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
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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