers - regular people pandering to their desire for validation and ego by sharing posts/emojis/slogans without really understanding the discourse.
The next chapters expand on the debasing of the dollar (some insightful charts on its decreasing purchasing power) and the huge concerns on turning it digital - CBDC (central bank digital currency) and how it can be used against the common person's rights and freedoms. This allows a neat segue into Big Tech and how they have made us dependent, and infringed on our basic rights. Think of getting locked out of mail, social media, payments etc with no easy means of recourse. Most of us don't really own anything digitally, it's all on a company's servers. They would serve as great allies of the government, possibly even overshadowing them with their technical superiority. Wars are almost more cyber than real, after all.
She then does a deep dive on the various power and money grab mechanisms already underway. ESG, (thanks BlackRock!) for instance, played a crucial role in tanking Sri Lanka's economy. The increasingly unattainable home ownership in US thanks to corporations, who are helped by cheap capital enabled by the Fed, competing against the common man for real estate. And city administrations who are happy to go along with AirBnB because they pay taxes. Add to this billionaires like Gates and institutions like Harvard (enabled by endowments) buying up farmland, including things like water rights. Now think about it, why wouldn't private investors start moving water to say, nearest cities, because they think it's the most efficient use of water?
Another example is the crazy cost of education and the increasing lack of ROI, thereby creating a population that is always in debt. And guess who's the one providing these loans - the government! And despite their 'loan forgiveness', ultimately it's the taxpayer footing the bill! A transfer of money from the working class to the college-educated class.
The final chapter is on how the common man (in the US context) can fight back against all this. While the context is the US, the ideology of capitalism and the alliance of government-corporations-BigTech is a global phenomenon, soon coming to a country near you.
What was super insightful to me is the nuance of arguments. I had broadly supported the vaccine mandate, Biden, and was not fond of Joe Rogan, but I was forced to think deeply on all this. This is a fantastic read, and I absolutely recommend it.

Quote
"When a social moral code replaces a legal code and gains acceptance it is only a matter of time before those in power want to leverage that dynamic to secure more power for themselves"
'We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office' ~ Aesop
]]> <![CDATA[The Bullet That Missed (Thursday Murder Club, #3)]]> 58957616
Except trouble is never far away where the Thursday Murder Club is concerned. A decade-old cold case leads them to a local news legend and a murder with no body and no answers.

Then, a new foe pays Elizabeth a visit. Her mission? Kill . . . or be killed.

As the cold case turns white hot, Elizabeth wrestles with her conscience (and a gun), while Joyce, Ron and Ibrahim chase down clues with help from old friends and new. But can the gang solve the mystery and save Elizabeth before the murderer strikes again?]]> 413 Richard Osman 0241512433 Manu 4 4.37 2022 The Bullet That Missed (Thursday Murder Club, #3)
author: Richard Osman
name: Manu
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2024/02/22
date added: 2024/02/22
shelves:
review:

]]> The Lost Pianos of Siberia 53176764 448 Sophy Roberts 1784162841 Manu 5 review Sophy Roberts' Siberian journey is the hunt for a piano for her friend Odgerel in Mongolia, but for a reader if offers far more - a fantastic trip through time and space in one of the remotest parts of the world. The book is divided into three portions - 1762-1917 (from Catherine's the Great's ascension to the February revolution when Tsar Nicholas II abdicated and was taken to Siberia with his family), 1917-1991 (when the Soviet became the Russian federation) and 1991 - present. We see the region not just through the political changes, but primarily through the lens of music and culture. In fact, the music remains the constant.
Siberia is 1/11th of the world's landmass, with the Urals, the Pacific, the Arctic Circle and Mongolia serving as its borders. The Tsars made it a penal colony early on, and it played host to a variety of famous folks - politicians to writers to artists. But it was also home to pianos, starting from the nineteenth century, thanks to Catherine the Great's penchant for collecting new technologies. Chasing these lost pianos, we go across Siberia from Tobolsk and Irkutsk and Tomsk to Sakhalin, Harbin (now in China, but with a very Russian past), the Dead Road (one of Stalin's crazy projects where the track was being built in temperatures 50 degrees below zero and where people's hair froze on to their neighbour's skin when they slept close for warmth), Kolyma, Akademgorodok and Kamchatka, Kurils and Khabarovsk. Names on a map, but now rich in my mind with character.
But what makes this all come to life are the people and their poignant stories. A family that retreated into the Siberian taiga in 1945 , living in total isolation in the Sayan Mountains, until someone discovered them in the 70s. They only possessed a spinning wheel and a bible and refused to believe the moon landing. Dmitri Girev, who had accompanied Robert Scott to the South Pole. The ordinary yet moving story of Lidiya in DuÄ— Post, where the infamous coal mines used to be. Anatoly Lunacharsky whose efforts made sure pianos weren't completely lost during the Revolution, the last days of the Romanov dynasty, the 2500 year old Ukok princess' mummy in the Atlai mountains.
Leonid Kalsohin, an Aeroflot navigator who gave up that life to settle in a remote village called Ust-Koksa, where he is trying to build a concert hall. "The world is very remote. We are at the centre", he says with a twinkle in his eye. The stunning concert during the Leningrad siege, when people braved the cold and the enemy fire just for the music. The Lomatchenko family in Novosibirisk, whose room in the basement of the Opera House contained musical treasures ('It's not much", said Igor, 'but it is my life.') Mary, the 80-year-old birder, whom Sophy meets on a cruise to Commander Islands ('neither of us had come for the certainties, but for the outside possibility that a little marvel might appear').
You don't need to enjoy music to love this book. Because this is about places and people, who even in this hyperconnected world are outside the radar of most of us. Sophy Roberts' prose is vivid and deeply moving, and takes us on a fantastic tour of a unique part of the world. ]]> 3.87 2020 The Lost Pianos of Siberia
author: Sophy Roberts
name: Manu
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2024/02/17
date added: 2024/02/18
shelves: review
review:
In the epilogue, Sophy Roberts quotes Fyodor Tyutchev - "You cannot fathom Russia with the mind... You can only believe in it" Once you really pay attention to the map and figure that it has Finland and Ukraine on its western borders and China and Japan in the south/east, it is easy to nod in agreement. For a lark, I tried to calculate the distance/time taken from Moscow to Vladivostok, and gave up on any dreams - 7 days, 7 time zones, 30 cities and almost 10000km!
Sophy Roberts' Siberian journey is the hunt for a piano for her friend Odgerel in Mongolia, but for a reader if offers far more - a fantastic trip through time and space in one of the remotest parts of the world. The book is divided into three portions - 1762-1917 (from Catherine's the Great's ascension to the February revolution when Tsar Nicholas II abdicated and was taken to Siberia with his family), 1917-1991 (when the Soviet became the Russian federation) and 1991 - present. We see the region not just through the political changes, but primarily through the lens of music and culture. In fact, the music remains the constant.
Siberia is 1/11th of the world's landmass, with the Urals, the Pacific, the Arctic Circle and Mongolia serving as its borders. The Tsars made it a penal colony early on, and it played host to a variety of famous folks - politicians to writers to artists. But it was also home to pianos, starting from the nineteenth century, thanks to Catherine the Great's penchant for collecting new technologies. Chasing these lost pianos, we go across Siberia from Tobolsk and Irkutsk and Tomsk to Sakhalin, Harbin (now in China, but with a very Russian past), the Dead Road (one of Stalin's crazy projects where the track was being built in temperatures 50 degrees below zero and where people's hair froze on to their neighbour's skin when they slept close for warmth), Kolyma, Akademgorodok and Kamchatka, Kurils and Khabarovsk. Names on a map, but now rich in my mind with character.
But what makes this all come to life are the people and their poignant stories. A family that retreated into the Siberian taiga in 1945 , living in total isolation in the Sayan Mountains, until someone discovered them in the 70s. They only possessed a spinning wheel and a bible and refused to believe the moon landing. Dmitri Girev, who had accompanied Robert Scott to the South Pole. The ordinary yet moving story of Lidiya in DuÄ— Post, where the infamous coal mines used to be. Anatoly Lunacharsky whose efforts made sure pianos weren't completely lost during the Revolution, the last days of the Romanov dynasty, the 2500 year old Ukok princess' mummy in the Atlai mountains.
Leonid Kalsohin, an Aeroflot navigator who gave up that life to settle in a remote village called Ust-Koksa, where he is trying to build a concert hall. "The world is very remote. We are at the centre", he says with a twinkle in his eye. The stunning concert during the Leningrad siege, when people braved the cold and the enemy fire just for the music. The Lomatchenko family in Novosibirisk, whose room in the basement of the Opera House contained musical treasures ('It's not much", said Igor, 'but it is my life.') Mary, the 80-year-old birder, whom Sophy meets on a cruise to Commander Islands ('neither of us had come for the certainties, but for the outside possibility that a little marvel might appear').
You don't need to enjoy music to love this book. Because this is about places and people, who even in this hyperconnected world are outside the radar of most of us. Sophy Roberts' prose is vivid and deeply moving, and takes us on a fantastic tour of a unique part of the world.
]]> Stranger in a Strange Land 40314509 Robert Heinlein's Hugo Award-winning all-time masterpiece, the brilliant novel that grew from a cult favorite to a bestseller to a science fiction classic.

Raised by Martians on Mars, Valentine Michael Smith is a human who has never seen another member of his species. Sent to Earth, he is a stranger who must learn what it is to be a man. But his own beliefs and his powers far exceed the limits of humankind, and as he teaches them about grokking and water-sharing, he also inspires a transformation that will alter Earth's inhabitants forever...]]> 608 Robert A. Heinlein 198480278X Manu 4 3.51 1961 Stranger in a Strange Land
author: Robert A. Heinlein
name: Manu
average rating: 3.51
book published: 1961
rating: 4
read at: 2024/02/11
date added: 2024/02/11
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Complete Adventures of Feluda Vol. 1 (The Penguin Ray Library)]]> 27045170 229 804 Satyajit Ray 014342503X Manu 0 4.62 2005 Complete Adventures of Feluda Vol. 1 (The Penguin Ray Library)
author: Satyajit Ray
name: Manu
average rating: 4.62
book published: 2005
rating: 0
read at: 2024/02/05
date added: 2024/02/05
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Pathless Path: Imagining a New Story For Work and Life]]> 60151185 With 55k global sales, The Pathless Path has become a surprise best-seller. The book has received attention from major publishers, including a 6-figure offer from a Big Five publisher (which was turned down). The author is currently looking for foreign publishers to translate the work into different languages.It takes a few wrong turns to find the right way.

Paul thought he was on his way. From a small-town Connecticut kid to the most prestigious consulting firm in the world, he had everything he thought he wanted. Yet he decided to walk away and embark on the "real work" of his life - finding the things that matter and daring to create a life to make them happen.

This Pathless Path is about finding yourself in the wrong life, and the real work of figuring out how to live. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries and the goodwill of people from around the world, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to the good life and all of the existential crises in between.

The Pathless Path is not a how-to book filled with “hacksâ€; instead, it is a vulnerable account of Paul’s journey from leaving a path centered around getting ahead and towards another, one focused on doing work that matters. This book is an ideal companion for people considering leaving their jobs, embarking on a new path, dealing with the uncertainty of an unconventional path, or searching for better models for thinking about work in a fast-changing world.

Reader

“It’s a rare book in that it is tangentially about careers and being more focused and productive, but unlike almost every other book I have read about these topics, I finished this one and felt better about myself and my career.â€

“The themes are timeless. The content is expertly written. The advice is refreshingly non-prescriptive.â€

“If you have questioned your own path, or a nagging lack of intention in your choices you need this book. If you have felt a gradual loss of agency in your direction you need this book. You are in the grip of an invisible script that was not written for you.†- Kris Abdelmessih

“The writing is fantastic - Paul's writing is approachably poetic; a quick read that weaves together his own experience moving from a 'default path' overachiever to a 'pathless path' seeker of passion and curiosity, deep research into the history of work and collections of perspectives from years of podcasting, friendship, conferences, and meetings with other 'alternative path' life-livers."]]> 222 Paul Millerd Manu 4 review The book is divided into two very broad sections. The first, with six chapters, focuses on the default path. The default is what most of the world does - predictable incomes, predictable lives, "life's existential fears are traded for certainty". Paul also quotes Keynes - "it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally." And it provides prestige, which as Paul Graham says, is "a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy." However the story is cracking. "You work hard, but get laid off anyway. You have the perfect life on paper, but no time to enjoy it. You retire with millions in the bank, but no idea what to do with your time."
He introduces us to his own journey from the default to the pathless across his academic and professional lives, how he figured out the hacks to grow fast, his health crisis, and how he then started thinking about his life and work differently.
At this point, he goes back in history to understand where our current beliefs and structure about work came from, how work took the space religion vacated, and how the larger narrative of defining and judging people by their profession became a part of culture. He then continues to take us through his own struggles in the default path as values clashed and the lure subsided, but the pressure of making a living continued. He stresses how moving to the pathless path is not a simple story of sudden glory, but rather a series of experiments, deliberate changes, and iterative learning towards a journey that fulfils the self.
In the second section - the pathless path, the focus is on how one can reimagine one's life, and address the many barriers that a part of our self comes up with to discourage us - narratives around (lack of) money, creativity, to name the most common ones. He also notes the importance of finding one's tribe, and designing work in such a way that you love it. His perspective is that ultimately what we want is to be useful to others. In the final chapter, he writes about a couple of things I have spent a lot of time thinking about - the abundance mindset, and playing the long game. Both have the potential to radically change the way one interacts with the world at large.
From what I understand, Paul went off the default in his 30s, so this is not a midlife crisis-management book. Rather, it's for anyone who has that little 'pebble in the shoe' which tells them that there is a better way of living, and working. The pathless path is exactly that - it is deeply personal, a blueprint doesn't really exist - you have to arrive at your version yourself. It's uncomfortable, uncertain, and a movement away from conformity. But you'll know when the shift happens, and when it does, it's quite liberating. As per Andrew Taggart, crisis moments lead to "existential openings" which forces us to deal with existential questions. These could be of two kinds - a "way of loss" (loved ones, health job) or a "way of wonderment" (moments of undeniable awe and inspiration). But you don't necessarily need to wait. It's never too early, or late.

Notes
1. People who face crises often experience 'post-traumatic' growth and this manifests as "an appreciation for life in general, more meaningful interpersonal relationships, an increased sense of personal strength, changed priorities, and a richer existential and spiritual life"
2. "But under the hardness of that armor there is the tenderness of genuine sadness." ~ Pema Chödrön
3. Uncertain discomfort < certain discomfort + coping mechanism. Given sufficient coping strategies, people will be willing to tolerate consistent levels of misery for long stretches of time.
4. Tim Ferriss "fear setting" reflection - what is the change, what are the worst possible outcomes, how can you mitigate them, possible steps/actions to get back to where you are now, what are the benefits, what are the costs of inaction 3/12/months few years
5. "Misery tax" - the spending an unhappy worker allocates to things that "keep you going and keep you functioning in the job". e.g. alcohol, expensive food and vacations (Thomas J. Bevan)
6."Belief clings, but faith lets go" ~ Alan Watts
7. There is a kind of status we get from doing impressive things or having impressive traits or skills. In some domains like sports, this works. In the business world, talent is harder to assess, and we tend to use proxies like credentials to determine quality and prestige.
8. "The problem is that our culture has engaged in a Faustian bargain in which we trade our genius and artistry for apparent stability" ~ Seth Godin
9. "Critical thinking without hope is cynicism. But hope without critical thinking is naïveté" ~ Krista Tippett ]]> 3.98 2022 The Pathless Path: Imagining a New Story For Work and Life
author: Paul Millerd
name: Manu
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/28
date added: 2024/01/29
shelves: review
review:
I have to admit a little bias here - I started my own journey only a few months ago, and a bunch of things that Paul Millerd has written about resonates very well and mimics the thoughts and paths that I have experienced recently. I also share some of his influences in terms of thinkers - Erich Fromm, David Graeber - both of who have had a lot to say about the human condition in the context of work.
The book is divided into two very broad sections. The first, with six chapters, focuses on the default path. The default is what most of the world does - predictable incomes, predictable lives, "life's existential fears are traded for certainty". Paul also quotes Keynes - "it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally." And it provides prestige, which as Paul Graham says, is "a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy." However the story is cracking. "You work hard, but get laid off anyway. You have the perfect life on paper, but no time to enjoy it. You retire with millions in the bank, but no idea what to do with your time."
He introduces us to his own journey from the default to the pathless across his academic and professional lives, how he figured out the hacks to grow fast, his health crisis, and how he then started thinking about his life and work differently.
At this point, he goes back in history to understand where our current beliefs and structure about work came from, how work took the space religion vacated, and how the larger narrative of defining and judging people by their profession became a part of culture. He then continues to take us through his own struggles in the default path as values clashed and the lure subsided, but the pressure of making a living continued. He stresses how moving to the pathless path is not a simple story of sudden glory, but rather a series of experiments, deliberate changes, and iterative learning towards a journey that fulfils the self.
In the second section - the pathless path, the focus is on how one can reimagine one's life, and address the many barriers that a part of our self comes up with to discourage us - narratives around (lack of) money, creativity, to name the most common ones. He also notes the importance of finding one's tribe, and designing work in such a way that you love it. His perspective is that ultimately what we want is to be useful to others. In the final chapter, he writes about a couple of things I have spent a lot of time thinking about - the abundance mindset, and playing the long game. Both have the potential to radically change the way one interacts with the world at large.
From what I understand, Paul went off the default in his 30s, so this is not a midlife crisis-management book. Rather, it's for anyone who has that little 'pebble in the shoe' which tells them that there is a better way of living, and working. The pathless path is exactly that - it is deeply personal, a blueprint doesn't really exist - you have to arrive at your version yourself. It's uncomfortable, uncertain, and a movement away from conformity. But you'll know when the shift happens, and when it does, it's quite liberating. As per Andrew Taggart, crisis moments lead to "existential openings" which forces us to deal with existential questions. These could be of two kinds - a "way of loss" (loved ones, health job) or a "way of wonderment" (moments of undeniable awe and inspiration). But you don't necessarily need to wait. It's never too early, or late.

Notes
1. People who face crises often experience 'post-traumatic' growth and this manifests as "an appreciation for life in general, more meaningful interpersonal relationships, an increased sense of personal strength, changed priorities, and a richer existential and spiritual life"
2. "But under the hardness of that armor there is the tenderness of genuine sadness." ~ Pema Chödrön
3. Uncertain discomfort < certain discomfort + coping mechanism. Given sufficient coping strategies, people will be willing to tolerate consistent levels of misery for long stretches of time.
4. Tim Ferriss "fear setting" reflection - what is the change, what are the worst possible outcomes, how can you mitigate them, possible steps/actions to get back to where you are now, what are the benefits, what are the costs of inaction 3/12/months few years
5. "Misery tax" - the spending an unhappy worker allocates to things that "keep you going and keep you functioning in the job". e.g. alcohol, expensive food and vacations (Thomas J. Bevan)
6."Belief clings, but faith lets go" ~ Alan Watts
7. There is a kind of status we get from doing impressive things or having impressive traits or skills. In some domains like sports, this works. In the business world, talent is harder to assess, and we tend to use proxies like credentials to determine quality and prestige.
8. "The problem is that our culture has engaged in a Faustian bargain in which we trade our genius and artistry for apparent stability" ~ Seth Godin
9. "Critical thinking without hope is cynicism. But hope without critical thinking is naïveté" ~ Krista Tippett
]]> <![CDATA[The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida]]> 62426440
Colombo, 1990. Maali Almeida, war photographer, gambler and closet gay, has woken up dead in what seems like a celestial visa office. His dismembered body is sinking in the Beira Lake and he has no idea who killed him. At a time when scores are settled by death squads, suicide bombers and hired goons, the list of suspects is depressingly long, as the ghouls and ghosts who cluster around him can attest. But even in the afterlife, time is running out for Maali. He has seven moons to try and contact the man and woman he loves most and lead them to a hidden cache of photos that will rock Sri Lanka. Ten years after his prizewinning novel Chinaman established him as one of Sri Lanka's foremost authors, Karunatilaka is back with a rip-roaring epic, full of mordant wit and disturbing truths.]]> 386 Shehan Karunatilaka 0143459678 Manu 0 4.07 2022 The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida
author: Shehan Karunatilaka
name: Manu
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2024/01/25
date added: 2024/01/25
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Dopamine Nation: Why our Addiction to Pleasure is Causing us Pain]]> 61343316
In Dopamine Nation, Dr. Anna Lembke, psychiatrist and author, explores the exciting new scientific discoveries that explain why the relentless pursuit of pleasure leads to pain...and what to do about it. Condensing complex neuroscience into easy-to-understand metaphors, Lembke illustrates how finding contentment and connectedness means keeping dopamine in check. The lived experiences of her patients are the gripping fabric of her narrative. Their riveting stories of suffering and redemption give us all hope for managing our consumption and transforming our lives. In essence, Dopamine Nation shows that the secret to finding balance is combining the science of desire with the wisdom of recovery.

"Brilliant... riveting, scary, cogent, and cleverly argued."--Beth Macy, author of Dopesick]]> 304 Anna Lembke 1472294157 Manu 0 review The book is divided into three sections - The Pursuit of Pleasure, Self-Binding, and The Pursuit of Pain. Each of these is further divided into three chapters giving the book a structure that is easy to follow. In her introduction, she writes about the overwhelming amount of stimuli around us and calls the smartphone 'the modern-day hypodermic needle delivering digital dopamine for a wired generation.' So how does one find balance in this age of indulgence? A big risk-factor in addiction is ease of access and across digital and reality, that has very less mediation. " I was struck by how much hotel rooms are like latter-day Skinner boxes: a bed, a TV, and a minibar. Nothing to do but press the lever for a drug". A dopamine economy or 'limbic capitalism' (David Courtwright).
Continuing this thought, she writes about how we run from pain. She throws light on how "the pursuit of personal happiness has become a modern maxim, crowding out other definitions of the "good life". Even acts of kindness towards others are framed as a strategy for personal happiness. Altruism, no longer merely a good in itself, has become a vehicle for our own 'well-being'".
To illustrate the pleasure-pain balance, she imagines our brain having a balance - a scale with a fulcrum. When we experience pleasure, dopamine is released in our reward pathway and the balance tips to the side of pleasure. (the first in a packet of chips) But the problem is that the system wants homeostasis. The self-regulating system now starts functioning. Meanwhile, with repeated exposure to the pleasure, the initial deviation of the scale towards pleasure becomes weaker and shorter, and the response from the self regulation gets stronger and longer. This is neuroadaptation. Now you need the second chip from the packet, and the more you eat, the bigger the craving and more the irritation if you don't get it. You consume the chips though it no longer gives you pleasure, just to avoid the pain. It doesn't end there. The biggest paradox is that hedonism leads to anhedonia, the inability to enjoy pleasure of any kind. The good news is that abstinence can lead to a natural homeostasis.
In short, "science teaches us that every pleasure extracts a price, and the pain that follows is longer and lasting and more intense than the pleasure that gave rise to it. With prolonged and repeated exposure to pleasurable stimuli, our capacity to tolerate pain decreases, and our threshold for experiencing pleasure increases."
In the Self-Binding section, she charts out the escape path with an acronym for dopamine - data, objectives, problems, abstinence, mindfulness, insight, next steps, experiment. Broadly, abstinence can be aided by space (physically creating barriers to access, or even reminders), time (restricting consumption to a certain time, or only as a reward) and by finding meaning in something, to replace the pull of the craving. In the last chapter of this section, she points out how anti-depressants can actually go beyond their call of duty and limit the ability to experience the full range of emotions. Making us a person different from our natural self. A difficult trade-off.
I found the third section very interesting on two counts. One, a new idea in the first chapter of this section. What if we reverse the pain-pleasure balance by pushing on the side of pain? "With intermittent exposure to pain, our natural (self regulating) hedonic set point gets weighted to the side of pleasure, such that we become less vulnerable to pain and more able to feel pleasure over time". Cold water baths is an example used. So are extreme sports. Obviously too much of anything will result in addiction.
Two, some excellent connections in the second chapter of this section, titled Radical Honesty, which also touches upon the trend of 'disclosure p0rn'. The connection is on a favourite topic of mine - scarcity and abundance mindsets. The author's hypothesis is that truth-telling engenders an abundance mindset, and lies, a scarcity mindset. She explains this both in terms of us feeling more confident about the world when people around us tell the truth, as well as how when resources are (perceived to be) scarce, people are more invested in immediate gains. I connected this to something I read in The molecule of more - the two kinds of activities we do. Agentic, formed for the purpose of accomplishing a goal and orchestrated by dopamine, vs affiliative, formed for the pleasure of interaction, driven by oxytocin, vasopressin and others more interested in the here and now. The connection I made? Scarcity mindset - Lies - Agentic activities - Dopamine pathways for quick rewards. I am still thinking of direction and causality, but I intuitively sense a thread.
In essence, I found this a very interesting read. And if you're intrigued by behaviour - yours or others' - I think this will be an engaging read for you as well. Best paired with the book I mentioned in the beginning. ]]> 3.78 2021 Dopamine Nation: Why our Addiction to Pleasure is Causing us Pain
author: Anna Lembke
name: Manu
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2024/01/20
date added: 2024/01/20
shelves: review
review:
A book that made it into my recommendations list in 2022 was 'The Molecule of More' by Daniel Z. Lieberman & Michael E. Long. That book, as I wrote in my review then, made a complex subject very accessible and even entertaining, with interesting experiments, real-life scenarios and very less jargon. And it got me interested in the subject. I discovered Dopamine Nation thanks to a podcast, where Dr. Anna Lembke gave a very lucid explanation of the relationship between pleasure and pain.
The book is divided into three sections - The Pursuit of Pleasure, Self-Binding, and The Pursuit of Pain. Each of these is further divided into three chapters giving the book a structure that is easy to follow. In her introduction, she writes about the overwhelming amount of stimuli around us and calls the smartphone 'the modern-day hypodermic needle delivering digital dopamine for a wired generation.' So how does one find balance in this age of indulgence? A big risk-factor in addiction is ease of access and across digital and reality, that has very less mediation. " I was struck by how much hotel rooms are like latter-day Skinner boxes: a bed, a TV, and a minibar. Nothing to do but press the lever for a drug". A dopamine economy or 'limbic capitalism' (David Courtwright).
Continuing this thought, she writes about how we run from pain. She throws light on how "the pursuit of personal happiness has become a modern maxim, crowding out other definitions of the "good life". Even acts of kindness towards others are framed as a strategy for personal happiness. Altruism, no longer merely a good in itself, has become a vehicle for our own 'well-being'".
To illustrate the pleasure-pain balance, she imagines our brain having a balance - a scale with a fulcrum. When we experience pleasure, dopamine is released in our reward pathway and the balance tips to the side of pleasure. (the first in a packet of chips) But the problem is that the system wants homeostasis. The self-regulating system now starts functioning. Meanwhile, with repeated exposure to the pleasure, the initial deviation of the scale towards pleasure becomes weaker and shorter, and the response from the self regulation gets stronger and longer. This is neuroadaptation. Now you need the second chip from the packet, and the more you eat, the bigger the craving and more the irritation if you don't get it. You consume the chips though it no longer gives you pleasure, just to avoid the pain. It doesn't end there. The biggest paradox is that hedonism leads to anhedonia, the inability to enjoy pleasure of any kind. The good news is that abstinence can lead to a natural homeostasis.
In short, "science teaches us that every pleasure extracts a price, and the pain that follows is longer and lasting and more intense than the pleasure that gave rise to it. With prolonged and repeated exposure to pleasurable stimuli, our capacity to tolerate pain decreases, and our threshold for experiencing pleasure increases."
In the Self-Binding section, she charts out the escape path with an acronym for dopamine - data, objectives, problems, abstinence, mindfulness, insight, next steps, experiment. Broadly, abstinence can be aided by space (physically creating barriers to access, or even reminders), time (restricting consumption to a certain time, or only as a reward) and by finding meaning in something, to replace the pull of the craving. In the last chapter of this section, she points out how anti-depressants can actually go beyond their call of duty and limit the ability to experience the full range of emotions. Making us a person different from our natural self. A difficult trade-off.
I found the third section very interesting on two counts. One, a new idea in the first chapter of this section. What if we reverse the pain-pleasure balance by pushing on the side of pain? "With intermittent exposure to pain, our natural (self regulating) hedonic set point gets weighted to the side of pleasure, such that we become less vulnerable to pain and more able to feel pleasure over time". Cold water baths is an example used. So are extreme sports. Obviously too much of anything will result in addiction.
Two, some excellent connections in the second chapter of this section, titled Radical Honesty, which also touches upon the trend of 'disclosure p0rn'. The connection is on a favourite topic of mine - scarcity and abundance mindsets. The author's hypothesis is that truth-telling engenders an abundance mindset, and lies, a scarcity mindset. She explains this both in terms of us feeling more confident about the world when people around us tell the truth, as well as how when resources are (perceived to be) scarce, people are more invested in immediate gains. I connected this to something I read in The molecule of more - the two kinds of activities we do. Agentic, formed for the purpose of accomplishing a goal and orchestrated by dopamine, vs affiliative, formed for the pleasure of interaction, driven by oxytocin, vasopressin and others more interested in the here and now. The connection I made? Scarcity mindset - Lies - Agentic activities - Dopamine pathways for quick rewards. I am still thinking of direction and causality, but I intuitively sense a thread.
In essence, I found this a very interesting read. And if you're intrigued by behaviour - yours or others' - I think this will be an engaging read for you as well. Best paired with the book I mentioned in the beginning.
]]> <![CDATA[Twitterature: The World's Greatest Books Retold Through Twitter]]> 19473853 164 Alexander Aciman Manu 0 2.38 2009 Twitterature: The World's Greatest Books Retold Through Twitter
author: Alexander Aciman
name: Manu
average rating: 2.38
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at: 2024/01/11
date added: 2024/01/11
shelves:
review:

]]> The People on Platform 5 61437109 No one speaks to strangers on the train. What would happen if they did?

Every day at 8:05, Iona Iverson boards the train to go to work. As a seasoned commuter, she knows there are rules that everyone should follow:

· You must have a job to go to
· Don't consume hot food
· Always pack for any eventuality
· You must never speak to strangers on the train

Iona sees the same group of people each day - ones she makes assumptions about, gives nicknames to, but never ever talks to.

But then, one morning, Smart-but-Sexist-Surbiton chokes on a grape right in front of Iona. Suspiciously-Nice-New Malden steps up to help and saves his life, and this one event sparks a chain reaction.

With nothing in common but their commute, an eclectic group of people learn that their assumptions about each other don't match reality. But when Iona's life begins to fall apart, will her new friends be there when she needs them most?]]> 368 Clare Pooley 1804990973 Manu 0 4.13 2022 The People on Platform 5
author: Clare Pooley
name: Manu
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2024/01/09
date added: 2024/01/09
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Gut : The Inside Story of Our Body's Most Under-Rated Organ]]> 27211311
For too long, the gut has been the body’s most ignored and least appreciated organ, but it turns out that it’s responsible for more than just dirty work: our gut is at the core of who we are. Gut, an international bestseller, gives the alimentary canal its long-overdue moment in the spotlight. With quirky charm, rising science star Giulia Enders explains the gut’s magic, answering questions like: Why does acid reflux happen? What’s really up with gluten and lactose intolerance? How does the gut affect obesity and mood? Communication between the gut and the brain is one of the fastest-growing areas of medical research—on par with stem-cell research. Our gut reactions, we learn, are intimately connected with our physical and mental well-being. Enders’s beguiling manifesto will make you finally listen to those butterflies in your stomach: they’re trying to tell you something important.]]> 264 Giulia Enders 938528861X Manu 0 review If we consider our development as an embryo, it goes along three 'tubes' - cardio-vascular, nervous, and the gut systems. But unlike the heroes of the first two - the heart and the brain, who have attention and literature, we rarely even think about the gut unless we have an ailment. But it is amazingly complex, with links to even something like mental health, and that's what makes "the inside story of our body's most underrated organ" a really interesting read.
Giulia Enders does an excellent job of breaking down the complexities, much like some of her favourite bacteria that find a mention in the book! The book is not just accessible but entertaining too, with fun illustrations popping up on a regular basis. However, despite not sounding like a boring thesis, the book is full of not just information, but insight. This goes all the from the scenes of the behind like how does pooing work, and the kinds of poo, to behind-the-scenes walkthroughs of important and not-so-known processes like the gut structure and how organs transport food, to practical advice on everything from allergies, things like reflux and constipation, and diets, to cleanliness, and the MCU equivalent of the microbes in our gut.
As someone who has been at the mercy of clueless gastro-intestinal practitioners, I'd say that her stated aim of making information available to a broad audience is in itself worthy of an applause. An absolutely fascinating read, even if you're only vaguely interested in this inner piece of ours!

Things I learned
- The gut accounts for two-thirds of our immune system
- There are inner and outer sphincters, representing our unconscious inner world and our consciousness respectively. Their understanding of the respective spaces, and their 'conversations' and relationship determine when you fart, or when you have to just go!
- Squatting is indeed the best way to defecate, as it leads to a nice, straight intestinal tract. This is scientifically proven in the book
- Saliva is basically filtered blood! It also contains a painkiller stronger than morphine, called opiorphin. Because the mouth is super sensitive thanks to more nerve endings than any other part of the body
- The stomach is shaped like 'Quasimodo' so that water and food can be treated separately
- Lactose intolerance is not an allergy, it's a deficiency - the body not having the enzyme to break the two sugar molecules. In 75% of the population, the gene for digesting lactose begins to switch off as we grow older because we are no longer reliant on mother's milk
- Rumbling tummy is the 'migrating motor complex' at work. And it's more from the small intestine. Housekeeping when that and the stomach are empty. If something enters, the process stops. In this context, regular snacking isn't a good idea, and needs separation of at least 5 hours
- Solve constipation with dietary fibres, fluids, pro and prebiotics
- The extraordinary story of the sea squirt, which navigates the oceans, finds a good place to settle down, and then proceeds to eat its own brain!
- Irritable bowel syndrome could be caused by micro inflammations, bad gut flora or undetected food intolerances (but as you might have experienced, doctors pooh pooh patients as hypochondriacs or malingerers!)
- The brain can receive information from the gut at the insular cortex. Bud Craig's theory is that human self awareness originates in the insular cortex. It consists of three hypothesis - this part gets info from all over the body and organises it to form an image - a representation of our feelings. The second part of the hypothesis is that the purpose of the brain is to create movement - for the best life possible. The third part of the hypothesis is that to make the best possible movement, the images are important and the brain and the gut are both qualifiers for the central role in giving this information
- Gut bacteria vary by geography too - climate, food etc all play a part
- "Genes are possibilities. Genes are information. Genes can be dominant, forcing features on you or they can just offer their abilities for us to use or not. But most of all, genes are plans." Lovely!
- Our collective gut bacteria have 150 more times genes than a human. Who are we really made of!
- Gut bacteria are of 3 types- bactericides, prevotella, ruminococcus.
- Haem is needed for many things, like production of blood. Its lack is a genetic defect that has been seen in Romania - results in symptoms that include garlic intolerance, sensitivity to sunlight, and red urine. Vlad!
- Yoghurt is nothing but milk pre-digested by bacteria. Buy ones that use bacteria that produce dextrorotatory lactic acids rather than levorotatory.
- Lactobacillus Reuteri can significantly lower cholesterol and lipid levels, and increase HDL
- A toxoplasmata infection causes our immune system to activate an enzyme IDO which breaks down the substance the invaders like to eat and forces them to enter a dormant state. But this eatable is also an ingredient needed to produce serotonin. This potentially causes suicidal behaviour.
-Eat prebiotic dishes]]> 4.24 2014 Gut : The Inside Story of Our Body's Most Under-Rated Organ
author: Giulia Enders
name: Manu
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at: 2023/02/17
date added: 2024/01/05
shelves: review
review:
When you think of it, it's quite amazing how emotions we might attribute to the mind find metaphors related to another part of the body - 'gut feel', 'butterflies in the stomach', 'sh*t your pants', 'pit in your stomach' and so on. The metaphors are based on actual physical sensations, and so on hindsight, it is quite obvious that the gut and the brain have quite a connection.
If we consider our development as an embryo, it goes along three 'tubes' - cardio-vascular, nervous, and the gut systems. But unlike the heroes of the first two - the heart and the brain, who have attention and literature, we rarely even think about the gut unless we have an ailment. But it is amazingly complex, with links to even something like mental health, and that's what makes "the inside story of our body's most underrated organ" a really interesting read.
Giulia Enders does an excellent job of breaking down the complexities, much like some of her favourite bacteria that find a mention in the book! The book is not just accessible but entertaining too, with fun illustrations popping up on a regular basis. However, despite not sounding like a boring thesis, the book is full of not just information, but insight. This goes all the from the scenes of the behind like how does pooing work, and the kinds of poo, to behind-the-scenes walkthroughs of important and not-so-known processes like the gut structure and how organs transport food, to practical advice on everything from allergies, things like reflux and constipation, and diets, to cleanliness, and the MCU equivalent of the microbes in our gut.
As someone who has been at the mercy of clueless gastro-intestinal practitioners, I'd say that her stated aim of making information available to a broad audience is in itself worthy of an applause. An absolutely fascinating read, even if you're only vaguely interested in this inner piece of ours!

Things I learned
- The gut accounts for two-thirds of our immune system
- There are inner and outer sphincters, representing our unconscious inner world and our consciousness respectively. Their understanding of the respective spaces, and their 'conversations' and relationship determine when you fart, or when you have to just go!
- Squatting is indeed the best way to defecate, as it leads to a nice, straight intestinal tract. This is scientifically proven in the book
- Saliva is basically filtered blood! It also contains a painkiller stronger than morphine, called opiorphin. Because the mouth is super sensitive thanks to more nerve endings than any other part of the body
- The stomach is shaped like 'Quasimodo' so that water and food can be treated separately
- Lactose intolerance is not an allergy, it's a deficiency - the body not having the enzyme to break the two sugar molecules. In 75% of the population, the gene for digesting lactose begins to switch off as we grow older because we are no longer reliant on mother's milk
- Rumbling tummy is the 'migrating motor complex' at work. And it's more from the small intestine. Housekeeping when that and the stomach are empty. If something enters, the process stops. In this context, regular snacking isn't a good idea, and needs separation of at least 5 hours
- Solve constipation with dietary fibres, fluids, pro and prebiotics
- The extraordinary story of the sea squirt, which navigates the oceans, finds a good place to settle down, and then proceeds to eat its own brain!
- Irritable bowel syndrome could be caused by micro inflammations, bad gut flora or undetected food intolerances (but as you might have experienced, doctors pooh pooh patients as hypochondriacs or malingerers!)
- The brain can receive information from the gut at the insular cortex. Bud Craig's theory is that human self awareness originates in the insular cortex. It consists of three hypothesis - this part gets info from all over the body and organises it to form an image - a representation of our feelings. The second part of the hypothesis is that the purpose of the brain is to create movement - for the best life possible. The third part of the hypothesis is that to make the best possible movement, the images are important and the brain and the gut are both qualifiers for the central role in giving this information
- Gut bacteria vary by geography too - climate, food etc all play a part
- "Genes are possibilities. Genes are information. Genes can be dominant, forcing features on you or they can just offer their abilities for us to use or not. But most of all, genes are plans." Lovely!
- Our collective gut bacteria have 150 more times genes than a human. Who are we really made of!
- Gut bacteria are of 3 types- bactericides, prevotella, ruminococcus.
- Haem is needed for many things, like production of blood. Its lack is a genetic defect that has been seen in Romania - results in symptoms that include garlic intolerance, sensitivity to sunlight, and red urine. Vlad!
- Yoghurt is nothing but milk pre-digested by bacteria. Buy ones that use bacteria that produce dextrorotatory lactic acids rather than levorotatory.
- Lactobacillus Reuteri can significantly lower cholesterol and lipid levels, and increase HDL
- A toxoplasmata infection causes our immune system to activate an enzyme IDO which breaks down the substance the invaders like to eat and forces them to enter a dormant state. But this eatable is also an ingredient needed to produce serotonin. This potentially causes suicidal behaviour.
-Eat prebiotic dishes
]]> <![CDATA[Journey Under the Midnight Sun]]> 26924866 A chain of unsolvable mysteries
Can one detective solve this epic riddle?

When a man is found murdered in an abandoned building in Osaka in 1973, unflappable detective Sasagaki is assigned to the case. He begins to piece together the connection of two young people who are inextricably linked to the crime; the dark, taciturn son of the victim and the unexpectedly captivating daughter of the main suspect. Over the next twenty years we follow their lives as Sasagaki pursues the case - which remains unsolved - to the point of obsession.

Stark, intriguing and stylish, Journey Under the Midnight Sun is an epic mystery by the bestselling Japanese author of The Devotion of Suspect X.]]> 540 Keigo Higashino 0349138745 Manu 5 4.32 1999 Journey Under the Midnight Sun
author: Keigo Higashino
name: Manu
average rating: 4.32
book published: 1999
rating: 5
read at: 2023/12/30
date added: 2023/12/30
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India Through its Languages]]> 57615995
Through a first-of-its-kind and incisive study of languages, such as the story of early Sanskrit, the rise of Urdu, language formation in the North-east, it presents the astounding argument that all Indians are of mixed origins. It explores the surprising rise of English after Independence and how it may be endangering India's native languages.]]> 352 Peggy Mohan 0670093688 Manu 0 review She gives us a quick introduction with Creoles in the Caribbean, and points out the appearance of the vocabulary layer, which is influenced by the more powerful group (usually male) and the more intrinsic sound and grammar, which is the maternal side of the story - mother tongue. With this background she brings the narrative to India and creates a storyline using different languages.
She begins with the presence of sounds of Dravidian origin in the recitation of the Rig Veda, and with supporting historical & DNA evidence of a male-driven migration about 3500 year ago when the Harappan civilisation was in decline, traces the Vedic male - local wife combination which led to the Dravidian sounds in the Rig Veda. To be noted that this didn't happen in the beginning when they were orally preserved and transferred, but around 700 years later when they were formally compiled, edited and written down, reflecting a Sanskrit which by then had vernacular sounds. This was also when the Kuru super-tribe spread east and south, from Kabul to Andhra, taking Sanskrit along. This Sanskrit then mixed with the language of the elite in these regions and created the first versions of Prakrit. As the language trickled down from the elite to the masses, or rather, locals moved up in lifestyles and hence words used, the influence of the latter's native tongue became stronger and around 1000 CE marked the beginning of the Indo Aryan languages, first as dialects in small areas, and then gradually expanding their domain.
Meanwhile, in my little state of Kerala, around 800 CE, brahmins relocated from the north - Namboodiris, at the behest of local kings. As with the story up north, male-driven migration + local women and an elite happened. The brahmins' original Apabhramsa language (a 'corrupted form of Sanskrit that didn't follow Paninian rules) faded because they had to pick up Malayalam in the long-term, and centuries later, a new language Manipravalam emerged - Sanskrit nouns in (erstwhile) Malayalam sentences. Interesting that a sociopolitical tumult also happened here around the same time - the rise of the Second Chera Empire and the beginning of a strong Malayali identity distinct from Tamil/Cholas. In parallel, a resurgence of Hinduism at the expense of Buddhism and the re-emergence of Brahminical Hinduism.
Similarly, the Central Asian influx into the north (Delhi Sultanate, Mughals) brought with it Uzbek, which quickly vanished as the Central Asians started using the dialect in the region (Hindi) as their vernacular. It was only in the late 1700s that they moved from using Persian as the official language and started writing in Hindi - then renamed Urdu, with an infusion of Persian nouns.
She then takes us to the contemporary example of Nagamese - the grammar of Assamese and a small portion of Naga. It grows even as the both Assamese and the Naga languages continue to exist. The flashback on Assamese is Ahom, courtesy migrants from Burma. This itself is a later episode of the SE Asia + Munda people of the Magadha region. This combination, and the presence of the Vratyas, a pre-Vedic Arya group, is what makes the Magadha languages different from Dravidian.
The most recent play- British and English. The British not only created a Hindi-Urdu divide which hadn't existed before, but also, thanks to having Indian employees, got the latter to pick up English, though mostly in 'Prakrit English' form in the beginning. Ironically, English really spread only after Independence, because the elites wanted to retain their hold on power using language as an access point, and were helped by the fact that no single language had the heft to cover the entire country. And that's where we are now. 'What had started as a code to identify the elite snowballed into something set to replace our older languages and cultures as it trickled down, forging a new homogeneity.'
I have to admit I glazed over some of the parts where she decided to go a little deep (by my standards) on technicality of language, but I found the book to be mostly accessible, and definitely fascinating. If you're even vaguely interested in history, this is a must-read.

Interesting points
Cows as a metaphor for women in the Rig Veda.
The uncanny resemblance between Panini, and the Phoenicians (Poeni in Latin)
Ditto Turkic Ordu (army) and horde
Urdu got its name in the Deccan in 1780, and in its later usage was practically the same as Hindi, both belonging to Hindus and Muslims, until the British decided to cause a split by trying to create a shudh Sanskritisedversion of Hindi, and in addition the use of Devanagari script. The idea being that they wanted to undermine Urdu, written in Persian script, because it was associated with the Mughal empire.]]> 4.15 2021 Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India Through its Languages
author: Peggy Mohan
name: Manu
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2023/05/06
date added: 2023/12/22
shelves: review
review:
For a while, I have been fascinated by the similarity in words across languages - from the simple biradar-brother to the slightly more elaborate Agni-ignite. I even started a Twitter thread to keep track of these 'discoveries'. Linguistics per se, the theory of it though, is less of a fascination. I started reading it with the notion that it would be this, but was pleasantly surprised. I love history and that's what Peggy Mohan has actually done using language(s) and their evolution as her tool.
She gives us a quick introduction with Creoles in the Caribbean, and points out the appearance of the vocabulary layer, which is influenced by the more powerful group (usually male) and the more intrinsic sound and grammar, which is the maternal side of the story - mother tongue. With this background she brings the narrative to India and creates a storyline using different languages.
She begins with the presence of sounds of Dravidian origin in the recitation of the Rig Veda, and with supporting historical & DNA evidence of a male-driven migration about 3500 year ago when the Harappan civilisation was in decline, traces the Vedic male - local wife combination which led to the Dravidian sounds in the Rig Veda. To be noted that this didn't happen in the beginning when they were orally preserved and transferred, but around 700 years later when they were formally compiled, edited and written down, reflecting a Sanskrit which by then had vernacular sounds. This was also when the Kuru super-tribe spread east and south, from Kabul to Andhra, taking Sanskrit along. This Sanskrit then mixed with the language of the elite in these regions and created the first versions of Prakrit. As the language trickled down from the elite to the masses, or rather, locals moved up in lifestyles and hence words used, the influence of the latter's native tongue became stronger and around 1000 CE marked the beginning of the Indo Aryan languages, first as dialects in small areas, and then gradually expanding their domain.
Meanwhile, in my little state of Kerala, around 800 CE, brahmins relocated from the north - Namboodiris, at the behest of local kings. As with the story up north, male-driven migration + local women and an elite happened. The brahmins' original Apabhramsa language (a 'corrupted form of Sanskrit that didn't follow Paninian rules) faded because they had to pick up Malayalam in the long-term, and centuries later, a new language Manipravalam emerged - Sanskrit nouns in (erstwhile) Malayalam sentences. Interesting that a sociopolitical tumult also happened here around the same time - the rise of the Second Chera Empire and the beginning of a strong Malayali identity distinct from Tamil/Cholas. In parallel, a resurgence of Hinduism at the expense of Buddhism and the re-emergence of Brahminical Hinduism.
Similarly, the Central Asian influx into the north (Delhi Sultanate, Mughals) brought with it Uzbek, which quickly vanished as the Central Asians started using the dialect in the region (Hindi) as their vernacular. It was only in the late 1700s that they moved from using Persian as the official language and started writing in Hindi - then renamed Urdu, with an infusion of Persian nouns.
She then takes us to the contemporary example of Nagamese - the grammar of Assamese and a small portion of Naga. It grows even as the both Assamese and the Naga languages continue to exist. The flashback on Assamese is Ahom, courtesy migrants from Burma. This itself is a later episode of the SE Asia + Munda people of the Magadha region. This combination, and the presence of the Vratyas, a pre-Vedic Arya group, is what makes the Magadha languages different from Dravidian.
The most recent play- British and English. The British not only created a Hindi-Urdu divide which hadn't existed before, but also, thanks to having Indian employees, got the latter to pick up English, though mostly in 'Prakrit English' form in the beginning. Ironically, English really spread only after Independence, because the elites wanted to retain their hold on power using language as an access point, and were helped by the fact that no single language had the heft to cover the entire country. And that's where we are now. 'What had started as a code to identify the elite snowballed into something set to replace our older languages and cultures as it trickled down, forging a new homogeneity.'
I have to admit I glazed over some of the parts where she decided to go a little deep (by my standards) on technicality of language, but I found the book to be mostly accessible, and definitely fascinating. If you're even vaguely interested in history, this is a must-read.

Interesting points
Cows as a metaphor for women in the Rig Veda.
The uncanny resemblance between Panini, and the Phoenicians (Poeni in Latin)
Ditto Turkic Ordu (army) and horde
Urdu got its name in the Deccan in 1780, and in its later usage was practically the same as Hindi, both belonging to Hindus and Muslims, until the British decided to cause a split by trying to create a shudh Sanskritisedversion of Hindi, and in addition the use of Devanagari script. The idea being that they wanted to undermine Urdu, written in Persian script, because it was associated with the Mughal empire.
]]> <![CDATA[Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World]]> 58078595
Ìý

Fifty-five years have passed since the cover of Time magazine proclaimed the death of God and while participation in mainstream religion has indeed plummeted, Americans have never been more spiritually busy.

Ìý

While rejecting traditional worship in unprecedented numbers, today's Americans are embracing a kaleidoscopic panoply of spiritual traditions, rituals, and subcultures -- from astrology and witchcraft to SoulCycle and the alt-right. As the Internet makes it ever-easier to find new "tribes," and consumer capitalism forever threatens to turn spirituality into a lifestyle brand, remarkably modern American religious culture is undergoing a revival comparable with the Great Awakenings of centuries past. Faith is experiencing not a decline but a Renaissance. Disillusioned with organized religion and political establishments alike, more and more Americans are seeking out spiritual paths driven by intuition, not institutions.

Ìý

In Strange Rites , religious scholar and commentator Tara Isabella Burton visits with the techno-utopians of Silicon Valley; Satanists and polyamorous communities, witches from Bushwick, wellness junkies and social justice activists and devotees of Jordan Peterson, proving Americans are not abandoning religion but remixing it. In search of the deep and the real, they are finding meaning, purpose, ritual, and communities in ever-newer, ever-stranger ways.]]> 320 Tara Isabella Burton 1541762525 Manu 4 review She begins with her personal experience at the McKittrick Hotel, home to the British theatre company Punchdrunk's production - Sleep No More, an experiential phenomenon that she describes as "equal parts video-game, voyeurism and religious pilgrimage". It's a retelling of Macbeth but every part of it is subject to interpretation by the performers and the audience, with the latter also having the option to be part of the 'play'.
This serves as a preview of the world of SoulCycle, Korean beauty routines, Gwyneth Paltrow's juice cleanse, Crossfit, Internet fan fiction, Headspace, and so on. A long list of options from which people can mix their own religious cocktail of spiritual, philosophical, aesthetic and experiential dimensions. It influences not just individual lifestyle but societal politics too.
The author broadly classifies the non-affiliated into SBNRs (Spiritual but not religious), Faithful Nones (who hunger for something larger than themselves) and Religious Hybrids (who practice a portion of their religion, and supplement it with things outside it). All of them (and us) are looking for what religion originally delivered - meaning, purpose, community, and ritual.
She then spends a chapter on the war that has been fought on religion within America - the institutional (centred around Church and society) vs the intuitional (centred around the person). And that progression and the heterogenous mixes that happened reflects in the changes in culture and mindset within society during the 60s, 70s and so on.
And thus, while the new forms of religion aren't new, the author cites three factors that makes this era different and likely to stick around - the absence of wider demographic pressure, the power of consumer capitalism, and the rise of the internet. While millennials are caught between their lack of belief in their parents' religion and the political conservatism on societal issues, capitalism finds a way in, helping them create identities and tribes. It will sell us meaning, brand our purpose, custom-produce community, tailor-make rituals and commodify our humanity. That includes a spiritual entrepreneurship course at the Columbia Business School!
This new age version of religion (spiritualism) has an interesting parallel - the role that the printing press and the spread of mass literacy played for Protestantism is what the internet is doing today for new age movements. From Yahoo Groups for The X Files and Xena to Harry Potter and World of Warcraft, people were no longer bound to their geography to find their tribe. Fanfiction boomed. The author cites two watershed moments which show how 'fans' started taking ownership - the call for Rowling to step away from the Harry Potter universe after her fall from grace, and Gamergate, when there was a backlash against a section of gamers who wanted video games to address the interests and concerns of minority players. Though it wasn't the first of its kind, the movement was the first to get into a large cultural conversation. Many of the players on the reactionary side (against the demand) would later become alt-right/alt-lite celebs.
Another evident phenomenon is wellness culture, which focuses on self improvement and commoditises self care. It has the fandom and the 'theology' of purpose and meaning to back it. The philosophy of SoulCycle, Goop etc have their roots in New Thought, one of America's earliest spiritual traditions that blended liberal Christianity with Transcendentalism, and the path includes folks like Norman Vincent Peale (The Power of Positive Thinking), and the discourse in the contemporary era even included self care as a revolutionary act against Trump's America! The other phenomenon that the author brings up is the revival and rise of witchcraft. The number of adherents are over a million. Here too, Trump served as a nemesis, with the larger narrative connecting the rituals of witchcraft to a higher social and spiritual purpose - dismantling toxic and oppressive structures associated with patriarchy, white supremacy and other unjust hierarchies.
Another massive shift is in social-sexual identities. Though swapping, kink etc existed in the 1900s, many interests and groups were in the closet are now lifestyles accepted by the mainstream. A key role was played by the internet in transforming the modes and rituals of these communities too, accelerating access and consumption. Simultaneously monogamy is receiving a pushback. The 1970s and 80s were the peak time for divorces in the US, that means children growing up then have a fairly dismal view of marriage.
74% of American millennials now say that "whatever is right for your life or works best for you is the only truth you can know". While fandom, wellness, witchcraft, sexual utopias all play out, are there organising thoughts that can take the place of religion? The author works out three of them. The first is 'social justice culture' - a progressive mix of self care, moral determination through lived experience, and a fight against racism, sexism and other forms of bigotry and injustice. The second is a Silicon Valley based version who work towards an optimised self. Libertarian techno-utopians, rewriting biology and society through 'hacking'. Despite their cosmetic differences, both groups have much in common. They both have a disdain towards society's mores, maxims and rules. And both seek self actualisation. And yes, both are viable consumer categories for capitalism. Wokeness, self care and more!
However it is the third that the author considers the most viable contender, and the most dangerous. Authoritarian, reactionary, materialist, and one that valourises submission to a higher political or biological truth. They find spiritual and moral meaning in primal, masculine images of heroes past. Yes, mostly white. They believe that biological determinism, gender binary, and natural hierarchies are what leads to progress. Not progressivism and political correctness. Jordan Peterson is one of the high priests, and r/TheRedPill forum is an active shrine of the movement. They provide a sense of brotherhood. Meme magic in 4chan, Pepe and Kekism all were connected to the Donald Trump campaign. Many mass shootings and other acts of violence are by graduates of this school of thought.
Religion and politics have been connected throughout history, but is remarkable to watch the narrative in the contemporary era unfold as the author connects the pieces and lights up the path that got us to where we are. But then again, to learn of something and to learn from something are two different things. Highly recommended if you have any interest in modern society and/or religion/ and/or culture.

Notes
1. In 1890, a businessman Elijah Bond patented a "talking board" for mass use. That's the Ouija board.
2. Apparently Fifty Shades of Grey started out as fan fiction - based on Twilight's lead characters!]]> 3.67 2020 Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World
author: Tara Isabella Burton
name: Manu
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/10
date added: 2023/12/22
shelves: review
review:
Another book I discovered only thanks to a podcast. I found it a fascinating exploration of how the (almost) post-religion United States is evolving. Folks who call themselves Christians have been steadily decreasing, and 'Nones' who claim no affiliation to any organised religion is the fastest growing group. One-third of millennials (and one fourth of all adults) have no affinity to religion. Tara Isabella Burton tries to find out who (or what) is filling the God-sized hole.
She begins with her personal experience at the McKittrick Hotel, home to the British theatre company Punchdrunk's production - Sleep No More, an experiential phenomenon that she describes as "equal parts video-game, voyeurism and religious pilgrimage". It's a retelling of Macbeth but every part of it is subject to interpretation by the performers and the audience, with the latter also having the option to be part of the 'play'.
This serves as a preview of the world of SoulCycle, Korean beauty routines, Gwyneth Paltrow's juice cleanse, Crossfit, Internet fan fiction, Headspace, and so on. A long list of options from which people can mix their own religious cocktail of spiritual, philosophical, aesthetic and experiential dimensions. It influences not just individual lifestyle but societal politics too.
The author broadly classifies the non-affiliated into SBNRs (Spiritual but not religious), Faithful Nones (who hunger for something larger than themselves) and Religious Hybrids (who practice a portion of their religion, and supplement it with things outside it). All of them (and us) are looking for what religion originally delivered - meaning, purpose, community, and ritual.
She then spends a chapter on the war that has been fought on religion within America - the institutional (centred around Church and society) vs the intuitional (centred around the person). And that progression and the heterogenous mixes that happened reflects in the changes in culture and mindset within society during the 60s, 70s and so on.
And thus, while the new forms of religion aren't new, the author cites three factors that makes this era different and likely to stick around - the absence of wider demographic pressure, the power of consumer capitalism, and the rise of the internet. While millennials are caught between their lack of belief in their parents' religion and the political conservatism on societal issues, capitalism finds a way in, helping them create identities and tribes. It will sell us meaning, brand our purpose, custom-produce community, tailor-make rituals and commodify our humanity. That includes a spiritual entrepreneurship course at the Columbia Business School!
This new age version of religion (spiritualism) has an interesting parallel - the role that the printing press and the spread of mass literacy played for Protestantism is what the internet is doing today for new age movements. From Yahoo Groups for The X Files and Xena to Harry Potter and World of Warcraft, people were no longer bound to their geography to find their tribe. Fanfiction boomed. The author cites two watershed moments which show how 'fans' started taking ownership - the call for Rowling to step away from the Harry Potter universe after her fall from grace, and Gamergate, when there was a backlash against a section of gamers who wanted video games to address the interests and concerns of minority players. Though it wasn't the first of its kind, the movement was the first to get into a large cultural conversation. Many of the players on the reactionary side (against the demand) would later become alt-right/alt-lite celebs.
Another evident phenomenon is wellness culture, which focuses on self improvement and commoditises self care. It has the fandom and the 'theology' of purpose and meaning to back it. The philosophy of SoulCycle, Goop etc have their roots in New Thought, one of America's earliest spiritual traditions that blended liberal Christianity with Transcendentalism, and the path includes folks like Norman Vincent Peale (The Power of Positive Thinking), and the discourse in the contemporary era even included self care as a revolutionary act against Trump's America! The other phenomenon that the author brings up is the revival and rise of witchcraft. The number of adherents are over a million. Here too, Trump served as a nemesis, with the larger narrative connecting the rituals of witchcraft to a higher social and spiritual purpose - dismantling toxic and oppressive structures associated with patriarchy, white supremacy and other unjust hierarchies.
Another massive shift is in social-sexual identities. Though swapping, kink etc existed in the 1900s, many interests and groups were in the closet are now lifestyles accepted by the mainstream. A key role was played by the internet in transforming the modes and rituals of these communities too, accelerating access and consumption. Simultaneously monogamy is receiving a pushback. The 1970s and 80s were the peak time for divorces in the US, that means children growing up then have a fairly dismal view of marriage.
74% of American millennials now say that "whatever is right for your life or works best for you is the only truth you can know". While fandom, wellness, witchcraft, sexual utopias all play out, are there organising thoughts that can take the place of religion? The author works out three of them. The first is 'social justice culture' - a progressive mix of self care, moral determination through lived experience, and a fight against racism, sexism and other forms of bigotry and injustice. The second is a Silicon Valley based version who work towards an optimised self. Libertarian techno-utopians, rewriting biology and society through 'hacking'. Despite their cosmetic differences, both groups have much in common. They both have a disdain towards society's mores, maxims and rules. And both seek self actualisation. And yes, both are viable consumer categories for capitalism. Wokeness, self care and more!
However it is the third that the author considers the most viable contender, and the most dangerous. Authoritarian, reactionary, materialist, and one that valourises submission to a higher political or biological truth. They find spiritual and moral meaning in primal, masculine images of heroes past. Yes, mostly white. They believe that biological determinism, gender binary, and natural hierarchies are what leads to progress. Not progressivism and political correctness. Jordan Peterson is one of the high priests, and r/TheRedPill forum is an active shrine of the movement. They provide a sense of brotherhood. Meme magic in 4chan, Pepe and Kekism all were connected to the Donald Trump campaign. Many mass shootings and other acts of violence are by graduates of this school of thought.
Religion and politics have been connected throughout history, but is remarkable to watch the narrative in the contemporary era unfold as the author connects the pieces and lights up the path that got us to where we are. But then again, to learn of something and to learn from something are two different things. Highly recommended if you have any interest in modern society and/or religion/ and/or culture.

Notes
1. In 1890, a businessman Elijah Bond patented a "talking board" for mass use. That's the Ouija board.
2. Apparently Fifty Shades of Grey started out as fan fiction - based on Twilight's lead characters!
]]> <![CDATA[Killers of the Flower Moon: Oil, Money, Murder and the Birth of the FBI]]> 35917282 Osage County, Oklahoma, in the 1920s was where the richest people per capita in the world were to be found. The reason? Oil.

After oil was discovered beneath their land, the Osage Indians had untold wealth. Then, one by one, they began to be killed off.

The family of an Osage woman, Mollie Burkhart, became a prime target, her relatives shot or poisoned. And, as the death toll climbed, the FBI took up the case and began to expose one of the most chilling conspiracies in American history.

Based on years of research and startling new evidence, this is a masterpiece of narrative non-fiction, as each step in the investigation reveals a series of sinister secrets and reversals. Killers of the Flower Moon is utterly compelling, but also emotionally devastating.

]]> 339 David Grann 0857209035 Manu 4 4.26 2017 Killers of the Flower Moon: Oil, Money, Murder and the Birth of the FBI
author: David Grann
name: Manu
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2017
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/22
date added: 2023/12/22
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Seeing What Others Don't: The Remarkable Ways We Gain Insights [Paperback] [Jan 30, 2017] Gary Klein]]> 34117503 Seeing What Others Don’t, renowned cognitive psychologist Gary Klein unravels the mystery.

Klein is a keen observer of people in their natural settings—scientists, businesspeople, firefighters, police officers, soldiers, family members, friends, himself—and uses a marvelous variety of stories to illuminate his research into what insights are and how they happen. What, for example, enabled Harry Markopolos to put the finger on Bernie Madoff? How did Dr. Michael Gottlieb make the connections between different patients that allowed him to publish the first announcement of the AIDS epidemic? What did Admiral Yamamoto see (and what did the Americans miss) in a 1940 British attack on the Italian fleet that enabled him to develop the strategy of attack at Pearl Harbor? How did a “smokejumper†see that setting another fire would save his life, while those who ignored his insight perished? How did Martin Chalfie come up with a million-dollar idea (and a Nobel Prize) for a natural flashlight that enabled researchers to look inside living organisms to watch biological processes in action?

Klein also dissects impediments to insight, such as when organizations claim to value employee creativity and to encourage breakthroughs but in reality block disruptive ideas and prioritize avoidance of mistakes. Or when information technology systems are “dumb by design†and block potential discoveries.

Both scientifically sophisticated and fun to read, Seeing What Others Don’t shows that insight is not just a “eureka!†moment but a whole new way of understanding.
]]> 288 Gary Klein 185788678X Manu 0 3.54 2013 Seeing What Others Don't: The Remarkable Ways We Gain Insights [Paperback] [Jan 30, 2017] Gary Klein
author: Gary Klein
name: Manu
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at: 2023/12/18
date added: 2023/12/18
shelves:
review:

]]>