An uneven overview that fails to step outside its own scene.
An undercooked introduction to cryptocurrency and non-fungible tokens.
Hundreds runs a streetwear label and has minted his own NFTs, both of which provide his book a foundation of industry experience. But despite an eager narrative and insightful interviews, it comes up short. The author rushes through technical details, which are often overshadowed by meandering cultural commentary and speculation. What’s a blockchain? “You can google it,” he explains in his prologue. Written between 2021 and 2022, the book is a “snapshot” of that time, and he’s “cognizant that there are outdated remarks.” Though often informative, the author rearticulates ideas throughout multiple essays. Slang and acronyms like FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) are repeatedly parsed out, as if each appearance is the reader’s first introduction. Hundreds assumes his readership is familiar with his fashion label, and some essays feel like sales pitches, particularly those that tout his company’s efforts to lead the digital fashion scene in the metaverse. A lengthy account of the creation of his “Adam Bomb Squad” NFTs is compelling, but it shines a light more on the expanding fashion industry than on the crypto wave. Most problematic is the author’s view of his readership. Following a comment about his kids’ interest in digital Fortnite costumes, he writes: “you’re no different….You’d rather curate your page instead of decorating your home.” During Zoom meetings, “people started facing their cameras toward their bookshelves to appear well-read. Others dropped a colorful painting behind their heads to associate with culture.” This jaded take muddles his message. NFTs may indeed be a community-driven new wave of media on a cutting-edge platform, but Hundreds is unable to explain the phenomenon without framing its participants as either savvy businesspeople or always-online users looking for something unique to enhance their digital existence. The plethora of readers who don’t fall into these two categories will find little resonance.
An uneven overview that fails to step outside its own scene.Pub Date: May 16, 2023
ISBN: 9780374610296
Page Count: 224
Publisher: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Feb. 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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