Useful, timely revelations about the political underbelly of New Age spiritualism.
A sprawling critique of the dangerous promise and politics of the modern wellness industry.
Beres, Remski, and Walker—three veterans of New Age wellness and co-hosts of the eponymous podcast—attempt to untangle a web of histories connecting yoga, pseudoscience, toxic individualism, and fascism. The titular term, a portmanteau of conspiracy and spirituality, describes the ideological pathway that ushers many wellness-seekers from innocuous self-improvement to political extremism. Conspiritualists generally come to wellness depoliticized and ideologically vulnerable, and they are often desperate for answers to physical or spiritual problems that traditional religion and medicine have failed to provide. Conspiritualists generally assign more agency to individual impurity than systemic injustice. Their faith in charismatic gurus, who unveil the arbitrary forces (karma, “energy”) supposedly governing bodily health, primes them to accept similar myths (Pizzagate, QAnon) about the wider world. This trajectory is bolstered by a lucrative online wellness-influencer industry in which algorithms encourage extremist political content, resulting in “an online religion that strings mysteries together on a compelling narrative arc.” The authors couple their firsthand experiences with well-researched accounts of clairvoyants and cult leaders to criticize the cultural appropriation, disaster profiteering, and moral panic scaffolding the conspirituality economy. Their study locates pieces of this formula across time and space, from present-day Hindu nationalism to Nazi racial ideology and the American eugenics movement. “The timeline is chaotic,” write the authors, “but cryptic hashtags keep it strung together: #savethechildren, #trusttheplan, #enjoytheshow, #WWG1WGA. It’s chilling, because you’ve heard these terms in a news report about QAnon.” If this seems like a lot of threads to weave into a single narrative, it is. The book verges on conspiratorial thinking in trying to neatly connect them all through disparate accounts of sexual, racial, and bodily anxiety. However, the core argument about the contemporary conspirituality pipeline is compelling.
Useful, timely revelations about the political underbelly of New Age spiritualism.Pub Date: June 13, 2023
ISBN: 9781541702981
Page Count: 384
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.
All right, all right, all right: The affable, laconic actor delivers a combination of memoir and self-help book.
“This is an approach book,” writes McConaughey, adding that it contains “philosophies that can be objectively understood, and if you choose, subjectively adopted, by either changing your reality, or changing how you see it. This is a playbook, based on adventures in my life.” Some of those philosophies come in the form of apothegms: “When you can design your own weather, blow in the breeze”; “Simplify, focus, conserve to liberate.” Others come in the form of sometimes rambling stories that never take the shortest route from point A to point B, as when he recounts a dream-spurred, challenging visit to the Malian musician Ali Farka Touré, who offered a significant lesson in how disagreement can be expressed politely and without rancor. Fans of McConaughey will enjoy his memories—which line up squarely with other accounts in Melissa Maerz’s recent oral history, Alright, Alright, Alright—of his debut in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, to which he contributed not just that signature phrase, but also a kind of too-cool-for-school hipness that dissolves a bit upon realizing that he’s an older guy on the prowl for teenage girls. McConaughey’s prep to settle into the role of Wooderson involved inhabiting the mind of a dude who digs cars, rock ’n’ roll, and “chicks,” and he ran with it, reminding readers that the film originally had only three scripted scenes for his character. The lesson: “Do one thing well, then another. Once, then once more.” It’s clear that the author is a thoughtful man, even an intellectual of sorts, though without the earnestness of Ethan Hawke or James Franco. Though some of the sentiments are greeting card–ish, this book is entertaining and full of good lessons.
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-13913-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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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