LITTLE DATA

Schaberg and Yakich offer an assemblage of brief meditations on just about everything, especially in relation to children, in this nonfiction collection.

The authors like to meander philosophically, but not without some sense of structure; their collection of 108 very short ruminations (most less than a page in length and some only a single sentence) are presented in alphabetical order. The subjects selected are starkly heterogeneous—they dwell on such thoroughly quotidian topics as vegetables, pajamas, and diapers, as well as grander ones like self-actualization, wisdom, and death. The pithy reflections are largely tied to the theme of children; more specifically, Schaberg and Yakich focus on the issue of raising children in a “world of screens,” in which “Big Data” seems ubiquitous and even despotic and the concept of eternity has been usurped by “only endless blips and drips, a stream of little data flowing.” This quietly gripping book is filled with peculiar data of its own: “One third of the world still builds a fire to cook dinner.” Often, the preoccupation with children and the obsession with esoteric data are whimsically combined: “You know what would be really bad? If someone fell down a hundred stairs. And they were cement… Fact is, 12,000 people die each year at the bottom of the stairs.” Beneath the gamesome whimsy lurks a deadly serious concern—per the book, some believe that the generation raised on screens is already in the premature throes of “digital dementia.” A book of this kind isn’t easy to pull off, since readers can quickly become exhausted by a series of shapeless, peripatetic musings. But there’s a definite shape to this collection, granted by the love and wonder inspired by one’s children; such love is not fully comprehensible as data, big or little. This is a delightful book, one as quirkily insightful as it is entertaining.

A charmingly peculiar collection of eccentric cogitations.