For those inclined to engage, a useful handbook for dealing with the pizza-and-pedophilia devotee of the family.
The well-known psychologist and behavioral economist explores the rabbit holes that lead to conspiracy theories and other brands of irrational thought.
Duke psychology professor Ariely, the author of Predictably Irrational, Payoff, and other books, begins by chronicling how he was accused of being a shill for big pharma and the “Deep State” for supporting Covid-19 vaccination. Why him? The conspiratorial echo chamber, he notes, searches high and low for heretics, aided by “technology, politics, [and] economics.” The technology is beyond individual control, the politics and economics thorny, and the battle against what Ariely characterizes as misbelief, “a distorted lens through which people begin to view the world,” is endless. Too many people are not just suckers for misinformation; they go out of their way to perpetuate it. As Ariely explains, it’s easy for a person to become ostracized by peers and family for believing that the Illuminati or lizard people control the Earth and, once ostracized, to double down, feeling persecuted and isolated, in a kind of rolling martyr complex. It’s difficult to reason with someone battered by precarity, stress, and loneliness—and if nothing else, holding outlandish ideas will earn people a place in a community thanks to, yes, technology. Still, the author urges us to try the best we can. “Providing reassurance to someone in stressful circumstances can make a big difference,” he writes, and introducing talking points designed to increase “intellectual humility,” or the ability to admit that it’s possible that one is wrong, may help, too. Empathetic but not overly soft, Ariely counsels readers to try to understand why ostracism won’t do the trick, why social roles help drive extreme emotions and polarization, and why dealing with the “funnel of misbelief” is a proposition both staggeringly challenging and wholly necessary.
For those inclined to engage, a useful handbook for dealing with the pizza-and-pedophilia devotee of the family.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2023
ISBN: 9780063280427
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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